One Nation Under CCTV 26 September 2021

Banksy, 9/11, and the Panopticon

From far away, this Banksy piece may not seem very Banksy-like at all -- just white dripping text in a bold font: "ONE NATION UNDER CCTV". It may even seem like a simply provocative, undirected, perhaps unartful, vandalism that commonplace in urban areas. That, all, is, until you move further and see the characters that is part of the work, painted in the iconic Banksy style of stenciling, as well as the ironic placement of the mural itself -- just out of view of a CCTV camera.

The words are being painted on by a child in a brightly coloured hoodie, (crime tip: do not wear brightly coloured clothes if you do not want to be caught), being watched by a police officer and his dog. The officer is presumably holding up a camera, (though, it is hard to be sure, as it is being obstructed by his hands). Perhaps this alludes to the fact that it is impossible to evade surveillance in the modern world -- if you can beat the static cameras, the cameras are now mobile and are always watching. The dog, (if its presence has intentional meaning rather than just to complete the image visually), could present the role of those that, perhaps are not the ones recording, but nevertheless brings attention to something, in this case -- perhaps quite a derogatory metaphor -- by barking.

The question of why is the painter of the text here a child, (again, assuming it has intentional meaning), could have a few meanings. Maybe it is a representation of the stereotypical teenage angst to revolt, with the police being the Father figure to discipline the child, although this would seem to contradict Banksy's noted values in most of his works (for example, see: Banksy, Flower Thrower). Perhaps it is commentary on where that (though not normally characterized as such, but certainly could be seen, at least here, as) paranoid teenage angst comes from, considering that this generation has never lived before the time where it is normal for everything to be recorded.

However, I would argue that this work, like some of Banksy's other pieces, has significance mostly in its (absolutely meaningfully dense) words rather than the visuals (for example, see: Banksy, Follow Your Dreams). "One Nation Under CCTV" is of course a reference to the extremely American phrase "One Nation Under God," from the Pledge of Allegiance. One line of analysis could be through American nationalism and its military-industrial complex. Though this thread may be quite far fetched, considering that this work was painted in London, it is still an interesting exploration, as many of Banksy's work also deal with themes of war. Again, Flower Thrower is a good example, being that it was painted in Jerusalem, the active war zone between Palestine and Israel.

The version of the Pledge of Allegiance that evolved into the one that is used today was written in 1892 by a Christian socialist Francis Bellamy, who believed in the separation of church and state, and did not include the words "under God" (Jacoby, 2004, p. 287, as cited in Wikipedia, Francis Bellamy). That addition was actually introduced in the 1950s, by religious leaders who were allied with large business owners, whose ideological project was to marry Christian ideals with a libertarian capitalism (Kruse, 2015). This came in the wake of president Roosevelt's New Deal, which gave power to labour unions and workers, a move that largely affected the bottom line of large employers. The addition of the religious reference to the Pledge also was due to the Cold War, where the US had to create an ideological identity of capitalism and Christianity, against the atheistic Marxism of the USSR and the newly communist China. The point here is that it is in the interest of the owners of capital to create an ideological basis, of Christian capitalism, to manufacture the public's consent to go to wars that are ultimately financially beneficial for the wealthy.

The Cold War eventually came to an end with the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 90s, which was in large part due to their loss in the Soviet-Afghan War (Reuveny & Prakash, 1999). The collapse of the USSR was a big symbolic win for American capitalism, as the (then) very possible threat of a communist world was eliminated, and capitalism became the global default, with no viable alternatives (see: Fisher, 2010). To achieve this, the US armed and trained the Afghan Mujahideen to fight against the Soviets (Pear, 1988). However, the consequences of funding a terrorist group backfired on America (though, subscribers of certain theories may say it went exactly according to plan (see: Eichenwald, 2012 and Ismail, 2004)). It just so happened that a financier and militant of the Mujahideen was one Osama bin Laden (Robert, 2005, p. 4, as cited in Wikipedia, Osama bin Laden).

To finally bring this back to the Banksy piece: the heightened panic that defined aftermath of the 9/11 attacks allowed for (in hindsight, extremely liberties-infringing) measures that presented itself as a means of counter-terrorism. One such measure was the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, under the authority of president George W. Bush, that allowed warrantless wiretapping and metadata collection of potentially millions of Americans' phone calls and emails (Gellman, Linzer, & Leonnig, 2006 and Ross, 2006). While this specific program seem to have ended in 2007 (Stout, 2007), programs of essentially the same nature continued on even into the Obama adminstration, and expanded further into getting direct access to information from online services such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, as detailed by the infamous Snowden leaks (Greenwald & MacAskill, 2013 and Gellman & Poitras, 2013).

Another line of analysis that could be followed -- one that contains less tinfoil and is more generalizable -- is through Michel Foucault's conception of the societies of sovereignty and disciplinary societies, as well as Gilles Deleuze's expansion on this with the idea of the society of control.

Still not done!!!

Works Cited

Banksy. (2005). Flower Thrower Ash Salon Street, Bethlehem, West Bank.

Banksy. (2010). Follow Your Dreams Chinatown, Boston, Massachusetts.

Banksy. (2007). One Nation Under CCTV Newman Street, Westminster, London.

Eichenwald, K. (2012, September 11). The deafness before the storm. The New York Times. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html.

Fisher, M. (2010). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.

Gellman, B., & Poitras, L. (2013, June 7). U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. internet companies in broad secret program. The Washington Post. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html.

Gellman, B., Linzer, D., & Leonnig, C. D. (2006, February 5). Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects. The Washington Post. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/04/AR2006020401373.html.

Greenwald, G., & MacAskill, E. (2013, June 7). NSA PRISM program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others. The Guardian. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data.

Ismail, M. A. (2004, November 18). Investing in war. Center for Public Integrity. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/investing-in-war/.

Kruse, K. M. (2015, March 30). How 'One Nation' Didn't Become 'Under God' Until The '50s Religious Revival. NPR. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/396365659/how-one-nation-didnt-become-under-god-until-the-50s-religious-revival.

Reuveny, R., & Prakash, A. (1999). The Afghanistan war and the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Review of International Studies, 25(4), 693-708. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210599006932

Ross, B. (2006, November 28). NSA Whistleblower Alleges Illegal Spying. ABC news. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1491889.

Stout, D. (2007, January 18). Gonzales testifies on Eavesdropping changes. The New York Times. Retrieved September 27, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/washington/18cnd-justice.html.

Wikipedia Contributors. Francis Bellamy. Wikipedia. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bellamy.

Wikipedia Contributors. Osama bin Laden. Wikipedia. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden.