The Assassination of John Brennan Considered as a Downhill Motor Race (1994)
At what point does a man cease to be a man and become an image? For John Brennan, it is arguable that the process was well underway quite some time before the cold, bright March morning where he was forced, blinking in the unaccustomed light, from the back of a SATPO truck into the waiting arms of a NWF unit. His political capital entirely burned through by the Plains Massacre, and abandoned by both the Bureaus of Internal and External Security, he had been held as a virtual prisoner in the Mechanised Brigade’s forward headquarters in Missoula. In his absence, two processes were set in motion: the progressive disintegration of the intelligence gathering apparatus he had so lovingly curated over the last three years, and the gradual spread of a narrative among Northwest Montana’s civilian population which identified him completely with the worst excesses of SATPO.
This narrative was assisted immensely by a neat piece of British black propaganda: by early 1993, a memo (purportedly written by Brennan for internal discussion within SATPO) was being circulated by NWF insurgents as evidence for long-term plans for counter-insurgency activities in the region. Brennan’s actual proposals up to this point, if harsh, had at least been guided by an internal logic and had been moderately effective – the actions outlined in the memo (which included the widespread taking of civilian hostages for future execution in response to NWF activities, the use of some of the CSA’s significant stocks of nerve gas to pacify large areas, and starving out civilians by spraying crops with defoliants) are more indicative of a psychopath than an anti-insurgency specialist. Brennan, even if aware of this image, was powerless to prevent its spread. Even today, Brennan is still stubbornly if inaccurately associated with a quote contained within this memo: “it is impossible to defeat insurgents by showing them that their fears are unfounded. They must instead be shown that they are powerless to resist these fears.”
This narrative, which doomed Brennan, may well have saved Oliver North’s life. In the absence of any real succession planning within SATPO, the immediate aftermath of Kanne’s death saw the complete breakdown of its upper echelons. While McChrystal was nominally in charge of SATPO by dint of his seniority, for the last chaotic fortnight of fighting, both he and North were too busy desperately trying to shore up some sort of plausibly defensible line using the troops under their immediate command to lend each other assistance. Recognising that the situation had become irretrievable in the second week of March, McChrystal made contact with the NWF’s Provisional Council about what terms they would be willing to offer regarding the full evacuation of the SATPO brigades under his direct control from Northwest Montana. Within eighteen hours, a flightplan which would allow simultaneous evacuation from the two AFBs still in use along a predetermined route had been agreed: at noon on 14 March 1994, the last of the SATPO helicopters still in a usable condition took off from Perry AFB, in full view of an NWF unit which had been engaged in a low-intensity running battle with its defenders until six hours before. Although, in the process of its evacuation, SATPO had been forced to abandon the vast majority of its heavy equipment (including a dozen truck-mounted anti-air systems, no-one from the airborne brigades had been left behind: North’s troops would have to fend for themselves.
To the remnants of the SATPO mechanised brigade, the ceasefire agreement came as a direct betrayal. North, his effective control over Northwest Montana shrunk to the centre of Missoula, realised that he would have to buy himself and his men their way out as soon as possible. Luckily, he was still in a possession of an asset in which the NWF were very interested indeed. By the evening of 14 March, he had made contact with the overall commander of the joint NWF-Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion forces surrounding Missoula: his terms, if surprising, were accepted after brief discussion. It was thus that John Brennan, the next morning, became briefly (if unwillingly) more useful to SATPO than he had been at any point since the Plains Massacre.
It is at the moment of the handover that John Brennan the man ceases to exist. Regardless of precisely what happened in the interval between the exchange and the period that afternoon where an anonymous NWF insurgent with a smuggled Pacifican videocamera records something that had once been a human being dragged behind a Toyota Hilux filled with cheering fighters, it is John Brennan the image which has enjoyed an odd afterlife over the subsequent quarter of a century. On occasions, this image briefly emerges from its resting-place in the collective subconscious: judging by past behaviour, it will continue to do so until the Northwest Montana Insurgencies are viewed as purely historical events rather than ones with ongoing ramifications. It is unlikely that this state of affairs will be brought about any time soon.
1999: The family of John Brennan sue rotten.com, a shock image website whose servers are held in St Vincent, to force their removal of a video of Brennan’s torture: although the case is ultimately settled in 2002 by the website agreeing to voluntarily remove the video, the prior legal dispute is instrumental in determining cross-jurisdictionality for internet services and the extent to which common carrier provisions apply to image and video hosts.
2006: The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard publishes the controversial essay “l'assassinat de John Brennan n'a pas eu lieu”, in the course of which he argues that in a fundamental sense, the “assassination” of “John Brennan” never occurred: an assassination requires the obliteration of an individual capable of free action (which Brennan hadn’t really been for at least two years) in order to damage a system dependent on said individual (which didn’t really exist at that point either). Instead, he proposes that Brennan’s death was an act of iconoclasm by the new power structure within Northwest Montana.
2009: As part of Flathead Lake, his series of documentaries covering the manipulation of images and narratives by state and non-state actors during the Northwest Montana Insurgencies, British documentarian Adam Curtis releases The Flayed Man. This documentary is concerned with a detailed analysis of the three images most indelibly associated with the final collapse of SATPO in March 1994: a photograph of a Rushdoonyite community stoning to death a man ostensibly guilty of adultery (further investigation after the photojournalist had won an international competition revealed that in actuality the man was executed for the rape and murder of a ten year old girl); a flayed corpse draped over the front of an insurgent IFV (popular perceptions of the NWF’s fondness for flaying notwithstanding, Curtis is unable to identify any other first-hand accounts of flayings – much as with Qing China and the “death of a thousand cuts”, the practice appears to have been otherwise extremely rare if not entirely nonexistent); and the video of John Brennan’s body being dragged through the streets of Missoula.
2014: Montreal-based alternative magazine Vice publishes an article titled “In Search of Brennan’s Dick”, wherein a journalist on a visit to Missoula meets an elderly man who claims to have the organ in question (removed from a conscious Brennan prior to death) pickled in a jar in his basement. Although understandably unable to determine whether the contents of the jar belonged to Brennan at any point, the journalist spends an immensely enjoyable few days drinking with former militiamen before Vice’s expense account cuts him off.
2018: An episode of Dark Tourist features journalist David Farrier visiting Northwest Montana, in the course of which he is briefly detained after trying to enter the abandoned city of Helena, takes part in a themed tour of Missoula purportedly conducted in the same Toyota used to drag Brennan and visits a commune operated semi-legally by the remnants of Michael Aquino’s Church of the Black Flame.
