Our Mini-Dark Age

Not-so brief disclaimer: I was inspired to write this sloppy and unedited piece after my recent reading of The Phenomenon of Torture, which is a collection of writings on torture gathered by William F. Schulz. If you don't like reading college papers then I advise you to pass on this one. But there are some hidden jewels in this minefield, and none of them are mine, I assure you. Just skip along and read whatever you find interesting. I have to warn you though, if you choose to go along for the whole ride, you do so at your own peril because this article was written without regulation and in a half-hazard fashion. Also, my citations are not conclusive, some are quotes from famous philosophers that are not sourced and some are quotes from articles in the book that I've forgotten the title of and the page number. But they are all in quotes. Moreover, I want to express my gratitude to the editor of The Phenomenon of Torture which was an endlessly fascinating book, so much so in fact that I skipped two of my classes and stayed in the library to finish the whole book. When I write in the future I'll make sure to take the reader's interests into consideration, and polish up my writing before posting it.

Voltaire proclaimed "Woe unto the nation which, though long civilized is still led by ancient atrocious customs!" He was referring to France in the 18th century but his statement also applies to the United States in the 21st. I don't pretend to be wise and witty like Voltaire, I'm merely a student of history and philosophy but basic fundamental truths can be stated as savagely as possible by the least eloquent amongst us and still arouse our common sympathies. The immorality and destructiveness of torture is one of those truths and that it is debated in Amerika reveals evermore the barbarous path the country has taken in recent decades. Grappling with torture is like facing down a shadow in a cave, and the reason for its appearance will forever escape us unless we turn our gaze from Guantanamo to the private poor houses across the land.

In the Middle Ages punishment was a spectacle, its purpose was both to entertain and strike terror in the hearts of the spectators. In our hyper-advanced technological-totalitarian age, the reversal is true. Evans and Morgan in "Preventing Torture" write:

Torture is not acknowledged. The instruments of torture are hidden and their existence disclaimed. Places of torture are inaccessible, not to increase the terror--though they do of course serve that purpose, and the physical and social isolation of victims is part of the design--but because they may not be known. What is done may not be seen or heard. There must be no spectators, no witnesses. Indeed, the most potent threat in the hands of the contemporary torturer is that: "No one will hear you cry. No one knows that you are here. No one cares whether you live or die. No one will ever know." --a threat that the power of the secretive state can all too often make.(1)

The methods torturers use today are far reaching and include psychological manipulation of a human's inborn fear of powerlessness in a helpless situation. His cultural soft spots are also used to full advantage by the torturer. For modern day scarecrows, anything goes. When torture was held as an acceptable technique and part of jurisprudence prior to the 18th century it was regulated, and different methods were weighed against each other. Unlike secret off shore torture havens today, there was some civility amidst the barbarity in the dark ages since it was public. But not so in modern day Amerika. As Evans and Moran point out, "It is the culture of denial and the absence of debate that makes contemporary as opposed to classical torture the more difficult to combat," (2). Torture as a credible and humane technique for interrogation was abandoned by Western states in the wake of the Enlightenment because it was thought that its savagery was equal to the crime itself.

Those who currently advocate the use of torture on captured terrorist subjects/suspects resort to the ticking time bomb argument that has somehow seeped into the popular imagination. It is not a rational and honest talking point and only put forward by feeble and terror-stricken minds.

The fear people have, regardless that it is manipulated to achieve certain ends by the dominating elite, is not wholly without some basis in reality. We live in a visual age, images stay in people minds longer than facts. Some of these images have been used by propagandists to build a 'terror narrative' in the public mind and in my opinion there are four fundamental images that stick out. 1)the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 2)planes hitting the world trade center, 3)nuclear war heads lying around(Fox News presents this image on a highly-regular basis) and 4)muslims in turbans with AK-47's(of course these are not American made, but brought into their farms by those bloody Russians). Too often these images are assembled together in a straight line, and like factory workers assembling toys the directions are given beforehand, making it an endlessly repeating and mindless task that only slaves can perform.

The worker, or the consumer of news, learns to do this without any objections, questions are deemed counter-productive and unpatriotic or loony. Thus, people put non-related images together into one narrative, however little it makes sense, solely because it has become routine to think that way. Also, people do not unconsciously come up with these narratives, the terrorist/nuclear being one among many, instead, the psychiatric-corporatist state actively push their mythology every chance they get and use every propaganda technique at their disposal (film, news, public speeches, press releases, etc). "Public opinion," George Santayana said, "does not signify merely private opinions prevalent amongst the public, but such opinions when they touch matters in public dispute or are due to contagion, having not been formed spontaneously among the people but imposed on them by eloquence or iteration." Senators and congressmen are also mired in image-based thinking. Harry Reid, for example, recently answered a questioning about releasing prisoners and putting them in prisons inside the U.S by saying "Can’t put them in prison unless you release them," which is a mind boggling statement if your thoughts are fact-based as opposed to image-based. I think Mr. Reid has seen far too many movies.

Anybody who consistently watches the media can't help but pick up this way of thinking and internalize it into their subconscious to the point that they are no longer persuaded by logic and facts. I bring up this point because people who advocate torture have this idea in their mind that as soon as a terrorist gets his hands on a nuclear bomb he will instantly detonate it. Life, they imagine, is like a movie and the good guys have a limited amount of time to reach the terrorist. To them terrorists are irrational actors who only desire to kill, rather than negotiate.

If I was a terrorist and got my hands on a nuclear device, if that is even a possibility which I'm positive that it is not, then I would negotiate with my oppressor rather than invigorate him by using the nuke. But let's clear up a few assumptions first, a)terrorists do not attack without a reason(your freedom and lifestyle do not apply), b)terrorists are political actors, they are striving for a certain conclusion(I'm taking about the queen bees, not the suicidal worker bees), and c)nukes are political tools that will only be in the hands of powerful men with a political agenda, they are not apocalyptic weaponry used by religious minions in the global terror stage.

Moreover, I'm willing to bet that torture may in fact work if it is applied to powerful men who have information like Cheney and with a clear objective in mind so as to ask pointed questions, i.e. did you possess information of an upcoming attack on U.S soil prior to 9/11? I don't think any of these men in charge of the American secret state are suicidal and true believers. Some of them might certainly be, like Cheney, which is very frightening, but I doubt that none of them will speak if they get water boarded.

But it doesn't matter if torture works because it is always used against men who have no real information and are only in custody because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Jackals and bounty hunters captured some Afghan villagers, put a terrorist sticker on their head and presented them to the authorities in exchange for cash. Frankly, I'm surprised at how few Afghans and Iraqis choose to fight back against an immoral and unjust occupier. If it was the other way around, Americans left and right would be blowing themselves up to defeat the enemy. The lack of empathy among the large majority of the American people for foreigners is the most disappointing fact. Can history forgive such a war culture? I'll try to present my own analysis of that question some other time.

Furthermore, proponents of torture stand behind it's usefulness to get the truth out of suspects but torture has never been used to get the truth out. If it was used to get the truth out, I still wouldn't advocate it on a systematic basis because only a few men know the truth. Some argue using torture in private cases, for example, torturing Cheney and other key operators inside the criminal American state. Even in that case I'd oppose torture because I sincerely believe that if the right public environment is created and there is an ongoing serious investigation into the crimes of the past then patriots would step forward and provide important information to help indict the criminals. If there is one thing everyone should get from reading the history of torture it is this: it is not about finding confessions, or keeping the public safe, but about imposing one's will. It's about power, pure and fucking simple. As Arthur Silber writes in his piece on torture in December of 2005:

Governments have always used the excuse of an "emergency" to significantly broaden their powers, and to claim the right to use "extraordinary" means. And those means are always justified by an appeal to "public safety," or an appeal to "saving the lives of our citizens," or something similar.

The claim that by conducting torture the victims will spill their guts (metaphorically speaking of course) is a lie that can easily be blown out of the water. Only psychotics would believe such a monstrous falsehood. Cesare Beccaria, an 18th century Italian economist said this about the defects of torture confessions:

"see the drawbacks of the pretended test of truth--a test, indeed, that is worthy of cannibals; a test which the Romans, barbarous as they too were in many respects, reserved for slaves alone, the victims of their fierce and too highly lauded virtue."

In our day too it is the slaves who conduct torture, and by slaves I mean the men and women of the armed forces and the police state. Cheney who is the biggest defender of torture has probably never been in the presence of a torture session. And Bush? The man considers reading torture so why would he want to get his hands dirty if there are perfectly trained slaves to do the job. I'm not using the word slave rhetorically but as a genuine descriptive term for what torturers are(more on this below).

Terrorists "R" Us: The Torturers, and The Tortured

Mika Haritos-Fatouros, Professor of Psychology at the University of Thessaloniki in Greece interviewed 16 ex-military policeman who had served during the military dictatorship in Greece from 1967-1974 and he outlined four steps crucial to indoctrinating administrators of torture. They are:

• Overlearning - Values of the greater good and obedience without question had to be drilled into new recruits' skulls.
• Desensitization- New Recruits have to endure sights of torture on a daily basis so as to conform to their surroundings, and they themselves have undergo torture.
• Role modelling- Senior officers guiding new recruits, providing example of how a obedient slave is supposed to act, both in torture sessions and in polite company.
  
• Reinforcement- Torturers received threats to their own well being, subjects reported that no one trusted each other and each slave spied on the other slave's activities.(3)
  

In fact, all ex-torturers face being killed by their former peers/slaves. The torturer mantra is the same as the mafia's, once you are in you cannot get out. And it becomes regular business if you have the stomach for it. "To tell the truth," said Franz Stangl, commandant of the two Nazi death camps, "one did become used to it,"(4). And they became used to it not because they were unbalanced human beings with a strong appetite for human blood but because they were doing their job. Amazing, huh? All for a day's paycheck. After a while it gets fun, I'm sure, because well, we all want to have fun at our jobs, don't we?. Torturers are not that different from us. One Brazilian victim of torture couldn't "console himself that the men who applied the wires were depraved. They seemed to practice sexual torture because it was most efficient," (5). In his book At the Mind's Limits Jean Amery, a member of the Belgian resistance during WWII and captured by the Gestapo in 1943, described torturers as "bureaucrats of torture":

I saw it in their serious, tense faces, which were not swelling, let us say, with sexual-sadistic delight, but concentrated in murderous self-realization. WIth heart and soul they went about their business, and the name of it was power, dominion over spirit and Flesh, orgy of unchecked self-expansion. I also have not forgotten that there were moments when I felt a kind of wretched admiration for the agonizing sovereignty they exercised over me. For is not the one who can reduce a person so entirely to a body and a whimpering prey of death a god or, at least, a demigod? (6)

That is precisely what happens when a slave is in a desperate situation and unwilling to face his true masters. . .he pretends to be a god and overpowers other men, as forcefully as possible. Below is a sworn statement by a detainee at Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq, first reported by the Washington Post:

"They took me to the room and they signalned me to get on the floor. And one of the police he put a part of his stick that he always carries inside my ass and I felt it going inside me about 2 centimeters, approximately. And I started screaming and he pulled it out and he washed it with water insde the room. And the two American girls that were there when they were beating me, they were hitting me with a ball made of sponge on my dick. And she was playing with my dick. I saw inside this facility alot of punishment just like what they did to me and more. And they were taking pictures of me druing all these instances. (7)

Why would torturers commit such inhumane and unforgivable deeds? Psychologist Stanley Milgram in his article called "The Perils of Obedience" said "for a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from 'the self'." Torturers abandon their own selfhood and anybody else in the power system who obey inhumane orders. The essence of obedience is its abdication of personal responsibility. But the torturer doesn't lose sight of his other responsibilities, rather, he becomes more diligent to see them through. "There is a fragmentation of the total human act," says Milgram, "no one is confronted with the consequences of his decisions to carry out the evil fact." It is a slave ethic but not without a sense of purpose. Tortures value good conduct and hard work. They are not mindless drone, but all too conscious of their intentions and 'the greater good.' "The most far-reaching consequence," writes Milgram, "is that the person feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear--it acquires a radically different focus, the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority." Torturing turns into a supreme virtue, and wielding it on a regular basis becomes a duty.

One lieutenant from the Uruguayan Army revealed that supervisors picked those "who had displayed the most care and zeal in the accomplishment of their duties," (8). And the innocent men lie there hopeless after being subjected to the greatest terror in the world: torture. Most of those who are tortured are indeed innocent, and even the ones who fight back, in my eyes, are innocent because of their inborn rights to protect themselves. Of all the people in the world, Americans should understand innately the rights of self-defense.

Moreover, it is not physical terror that is used against most of these suspects but psychological terror which produces lasting effects, forever putting the tortured into a state of terror well beyond the few seconds of the evil doing. Amery wrote about his experiences in Nazi prison camps and his insights are worth mentioning:

Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one's fellow man was experienced as at the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules. (9)

Side Antidote: Private and Public Rebels

The world needs more public rebels and less public functionaries, and I don't mean men whose morality is not to serve others but to serve themselves. I mean men who have public, not private, interests in mind. Public rebels are the members of society who serve the public interest the most often. They gain their independence because they stay true to public morality and listen to their inner voice of reason which are one and the same, as opposed following private orders. When the orders of the day are given by psychotics, serving your own self is the highest moral and public duty. The conscious, individual self and the public self are not separate. Torturers, who are human beings that reject selfhood, are not evil but ignorant of their inherent nature that is more powerful than any authority. The deranged men who give the orders to torture are a different matter. They are the scum of the earth. Dr. Allodi who works for the Canadian Center for Victims of Torture described the inner world of torturers thusly:

Crushed into submission in an irrational and unpredictable world, where the only escape is to obey orders blindly, they are introduced to a new ideology and values and a system of rewards for those who conform. (10)

Are Cheney and Bush conformers? Hardly. They don't believe in the public good, they avoided service when they were young, and they look down on society. They are private men who lead private lives, which should disallow them of public office. Cheney and Bush couldn't be torturers because they are both privileged and private rebels, who go against the crowd just for the hell of it. Rebels like them should not be in government. But other rebels, like Hunter S Thompson or Bill Hicks are public rebels. HST famously ran for the sheriff's office in Aspen on the freak power ticket, and Bill Hicks began performing on a public stage as a kid.

Terrorism, Truth, and The Hopeless President

Arthur Silber recently said:

When we consider that the United States government slowly, inexorably transforms itself into institutionalized terrorism both abroad and at home (or not slowly at all, depending on where you are in relation to the bombs, bullets and numerous other instrumentalities of murder and control), we realize that Our Masters, with less than a handful of exceptions, are terrorists themselves.

Remember Waco? The torturers dressed themselves in police uniform and engaged in psychological warfare by blasting loud music and other disturbing sounds at a group of peaceful, though strange, men, women and children. Before blowing them to pieces using balls of fire, the torturers gassed them and when it was all over they destroyed the crime scene. The show of force in Waco established the precedent to stage terror and export the killing spree to Iraq and Afghanistan. Government agents saw that they could go unpunished after dealing death to innocent people on such a massive scale. The only terrorists that matter are government terrorists and they are the helm of Amerika's totalitarian regime. Robert Anton Wilson called it a tsarist government. A tsarist government that disguises its evil as benevolence and treats its citizens as morons who only desire to be fed and kept safe. And they will have their way, as Obama is making clear, because torturers have the power. Nothing else matters. But they are not completely soulless, there is a grand philosophy that motivates their actions. However, they have chosen to keep their philosophy and worldview a secret, unlike the Nazis and other tyrannical regimes that gained steam throughout history. At least the Nazis were honest of their intentions, these criminal bastards don't even have the integrity to show their faces.

If we continue to believe that history is a natural progression towards freedom and liberty then were in for a world of pain. Vigilance, fearlessness and honest assessment of the facts are the key qualities that will help us get out of this crisis. Though the enemies of human liberty and higher consciousness will stop at nothing, their defeat is etched in their behavior. If the King and the Church couldn't stop the Enlightenment then what rational reasons do modern day tyrants have that they can suppress the truths of our day? Maybe because of their unfathomable ignorance these torturers are more merciless than even past tyrants. As Amery said:

The king could be terrible in his wrath, but also kind in his mercy; his autocracy was an exercise of authority. But the power of the torturer, under which the tortured moans, is nothing other than the triumph of the survivor over the one who is plunged from the world into agony and death. (11)

Was there mercy shown at Waco? Was there mercy shown at Guantanamo? No. And. No. The innocent are punished and the guilty are not. What is urgently needed now more than ever in American history is a truth commission. Both the governments of Chile and South Africa created a national commission on truth and reconciliation. Truth commissions can help bring patriots out of the shadows, unravel the dark past, pay respect to innocent victims and prescribe much needed reforms. All truth commissions are marked by four distinctive features:

• Focused on the past
• Investigates not a singular event but a record of abuses
• A temporary body with substantial powers, unlike a court which is permanent
• Sanctioned by the government and the opposition
• The above points are taken from The Phenomenon of Torture.

Furthermore, British attorney Philippe Sands recently told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now that if "there was knowledge, it doesn’t matter whether it was Independents or Republicans or Democrats. We need a full investigation. It needs to come out." We need more people like Mr. Sands to start hollering, as loudly as they can, the need for a truth commission. We don't need President Obama's consent, if there is enough opposition at the ground level that will force the Congress and the WH to follow through with our demands then it will be done. Marches, protests, boycotts, anything and everything, the truth needs to come out, about anything and everything committed by the US government in the past six decades. We have to act. We owe it to our society, but even more importantly, to the innocent victims who underwent needless terror. Miguel D'Agostino was one of those individuals who was subjected to needless terror by a government. He is listed under file No. 3901 on the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared and he describes below very directly how he felt after the traumatic experience of torture. His voice is relevant for seekers of justice today. Here is what he said:

If someone had asked me when I was set free: did they torture you alot? I would have replied: Yes, for the whole of the three months. . .If I were asked that same question today, I would say that I've now lived through seven years of torture. (12)

Got that, everyone? Prolonging justice is torture. The day of reckoning will indeed income, why wait till our hearts are drenched in sweat and souls are emptied of any mercy? A process of healing, at the societal level, not just the individual, should be backed by all the people. Our leaders are not filled with the moral courage to step up, nor are they prepared to do the right thing. As Chomsky says in his most recent article:

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward -- a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.

Obama doesn't have his hands tied behind his back, as some would suggest, his hands are clearly visible for all to see and they are stained. The entire tsarist government is stained; the CIA, FBI, Congress, Senate, not one body of government can prove they have acted constitutionally and humanely in these past decades, stretching back to WWII. Some of these agencies are plain unconstitutional and more importantly, immoral at their core. Some agencies will cite historical emergencies such as the 'communist enemy', the 'increase in crime' or the 'availability of drugs' for their existence, regardless that they help build these public enemies up to increase their control and power.

And the elected representatives will blame the voters, or pretend they didn't know what was going on and some of them maybe right but certain individuals of the governing classes and the larger elite are entirely in the wrong. Facts are facts, and the biggest fact of our lifetime is that the majority of the alphabet agencies, which are supported by both parties, are unconstitutional and have no purpose for existence. Abolishing all of them is the only legitimate punishment, picking and choosing tyrants to hang is gutless, immoral and very stupid. Chris Floyd covers this point clearly:

Faced with prosecution for their admitted deeds, the principals of the Bush Administration would have only one defense: precedent. They would have to show that their actions had been accepted practice in American government for many, many years -- from the very beginning, in fact -- and had never been regarded as prosecutable offenses before. To imprison them now -- or even execute them -- for carrying on the standard policies and practices of bipartisan governance stretching back for generations would surely constitute cruel and unusual punishment. It would be selective prosecution.

Installing a truth commission will put every body of government, every elected leader, and both parties in jeopardy. But let it be so. All of mankind's angels in heaven are calling for a clean sweep, from Thomas Paine to Walt Whitman. Read their words and weep for them.

Conclusion

Unchecked power must be dealt with by the full force of the constitution and it's rightful parents, we the people. Regardless if the whole truth or half of the truth comes out, there needs to be a truth commission set up. Are the elected leaders afraid that if the government goes forward with an investigation into the past the people will blindly revolt and murder them? Do they not see that is precisely what will happen if they don't stand boldly now and call for an investigation? I believe the American people are just, and that only the most criminal and treasonous in the government will be punished, if a truth commission finds them guilty. But if such a commission is not installed then the people will indeed blindly revolt, not without cause, but certainly without aim. The question is can the people handle the truth?

Contemplating Nietzsche's question whether mankind can endure the truth, George Santayana pronounced "some minds, I think, can endure it, but not mankind." He added: "For that very knowledge of man which a scientific knowledge would provide, would show us that the human mind, while it liberates us from the servitude to a narrow routine in a fixed round of impulses and adventures, such as the brutes turn in, deceives us and renders us avid for hearsay." I agree with him, not everybody in America will stand enthusiastically behind a truth commission because some of them, no, a lot of them actively supported these leaders and their policies. They'll search deep down and ask how such evil went over their heads for such a long period of time and simply not accept it. But the Americans who never believed a word coming out of Washington in these past decades will find solace and some peace, which I believe is still possible if the truth is pursued with all our wills combined.

1. Evans. &, Morgan. (2007). Preventing Torture. In William F. Schulz & Juan E. Méndez (Ed.), The phenomenon of torture: readings and commentary. (pp. 41). Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2. Ibid.
3. Fatouros, M.H. (2007). ?. In William F. Schulz, W.F, & Juan E. Méndez. (Ed.) The phenomenon of torture. (pp.122). Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
4. Stangl, F.. (2007). ?. In William F. Schulz, & Juan E. Méndez. (Ed.) The phenomenon of torture. (pp.102). Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
5. The phenomenon of torture. pp. 142
6. Amery, John. ?. In William F. Schulz, & Juan E. Méndez. (Ed.) The phenomenon of torture. (pp.135). Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
7. The phenomenon of torture. pp. 62
8. The phenomenon of torture. pp 143.
9. Amery, John. ?. In William F. Schulz, & Juan E. Méndez. (Ed.) The phenomenon of torture. (pp.87). Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
10. The pheomenon of torture. pp. 109
11. Amery, John. ?. In William F. Schulz, & Juan E. Méndez. (Ed.) The phenomenon of torture. (pp.86). Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
12. The phenomenon of torture. pp. 345