The Sacred Moment

Reminder

2006-02-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder that more recent posts will be found at Once Upon A Time.

Some of the new pieces focus on issues directly connected to the themes I've discussed in my Alice Miller essays. In particular, you may be interested in the series on Iran. The latest entries are this one, and Part VI, which has links to the earlier entries.

Karloff, Gods and Monsters, and the Horrors of War

2006-02-04T08:42:00.000-08:00

Posted at Once Upon A Time.

An Explanation, and the Pitch

2006-02-02T12:58:00.000-08:00

Posted at Once Upon A Time.

Essays Based on the Work of Alice Miller

2006-02-02T11:11:00.000-08:00

What follows is a listing of many of the essays I've written based on the work of Alice Miller. It is not yet complete; as I continue to repost earlier essays, I will add them here. In addition, because of the great richness of Miller's thought and its endless implications and ramifications -- and because the dynamics identified by Miller are reflected in countless events in the world today, including perhaps most notably in our foreign policy -- I expect to write a number of future essays on these themes. Those, too, will be added to this list as they are published.

The articles are not always listed in the order they first appeared. Instead, I have grouped them by topic. I hope that will prove more helpful for readers trying to find essays that focus on specific topics.

The Roots of Horror Series

Instilling Obedience and Denial in Childhood: A review of two news stories that reveal our culture's preoccupation with the irrelevant and/or the trivial, a discussion of some of the reasons such stories are not deserving of any serious attention whatsoever -- and concluding with a horrifying news story that received almost no notice at all but most certainly should have, a story that serves as an introduction to the importance of Alice Miller's work about commonly accepted child-rearing practices and their consequences.

Worth A Thousand Words: A few comments about a Rembrandt painting that captures many of the themes that Miller discusses, and that leads into the next essay..

The Institutionalized Destruction of Innocence -- and of Life: A discussion of the story of Abraham and Isaac, and an introduction to some of Miller's central ideas: how cruelty to children, both physical and/or psychological -- cruelty in the form of not paying attention to the child's genuine needs, and demanding obedience above all -- prevents the formation of an authentic self, and how that lack of a true self can then be enlisted in the service of dangerous and destructive ideologies.

Mel Gibson, A Public Case Study in Obedience and Denial: A summary of Miller's major thesis, and an examination of Mel Gibson and fundamentalist religious belief more generally as one kind of example of the mechanisms that Miller discusses.

Addendum on Mel Gibson: Some further details about the views of Mel Gibson's father, which make indisputably clear the abusive nature of the psychological dynamics in this family.

The Consequences of Denial: Some examples of the mechanisms of denial from the current political scene, and an example of how far such denial can go, using an excerpt from the writings of Carl Jung.

The Search for Underlying Causes, and Why Spanking Is Always Wrong: A description of how and why I was led to seek for underlying causes and why I was drawn yet again to Alice Miller's books, and a discussion of why physical punishment, including even occasional spankings, is always wrong -- and why it is wrong and destructive psychologically, and wrong philosophically as well.

Iraq -- The Practice of Denial: An examination of the meaning of statements from some of the U.S. military commanders in Iraq, about how we "have to understand the Arab mind," and about how "the only thing they understand is force." I explore how the obedience-denial mechanism identified by Miller leads to massive denial of the pain, and of the very humanity, of the Iraqis themselves -- and how the United States thus is driven to treat the Iraqis in exactly the same manner that a brutal, punishing parent treats a "bad" child, all the while telling the child that the parent is only doing it "for the child's own good."

The Demand for Obedience: A review of the fundamentals of Miller's work, including her definitions of "poisonous pedagogy" and of a "helping witness," with some autobiographical details to make the latter concept clearer. I also examine the psychological dynamics underlying articles by David Brooks (condemning "narcissism" and calling for a return to "a creedal order") and Joseph Farah (condemning homosexuality, as he frequently does, specifically on the grounds that God has condemned it: "There is a reason most people frown on homosexuality. It is not prejudice. It is not bias. It is not irrational. It is because God has pronounced it wrong, immoral, abomination, sin.").

The Voice of the Thug, and the Harbinger of Horrors Still to Come: An analysis of certain aspects of the psychology revealed by many hawks, and a lengthy discussion of their reaction to the election in Spain. I consider the roots of the hatred, contempt and scorn heaped upon the Spanish people by writers such as David Brooks, Mark Steyn, and Andrew Sullivan, and what the sources of that reaction are -- and what such a reaction bodes for the future. I include an excerpt from Alice Miller's Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, which explains her contention that, "The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason" -- and I explain how many hawks are now engaged in a revenge fantasy of their own, with the "War on Terror" as their supposed justification.

From Mild Smacking to Outright Torture and War: The Lie of "Well-Intentioned Violence": Some news stories that show how our society commonly accepts violence, and even brutal sadism, toward children. I also examine again the dynamics of the denial in which most adults engage, and I excerpt Miller's article, "Why Every Smack Is A Humiliation." At the end, I review some recent news stories about the Abu Ghraib abuse -- and discuss why the fact that children were also abused by coalition forces is an inevitable result of the mechanisms Miller has identified.

To Destroy the World: The Case of Saddam Hussein: Some further excerpts from Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, including Miller's consideration of the question, "What makes a person wish to destroy the world?," and a discussion of the childhood of Saddam Hussein, and how that background helps to explain the monster that he became.

To Destroy the World, II: The Case of Fallujah, and Ralph Peters: An article continuing the examination of the dynamics identified by Miller, as they are revealed in the devastation unleashed on Fallujah and in a column by Ralph Peters. I explain how Peters' article is close to a perfect clinical example of an eliminationist pathology bent on revenge for its sake, and offering only the most transparent of rationalizations as its superficial justification.

"Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill": Relying on a news account, I explore what happens when the desire for revenge is unleashed, and when soldiers begin to take actual "joy" in killing for its own sake. When the soldiers return home, the ongoing psychological damage often includes suicide and domestic violence -- yet the military fails to offer sufficient treatment for any of these problems, and hopes that they will simply go away if they are ignored. Of course, they won't, and often lead to tragic consequences.

Instilling Obedience and Denial, Continued: Another story about one of the U.S. soldiers involved in the Iraqi prison abuse story, and how he came from a military family and "knows how to follow instructions."

The Ignored Casualties of War: A news story demonstrating how the wounds of war kill, even far from the battlefield.

About Prison Abuse and Torture in the U.S., and in Iraq

The Denial Spreads -- and the Desire for Control: A discussion focusing on certain news accounts of the Iraqi prisoner abuse story: the reliance on the "I was only following orders" excuse; how a loss of autonomy, i.e., the lack of a genuine self, often leads people to pursue careers in the military or in the U.S. prison system; and how the child who was once neglected and/or abused frequently grows up seeking an environment where he can now be the one in control, and the one giving orders.

"They Don't Represent America"? Not Quite, Mr. President: An essay concerning Bush's false assertion that the Iraqi prison abuses "don't represent America," focusing on some materials from Stop Prisoner Rape that document many decades of horrific prison abuse, including some personal horror stories of prison torture and rape -- here in the United States.

The Deep Rot and Corruption in Our Nation's Soul: A further consideration of the abuse, rape and torture that are regularly inflicted on prisoners, both here in the United States and in Iraq, and the roots and significance of this routine violence and cruelty. I also discuss an unusually perceptive article by a man who was once a prison guard, and his experience with regard to the crucial question: "How will you treat those who are helpless before you?"

The Real Scandal: A further consideration of the commonplace abuses that occur in the U.S. prison system, excerpting a New York Times story about these issues. As I also explain, "the true scandal lies in the fact that, given the history of prison abuse and rape here in the United States, and given how the U.S. went about reconstituting the criminal justice and prison system in Iraq --and given the particular individuals they selected for positions of authority and power -- the current scandal was the logical and inevitable result."

The Horrors Against Women: A genuinely horrifying news story that sets forth the systematic abuse and torture inflicted on women, almost all of whom were entirely innocent, by the U.S. forces in Iraq, and the tragic results of such practices. This is an aspect of the prison abuse story that has been almost entirely neglected.

The Practice of National Self-Deception and Denial: A consideration of how the military investigation into prison abuses reveals profound systemic failures -- even as the government adamantly denies the very conclusions impelled by the evidence it sets forth.

The Causes and Dynamics of Suicide

The Suicide Taboo: A discussion of the dynamics underlying suicide, what it represents psychologically, and why it is so little understood, drawing on Miller's analysis of Sylvia Plath's writings, and concluding with a news story about the suicides in our military at present. I also offer some personal observations, based on my own experiences, about how to deal with someone you might know who is suffering from severe depression.

And Still More Death: Yet another story about a soldier's suicide.

The Dynamics of Suicide, Revisited: A detailed news story about the suicide of a young man at the age of 27, and how it tragically reveals all the mechanisms discussed by Miller in her work.

"Suck It Up": The Denial Continues -- and Kills Once More: A news story about the suicide of a New Orleans police officer after Hurricane Katrina, revealing the same tragic psychological dynamics.

Articles on the General Themes

When the Demons Come: A review of the basic principles identified in Alice Miller's work, a discussion of "hot saucing" and other currently popular and "acceptable" forms of child abuse, and how all these issues then manifest themselves in full-fledged atrocities on a much broader scale, focusing on events from the Vietnam War and their aftermath, including the ongoing, terrible psychological injuries that result.

When Life and Happiness Are Not Enough: The Tragedy of the Unborn Self: An analysis of a detailed Washington Post article about the roots of the neoconservatives' views and program, including the perspectives offered by William Buckley and Irving Kristol. I consider how their political program and their foreign policy prescriptions arise from certain psychological dynamics which prevent the formation of a self in the first instance -- and how they are then driven to seek for "mystery" and "meaning" to fill the emptiness in their lives, and how that quest can lead to destruction and death, as we are now witnessing.

The Indifference and Denial that Kill: A piece concerning a lengthy article about Iris Chang and her life and work, and her suicide at the age of 36, including a discussion of how the issues identified by Miller are involved.

The Apocalyptic Crusader: Redemption, Purification and a New World -- through Sacred Violence and Death: A discussion of some excerpts from James Carroll's work, focusing on the nature of the apocalyptic worldview -- including how that view is shared by both certain of our enemies and Bush and many of his supporters -- and a consideration of the roots and great dangers of this particular perspective.

The Truth that Lies Within, and the Truth that Many Will Not Face: The conclusion of my series, On Torture, explaining the vast chasm that separates the approach of a writer like Andrew Sullivan to this subject from mine, and a consideration of the ultimate roots of torture and violence in the numerous cruelties inflicted on children by the majority of parents, relying on Miller's work. All of the entries in the series, On Torture, together with brief descriptions of their contents, are listed here.

The Mythic Reality of War: Denying the Pain, and the Death

2006-02-01T16:58:00.000-08:00

Some reflections about the coverage accorded to the injuries sustained by Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt, and about the "mythic reality" of war -- with a large assist from Chris Hedges.

The Limits of Politics, I: The Roots of the Politics of Power

2006-01-31T15:16:00.000-08:00

Posted at Once Upon A Time.

AND: See Bush's Renewed Declaration of War on Dissent.

ALSO: Bush and the Legions of the Damned.

Why Alito Should and Must Be Filibustered: The Power of "No," Revisited

2006-01-29T23:10:00.000-08:00

Posted at Once Upon A Time.

To the New Empire Builders

2006-01-29T10:30:00.000-08:00

Posted at Once Upon A Time.

When the Pain Can Be Borne No Longer

2006-01-27T06:53:00.000-08:00

Posted at Once Upon A Time.

ON TORTURE

2006-01-23T14:08:00.000-08:00

The following is a list of the entries in my series, "On Torture," written in December 2005, together with a brief description of the content of the individual parts of this extended essay:

I, State Violence and Brutality, and Totalitarianism: A discussion of the manner in which torture is an integral and necessary part of the apparatus of any totalitarian police state, relying in significant part on Hannah Arendt's immensely important writing.

II, Of Means and Ends: An analysis of the fundamental contradiction that fatally undercuts the opposition of a writer like Andrew Sullivan to the use or approval of torture: why it is not possible to continue to support the goals of our foreign policy -- which necessitate the imposition, by means of military force, of our form of government on cultures and societies that have no history, traditions or intellectual roots to sustain the specific political forms we have adopted -- while decrying the inevitably implied and necessary means of achieving those ends.

III, Brutality and Sadism as National Policy, and the Monsters of Our Time: An examination of how torture has become a central and systematic element of the Bush administration's policies in the prosecution of its erroneously conceived "War on Terror," and why the administration has unforgivably and perhaps fatally branded the United States as a barbarian nation.

IV, Becoming Monsters, and Ensuring Our Ultimate Defeat: A discussion of articles by Darius Rejali and Mark Danner, explaining why torture does not work, how the official governmental adoption of torture eventually destroys any society, and further analyzing how the horrifying damage resulting from the use of torture expands in all directions, corrupting everyone in its wake.

V, A Monster's Confession, and the Choice to be Human: A dissection of the "defense" of torture offered by Charles Krauthammer (a "defense" widely heralded by many hawks), explaining the numerous dishonesties and contradictions engaged in by Krauthammer, and his profound immorality.

Addendum--More From the Annals of Horror: Some excerpts from a recent article about the horrific torture inflicted on one prisoner, and the utterly meaningless "confession" ultimately coerced by such barbaric methods.

VI(A), The Truth that Lies Within, and the Truth that Many Will Not Face: The first part of an analysis of the ultimate failure of Andrew Sullivan's answer to Krauthammer, including an identification of certain crucial questions that are ignored by both writers -- and an explanation of how both Krauthammer and Sullivan reveal psychologies dominated, above all else, by the demand for obedience. (In the near future, I will offer a lengthier examination of that last point.)

VI(B), The Truth that Lies Within, and the Truth that Many Will Not Face: The conclusion of my explanation of the vast chasm that separates Sullivan's approach to this subject from mine, and a consideration of the ultimate roots of torture and violence in the numerous cruelties inflicted on children by the majority of parents, relying on the work of Alice Miller.

With regard to this last issue, a related piece is also critical: When the Demons Come. That essay discusses certain tragically common barbarities in child rearing (such as "hot saucing" and the methods championed by James Dobson), the psychological dynamics instilled by such means -- including most notably obedience and denial -- and how those dynamics lead to atrocities committed by adults.

ON TORTURE, VI(B): The Truth that Lies Within, and the Truth that Many Will Not Face

2005-12-13T14:55:00.000-08:00

Children who become too aware of things are punished for it and internalize the coercion to such an extent that as adults they give up the search for awareness. But because some people cannot renounce this search in spite of coercion, there is justifiable hope that regardless of the ever-increasing application of technology to the field of psychological knowledge, Kafka's vision of the penal colony with its efficient scientifically-minded persecutors and their passive victims is valid only for certain areas of our life and perhaps not forever. For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath. -- Alice Miller, at the conclusion of the "Afterword" to For Your Own Good

I have read extensively in my life, and Alice Miller is the most profoundly courageous writer in the world today to my knowledge. She writes unflinchingly and with a gaze that never turns away from what it perceives, no matter how horrifying it may be. Miller describes the untold cruelties that are inflicted on the most innocent and defenseless of victims -- infants and very young children. Almost all of us accept these cruelties to one degree or another. I am not speaking only of the obvious cruelties, of corporal punishment and similar barbarities -- although we should never forget that the great majority of parents believe that spanking is sometimes necessary. I will begin to trace the connections here at the outset: just as Charles Krauthammer maintains that we are "morally compelled" to utilize torture in rare circumstances in the name of our own survival, so most parents believe that physical violence is sometimes morally "required" if their children are to be taught to be "civilized."

Let us try to be as brave as Alice Miller: what we mean by "civilized" when we speak in this way, is that children must be taught to obey. If the principle of obedience is instilled in children from earliest infancy, and if parents further teach their children that physical violence is the means of commanding obedience, why do we wonder that some adults will torture those who have been rendered helpless and delivered into their control? They are merely reenacting what their parents taught them.

But we refuse to see this. We will not acknowledge what has been done to us. Miller continues in her work, because she understands better than anyone that these issues must be understood if the horrors are to be stopped. But she has met with fierce resistance every step of the way. In a similar way, although on an immensely more modest scale, I have found that many readers who agree with me on many issues -- and many readers who may have followed this series so far, nodding their heads in confirmation at every point in my argument -- will stop here. They will not acknowledge these particular truths, because they are too threatening.

This is because there is a necessary corollary to the obedience we are taught: the idealization of the authority figures in our lives. As children, we dare not question what our parents do: we depend on them for life itself. To comprehend fully what is being done to us would be unbearable, and it might literally kill us. So we must believe that, whatever our parents do, they do it "for our own good." To believe otherwise is the forbidden thought. So we must deny our own pain when we are young; such denial is necessary if we are to survive at that stage in our lives.

But if we maintain the denial when we become adults, it spreads throughout our lives. When such modes of thought are established in our psychologies, they cannot be isolated or contained. We deny our own pain -- so we must deny the pain of others. If we acknowledge their pain fully and allow ourselves to realize what it means, it will necessarily call up our own wounds. But this remains intolerable and forbidden. In extreme cases, we must dehumanize other human beings: they become "the other," the less-than-human. By using such devices, we make inflicting untold agonies on another person possible: if they are not even human, it doesn't matter if we torture them. This is always how we create hell on earth.

I said I was not referring only to the obvious cruelties inflicted on children by physical violence. Just as important, and often of much greater significance, are the psychological agonies to which parents subject their children. How often do we hear parents say to a child who will not follow an order: "Why are you making me so unhappy? You don't want to make your mother unhappy and sad, do you, darling? Now just do what I say." We should recognize this for what it is: emotional blackmail. The unstated threat -- but the threat that is deeply felt by the child, even if he is not able to understand it -- is that the parent's love will be withdrawn unless the child obeys. Since the child knows that his life depends on that love, the threat is a terrifying one. Such blows are delivered countless times every day, by millions of parents around the world.

This knowledge is inaccessible to the majority of adults. We are taught to obey, and we learn to idealize our parents. We tell ourselves they did the best they could, or they couldn't help it. In one sense, that is true: they raise their children as they were raised. They learned obedience very well, and they do to their own children what was done to them. But most of us cannot leave this truth at this point: to maintain the veneration of our parents, we must insist that they in fact were right -- that they did it "for our own good." That is where the great danger lies.

When the idealization of the authority figure spreads once we become adults, it can encompass additional authority figures. There are two primary such figures: God -- who may have been there from the beginning, if the child is raised in a very religious household where God is the ultimate authority, and the parents only speak on His behalf; and country. When one's nation becomes such an authority figure, there are subsidiary ones as well: the nation's leaders, and the nation's military.

I realize that people often do not follow links. If this subject is of interest to you, I hope you will make an exception here. An earlier essay of mine presents a fuller version of this argument: When the Demons Come. I trace the connections between cruelties inflicted on children -- methods of "discipline" such as "hot saucing," and the kinds of punishment recommended by religious leaders such as James Dobson -- and atrocities committed by adults, such as those committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam. That piece also summarizes some of the major themes in Alice Miller's work.

Many of today's hawks exhibit the kind of denial to which I refer in an extreme form: because they will not acknowledge any of this, they must insist that the U.S. military could never commit such atrocities. It must all be a vicious lie. As I explain in that earlier piece, this was the ultimate root of the hatred heaped on John Kerry: he dared to speak the truth about what had happened in Vietnam. For the deniers, this is the one crime for which no forgiveness is possible. As I wrote about this kind of denier (and Rich Lowry and Andrew Sullivan were the particular writers to whom I was responding, but the same is true of many millions of additional people):

With no effort at all, you could multiply examples such as these a thousandfold, every single day. In this manner, defenders of our current foreign policy wipe out of existence all the facts, all the costs, all the deaths, and anything else that might bring into question what is an absolute of their faith: the United States is right, what we have done and are doing in Iraq is right, our military is right, we are inherently unable to make mistakes, and the authorities must not be questioned.

These are the victims described by Miller -- now grown into adulthood, continuing their denial, with additional authority figures added to the ones they first had. Besides the original parent, they now revere our government and our military and, beyond a certain point, nothing they do is to be challenged. ... [T]o do so would bring into question these individuals' entire false sense of self, it would undermine their worldview completely, and it represents a threat that cannot be allowed to come too close. As always, what is dispensable in all this are facts, untold national wealth, reputation and prestige, and above all, the lives of human beings.

As I have said before, it is in this manner that horrors are unleashed upon the world. And if this mentality is carried far enough, you will finally end up with the kind of thinking, and the kind of psychology, that lies behind the journal entry from World War II (written by a German soldier) that I quoted in the previous part of this essay:

"On a roundabout way to have lunch I witnessed the public shooting of twenty-eight Poles on the edge of a playing field. Thousands line the streets and the river. A ghastly pile of corpses, all in all horrifying and ugly and yet a sight that leaves me altogether cold. The men who were shot had ambushed two soldiers and a German civilian and killed them. An exemplary modern folk-drama. (1/27/44)"

If you never allowed your authentic self to develop (or your parents never allowed you to develop one), if you denied and continue to deny the reality of your own pain, then you will deny the pain of others, even as the corpses pile up -- and you will be prepared to believe anything.

And the horrors continue, beyond all human reckoning -- and without end.

In "When the Demons Come," I also offered a brief summary of my own of Miller's central thesis (from another essay):

By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their "good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.

In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using "violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:

"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."

At the conclusion of the previous part of this series, I noted two types of person that almost no one seeks to explain: the man or woman who will refuse to inflict unbearable agony on another human being, even when that refusal ensures his or her own death; and the person who will engage in torture, even when he knows that torture does not work, and even if he senses in some vague form that he is engaging in sadism for its own sake. He knows there is nothing to be gained from his unforgivable cruelty, yet he does it anyway.

About both types of person, I asked a simple question: Why? Why does one person refuse to act cruelly, while another does so with an eagerness that horrifies us? Since last evening, I have been struggling to find another way of identifying the chasm that separates my approach from that utilized by someone like Andrew Sullivan. The difference is crucial, especially because Sullivan condemns torture in no uncertain terms. But as I explained, the entire perspective that informs his condemnation is profoundly different from mine. Therefore, identifying the difference in our outlooks with precision is of immense importance.

In the previous essay, I analyzed how Sullivan approaches the question of torture as a political one: he considers the legitimizing of torture in terms of its effects on the United States as a political entity. He discusses torture's ghastly effects on the victim -- but only in very abstract, impersonal terms, as if he were writing a textbook on political theory. And, very significantly, both Krauthammer and Sullivan -- even though they come down on opposite sides of this dispute -- exhibit the same blind spot: the reality of the person who will always refuse to inflict torture on another does not appear to exist for them. We are left with the sense that, in their world, if the order comes down to torture, the order will be obeyed. So the critical question for them is whether that order should ever be issued. Krauthammer says it should, and Sullivan says it must never be.

For me, the question is a profoundly different one. I recognize that the order will not necessarily be obeyed. So for me, the key lies right there: why will some people refuse, while others won't? Krauthammer and Sullivan never ask this question. They are both the victims that Miller describes. Obedience is the ruling principle that informs their approach -- and the only question is: obedience to what? (I note the following, because it is very revealing of the extent to which the principle of obedience dominates Sullivan's approach. Sullivan is an openly gay man, who writes extensively about gay issues -- and also about his Catholicism. It is quite striking to see the enormous struggles that engage Sullivan -- struggles which are entirely self-selected and to which he voluntarily submits -- as he tries to reconcile his own homosexuality with a Church that continues to explicitly condemn gay people for their sexuality. He cannot make peace between these warring parts of his worldview and of himself because, in fact, no such peace can ever be attained. But he refuses to give up the principle of obedience that is still represented by his allegiance to the Catholic Church.)

As I was reflecting on these issues, I recalled a line I once heard or read somewhere. I've tried to remember its source, but I can't. It is not the way I would choose to make the point; it's a sentimental, not fully serious manner of expressing the thought. The line went something like this: "Nothing happens in politics, that did not happen first in the human heart." Let us set the style aside: there is a great truth contained in that statement. It is crucial to appreciate what it is.

For me, the ultimate truth of any question is an individual one. Individual human beings are the ultimate components of all the questions that concern us, whether they are philosophical, political, aesthetic or of any other kind. Politics represents the summation of many individual actions. In all the heated debates about politics or foreign policy, we too often forget where the final consequences of our actions are felt: by individual human beings, by people who are happy or sad because of what we do, by people who all too frequently today live or die as the result of our actions. Obviously, this is why politics and foreign policy matter so much: the lives of countless people are affected because of the decisions we make. This is why I spend so much time on these questions myself.

But the final significance of all these issues is intensely personal: these questions matter so desperately because of how they affect me, and you, and all of us. And this is why, when I consider a subject like torture, the most critical question for me is the personal one: why are there some people who will refuse to obey the order? If everyone refused, the problem would never arise. This is another way of expressing an old cliche. It may be a cliche, but it goes to the identical personal issue: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"

Think about that for a moment. What if no one did come? Put it another way: why are so many people willing, even eager, to engage in violence? Almost all of us reject violence on the narrower scale: we all condemn the thief, or the individual murderer. But when violence is engaged in on a wide scale by governments, many of us enthusiastically embrace it. We allow ourselves to forget the personal impact, and the horror becomes manifest. And when it comes to the question of torture, some of us will approve it, while refusing to consider its ultimate source -- and while refusing to acknowledge that some people will never permit themselves to act in such a manner. Still others, while they condemn it, similarly refuse to consider the issue in any but the most impersonal and abstract of terms. They cannot imagine the person who simply says, "No" -- because they themselves would not. They have been taught to obey, and they will not challenge the principle that lies at the foundation of their identity.

This is why, even though I agree with his ultimate condemnation, I reject Sullivan's approach and the means by which he arrives at his conclusion absolutely, and across the board. He is incapable of seeing what the critical question is: he cannot understand the roots of such violence, nor can he see that our current foreign policy itself embodies that same violence. In the end, his condemnation is irrelevant and futile. People who condemn torture for the reasons Sullivan does do nothing to stop the violence that threatens to engulf the world.

Because she is the preeminent expert on the subject, I will leave the final words to Alice Miller herself. Here is the main page of her site. Because it utilizes frames, I recommend you follow the links, until you get to the page that lists "Articles," "Books," "Interviews" and other categories, and you will be able to access the particular articles I mention from there, in addition to a wealth of other exceptional and illuminating material.

From her article, "The Origins of Torture in Endured Child Abuse":

Many people have claimed to be appalled by the acts of perversion committed by American soldiers on ADULT people, Iraqi prisoners. Amazingly, I have never heard of any such reaction in response to the occasional attempts to expose similar practices committed towards CHILDREN, as for instance in British and American schools. There, these practices come under the heading of "education." But the cruelty is the same. The world appears to be surprised that such brutality should rear its head among the American forces.

After all, America presents itself to the international public as the guardian of world peace. There is an explanation for all this, but hardly anyone wants to hear it.

It is definitely a good thing that light has been cast on the situation and that the media have exposed this lie for what it is. Basically it runs as follows: We are a civilized, freedom-loving nation and bring democracy and independence to the whole world. Under this motto the Americans forced their way into Iraq with devastating results and still insist that they are exporting cultural values. But now it turns out that alongside their bombs and missiles the well-drilled, smartly dressed soldiers are carrying a huge arsenal of pent-up rage around with them, invisible on the outside, invisible for themselves, lurking deep down within, but unmistakably dangerous.

Where does this suppressed rage come from, this need to torment, humiliate, mock, and abuse helpless human beings (prisoners and children as well)? What are these outwardly tough soldiers avenging themselves for? And where have they learnt such behavior? First as little children taught obedience by means of physical "correction," then in school, where they served as the defenseless objects of the sadism of some of their teachers, and finally in their time as recruits, treated like dirt by their superiors so that they could finally acquire the highly dubious ability to take anything meted out to them and qualify as "tough."

The thirst for vengeance does not come from nowhere. It has a clearly identifiable cause. The thirst for vengeance has its origins in infancy, when children are forced to suffer in silence and put up with the cruelty inflicted on them in the name of upbringing. They learn how to torment others from their parents, and later from their teachers and superiors. It is nothing other than systematic instruction by example on how to destroy others. Yet many people believe that it has no evil consequences. As if a child were a container that can be emptied from time to time. But the human brain is not a container. The things we learn at an early stage stay with us in later life.

...

The media quote psychological experts who contend that the brutality displayed by the American soldiers is a result of the stress caused by war. It is true that war unleashes latent aggression. BUT TO BE UNLEASHED IT HAS TO BE ALREADY THERE. It would be impossible for individuals who have not been exposed to violence very early, either at home or at school, to abuse and mock defenseless prisoners. They simply couldn't do it. We know from the history of the last World War that many conscripted soldiers were able to show a human face, even in the stress of war, if they had grown up without being exposed to violence. Many accounts of the war and the conditions in the camps tell us that even such extreme stress will not necessarily turn adults into perverted individuals.

From another Alice Miller article, "Taking It Personally: Indignation as a Vehicle of Therapy":

There is no shortage of books and articles informing us about horrific deeds and circumstances (cruelty to animals, exploitation of nature, torture, despotism, etc.), and it is only natural that we should respond to such accounts with strong feelings. The reaction displayed by a large majority of the thinking and feeling population is one of indignation. But there is an exception to this rule. To a striking degree, reports on the physical abuse of children in the form of spankings or beatings meet with almost total indifference. Most people are still convinced that for children physical "correction" is both necessary and harmless.

How can anyone possibly believe that youngsters will benefit from being beaten, particularly at a time when they are still growing and their brains are developing? One might perhaps assume that the advocates of corporal punishment have never heard of the fact that the human brain is still at the development stage in the first three years of life, and that it is precisely in this period that violence is learned by example. But what explanation is there for such ignorance? After all, this knowledge is not a closely guarded secret. At least educated people like teachers, priests, or lawyers (politicians, statesmen, ministers) must surely have been confronted with the facts of the matter at some point.

Reports on cruelty to children have been common knowledge for at least 20 years, yet there are still no signs of revulsion and horror at this ruthless exploitation of the helpless situation children find themselves in. Cruelty of this kind serves one single purpose: the discharge of the feelings of hatred pent up in adults, parents, and so-called caregivers. But what do we say when we hear a child has been beaten? "So what? That's quite normal, isn't it?"

In the last 20 years or so, some people have been raising their voices and insisting that it is in fact anything but normal, that it is both dangerous and ethically unconscionable. But these people are still a small minority. My numerous attempts to persuade the Vatican to assist me in enlightening young parents about the dangers of hitting their children have all failed. I have invariably come up against a wall of indifference and silence.

How can we explain this? We can hardly assume that there is no single person in the Vatican able to react with indignation to the violence done to children. This surely cannot be the reason why no one felt prompted to pass my information on to the Pope. Yet my experience indicates that nothing of the kind has in fact been done. And this applies not only to the Vatican. All over the world, governments have done very little indeed to put a stop to these barbaric practices.

...

Time and again, I ask myself why it is so difficult to communicate this knowledge, why the perfectly normal response - horror and indignation - fails to materialize when the question at issue is cruelty to small children. Deep down I know the answer, though I keep on hoping I am mistaken. The answer I have found is: Most of us were mistreated as children and had to learn to deny this fact at a very early stage in order to survive. We were forced to believe

"that we were humiliated and tormented 'for our own good,' that the beatings we received did not hurt and were harmless, that such treatment served to protect the community (as otherwise we would have turned into dangerous monsters)."

If the brain stores this aberrant information at a very early stage, then the message it conveys will normally retain its effect throughout our lives. It causes a persistent mental bias. In therapy, such biases may be resolved. But most people are not prepared to question and abandon preconceptions of this kind. Instead they chant this perverse litany: "My parents did their best to bring me up properly, I was a difficult child, and I needed strict discipline." Obviously, people who have been brought up to believe this cannot conceivably feel indignation about cruelty to children. Since their own childhood, they have been dissociated from their true feelings, from the pain caused by humiliation and torment. To feel their indignation they would need to get back in touch with that childhood pain. And who will want to do that?

...

Both in forensic psychiatry and in psychoanalytic circles we constantly hear it said that the abominable deeds perpetrated by mass murderers could hardly be the fruits of childhood abuse because some of these killers come neither from broken homes nor from families with an appreciable history of violence. However, if we take the trouble to inquire more closely into their parents' upbringing methods, we are invariably confronted with horrors that are just as execrable as the crimes committed by serial killers. Indeed, as these perversions were visited upon children - for years on end - what we usually refer to as corporal punishment fully deserves to be branded as murder - murder of the soul. As the book Base Instincts by Jonathan Pincus demonstrates (cf. Thomas Gruner's article "Frenzy" on this website), it is by no means difficult to elicit details about parental cruelty from murderers because they themselves hardly ever consider them to be evidence of perversion. They see them as instances of a perfectly normal upbringing. Like almost all people abused in childhood, these killers are fond of their parents and prepared to go to any lengths to shield them from blame and accusation.

From the same article, this is the most crucial point of all:

So what about terrorist attacks, or instances of genocide as in Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, and so many other places in the world? Can we imagine people wanting to blow themselves sky-high if they were loved, protected, and respected as children? I refuse to accept the idea that people capable of such abominable deeds should be regarded as incarnations of pure evil, thus relieving us of any attempt to identify the roots of this compulsive destructiveness in their biographies. These roots are readily discernible once we open our eyes to the fact that, horrific as the crimes of these adults may be, they are no more appalling than the tortures these criminals were exposed to as children. Then, suddenly, the apparent mystery is solved. We realize that there is not one single mass murderer or serial killer who as a child was not the victim of all kinds of humiliations and psychic murder. But to see that, we need the capacity for indignation that normally lapses into abeyance when we think and talk about childhood. (Once again, let me point out that my concern here is not to condone the crimes of adult sadists but to understand the sufferings of the children they once were).

And, because this subject is a very grim one, and because these horrors are all too real, I also repeat Miller's statement set forth at the beginning of this final installment:

For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.

That is a great truth we must always remember, and the hope we must never lose.

And I think the other great truth is the personal one, as I have described it. It lies within every one of us -- and it lies within you.

Each of us must struggle to find it and, as may be required, we should tell others about what we discover. That intimately personal truth, that inviolable part of ourselves where we can choose what we are and what we will be, is where our humanity lives, and where the possibility for glory may be found.

Each of us must find it -- and then we must make it real.

ON TORTURE, VI(A): The Truth that Lies Within, and the Truth that Many Will Not Face

2005-12-12T14:27:00.000-08:00

I have covered many aspects of torture in the earlier parts of this series. First and foremost, and the most crucial point in the debate over whether any government should officially condone torture in any circumstances, is the fact upon which the experts agree: torture does not work. As I've noted repeatedly, that ought to end the debate immediately. Yet it does not. Why doesn't it? The answer may not lie exactly where you think it does. We'll get to that shortly.

I've addressed the manner in which torture is an integral and necessary part of the apparatus of any totalitarian police state, relying on Hannah Arendt's immensely important writing. I've also explained the fundamental contradiction that fatally undercuts the opposition of someone like Andrew Sullivan to the use or approval of torture: it is not possible to continue to support the goals of our foreign policy -- which necessitate the imposition, by means of military force, of our form of government on cultures and societies that have no history, traditions or intellectual roots to sustain the specific political forms we have adopted -- while decrying the inevitably implied and necessary means of achieving those ends. If you want empire, you must use the means by which empire establishes and sustains itself. Moreover, it is simply not true that everyone wants what we want, and that everyone yearns for freedom in the particularly Western mode, as Barbara Tuchman has memorably discussed ("The assumption that humanity at large shared the democratic Western idea of freedom was an American delusion. 'The freedom we cherish and defend in Europe,' stated President Eisenhower on taking office, 'is no different than the freedom that is imperiled in Asia.' He was mistaken. Humanity may have common ground, but needs and aspirations vary according to circumstances.").

There is no question that torture has become a critical, systematic element in the Bush administration's policies regarding its ill-defined "War on Terror," as I discussed in Part III. I offered some indispensable excerpts from Darius Rejali's work on torture in Part IV -- concerning why torture does not work, and how it damages not only the person who is tortured, but the one who tortures. And much more than this is damaged: as Rejali explains, the systematic utilization of torture erodes and eventually destroys any political system that routinely employs it. Torture's destruction reaches in all directions: no one is exempt from the lethal power it exerts.

Even those of us who passionately protest against our government's policies in this regard are not untouched: how can we remain unaffected when our government engages in such monstrous acts, and does so allegedly to protect us, and in our name? It is not that I believe in notions such as collective guilt; I most emphatically do not. Guilt is individual, and belongs to those who have earned it by their wrongdoing. But when a nation's leaders institutionalize the methods of sadistic monsters and make them part of the government's formal policies (even if they simultaneously lie and insist they have not done so), the corruption affects the entire society. We live in this country and this society, and we cannot escape its atmosphere even if we wished to. That is precisely why those of us who deeply oppose our government's course must speak out in every way we can, and as often as we can -- that, together with the fact that the Bush administration does claim to commit these crimes in our name. It is our obligation, to ourselves and to all those who watch and judge what we do and all those who are affected by our actions, to make it clearly understood that this administration does not act for us in these ways. The Bush administration has polluted our nation's cultural and political atmosphere in ways that may not be reversible, at least not in our lifetimes. Now we all breathe its poisoned fumes. The administration's inhuman cruelty affects even those who so mistakenly support and encourage its policies. Their humanity is also diminished and perhaps destroyed, even if they accede in that destruction. In their case, the guilt is earned to varying degrees -- but better leaders would have chosen a very different course.

In Part V, I discussed the utterly flawed arguments offered in defense of the administration, and in defense of torture itself, by Charles Krauthammer. Every argument that Krauthammer offers is invalid -- but the issues that Krauthammer mentions only in passing or that he omits entirely are even more significant. Andrew Sullivan wrote a lengthy response to Krauthammer, disagreeing both with Krauthammer's arguments and with his conclusions. Even though Sullivan disagrees with Krauthammer on every aspect of the torture question, he omits the same elements from his own reply. That failure on the part of both men -- men who do not agree on any point in contention, but who both fail to raise or answer the identical questions -- is the central key, both to this debate and to what is so profoundly destructive and evil about torture itself.

In Part II, I explained the contradiction in Sullivan's views. The tone of that essay (much of which was originally written in May 2005) is admittedly very harsh. In addition, I scathingly condemned Sullivan for certain deeply offensive aspects of his own approach. Since he himself had brought those elements onto the field, it was legitimate for me (or anyone else) to criticize them in the manner I did. But there will be none of that here. These issues are much too important to engage in any kind of debate about "personalities." In fact, and this is why I hope you will be patient as I work through these points and follow me through these questions, I do not think there are any more crucial issues now facing us. In the end, I think these issues are the most critical ones for our future -- if we are to have a future that remains civilized in any meaningful way at all.

Sullivan makes a number of points in his reply to Krauthammer that are entirely valid and useful; in fact, he covers many of the same issues that I discussed myself. But Sullivan uses an entire framework that differs radically from mine, and that framework informs every element of his article. Sullivan essentially views the debate about torture in political terms. His most basic criticism of the endorsement of torture is that it will ultimately destroy the United States as a political entity. He begins by identifying torture as the antithesis of freedom and liberty:

Torture is the polar opposite of freedom. It is the banishment of all freedom from a human body and soul, insofar as that is possible. As human beings, we all inhabit bodies and have minds, souls, and reflexes that are designed in part to protect those bodies: to resist or flinch from pain, to protect the psyche from disintegration, and to maintain a sense of selfhood that is the basis for the concept of personal liberty.

For Sullivan, torture is the route to totalitarianism: "What you see in the relationship between torturer and tortured is the absolute darkness of totalitarianism. You see one individual granted the most complete power he can ever hold over another." This may appear to be closely related to Arendt's point -- but in fact, it is not the same point at all. I'll return to this question in an upcoming essay.

If we incorporate a "right to torture" into the United States in formal, political terms, Sullivan contends that we will destroy our country by inevitable implication:

Any polity that endorses torture has incorporated into its own DNA a totalitarian mutation. If the point of the U.S. Constitution is the preservation of liberty, the formal incorporation into U.S. law of the state's right to torture--by legally codifying physical coercion, abuse, and even, in Krauthammer's case, full-fledged torture of detainees by the CIA--would effectively end the American experiment of a political society based on inalienable human freedom protected not by the good graces of the executive, but by the rule of law.

Sullivan's approach grows out of the way he characterizes the current world conflict, which is, of course, also the way the Bush administration describes it. Sullivan sees the conflict as the "clash of civilizations" -- between Enlightenment values, liberty, and the possibility for achievement in all fields on one side, versus primitive fundamentalism, totalitarianism and nihilism on the other.

This claims far too much, and this approach easily shades into the vision of the Apocalyptic Crusader. That earlier essay of mine described this phenomenon at length, and relied in large part on James Carroll's invaluable work in this area. Toward the end of that piece, I wrote:

Even though we employ somewhat different terms, the extent to which Carroll and I are describing the same phenomenon is very striking to me. The dynamics we both discuss involve redemption through death on a mass scale, leading (its exponents hope) to an entirely new world – and the greater the scale of death and destruction, the better, from the perspective of the apocalyptic-millennialist world view. The same dynamics also lead to an "external" and an "internal" enemy. This time, the internal enemy comprises not only Muslims and Arabs, but everyone who fails to echo the administration line, and who thereby proves himself to be a "fifth columnist" who wants "the other side" to win, whether he will admit it or not.

It should never be forgotten that Sullivan was one of those most responsible for poisoning the cultural atmosphere after 9/11, with his interminable condemnations of the vile "fifth columnists" here at home -- which group was made up of anyone and everyone who failed to support Bush's plans for "benevolent worldwide hegemony" with the degree of enthusiasm Sullivan himself brought to the task. (On an issue of this significance, and given Sullivan's record in this regard, I will never hesitate to "personalize" these kinds of debates.)

As I've noted, Sullivan sees torture as perhaps the critical turning point for the survival or destruction of the Western form of government -- and survival or destruction depends on whether we reject or condone torture. This similarly claims far too much, and it misses several crucial points. To pick an obvious alternative hypothetical: our government could completely reject the use of torture, but it could simultaneously declare that it has the right to imprison all those it declares to be "enemy combatants" for the rest of their lives. It could say it is not obligated to defend or explain its actions, and it could maintain that its decisions on all such matters are absolute and unappealable. In fact, and with the critical exception of the rejection of torture, this is what the Bush administration claims it has the "right" to do. But it could ban torture altogether. You'll be in prison or in a detention camp until the day you die, but otherwise no one will harm a hair on your head.

The fact that the Bush administration has been rigorously pursuing its "right" to exert absolute dictatorial power in the Padilla case (and others) for several years can cause one to wonder exactly why Sullivan chooses the issue of torture upon which to stake his claim on behalf of liberty, and to write:

In order to retain fundamental American values, we have to banish from the United States the totalitarian impulse that is integral to every act of torture. We have to ensure that the virus of tyranny is never given an opening to infect the Constitution and replicate into something that corrupts as deeply as it wounds.

But it is tragically true that there are any number of other "openings" in addition to torture by which "the virus of tyranny" can fatally undermine liberty in the United States, and the Bush administration has been systematically and unrelentingly trying to exploit more than a few of them.

Or choose a less extreme example of the same kind, or one that at least appears to be less extreme. The government could ban torture across the board, but announce that it now has the power to decide what kind of work each of us must do. We live in wartime; our greatest resource is human labor and skill. Only the government can allocate human "resources" most effectively. So the government will decide how and where you will work, and what tasks will consume your days. You will never be tortured, and the government keeps its word on this point. You'll be a slave, but you will be unharmed physically. (In fact, there was talk for a while during World War II that the Roosevelt administration would do precisely this, and the debate about general "labor conscription" grew very heated. The proposal was ultimately defeated by the labor unions, who declined to let their members be made serfs belonging to government bureaucrats. The Roosevelt administration maintained, with logic and consistency on its side, that since almost everyone acknowledged that the government could draft people into the military -- and order them to be injured or killed -- it could draft citizens into any other occupation. After all, we were engaged in a world war, and the labor force at home was critical to victory. People who today so casually endorse military conscription would do well to remember this episode, because the same inexorable logic may still come back someday to enslave us all.)

Torture is not necessary for freedom to be destroyed; liberty can be lost in an infinite number of other ways, as human societies have proven throughout the tragic arc of most of human history. But Sullivan's approach is instructive: a danger to which those who defend our foreign policy are particularly susceptible is their unending effort to force every issue that arises into the pre-existing ideological framework to which they are already committed. In Sullivan's view, torture assumes such great importance because of its significance in the "clash of civilizations" and in the "War on Terror."

Sullivan's approach can be described in another way: it is very abstract, and it is almost entirely depersonalized. Yes, he talks at length about how torture assaults personal autonomy on the most basic level -- but consider exactly how and in what terms he does so. For example:

The infliction of physical pain on a person with no means of defending himself is designed to render that person completely subservient to his torturers. It is designed to extirpate his autonomy as a human being, to render his control as an individual beyond his own reach.

Or note the way Sullivan introduces his article:

In this inevitably emotional debate, perhaps the greatest failing of those of us who have been arguing against all torture and "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" of detainees is that we have assumed the reasons why torture is always a moral evil, rather than explicating them.

I would prefer not to use myself as the counterexample, but in this instance I have no choice. Consider my own essay condemning Krauthammer's position. I offer many facts, and trace through a number of arguments. But the tone of my piece and that of Sullivan's come from different universes: my tone is impassioned and, once I have set forth my reasons, I have no hesitation about identifying Krauthammer for what he is: a monster. Sullivan takes a clinical, almost textbook-like approach, and uses words like "extirpate" and "explicate" throughout -- when he is discussing the most brutal and sadistic of crimes. Part of the explanation for the difference may be simply that Krauthammer is Sullivan's "friend," and that this kind of "gentlemanly" style is typical of the chummy punditocracy. But that can't be the entire explanation, especially when the most basic issues of our humanity itself are involved.

And it is very far from the entire explanation -- because of what Krauthammer and Sullivan never discuss at all. In his defense of torture, Krauthammer writes: "Torture is a terrible and monstrous thing, as degrading and morally corrupting to those who practice it as any conceivable human activity including its moral twin, capital punishment." That is almost the only mention in Krauthammer's entire piece about what torture does to the torturer. Krauthammer broaches the subject only in one or two other instances, and the mentions are similarly fleeting. And Sullivan's focus is the same: his entire condemnation of torture focuses on what it does to the victims, to those who suffer the torture. And he talks at length about the consequences of torture on the United States as a political entity -- but what about what it does to those individuals who administer the torture?

It is obviously not at all the case that I do not care about what torture does to those who are its victims; consult all the previous entries in this series to see my repeated denunciations of these kinds of criminal and unforgivable acts, and the many other posts where I set forth the details of these acts of brutality (such as this Addendum to this series). But above all else, there is one fact that appears forever invisible to both Krauthammer and Sullivan, and one kind of individual who does not exist for them.

When the order comes down to treat a prisoner with unspeakable cruelty, to "waterboard" him, to electrocute him, to cut him, to hang him on hooks from the ceiling for days on end, or to commit any number of other unforgivable crimes, there is always the man or woman who will say -- without bravado, without show, without explicitly staking any particular moral claim, but as a simple, unadorned statement of fact:

No. I will not do this. You can torture me, or say you will kill me. I cannot and will not do this to another human being. I will not do this.

No.

Every conflict in history sees such people -- people who will not be moved from what they know to be right, to be human, to be decent, to be civilized. Many of us celebrate their stories. We draw inspiration from their unbreakable courage. They are the people who will not compromise their most fundamental values, or what they know to be the essence of their humanity. They refuse to surrender it -- no matter the cost, regardless of the pain they themselves may bear as a result, setting aside all the consequences that may ensue.

They will not do it -- even when they know to an absolute certainty that their refusal will mean their own death.

Yet the defenders of torture, and even many of those who condemn it, never mention these men and women. For them, it is as if such people never existed, and are nowhere to be found in our world today. Why?

There is an equally important, critically related question: every expert attests to the fact that torture does not work. Surely everyone in our military knows that, or has access to this information. And yet, when the order comes down -- even if only indirectly or implicitly -- we know, all too tragically, that many people will become sadists. They know (or easily could know) that torture is worse than futile, that it will not help to acquire "useful" information and will most likely lead to the opposite outcome, and that it will lead to many other profoundly negative and destructive results.

But they do it anyway. They turn themselves into sadistic monsters, and far too many of them do so with genuinely horrifying enthusiasm and commitment. Why?

These are the most vital and crucial questions of all, and they deserve considered, careful and detailed answers. I'll turn to this subject in what will be, for the moment, the final installment of this series.

ON TORTURE, ADDENDUM: More from the Annals of Horror

2005-12-11T14:08:00.000-08:00

From the UK Independent:

Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi is accused by the US government of planning a dirty bomb attack in America. He says he was tortured until he admitted the crime.

He was arrested at Karachi airport in April 2002, with a passport under the name of Fouad Zouawi, a friend, and with a ticket to Zurich and then on to London.

In documents compiled by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, he describes an encounter with someone he believes to be an MI6 officer and details the horror of his torture. Mr Habashi says the officer told him 'I'll see what we can do with the Americans'. "They gave me a cup of tea with a lot of sugar in it. He said 'Where you're going you need a lot of sugar'."

He was taken to Morocco and questioned, then tortured after refusing to admit [...] al-Qa'ida links.

"They took the scalpel to my right chest. One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times in maybe two hours. They would do it to me about once a month."

The treatment continued in the so-called "Prison of Darkness" in Kabul, where he was kept from January to May in 2004.

"The US military told us 'Bin Laden had his laugh on 9/11 so it is now our time to have our laugh'," he said. "They would hang me up. I was allowed a few hours' sleep on the second day, then I was hung up, this time for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb."

And so, after this repeated torture, he finally confessed. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't anyone -- simply to make it stop? Wouldn't you "confess" to any crime at all, just to make the agony end?

Of course you would. So would anyone in the world, guilty or innocent. At this point, and given the overwhelming number of such accounts that continue to surface, no one has the slightest reason to wonder why more and more people hate us with every day that passes, or why more and more people wish to do us grievous harm.

ON TORTURE, V: A Monster's Confession, and the Choice to be Human

2005-12-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

With regard to everything that follows, I urge you always to keep in mind two crucial facts. The first is the very simple truth that ought to end all the debates about torture before they even begin: TORTURE DOES NOT WORK. Torture does not lead to accurate intelligence, it does not aid us in any ascertainable, identifiable way in preventing atrocities visited upon either combatants or innocent civilians, and it does not take us one step closer to victory over our genuine enemies. For anyone who remains at all decent, that stops the discussion immediately. But it does not -- only because of certain truths a dangerous number of us refuse to face.

The second fact, which cannot ever be emphasized too often or too much, identifies the actual nature of torture. As I put it in Part III of this series:

Torture is the deliberate infliction of unbearable agony on a human being -- a human being who is intentionally kept alive precisely so that he will suffer still more and for a longer period of time -- for no justifiable reason. This is the embrace of sadism and cruelty for their own sake, and for no other end whatsoever.

I suppose it is only appropriate, in an especially grisly manner, that Charles Krauthammer, a leading and particularly vicious hawk, should have written a "defense" of torture recently published in what is probably the most profoundly irresponsible, dishonest and uncivilized periodical in the United States today, The Weekly Standard. The title and subheading of his article are themselves instructive: "The Truth about Torture -- It's time to be honest about doing terrible things." Krauthammer tells the "truth" and is "honest" in the same manner we might view Hitler or Stalin as "truthful" and "honest": his article is one lie piled on top of another. The distortions and contradictions are endless. Only a man who is deeply uncivilized and who is contemptibly dishonest could have authored such a piece; the same is true to varying degrees of anyone and everyone who has praised it, as many hawks have.

The deeply sickening and repellent tone of Krauthammer's paean to inhumanity is revealed in his opening paragraph:

DURING THE LAST FEW WEEKS in Washington the pieties about torture have lain so thick in the air that it has been impossible to have a reasoned discussion. The McCain amendment that would ban "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of any prisoner by any agent of the United States sailed through the Senate by a vote of 90-9. The Washington establishment remains stunned that nine such retrograde, morally inert persons--let alone senators--could be found in this noble capital.

Those who question the advisability of embracing barbarism as national policy are employing "pieties about torture," and they make it impossible for the monsters in our midst to have "a reasoned discussion" about what degree of sadism for its own sake is "proper," and precisely when it should be employed. Only "retrograde, morally inert persons" could oppose the McCain amendment. It is a wonder that even one such monster could be found "in this noble capital."

This is the cheaply sarcastic tone appropriate to a high school bully who happily terrorizes those he believes to be weaker than he is, not to any sort of serious consideration of an issue that directly calls into question whether we still deserve to be called "civilized" to any extent at all. The survival of our nation's soul is at stake, as it has been for at least the last several years -- and Krauthammer deliberately throws himself into the gutter and rolls around in the mud. Perhaps we should be grateful that people like Krauthammer finally recognize what is their natural environment. But the fact that a commentator who is viewed as "respectable" even in the most minuscule degree speaks of this subject in this particular way contaminates all of us.

Krauthammer very grudgingly and ungracefully concedes that John McCain "deserves respect" for his opposition to the official government approval of torture, but McCain's own history makes it impossible for anyone to do otherwise. (Actually, now that I recall the manner in which certain conservatives have smeared Murtha, Max Cleland, and others -- and McCain himself -- I probably am no longer safe in maintaining even that much. Certain conservatives will undoubtedly smear McCain himself in unforgivably ugly ways before this debate is over.) And I would not object to Krauthammer's statement: "But that does not mean, as seems to be the assumption in Washington today, that a critical analysis of his 'no torture, ever' policy is beyond the pale" -- if Krauthammer did not proceed to engage in lies and endless misdirection in the service of evil.

I will not spend a great deal of time on Krauthammer's effort to prove his "honesty" and "truthfulness," by beginning with "a few analytic distinctions." In the end, such distinctions are completely irrelevant: see the first two fundamental points above. Krauthammer identifies "three kinds of war prisoners" relevant to a discussion of "torture and prisoner maltreatment": "the ordinary soldier caught on the field of battle" (in which case "we have no right to disturb a hair on his head"); "the captured terrorist," who is "by definition, an unlawful combatant" (and who therefore "is entitled to no protections whatsoever"); and "the terrorist with information." It is with regard only to this last category that Krauthammer maintains "the issue of torture gets complicated and the easy pieties don't so easily apply."

To demonstrate his "seriousness," Krauthammer immediately employs the utterly misleading hypothetical that he calls "the textbook case":

A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.

Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?

I discussed this hypothetical in some detail in Part I of this series. I explained why it is a fantasy concocted by Hollywood scriptwriters who are unoriginal hacks of the first order, and why it has nothing whatsoever to do with how this problem would ever arise in the actual world.

By employing this example, one which has been discredited countless times -- and many times by experts on these subjects -- Krauthammer confesses not only his intellectual dishonesty, but his utter ignorance of torture itself, and how it works and fails to work. See Part IV of this series, and Darius Rejali's treatment of the "ticking bomb" problem. Here is a brief excerpt:

With regard to the "ticking time bomb" scenario, so beloved of torture's advocates, Rejali writes:

"What if time is short, as with a 'ticking bomb'? Does torture offer a shortcut? Real torture -- not the stuff of television -- takes days, if not weeks. Even torturers know this. There are three things that limit torture's value in this context."

Those "three things" are the medical limit, the resource limit, and the psychological limit. Consult the article for details.

As is usually true of men engaged in evil of this kind, Krauthammer is well aware of what he accomplishes if he gets you to accept his invalid hypothetical. Here is the heart of his argument:

Torture is not always impermissible. However rare the cases, there are circumstances in which, by any rational moral calculus, torture not only would be permissible but would be required (to acquire life-saving information). And once you've established the principle, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all that's left to haggle about is the price. In the case of torture, that means that the argument is not whether torture is ever permissible, but when--i.e., under what obviously stringent circumstances: how big, how imminent, how preventable the ticking time bomb.

That is why the McCain amendment, which by mandating "torture never" refuses even to recognize the legitimacy of any moral calculus, cannot be right. There must be exceptions. The real argument should be over what constitutes a legitimate exception.

Krauthammer knows exactly what is at stake here, and that is why his dishonesty is eternally unforgivable: "once you've established the principle" that torture would be required in certain circumstances, the argument is over. Krauthammer is hoping you won't notice that no meaningful distinction would exist any longer between us and the most loathsome, inhuman monster on this planet, in the entire span of human history.

The contradictions that Krauthammer permits himself, and which he hopes to foist on you, are further revealed in two other excerpts that deserve mention. With regard to "the terrorist with information," but not information about an allegedly impending catastrophe, Krauthammer writes:

A rational moral calculus might not permit measures as extreme as the nuke-in-Manhattan scenario, but would surely permit measures beyond mere psychological pressure.

Such a determination would not be made with an untroubled conscience. It would be troubled because there is no denying the monstrous evil that is any form of torture. And there is no denying how corrupting it can be to the individuals and society that practice it. But elected leaders, responsible above all for the protection of their citizens, have the obligation to tolerate their own sleepless nights by doing what is necessary--and only what is necessary, nothing more--to get information that could prevent mass murder.

As Krauthammer will shortly tell us, we are "morally compelled" to embrace measures that we know to represent and embody "monstrous evil." To translate this into plainer language: we are morally compelled to act in ways we know to be immoral -- and not simply immoral, but monstrously evil. Morality, according to Krauthammer, thus necessitates its own destruction. If the subject were not so horrifying, I would consider it ironic in the extreme that Krauthammer and hawks like him dare to accuse our enemies of being nihilists: to destroy the very concept of morality, and to do so in the name of saving it, is indeed a monstrous accomplishment that not even our worst enemies would have thought to attempt. The shrewder of our enemies might have realized that the worst among us would accomplish that particular destruction all on their own. But Krauthammer insists that "we must" cross this particular Rubicon -- but that "we need rules." The "rules" will save us. Every slaughtering dictator in history has said the same.

And then there is this:

[I]t simply will not do to take refuge in the claim that all of the above discussion is superfluous because torture never works anyway. Would that this were true. Unfortunately, on its face, this is nonsense. Is one to believe that in the entire history of human warfare, no combatant has ever received useful information by the use of pressure, torture, or any other kind of inhuman treatment? It may indeed be true that torture is not a reliable tool. But that is very different from saying that it is never useful.

Once again, let us translate this to make its meaning unmistakably clear: Because it is possible that on even one occasion torture might lead to "useful" information and save lives, there is no reason to resist the explicit embrace of the "reasoning" that has justified the most murderous regimes in history.

One final dishonesty in Krauthammer's article requires discussion. This particular dishonesty also reveals that Krauthammer and those who accede to this argument understand nothing at all about principles, or why specifically moral principles are so crucial to civilization. Krauthammer takes McCain to task for McCain's statement that, in the case of the invalid "ticking time bomb" scenario, McCain said, "you do what you have to do. But you take responsibility for it." Krauthammer then asks: "But if torturing the ticking time bomb suspect is 'what you have to do,' then why has McCain been going around arguing that such things must never be done?"

In this manner, Krauthammer and others of his kind eject themselves from civilization entirely, and forever. McCain's point is that we still do not consider sadistic, inhumane treatment as valid -- but if the circumstances demonstrate that, in the particular case, the use of torture in fact led to the saving of many lives, then, but only then, will we decline to impose the punishment that would otherwise be imposed. But the principle would remain intact. The exception would remain the exception: we still would not approve such conduct, and thus make it acceptable and sure to spread further in its use. We would recognize that a genuine emergency might carve out an exception only with regard to the punishment imposed, but not with regard to the behavior that we condemn in no uncertain terms.

Krauthammer wishes to convince us that he is "serious" and "truthful." Fine, then let us be "serious" and "truthful." I have no doubt, and neither does any other adult, that in a genuine emergency of the "ticking time bomb" fantasy variety, torture has been and will continue to be employed. But the point of the prohibition is to make those who may choose to use torture to remember the great and terrible significance of what they do: that torture is never to be used routinely, or even in a certain "category" of cases. Such "categories" are easily subject to manipulation and in the service of sadistic brutality. Even a scant knowledge of the twentieth century confirms that point, more times than we would care to remember. The rest of human history provides several encyclopedias of confirming evidence.

The further point is that, in such a case, the person or persons who used torture would be asking for mercy, i.e., that the law not be applied to them given the extraordinary nature of this specific case. If we were convinced that they acted with sufficient justification in this one case, we would grant them that mercy. Again, the principle and the prohibition would be preserved.

The full monstrousness of Krauthammer's purpose becomes clear in the scope of its horror at the very end of his article:

But if that is the case, then McCain embraces the same exceptions I do, but prefers to pretend he does not. If that is the case, then his much-touted and endlessly repeated absolutism on inhumane treatment is merely for show. If that is the case, then the moral preening and the phony arguments can stop now, and we can all agree that in this real world of astonishingly murderous enemies, in two very circumscribed circumstances, we must all be prepared to torture. Having established that, we can then begin to work together to codify rules of interrogation for the two very unpleasant but very real cases in which we are morally permitted--indeed morally compelled--to do terrible things.

This is the same justification that every cowardly, bloodthirsty murderer has always used: "You have left me no choice but to be a monster. Because I am helpless to resist what I know to be evil, I am still moral. I still uphold the values of civilization."

A word that is stronger and more damning that "evil" is needed to convey the nature of this kind of argument. Krauthammer seeks to make us all monsters, and to make us all accept that we must be monsters: "We must all be prepared to torture." And even worse: we are "morally compelled" to be monsters.

The confession is undeniable. Be absolutely sure to grasp what it is: Krauthammer thus confesses that he is already a monster, but he does not want you to condemn him for it. To the contrary, he wants you to become a monster too, to accept that you were "compelled" do so in the name of morality itself, all so that you will fear judgment in the same manner, and for the same reason.

Thus, these monsters seek to reduce every one of us to their level -- to make all of us sadistic brutes, who inflict pain for the sake of pain, and who continue to maintain that they are "morally compelled" to do so, that they are upholding civilization in so acting, and that they had no choice in the matter.

But it is all a lie. It is the single worst lie any human being can ever tell. We always have a choice. The choice is what makes us human. That is where the essence of our humanity lies -- and where the possibility for true nobility of action and spirit resides.

It is also where the capacity for evil lies. Krauthammer and those who believe as he does have told us in unmistakable terms that they are already monsters. They deny it, but the truth is that they have chosen to be monsters. Krauthammer's entire article is nothing but a series of lies, and a series of rationalizations to disguise his own evil.

They are monsters. They now seek to turn us into a nation of monsters. Never, ever forget it.

ON TORTURE, IV: Becoming Monsters, and Ensuring Our Ultimate Defeat

2005-12-11T12:22:00.000-08:00

[I wrote the following essay and first published it on September 20, 2004. I offer it again in this series because the two authors whose articles I excerpt here, Darius Rejali and Mark Danner, have done invaluable work on the subject of torture. These particular excerpts set forth some of the reasons why torture represents such an immense evil, and why it must never be accepted or legitimized as a valid means of warfare. I recently found yet another article by Rejali, which offers some crucial further insights and gets us closer to the underlying motives that drive those who endorse and support the use of torture. I'll discuss that article in an upcoming piece. This essay appears as it was originally written, except that I have deleted a two-paragraph parenthetical aside. It distracted from the major points I want to emphasize once again, and it wasn't necessary to the logic of the presentation. In all other respects, the essay is unchanged. This piece was originally titled: "The Case of the Hooded Man: Have the Terrorists Already Won?"]

The Bush administration has committed many far-reaching and momentous errors in its ill-conceived and woefully executed "War on Terror": an apparent inability to understand the nature of our enemy, which has led the administration to pursue and exacerbate a foreign policy which transmutes the United States into Osama bin Laden's "only indispensable ally"; a decision not to pursue our advantage against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan when we might have, but instead to divert crucial resources of intelligence and manpower to Iraq, a completely counterproductive detour in our efforts to improve our national security; a dangerous overstretching of our military capabilities, which makes us vulnerable to our enemies in ways we had not been previously, a weakness which might persist for an indefinite future period; and any number of additional errors, many of them growing out of these more fundamental mistakes.

But one fatal misjudgment has been especially damaging, and its corrosive effects will last for decades. That mistake attacks the meaning and symbolic importance of the United States at the most fundamental level: it undercuts the United States as a force for moral good in the world. The fact that our enemies can now portray us as embodying evil to a significant extent may be the worst legacy any administration has ever left our nation. The fault, the blame, and the cause of this disaster lie squarely with the Bush administration -- and with the President himself.

The most potent symbol of this horrific and grievous error is the story of the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but the full story encompasses much more than this single storyline can convey. Reading a great deal of commentary on this subject reveals to me that many people still do not grasp some essentials of the subject matter involved, so a brief review of those basics is necessary.

I would prefer to begin with the moral argument, but I will not. I'll come back to the moral considerations in the middle and final parts of this essay. Instead, let's begin with one single overwhelmingly significant fact, one which far too many people seem to be entirely ignorant of: even if one constructed an argument to make torture "acceptable" given certain exigent circumstances, the simple fact is that torture does not work. In a saner, more humane world, the fact that it does not work would end the argument. But our world is far from sane at the moment; war causes humanity to lose sight of the fundamentals of reasoning, and great fear leads people to abandon what they know to be right when they are not so threatened.

Darius Rejali first learned about torture growing up in Iran, "under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose government relied on Savak, a secret intelligence agency formed with the help of the CIA in 1957." He researched modern torture for 20 years, and studied "stealthy" methods of torture -- "those that leave few visible marks (i.e., blood or scars) on the victim. I noticed that stealthy techniques appeared more often in the wars of democracies than in those of dictatorships."

In a lengthy article published by Salon in June of this year, Rejali wrote:

Few things give a rush quite like having unlimited power over another human being. A sure sign the rush is coming is pasty saliva and a strange taste in one's mouth, according to a French soldier attached to a torture unit in Algeria. That powerful rush can be seen on the faces of some of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, a rush that undoubtedly changed them forever. The history of slavery tells us that one can't feel such a rush without being corrupted by it. And the history of modern torture tells us that governments can't license this corruption -- even in the cause of spreading democracy -- without reducing the quality of their intelligence, compromising their allies and damaging their military. ...

My research shows, however, that torture during interrogations rarely yields better information than traditional human intelligence, partly because no one has figured out a precise, reliable way to break human beings or any adequate method to evaluate whether what prisoners say when they do talk is true. Nor can torture be done in a professional way -- anyone who tortures is necessarily corrupted by the experience and is often turned into a sadist. The psychic damage to the soldiers who conducted the torture at Abu Ghraib is likely to be permanent.

What's more, a democracy that legalizes the use of torture in its desperation to gain information loses something more important -- the trust of its people, the foundation of a democracy. In Iraq, the United States was desperate as it sought to find and stop those responsible for the insurgency. When "intelligence" was not forthcoming from prisoners, senior U.S. Army officials decided to turn over interrogation to military intelligence personnel, who were instructed to use aggressive, even brutal techniques. These methods were rationalized as necessary in the overall global war on terrorism, but as my research has shown, institutionalizing torture in such a manner only ends up destroying all the individuals involved -- and the military and political goals of the government in whose name torture is carried out.

Rejali then turns to the question of torture's "utility":

Aside from its devastating effects and the wasted time and resources, does torture actually work? Organizations can certainly use torture to intimidate prisoners and to produce confessions (many of which turn out to be false). But the real question is whether organizations can apply torture scientifically and professionally to produce true information. Does this method yield better results than others at an army's disposal? The history of torture demonstrates that it does not -- whether it is stealthy or not.

He goes through a number of details to demonstrate the grounds for his conclusion. I could hardly bear to read it and will not reproduce it here, except for this excerpt:

As a victim feels less pain, torturers have to push harder, using more severe methods to overtake the victim's maximal pain threshold. And because victims experience different types of pain, torturers have to use a scattershot approach. No matter how professional torturers may think they are, they have no choice but behaving like sadists. Even though many of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were using techniques approved by their superiors, it is no surprise that they went far beyond these techniques, trying anything that worked.

Competition among torturers also drives brutality. As one torturer put it, each interrogator "thinks he is going to get the information at any minute and takes good care not to let the bird go to the next chap after he's softened him up nicely, when of course the other chap would get the honor and glory of it." Torture, as New York University economist Leonard Wantchekon has said, is a zero-sum game.

Even our former enemies understood this point:

The interrogation manual of Japanese fascists put it this way: "Care must be exercised when making use of rebukes, invectives or torture as it will result in his telling falsehoods and making a fool of you." Torture "is only to be used when everything else has failed as it is the most clumsy [method]."

Lest you think this is merely an academic discussion, Rejali points out that "good intelligence requires humans willing to trust government enough to work with it." This is a point that the insurgents in Iraq understand, but we clearly do not -- and the results have been disastrous, as all the world is now witnessing every day:

Even guerrillas know this truth. An internal report from Iraq, quoted by Seymour Hersh in the May 24 New Yorker, states that the insurgents have depended mainly on "painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance" by the Iraqi police force, "which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents" and "pro-insurgent individuals working within the [Coalition Provisional Authority's] so-called Green Zone." Not surprisingly, the insurgents' "strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good."

With regard to the "ticking time bomb" scenario, so beloved of torture's advocates [and which I discussed in Part I of this series, where I pointed out its fundamental errors], Rejali writes:

What if time is short, as with a "ticking bomb"? Does torture offer a shortcut? Real torture -- not the stuff of television -- takes days, if not weeks. Even torturers know this. There are three things that limit torture's value in this context.

Those "three things" are the medical limit, the resource limit, and the psychological limit. Consult the article for details.

And here is the most crucial, overarching point:

Abu Ghraib should teach us what America's founders would have told us: that we are our own worst enemy. Leaders of dictatorships sign on to the Geneva Conventions only out of prudential fear of what other states might do to their POWs. Leaders of democracies sign on to them because they understand the evil that lurks in the heart of all human beings. Those who choose to abide by the rules do so not simply to restrain others but to restrain themselves.

Unrestrained power leaves behind a legacy of destruction that takes generations to undo. Torture, like incest, is the gift that keeps on giving. Democratic societies that legalized torture or tried to constrain its use have come to two ends. Some, like the Greeks and Romans, created tiered societies where authorities could torture whole classes of people (slaves or lesser citizens) and those who were beyond torture. Others, like the Italian city-states, were unable to prevent the executive branch from torturing more and more citizens and in the end fell to its dictatorial power.

The second part of Rejali's article deals with the Battle of Algiers, an example often cited to support the use of torture. However, as Rejali writes, the real lesson lies in the other direction:

The real significance of the Battle of Algiers, however, is the startling justification of torture by a democratic state. Algerian archives are now open, and many French torturers wrote their autobiographies in the 1990s. The story they tell will not comfort generals who tell self-serving stories of torture's success. In fact, the battle shows the devastating consequences of torture for any democracy foolish enough to institutionalize it.

Part II of the article contains the details of the prohibitively high costs of any government sanction of torture. Moreover, as Rejali also explains, France won the Battle of Algiers "primarily through force, not by superior intelligence gathered through torture."

People often forget the other effects of torture, the effects that are felt at home, away from where the war is taking place:

Those who authorize torture need to remember that it isn't something that simply happens in some other country. Soldiers trained in stealthy techniques of torture take these techniques back into civilian life as policemen and private security guards. It takes years to discover the effects of having tortured. Americans' use of electric torture in Vietnam appeared in Arkansas prisons in the 1960s and in Chicago squad rooms in the 1970s and 1980s.

Likewise, the excruciating water tortures U.S. soldiers used in the Spanish-American War appeared in American policing in the next two decades. For those who had been tortured, it was small comfort when, on Memorial Day 1902, President Roosevelt regretted the "few acts of cruelty" American troops had performed. ...

It is easy to criticize the leaders and torture apologists who misled us and continue to do so. What is harder is to determine how to repair the damage. One crazy man can block the well, but it takes the whole village to remove the stone, an Iranian proverb says.

[I have written about the neglected part of this story -- the common use of torture and abuse in the prison system here in the United States -- in some detail. I will be reposting those essays here in the near future.]

...

The reason I revisit this subject -- one I first discussed at length well over a year ago -- is because Rejali's article was written before the various governmental investigations into the Abu Ghraib story were completed. Now that those investigations are over, and their reports duly issued, Mark Danner has written an extensive article for The New York Review of Books surveying the findings, and their meaning. I strongly recommend that you read Danner's article (as well as both parts of Rejali's), but here are a few significant excerpts:

They have long since taken their place in the gallery of branded images, as readily recognizable in much of the world as Marilyn struggling with her billowing dress or Michael dunking his basketball: Hooded Man, a dark-caped figure tottering on a box, supplicant arms outstretched, wires trailing from his fingers; and Leashed Man, face convulsed in humiliation above his leather collar, naked body twisted at the feet of the American female in camouflage pants who gazes down at him without expression, holding the leash casually in hand. The ubiquity of these images in much of the world suggests not only their potency but their usefulness and their adaptability. For the first of the many realities illuminated by the Global War on Terror--or the GWOT, as the authors of the latest reports listed here designate it--is the indisputable fact that much of the world sees America rather differently from the way Americans see themselves.

Out of the interlocking scandals and controversies symbolized by Hooded Man and Leashed Man, the pyramids of naked bodies, the snarling dogs, and all the rest, and known to the world by the collective name of Abu Ghraib, one can extract two "master narratives," both dependent on the power and mutability of the images themselves. The first is that of President Bush, who presented the photographs as depicting "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops, who dishonored our country and disregarded our values"--behavior that, the President insisted, "does not represent America." And the aberrant, outlandish character of what the photographs show--the nudity, the sadism, the pornographic imagery--seemed to support this "few bad apples" argument, long the classic defense of states accused of torture.

The facts, however, almost from day one, did not. ...

The second "master narrative" of Abu Ghraib is that of the Muslim preacher Sheik Mohammed Bashir, quoted above, and many other Arabs and Muslims who point to the scandal's images as perfect symbols of the subjugation and degradation that the American occupiers have inflicted on Iraq and the rest of the Arab world. In this sense the Hooded Man and the Leashed Man fill a need, serving as powerful brand images advertising a preexisting product.

Danner reminds us of the manner in which many of the Iraqis imprisoned in Abu Ghraib were captured -- and military personnel themselves admit that as many as 85% to 90% of the prisoners had no or severely limited intelligence value:

Representatives of the Red Cross, who visited Abu Graib nearly thirty times in this period, offered a more vivid account of "cordon and capture":

"Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexi-cuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people. Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles. Individuals were often led away in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time of arrest--sometimes in pyjamas or underwear...."

Danner also explains how the Abu Ghraib story represents a failure at the most fundamental level:

The system was self-defeating and, not surprisingly, "interrogation operations in Abu Ghraib suffered from the effects of a broken detention operations system." Indeed, these reports are full of "broken systems" and "under-resourced" commands, from Abu Ghraib itself, a besieged, sweltering, stinking hell-hole under daily mortar attack that lacked interpreters, interrogators, guards, detainee uniforms, and just about everything else, including edible food, and that, at its height, was staggering under an impossible prisoner-to-guard ratio of seventy-five to one, all the way up to the command staff of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, which lacked, among other vital resources, two thirds of its assigned officers. In Iraq, as the Schlesinger report puts it bluntly, "there was not only a failure to plan for a major insurgency, but also to quickly and adequately adapt to the insurgency that followed after major combat operations." And though they don't say so explicitly, it is clear that the writers of these reports put much of the blame for this not on the commanders on the ground but on the political leadership in Washington, who, rather than pay the political cost of admitting the need for more troops--admitting, that is, that they had made mistakes in planning for the war and in selling it to the public--decided to "tough it out," at the expense of the men and women in the field and, ultimately, the Iraqis they had been sent to "liberate."

Danner also graphically explains the various methods of "water-boarding" (since we still do not know exactly which method Americans might have used). I could barely read the descriptions, and I think you will find them very difficult to take in as well, because they are so horrifying. And remember Rejali's point: the people who used such techniques will, at some point, return to civilian life -- here in the United States.

Danner additionally identifies the bureaucratic maneuvers by means of which the Bush administration has so far avoided having blame placed where it squarely belongs -- on the shoulders of the political leaders in Washington:

With no fear of a full, top-to-bottom investigation from a Congress that is firmly in Republican hands, administration officials, and particularly those at the Department of Defense, have managed to orchestrate a slowly unfolding series of inquiries, almost all of them carried out within the military by officers who by definition can only direct their gaze down the chain of command, not up it, and who are each empowered to examine only a limited and precisely defined number of links in the chain that connects the highest levels of the government to what happened on the ground in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in the war on terror. Thus General Taguba investigated the military police, General Paul Mikolashek, as the Army's inspector general, reported on detention procedures, General Fay on military intelligence, and so on.

By means of all the strategems employed by the Bush administration to minimize and explain away any possible damage, the most serious casualty is the question that still has yet to be seriously addressed:

What has been on trial, thus far, however is the acts depicted in the photographs and these acts, while no doubt constituting abuse, have been carefully insulated from any charge that they represent, or derived from, US policy--a policy that permits torture. Thus far, in the United States at least, there has been relatively little discussion about torture and whether the agents of the US government should be practicing it.

But the most disturbing result of all this, and ultimately the most damaging, is the one identified by Danner at the end of his article:

Meantime the Hooded Man has taken his place among the symbols calling forth, in some parts of the world, a certain image of the United States and what it stands for. Sheik Bashir, who said of the occupying soldiers that "no one can punish them, whether in our country or their country," has thus far been proved right. Only those at the lowest rung of the ladder have so far been punished and the matter of what was actually happening within the interrogation rooms of Abu Ghraib, not to mention in the secret detention centers of the CIA, has hardly been debated. The Iraqis know this, even if many Americans do not. Meanwhile the political damage to US interests in the world has been very great. ...

It has become a cliche of the Global War on Terror--the GWOT, as these reports style it--that at a certain point, if the United States betrays its fundamental principles in the cause of fighting terror, then "the terrorists will have won." The image of the Hooded Man, now known the world over, raises a stark question: Is it possible that that moment of defeat could come and go, and we will never know it?

In the first part of this series, I wrote:

Please remember these sentences [from Hannah Arendt]: "Torture, to be sure, is an essential feature of the whole totalitarian police and judiciary apparatus; it is used every day to make people talk. This type of torture, since it pursues a definite, rational aim, has certain limitations: either the prisoner talks within a certain time, or he is killed." An essential feature. Do you truly want to endorse torture as a legitimate government policy -- and endorse "an essential feature of the whole totalitarian police and judiciary apparatus" -- and possibly open the door, even by just the smallest amount, to the further horrors described by Arendt?

I would urge all those who advocate the legitimated use of torture as official government policy to consider these points -- and, much more importantly, to read all of Arendt's profoundly important book, and then to rethink their views on this subject. I would deeply, deeply hope that they would alter their views. You may view this step that you advocate as only a very small one -- but it is by means of such small steps that one descends into the deepest pit of hell.

One final personal comment. The fact that we have been having this discussion at all is the most disturbing aspect of this entire matter to me, particularly in light of the lessons of the twentieth century and its almost nonstop train of horrors -- lessons which we appear to be in peril of forgetting, if indeed we ever learned them at all. And it suggests to me that we may be in even greater danger than I had thought.

But I still hope to be proven wrong, with every atom of my being.

The events that have transpired since I wrote those words can only lead me to think that the danger is much greater than even I had thought.

And if Bush is reelected, and if he should launch another war, or if -- God forbid -- there is another major terrorist attack here in the United States, I am no longer confident that we would choose not to go down the path outlined in articles such as those I have discussed above. In such a case, I fear my remaining hope might grow very, very faint.

Nonetheless, I will still hope to be proven wrong. God, and what I still think is the basic decency of the American people, willing, I shall be.

ON TORTURE, III: Brutality and Sadism as National Policy, and the Monsters of Our Time

2005-12-11T11:42:00.000-08:00

Before proceeding to some crucial truths about torture, why torture is always, absolutely wrong, and why torture must never be affirmatively condoned -- directly or indirectly and even in the slightest degree, if an individual or a nation wishes to remain civilized in any meaningful manner -- we should briefly review where we find ourselves today. Among the many crimes and immoralities that can be placed directly at the feet of the Bush administration, the fact that we have now crossed a critical line and begun the descent into a moral abyss that may destroy us in time is undoubtedly the worst. What the Bush administration has done in this respect can be accurately described in only one way: their actions are profoundly and unforgivably evil.

Evil is a word from which we tend to recoil, both in our personal dealings and when we consider issues of national policy. My reasons for applying the word to the Bush administration -- and to all those who support the administration's position on the question of torture -- will become clearer in the final two parts of this series (which will follow this installment, later today). For the moment, only one key fact needs to be remembered, and we must never, ever forget it: Torture is the deliberate infliction of unbearable agony on a human being -- a human being who is intentionally kept alive precisely so that he will suffer still more and for a longer period of time -- for no justifiable reason. This is the embrace of sadism and cruelty for their own sake, and for no other end whatsoever. As we shall see, the rationalizations used to make torture "acceptable" on even one occasion are only that: rationalizations for other motives and other concerns. The excuses used to justify the practice of torture are the lies that serve only to disguise the nature and extent of the evil being committed.

In an article first published in Salon, Mark Follman provides some necessary background:

Five days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed the nation that the U.S. government would begin working "the dark side" to defeat its enemies in a new global war. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion," Cheney declared on NBC's "Meet the Press." He added, "It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."

More than four years later, the Bush administration has delivered on Cheney's vow to wage war in the shadows, free from oversight and accountability. Policies for seizing and interrogating suspects - conceived and commanded at the highest levels of the White House - have permitted numerous acts of torture and even murder at the hands of American soldiers and interrogators.

The grim acts unleashed by those policies are no secret today. Cruel and wanton abuses have been exposed at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and other lesser known U.S. military bases and prisons around the world. In November, the Washington Post uncovered a global network of covert CIA prisons known as "black sites," top-secret interrogation facilities reportedly operating in far-flung locations from Eastern Europe to Thailand. Still, many dark details remain unknown.

"There is no instance in American history where we've been exposed as being so deeply involved in actually conducting torture on a routine and regular basis," says Thomas Powers, an expert on national security and the author of two books on the CIA.

In recent months, a fierce backlash against the abuses has not only been rising in Washington, but well beyond. Many Americans on the front lines of national security are demoralized and angered by the fact that only a few foot soldiers have been punished - such as Pvt. Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib infamy - while commanders in the field and policymakers have remained untouched. A growing number of military and CIA personnel, according to officers from both realms, admit that the Bush policies, hatched in the fearful weeks and months after 9/11, have deeply corrupted military and intelligence operations over four years of war.

...

Following the revelation of the black sites, President Bush stated: "We do not do torture." Much evidence proves otherwise, but what else could the president of the United States say? Torturing prisoners is both illegal and morally reprehensible. Committed by Americans, it has undermined the mission to bring democratic reform to Afghanistan, Iraq and the greater Middle East. It has done profound damage to America's image at home and worldwide. And most intelligence experts, including CIA director Porter Goss, agree that when it comes to gathering useful information, torture simply doesn't work.

...

[E]vidence of widespread use of torture by the United States under the Bush administration is indisputable, including the policy of rendition, or the handing over of prisoners to foreign allies like Jordan and Egypt who are known to torture. European leaders have been in an uproar as further evidence emerges that the CIA has secretly used European airports to transport prisoners for interrogation.

The numbers alone tell a chilling story. According to recent reports by the Associated Press, the United States has held more than 83,000 prisoners since the war on terror began, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, more than 14,000 remain in U.S. custody, mostly in Iraq, where U.S. military officials have acknowledged in the past that many prisoners were of little or no intelligence value. Military officials have said the same of the majority of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay; yet from Guantánamo to the war zones, more than 4,000 prisoners have been held for a year or longer, with several hundred held for multiple years.

As of March this year, 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody. Of those, 22 died when insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib prison, while others reportedly died of natural causes. At least 26 deaths have been deemed criminal homicides.

And the warhawks who refuse to question any aspect of Bush's foreign policy -- except to insist that the administration is not brutal enough and has failed to kill sufficient numbers of people -- and who simultaneously insist that they and only they care for the welfare of our own troops should note the following:

Army Capt. Ray Kimball is among the growing number who say that interrogation by torture is anti-American, ineffective and categorically wrong. In an interview with Salon, he said it also causes severe harm to U.S. soldiers themselves.

"Torture not only degrades the victim, it also ultimately degrades the torturer," said Kimball, who served in Iraq and now teaches history at West Point. "We already have enough soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder after legitimate combat experiences. But now you're talking about adding the burden of willfully inflicting wanton pain on another human being. You tell a soldier to go out there and 'waterboard' someone" - strap a prisoner to a board, bind his face in cloth, and pour water over his face until he fears death by drowning - "or mock-execute someone, but nobody is thinking about what that's going to do to that soldier months or years later, when it comes to dealing with the rationalizations and internal consequences. We're talking about serious psychic trauma."

Follman provides these further details:

More soldiers are starting to come forward with the support of groups like Human Rights Watch, which conducts leading research on torture in the war on terror. Although unwilling to talk on the record for fear of retribution by the military, a number of active-duty soldiers who've spoken with Human Rights Watch are increasingly angry about the torture scandals, according to researcher John Sifton. While some soldiers are wary that media and human rights groups are out to make the military look bad, Sifton says most of them realize that they are taking the sole blame for the abuses.

A number of soldiers we've talked to have told us they were ordered by military intelligence to torture," Sifton told Salon. "And not just at Abu Ghraib but at forward operating bases across Iraq." According to Sifton, several soldiers who tried to report misconduct say their superiors told them to take a hike.

One of them was Army Spc. Tony Lagouranis, who worked as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison and in a special intelligence unit that operated across Iraq in 2004. After multiple attempts to report wrongdoing, he became frustrated by stonewalling inside the military and took his knowledge of abuses to the media.

"It's all over Iraq," Lagouranis, now retired, told the PBS show "Frontline" in late September. "The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like ... burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs." At the root of the abuses, he said, was a lot of "frustration that we weren't getting good intel," and murky directives regarding the treatment of prisoners. Inevitably, Lagouranis said, those conditions gave rise to instances of "pure sadism," like the ones at Abu Ghraib.

...

Beginning almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, policies crafted inside the Bush White House set the conditions for rampant abuses by the military and CIA. In the first fearful weeks and months after the attacks, top administration lawyers in the White House and Justice Department drew up a series of secret legal memos that recast the rules for the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, those considered terrorist suspects from no easily identifiable army or nation. The memos argued that captured enemy combatants were not entitled to fundamental protections of U.S. or international law, including the obligations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, a treaty the United States ratified in 1994 explicitly outlawing "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of prisoners.

The administration also relied on a classified document known as a "presidential finding," authorizing broad covert action by the CIA to capture, detain or kill members of al-Qaida anywhere in the world. The finding, which administration legal advisors apparently ruled lawful, was signed by Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. A day later, Congress granted the administration additional power by authorizing the use of "all necessary and appropriate" military force at the discretion of the president.

This November, in response to the torture scandals, the Pentagon issued a new high-level directive requiring that interrogations be conducted using "humane" treatment. That term replaced language in an earlier draft of the directive modeled after the international rules against torture - a change that was made following intense pressure from Cheney's office.

According to one senior Army officer, a judge advocate general who has been involved in discussions with Pentagon officials on the issue, reaching a consensus on what constitutes "humane" treatment can be exceedingly difficult - and vague language remains precisely the strategy of the Bush administration's legal maneuverings on detention and interrogation.

...

The rising backlash against torture today indicates more military and intelligence officers are realizing that the Bush administration is sinking the United States into an unprecedented moral quagmire - one that could lead to an especially dire end. "The problems with this are huge and they're hitting home now," Powers says. "How do you let these people go, especially the ones deemed to be of no intelligence value, after they've been treated so badly? Are you just going to hold them forever? You have to ask whether or not they will eventually reach the stage of just summarily killing them. It may have happened already. This policy isn't just ineffectual - it's complete madness."

...

While Durbin and fellow lawmakers responsible for oversight were kept in the dark on covert interrogation operations, before he left the committee he and others viewed hundreds of classified photos of torture from Abu Ghraib. According to Durbin, a number of the images they witnessed were even more horrific than the public has seen to date, though he declined to go into detail, because they remain classified. "In all of my years of public service, I'll never forget that day. I was standing there in a room with fellow senators, some of whom were in tears, as we watched brought up on a screen hundreds and hundreds of photos showing the most unimaginable treatment of prisoners."

The denial by the administration and its defenders has spread to another inevitable result of our embrace of sadism: our policies have now created our own monsters in Iraq. Bush and his fellow gang members mindlessly repeat that we are spreading the blessings of "freedom" and "democracy." But the Iraqis look at what we have actually done in their country and what we continue to do -- and they then unleash their own brand of cruelty, sadism and barbarism, knowing that the United States has no legitimate ground for complaint.

A story in the Christian Science Monitor provides some additional background on this part of our horror story:

Privately, half a dozen US officers have acknowledged to the Monitor that prisoner abuse by Iraqi police is common.

Now, one officer is speaking out. Major R. John Stukey, a US Army doctor who served in Baghdad from January to June, frequently visited Interior Ministry facilities on the east side of Baghdad to assess the health of prisoners. He says he personally treated about a dozen men who had been tortured and observed an environment of overcrowding and neglect.

Many more of his patients alleged torture, but in most cases this couldn't be verified, since he often saw them for the first time months after their initial arrests and interrogations.

In one east Baghdad facility run by Iraq's Interior Ministry, a few miles from the secret jail that was raided by US forces on Nov. 13, Major Stukey says about 220 men were held in filthy conditions in a space so crowded that many couldn't lie down to sleep.

Stukey visited the facilities with members of the 720th US Military Police Battalion. The MPs filed frequent reports to their commanders about the ill-treatment and, Stukey says, did what they could to prevent torture and improve the prisoners' conditions. They made a point of distributing soap, toothbrushes, and Korans whenever they visited.

"We did report what we saw, but it was like trying to put out a forest fire with a bucket of water,'' says Stukey by telephone at Fort Rucker in Alabama, where he is currently based. "The MPs submitted reports at least several times a week on detention issues. We knew about it, and we tried to change it, but it was just one of those things you had to deal with."

Officials from the 720th, now back at its base in Fort Hood, Texas, did not respond to requests for comment.

Coalition troops, fighting a deadly insurgency, say they don't have the manpower to compel better behavior from their Iraqi partners, and that to do so would require them to court frequent conflict with their closest allies inside the country.

The Bush Administration has sent mixed messages on the subject. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday that the US "does not authorize or condone torture of detainees." The US has also signed the UN Convention Against Torture. But administration officials have also argued that the treaty rules on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment do not apply outside US territory.

At the bottom of the first page of its article, the Monitor provides a graph containing information from a recent poll taken in several different countries. About 1,000 respondents in each country were asked this question: "Do you feel the use of torture against suspected terrorists to obtain information about terrorism activities is justified?" Note that the question asks about suspected terrorists -- in other words, people who may be entirely innocent. And as the articles excerpted above and many others demonstrate, the great majority of individuals who have been subjected to such inhumane, intentionally sadistic treatment have turned out to be innocent.

In terms of the respondents' support for torture, the United States came in second -- behind only South Korea. In response to the question, 23% of Americans said torture should "rarely" be used, 27% said torture should "sometimes" be used, and 11% said torture should "often" be used. Only slightly more than a third of Americans, 36%, said torture should "never" be used. Keep the much larger figure in mind: 61% of Americans approve of using torture.

For reasons I will explain further, especially in the final part of this series, you should not take comfort from the fact that a lie is built into the question. With very rare exceptions, these are the terms in which torture is debated today -- and our criminally irresponsible media do nothing to correct the lies for the most part. The question asks if torture is "justified" "to obtain information about terrorism activities." Actually, the phrasing represents a double lie: obviously the question assumes that such "information" is accurate information, although it does not state that explicitly. As the Follman article indicates, and as I will be examining in much more detail, that is one of the central indisputable facts about torture -- the point on which every knowledgeable expert agrees. As Follman puts it: "when it comes to gathering useful information, torture simply doesn't work."

I would certainly be very interested to know how people would answer the question if it were asked truthfully: "Do you feel the use of torture against suspected terrorists to obtain information about terrorism activities is justified -- even though almost every expert on the subject agrees that torture never results in obtaining accurate information and that it simply doesn't work?" A blunter version of the question would come considerably closer to the truth: "Do you approve of the use of brutal, unimaginably sadistic treatment of our enemies -- and even of those who are only suspected of being enemies -- to show the world that we mean business, that we are real sons of bitches, and that if you fail to do as we tell you, we will make your life an unbearable hell on earth?"

In the middle of its article, the Monitor offers a passage which I find almost impossible to grasp, so horrifying is it in its continued denial of truths that can no longer be denied by any honest observer:

Pat Lang, a retired colonel and former head of Middle East Intelligence for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, says it's important for the US to have a zero-tolerance policy toward torture.

"We know that left to their own devices the Iraqis are going to do these kinds of things, and there's no chance of stopping it all over the country,'' he says. "But to me, this is more about us than it is about them. We can't tolerate this when we see it. I don't want our standards eroded any further."

"Left to their own devices..." This is the sickening condescension of the most disgusting kind of white imperialist -- who is infinitely worse than the alleged barbarians he claims he seeks to "civilize," and who continues to regard those poor, non-white natives as subhuman. The genuine monster involved is the vicious colonialist himself -- but he has intentionally broken the mirror that would insist that he contemplate his own reflection.

So this is where we are today: even though the administration continues to peddle its pathetic lies -- lies that everyone knows are lies, including those who repeat them every day -- the United States has now officially implemented the use of torture. We have done so in a manner that is systematic and comprehensive. We know that torture "simply doesn't work," and that it produces no useful intelligence that in fact helps us in this war -- and yet we insist that we must continue to do it anyway.

We are now a barbarian nation. What we do is infinitely worse in one crucial respect: we insist that we must behave like sadistic monsters precisely so that we can uphold the values of civilization, of "democracy," and of the rule of law. We are not even honest monsters, if "honest" is a word that can be meaningfully used in this context.

But if we continue much farther on this path, that day too will come: the day when we announce our barbarity and inhumanity proudly to the world, and no longer engage in the pretense of making apologies or excuses for it. In fact, and as we shall see in the concluding part of this essay, some of the administration's most fervent defenders already do this. The final excuse they employ is the most pathetic one of all: we must act like monsters, they say, because our enemies have made us do it. These repellent, vile frauds, who trumpet their own strength of character and "manliness" because they enthusiastically embrace what ought to repel any person who is remotely civilized to any degree at all, are revealed by their own words to be the most contemptible of weaklings: they are helpless to resist evil because the enemies they identify as the essence of evil compel them to do so.

This is the final defense of the coward who has placed himself beyond redemption for all time: the coward who renounces the last remnants and protections of civilization and joyfully reduces himself to the level of the beasts of the jungle. But that does a disservice to those actual beasts: animals do not regularly engage in the cruelties that human beings commit so routinely throughout their history and, when they do so, they do not lie about it.

Barbarism and sadism are now the official policy of our government. And the defenders of that policy still tell the world that we, and only we, can ensure that the values of civilization are transmitted to the future. They seek to destroy the unique value of human life, and they have rendered themselves incapable of understanding the nature of the destruction upon which they have embarked.

Can there ever be forgiveness for choosing a course that is evil to this extent? History will make the final judgment. But I am entirely confident that if humanity does survive this catastrophe, as it has miraculously managed to survive other catastrophes of the past, its judgment will be simple, final and absolute: No. We do not forgive the monsters of the past -- and we should not forgive the monsters of our own time.

And if you support these policies of the administration to any extent at all, you are one of them.

ON TORTURE, II: Of Means and Ends

2005-12-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

[All of the essays in my series, On Torture, together with a brief description of each entry, are listed here.]

[This essay was originally published on May 20, 2005, and was titled: "No Sympathy for Any of Them, None at All." I include it in the group of earlier essays concerning torture for a few reasons. The most important of those reasons is to once more make the point that it is not possible to support the overall purposes of our current foreign policy, as for example Andrew Sullivan continues to do, without also supporting the particular means of implementing that policy -- means that are logically necessary and inextricably woven up in it, and used to advance it. To be precise, I should say that it is not possible assuming a certain degree of analytic ability and intellectual honesty. Sullivan has failed to demonstrate these qualities (among others) on numerous occasions. The lesson is one I had thought people understood by now, but many obviously do not: the ends determine the means. Invalid, and sometimes loathsome ends, require and necessitate cruel, barbaric and sometimes loathsome means. You cannot have these particular ends without certain means, Sullivan's self-obsessed wails of protest aside. He will not question the goals he still endorses, but he rails against the logically implied means of trying to attain them. Even a cursory appreciation of history would have informed Sullivan of the futility and error in his approach.

After this essay, I've included an excerpt from a Naomi Klein article that I initially noted on June 7 of this year, when Klein's piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Klein drives this same point home using the horrifying example of the French experience in Algeria. As a character in the film "Battle of Algiers" notes when defending the use of torture by the French -- and it should be emphasized that the character is based on an historical figure and on the facts of the French catastrophe: If this is what you still want, "then you must accept all the consequences." This is the stark truth that defenders of our policies like Sullivan still refuse to acknowledge. Tragically, those who have died or been maimed as the result of the policies of the Bush administration did not have the same choice -- and that choice is still denied to the innocent victims of our actions today.

This is why I have no patience whatsoever for Sullivan and others of his kind -- those people who support our foreign policy but who recoil at its barbaric elements. Tens of thousands of people are now dead or have suffered untold agonies because of policies they continue to support to this day -- but they still refuse to take responsibility for any of it. They cling to their so-called "noble ideals" -- while every day provides further evidence that those "ideals" are drenched in blood. There is nothing in the least "idealistic" about their program: it stinks of death and of untold human suffering. But Sullivan and others like him insist that if the policy were implemented in the way they recommend, none of these horrors would come to pass. They forget, and hope we too will forget, that every monster in history has made the same claim -- and with as little justification. The problem lies not in the specific means, as detestable as they are, but in the nature of the "ideals" themselves. But they will admit none of this, and so the destruction and the horror continue.]

As regular readers here know, although I recognize that we have genuine enemies who need to be defeated (which requires that we narrowly target the threats we face), I am profoundly opposed to Bush’s purposely never-defined “War on Terror” and his plans for “benevolent hegemony” via endless war, with nation-building as an inextricable and crucial part of his strategy. A brief review of the relevant history reveals that such delusions have always led finally to the destruction of the nation that attempts to put such plans into operation.

With that brief prefatory note in mind, I will say that I view it as an unqualifiedly good thing when those who enthusiastically support Bush’s foreign policy begin to fight among themselves. With regard to all such internecine battles, I emphatically join our president in saying: Bring it on! So in many ways, the current feud involving Reynolds, Sullivan, various denizens of The Corner and assorted other hawks is altogether a delight to behold, and balm to the soul.

Given Sullivan’s abhorrence in reaction to torture and abuse meted out by U.S. troops, some might think that I would take Sullivan’s side. They would be wrong, for reasons I have explained at length. These are a few key passages from my earlier essay:

It is true that Sullivan provides a good overview of the barbaric torture story ... but so have any number of other people. And in his U.K. Times article, he indulges himself in a truly repellent practice, one which is habitual to him. What seems to concern Sullivan just as much as the barbarity of torture or the disaster in Iraq is the exquisite agony that Bush’s failures have visited upon his, Sullivan’s, precious soul. In fact, the Torments of Sullivan as endlessly detailed by Sullivan himself for all the world to witness—assuming, without any grounds to do so, that any sentient being actually gives a damn—appear to be of considerably greater moment to him than the sufferings visited upon many thousands of people because of the policies he so endlessly championed.

...

And if you consult his blog (assuming you have a much stronger tolerance for this kind of melodramatic self-dramatizing than I do), you will find many more instances of this adolescent self-examination. Here’s a news flash for Sullivan: an endless number of people, Americans, Iraqis and others, have suffered genuine agony and injury—and are now dead—because of people like you, and as the direct result of your unquenchable desire for absolute safety, which in your view requires “benevolent American hegemony” exercised over the entire world by means of military force. Never mind that this fatal Utopian delusion has never led to anything other than death and destruction; you’re scared, you want to feel safe, and you will see the world destroyed before questioning the absolutely mistaken ideas that you treat as axioms never to be challenged.

And Sullivan’s crimes are even worse than this: it was Sullivan (along with many other warbloggers) who fatally poisoned the cultural atmosphere after 9/11, with his interminable rants about the “fifth columnists” who allegedly are enemies as dangerous to us as foreign terrorists. Recall that those “fifth columnists” included anyone at all who failed to embrace George Bush and his program for world domination in the manner that Sullivan himself did. But now—now that everything that many of those opposed to the Iraq war predicted before the fact has come to pass, and now that the details of abuse and torture have surfaced—now Sullivan is having a few second thoughts.

But there is a deeper problem here—namely, that Sullivan’s second thoughts do not go nearly far enough. Sullivan has not given up the program he endorses at all—or even seriously questioned it. He still believes "in this war as a war of liberation and increased security." This, too, fails to pass the sanity test. Sullivan apparently has never read the numerous articles by any number of experts on terrorism (genuine experts, I emphasize, not dilettantes who blog in between jaunts to Provincetown and walking the dog)—all of whom have pointed out at great length that the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as every other aspect of Bush’s “War on Terror,” have only served to increase the actual dangers we face.

But none of this for Sullivan. (None: "I’ve long admired Bush’s recognition of the life-and-death struggle against Islamist fascism as the central task of his presidency. And it’s hard not to value his grit in pursuing what will, I think, eventually be regarded as critical wars in the defense of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. He comes across as a genuinely kind and warm man, of solid values and clear objectives.") Sullivan still wants his American Empire (with his other hero, Tony Blair, as a very junior partner), he still wants American hegemony, and he still wants us to impose "freedom" by force on countries that have no history or culture to support a political system modeled on ours. He’s still an apocalyptic crusader, seeking to create a new world through sacred violence and death just like his hero, Bush.

He just doesn’t want any of the mess. Here’s another news flash for Sullivan: if you want empire and military domination of large swathes of the world in an endless, woefully defined “War on Terror,” lifelong detentions and torture are an inseparable part of what you’re going to get. That kind of mess (and much worse) is woven into the very fabric of the program you so enthusiastically supported—and which you still support.

Of course, to understand that brutality, cruelty, torture, death, the disregard of individual rights, and the undermining of what are supposedly “American values” inevitably accompany the drive to empire requires that one is capable of grasping the lessons of history, that one can engage in meaningful and accurate analysis of political and cultural dynamics—and that one can think.

It also assumes that a person understands that he cannot continually express admiration and support for the political equivalent of Al Capone—and then recoil in shock when he sees that blood has been spilled on his immaculate carpet. Oh, the horror! His carpet has been soiled, and his soul is tormented—while countless other people are maimed or dead.

In addition to everything else that is so deeply repellent about his writing and "thinking," Sullivan’s sense of priorities is so fundamentally twisted and perverse that no regrets he expresses at this point deserve even a moment of sympathy. He made his bed, and he deserves to lie in it. That’s the very least he deserves.

Therefore, in one very limited sense (and leaving aside the lunacy of other aspects of these comments), Reynolds is correct when he says:

When Andrew was a champion of the war on terror, writing about martial spirit and fifth columns composed of the “decadent left,” did he believe that nothing like Abu Ghraib would happen, when such things (and much worse) happen in prisons across America (and everywhere else) on a daily basis? If so, he was writing out of an appalling ignorance.

However, for the reasons explained in the essay excerpted above and in many others here, I obviously think both Reynolds and Sullivan are wrong, and not just wrong but gravely, hopelessly wrong.

With regard to a few more minor points, I will note that John Podhoretz has revealed a degree of ugliness and hatred which is truly sickening to contemplate. There was this post ("If he’s going to go all camp on us, couldn’t the Sullied One have quoted Mae West or Joan Crawford or Bette Davis or something?"), and then this one. Podhoretz’s view of what is "clever" is as shallow and disgusting as is his complete inability to appreciate the gravity of the issues raised by the allegations of torture. And his treatment of Sullivan is utterly despicable, regardless of Sullivan’s own many sins.

The fact that National Review tolerates and even seems to encourage this kind of naked hatred and bigotry places that once somewhat respectable magazine beyond the pale, for all time as far as I’m concerned. This is the territory inhabited by mindless, violent thugs, consumed by hatred and lashing out at anyone who disagrees with them, no matter how well-founded those disagreements might be. And these are the people who would see the world consumed by nuclear clouds, rather than ever admit they might be wrong.

All in all, it’s a thoroughly sickening display. As my headline says: no sympathy for any them, none at all. I only wish that there might be some way that this squabbling in the prowar ranks might translate into a weakening of Bush’s drive toward empire and perpetual war. But, alas, indications of any such weakening are scant to non-existent. Even though the signs of disaster mount day by day, as was true of Vietnam—which constituted a national tragedy from which we now see we learned absolutely nothing—we will not have second thoughts and change our direction until the costs become thoroughly unsustainable, and until a sufficient number of Americans become disgusted and fed up, and threaten retribution on their elected political leaders.

May that day come very, very soon.

-------------

[Originally posted on June 7, 2005: "You Must Accept All the Consequences."]

Naomi Klein ("Torture's Part of the Territory"):

Brace yourself for a flood of gruesome new torture snapshots. Last week, a federal judge ordered the Defense Department to release dozens of additional photographs and videotapes depicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The photographs will elicit what has become a predictable response: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will claim to be shocked and will assure us that action is already being taken to prevent such abuses from happening again. But imagine, for a moment, if events followed a different script. Imagine if Rumsfeld responded like Col. Mathieu in "Battle of Algiers," Gillo Pontecorvo's famed 1965 film about the National Liberation Front's attempt to liberate Algeria from French colonial rule. In one of the film's key scenes, Mathieu finds himself in a situation familiar to top officials in the Bush administration: He is being grilled by a room filled with journalists about allegations that French paratroopers are torturing Algerian prisoners.

Based on real-life French commander Gen. Jacques Massus, Mathieu neither denies the abuse nor claims that those responsible will be punished. Instead, he flips the tables on the scandalized reporters, most of whom work for newspapers that overwhelmingly support France's continued occupation of Algeria. Torture "isn't the problem," he says calmly. "The problem is the FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria and we want to stay. ... It's my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences."

His point, as relevant in Iraq today as it was in Algeria in 1957, is that there is no nice, humanitarian way to occupy a nation against the will of its people. Those who support such an occupation don't have the right to morally separate themselves from the brutality it requires.

ON TORTURE, I: State Violence and Brutality, and Totalitarianism

2005-12-10T11:00:00.000-08:00

[The current phase of the debate about torture as a legitimate means of the exercise of state power has brought forth a few new articles that merit some attention. I will deal with those articles in the final parts of this series. These recent articles are illuminating for several crucial reasons -- in large part because of the manner in which they frame the issues, and because of the central questions they studiously avoid. The framing is designed, intentionally or not, precisely to make the ultimate confrontation with truths we prefer not to face recede from our consideration, even as these writers maintain they are trying to grapple with the terrible moral dilemmas "honestly." With very few exceptions, almost all contemporary commentators and analysts completely miss what I consider to be the most crucial points, so I hope to shed at least some light on these neglected aspects of this profoundly disturbing debate. These issues will become clearer as I proceed through my analysis.

Before considering the current articles on offer, I will be reposting several earlier essays of mine that set forth some critical background material. I wrote this first piece on March 15, 2003 -- more than two and a half years ago. I am proud to say that I think it has stood up very well indeed. It was, in fact, the second major essay I wrote on the subject of torture -- but the important points from the initial piece are indicated sufficiently in what follows. It may strike some as melodramatic to phrase the following observation in this manner, but I honestly know of no other way to convey my reaction accurately: when I wrote this essay and the preceding one, I was almost struck dumb with horror that we were having this national conversation at all. In the time that has passed, my horror has only grown. But I also think my own understanding of the mechanisms involved has increased considerably during the same time, so there are several new aspects and issues related to this subject that I will discuss in the final parts of this series.

You will note that one issue I discuss below is the infamous "ticking bomb" scenario. That fictional invention continues to be criminally abused by the torture advocates. As I explained in the spring of 2003, the problem with this fantasy is an epistemological one: the example fails because of the specific means by which we acquire knowledge, and the patterns in how we do so. The "ticking bomb" scene is common in a certain kind of Hollywood thriller, and it has been made cheap and utterly unoriginal by endless repetition and imitation. However, it is virtually, if not entirely, impossible that such a situation would ever develop in this manner in real life.

The fact that those who advocate the "legitimated" use of torture find it necessary to avail themselves of such an obviously false hypothetical reveals that other concerns drive their campaign to make the most monstrous kind of inhuman brutality "acceptable" to any degree at all. They pretend to bring intellectual rigor to their unforgivable task -- but their allegedly "serious" arguments are full of the most obvious defects. The pretense at intellectual engagement serves a crucial function: it is the cover for much darker motives, which they do not care to face -- or to name. I will deal with those motives, and with the forces that drive advocacy of this kind of extreme cruelty, in the final parts of this series.

From March 15, 2003, the following essay was originally titled: "Some Additional Thoughts on Torture -- and Some Observations from Hannah Arendt."]

Continuing the discussion about whether our government should officially sanction torture as a means of eliciting information, even in very delimited circumstances, there are several additional points that I think need to be addressed. Before getting to Hannah Arendt's remarks, let me cover a few preliminary matters.

First, I just came across this item at TalkLeft, which quotes part of a new report:

One of the issues addressed in the report is the recent allegations in the news media that U.S. military officials are employing illegal interrogation techniques to elicit information from detainees in the U.S. and abroad. Some of these techniques include hooding and sleep deprivation and physical beatings. The Lawyers Committee has urged Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to address these allegations by making clear the unambiguous U.S. prohibition against all forms of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.

I want to leave aside what the merits of this report may or may not be -- and focus instead on the last sentence above. Think about how the reversal of current U.S. policy might appear. I guess it might sound something like this:

The government of the United States hereby announces that, after long and serious deliberation, it has decided the current world crisis necessitates a revision of the previous official policy of the government with regard to the use of torture. Whereas previously the government of the United States had eschewed and condemned in the strongest possible terms any and all uses of torture, the United States has now concluded that, in certain strictly regulated and proscribed situations, the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment is necessary and required, and will henceforth be considered a part of the legitimate methods to be utilized by the U.S. government in its unceasing efforts to protect the lives and safety of U.S. citizens. We are also putting into place, and will implement immediately, strict safeguards to ensure that the use of torture and other degrading treatment of certain suspect and/or criminal human beings will be utilized only when absolutely necessary, and only to the extent required in the judgment of those government officials empowered to supervise the use of such procedures. For obvious security reasons, we decline at this time to specify those particular methods of torture to be used in the future by the U.S., but we can assure the community of nations that we will not employ excessively inhumane methods of torture, but only the less severe, and less permanently damaging, forms of torture. Further details concerning these matters and policies will not be provided at this time.

Is this what people mean when they advocate bringing the use of torture out "into the light," and "regulating" it so that it will be used "properly"? But perhaps you might prefer a "softer" version of this official announcement. Is that the case?

Moving on. There is a serious, and fundamental, problem in the nature of the hypotheticals that are typically employed in discussing this issue. Those hypotheticals usually run along these lines: We know (for example) that a nuclear device has been planted in New York City. We know that it is set to go off within the next 24 hours. And we know that this individual we have just apprehended knows where the nuclear device is.

If the matter were not so serious, I would be tempted to say only that people who offer such hypotheticals have been watching too many movies. But since the matter is so serious, I will point out the following error: this is not how the situation is at all likely to develop -- in real life. Think about it for a moment. If you in fact knew all of those elements, don't you think it likely that you would also already know where the bomb is? How would a situation develop where you knew all the other variables, but it just happened that you didn't know where the bomb was? I submit that it is not at all likely, except in the imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter.

The underlying problem is this: in real life, all of these facts -- what it is that is planned, where, when and by whom -- are precisely those facts which you will be in the process of discovering. It is fantasy to think that you would have all the answers, save one. And this doesn't even address the serious problem as to the accuracy of any information you are likely to get by employing torture on the individual in custody. To put it another way: in real life, it is much more likely that you will know that something terrible is going to happen, but you're not certain exactly what the nature of it is. And you might know the city, and you might know that it's probably going to happen in the next 24 or 48 hours (or "very, very soon," or "within the next week"). Finally, you might be 80% or 90% certain that this particular individual knows what it is that is planned, and where and when it's going to happen -- but I doubt very much that it would transpire that you would know with absolute certainty that a given individual has the single piece of information that you happen to be missing. Forget about fiction scenarios, and ask yourself how this type of situation would be likely to actually develop in the real world -- and you will see that the usual hypotheticals are hopelessly inaccurate and misleading.

I also want to add another aspect to one of the major points of my earlier post: that the grant of any government power will always grow, including the grant of the power to use torture to elicit information. At this point, virtually everyone, at any point on the political spectrum, acknowledges the potential for widespread government corruption (and some of us consider it much more than merely a "potential"). In the general area of business regulation, for example, everyone knows how common it is to encounter graft, payoffs, kickbacks, and the like. Why do people who advocate the official endorsement of torture suddenly forget this fact, and seem unable to utilize the knowledge they already possess when the subject is torture? And I ask that question especially of [so-called, self-described] libertarians, who are known for their skepticism of the "wise" use of any form of government power. How hard is it to believe, once torture has been endorsed as a legitimate tool of the government, that some government official will "arrange" to have a longstanding personal enemy taken into custody, to be given some form of "special treatment"? After hearing of so many instances in the last decade or so of IRS audits being used against "enemies," forfeiture being used a weapon by the government, and far too many similar kinds of "punishment" to name, why would you think that torture would be exempt from this particular form of abuse? Face it, and face it now: it wouldn't be. Is that what you want to open the door to, by having our government officially sanction the use of torture?

And another point: some people have made the argument that the nature of the war on terror, and the particularly grave dangers posed by the enemies we now face, make "extraordinary" measures necessary -- to avoid, for example, another 9/11. Please remember the lessons of history, and read or reread the story of the rise of Nazism, or of the "excuses" utilized immediately prior to one of the Soviet (or Communist Chinese) purges. 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. It was precisely this kind of mentality that led to adoption of the first Patriot Act, which many of the lawmakers voting for it did not even bother to read, either in whole or in part. And we are still discovering the new government powers granted in that act -- and the same pattern will make another appearance in the wake of another domestic attack, you may be certain, and that may bring us Patriot Act II, containing a whole new host of government powers of which very few people will even be aware.

This is precisely how the road to a totalitarian government is followed; it has always been thus, and it always will be. This brings me to some remarks of Hannah Arendt's, from her monumental work The Origins of Totalitarianism. In these excerpts, note the special importance of torture in the nature and operation of the totalitarian state. Clearly, and mercifully, we are still quite far away from the additional Nazi horrors that Arendt describes -- but I would urge you to think about the principles involved here. Also, in one sense, we might not be that far away: after all, how long did it take to descend from Weimar Germany into the hell of the full-blown Nazi nightmare? Ten years? Fifteen years? Not that long; the blink of an eye in historical terms. With that in mind, consider the following (this is from Chapter 12, "Totalitarianism in Power," Part III -- "Total Domination"; I've added the highlights):

Once the moral person has been killed, the one thing that still prevents men from being made into living corpses is the differentiation of the individual, his unique identity. In a sterile form such individuality can be preserved through a persistent stoicism, and it is certain that many men under totalitarian rule have taken and are each day still taking refuge in this absolute isolation of a personality without rights or conscience. There is no doubt that this part of the human person, precisely because it depends so essentially on nature and on forces that cannot be controlled by the will, is the hardest to destroy (and when destroyed is most easily repaired) [Footnote: Bettelheim...describes how "the main concern of the new prisoners seemed to be to remain intact as a personality" while the problem of the old prisoners was "how to live as well as possible within the camp."]

The methods of dealing with this uniqueness of the human person are numerous and we shall not attempt to list them. They begin with the monstrous conditions in the transports to the camps, when hundreds of human beings are packed into a cattle-car stark naked, glued to each other, and shunted back and forth over the countryside for days on end; they continue upon arrival at the camp, the well-organized shock of the first hours, the shaving of the head, the grotesque camp clothing; and they end in the utterly unimaginable tortures so gauged as not to kill the body, at any event not quickly. The aim of all these methods, in any case, is to manipulate the human body--with its infinite possibilities of suffering--in such a way as to make it destroy the human person as inexorably as do certain mental diseases of organic origin.

It is here that the utter lunacy of the entire process becomes most apparent. Torture, to be sure, is an essential feature of the whole totalitarian police and judiciary apparatus; it is used every day to make people talk. This type of torture, since it pursues a definite, rational aim, has certain limitations: either the prisoner talks within a certain time, or he is killed. To this rationally conducted torture another, irrational, sadistic type was added in the first Nazi concentration camps and in the cellars of the Gestapo. Carried on for the most part by the SA, it pursued no aims and was not systematic, but depended on the initiative of largely abnormal elements. The mortality rate was so high that only a few concentration-camp inmates of 1933 survived these first years. This type of torture seemed to be not so much a calculated political institution as a concession of the regime to its criminal and abnormal elements, who were thus rewarded for services rendered. Behind the blind bestiality of the SA, there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than themselves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in their power. This resentment, which never died out entirely in the camps, strikes us as a last remnant of humanly understandable feeling.

The real horror began, however, when the SS took over the administration of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true: they were turned into "drill grounds," on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.

The killing of man's individuality, of the uniqueness shaped in equal parts by nature, will, and destiny, which has become so self-evident a premise for all human relations that even identical twins inspire a certain uneasiness, creates a horror that vastly overshadows the outrage of the juridical-political person and the despair of the moral person. It is this horror that gives rise to the nihilistic generalizations which maintain plausibly enough that essentially all men alike are beasts. Actually the experience of the concentration camps does show that human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human animal, and that man's "nature" is only "human" insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man.

And with regard to turning "normal men" into "full-fledged members of the SS," consider these chilling details, in terms of the effects of torture on those who administer it:

This new mechanized system eased the feeling of responsibility as much as was humanly possible. When, for instance, the order came to kill every day several hundred Russian prisoners, the slaughter was performed by shooting through a hole without seeing the victim. ... On the other hand, perversion was artificially produced in otherwise normal men. Rousset reports the following from a SS guard: "Usually I keep on hitting until I ejaculate. I have a wife and three children in Breslau. I used to be perfectly normal. That's what they've made of me. Now when they give me a pass out of here, I don't go home. I don't dare look my wife in the face." ... The documents from the Hitler era contain numerous testimonials for the average normality of those entrusted with carrying out Hitler's program of extermination. ... Most of the men in the units used for these purposes were not volunteers but had been drafted from the ordinary police for these special assignments. But even trained SS-men found this kind of duty worse than front-line fighting. In his report of a mass execution by the SS, an eyewitness gives high praise to this troop which had been so "idealistic" that it was able to bear "the entire extermination without the help of liquor."

That one wanted to eliminate all personal motives and passions during the "exterminations" and hence keep the cruelties to a minimum is revealed by the fact that a group of doctors and engineers entrusted with handling the gas installations were making constant improvements that were not only designed to raise the productive capacity of the corpse factories but also to accelerate and ease the agony of death.

Please remember these sentences: "Torture, to be sure, is an essential feature of the whole totalitarian police and judiciary apparatus; it is used every day to make people talk. This type of torture, since it pursues a definite, rational aim, has certain limitations: either the prisoner talks within a certain time, or he is killed." An essential feature. Do you truly want to endorse torture as a legitimate government policy -- and endorse "an essential feature of the whole totalitarian police and judiciary apparatus" -- and possibly open the door, even by just the smallest amount, to the further horrors described by Arendt?

I would urge all those who advocate the legitimated use of torture as official government policy to consider these points -- and, much more importantly, to read all of Arendt's profoundly important book, and then to rethink their views on this subject. I would deeply, deeply hope that they would alter their views. You may view this step that you advocate as only a very small one -- but it is by means of such small steps that one descends into the deepest pit of hell.

One final personal comment. The fact that we have been having this discussion at all is the most disturbing aspect of this entire matter to me, particularly in light of the lessons of the twentieth century and its almost nonstop train of horrors -- lessons which we appear to be in peril of forgetting, if indeed we ever learned them at all. And it suggests to me that we may be in even greater danger than I had thought.

But I still hope to be proven wrong, with every atom of my being.

For Maria Callas, Now and Always: All Things Are Connected

2005-12-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

Had she lived, Maria Callas would have celebrated her 82nd birthday today. It is only fitting that, in a life filled with controversy, the first dispute should concern this usually simple fact: Callas herself insisted she was born on December 2; other records indicate the fourth to be the correct date. She left us in 1977, when she was only 53 years old. She once remarked: "First I lost my voice, then I lost my figure and then I lost Onassis." She lost the ability to make her artistic vision real, which was her soul's reason for being, then she lost what she believed to be her physical allure -- an attractiveness she achieved at great personal cost, in service to her art in the first instance -- and then she lost perhaps the only man to make her feel truly feminine, and genuinely like a woman. When it was all gone, Callas felt there was no reason to go on -- so she died. Some of her friends still believe her death was largely self-willed. (Here is a site with a wealth of information about her.)

Callas was indisputably a supremely great artist, one of the very highest and most demanding rank -- an artist who comes along only a very few times in a generation, if we are extraordinarily lucky. This obviously does not mean that a listener has to love Callas's voice, in terms of its basic quality alone, above all others. With regard to lushness, richness, timbre or what is often referred to simply as beauty (a term which is unhelpfully most often left very vague in terms of a more specific meaning), one may prefer Renata Tebaldi, for example. In certain moods, I prefer to listen to Tebaldi myself, if what I want to hear above all else is a sound of almost inhuman, ineffable purity. Very early Tebaldi, up to the late 1950s, is what you want for such occasions. Callas's severest critics will sometimes gleefully point out her many technical failings, especially in the later stages of her very brief career.

But at her peak, Callas was a supreme technician; listen to the live Lucia di Lammermoor from Berlin, with Karajan conducting, to see what I mean. In what may be the single best book about opera, its history, its interpreters, and its special power that I have yet read, A Song of Love and Death, Peter Conrad wonderfully evokes Callas's unique gifts, and he writes about that Lucia performance:

Callas is admired for her willingness to let vocal beauty suffer in the interest of verbal meaning. But she was more than a great actress with an unreliable voice. She herself insisted on the authority of bel canto [which literally means "beautiful singing," and which refers to a particular Italian tradition of singing made world-famous in the nineteenth century], and remembering her early performances as Kundry in Parsifal said, 'I hated the screams--but I suppose I did them well'; she was capable of creating a dramatic character, psychologically true and detailed, using strictly musical resources and never marring an absolute beauty of tone.

Perhaps the finest case is her Lucia in Karajan's production for La Scala, which visited (and was taped in) Berlin during 1955. She discovers a musical language for Lucia's distraction. ...

The character's disorientation is revealed by her musical habits. She cowers behind diminuendi for instance, like that on 'quella fonte!' in her first scene. The reduction of volume swallows up and introverts the word and the idea....Her mad scene is an episode of recondite sonic research, dramatically appalling because so musically imperturbable. Singing of a 'dolce suono' ["sweet sound"] in a voice which is girlishly pure, Callas lyrically retreats to a mad second childhood. When a high note on the word for altar oscillates out of control, it does so because it has taken off from the rational human register and is echoing through the vast vacancy within Lucia's mind. Lucia chases echoes until, in the glassy, unphysical sound Callas makes during her concert with the flute, she herself becomes one: an acoustic specter; Orpheus insane but in tune.

This was the musical Callas, the notes her reverie. In other roles she was less serenely melodic, more intent on scavenging drama from the words. As Cherubini's Medea, she virtually tormented the text into meaning. She bit on words, she chewed them, she spat them. Uttered by her, they had power to kill.

Callas unquestionably had grave and obvious technical problems, once the impossible demands she made of her instrument began to take their toll -- demands that she miraculously met for a time. When that time had passed, the superlative artist remained. As Callas herself observed, "You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there." And so it was, always there.

And those who hold Tebaldi (or others) up as a reproach to Callas should remember that Tebaldi herself had a severe vocal crisis in the early 1960s, after which she retooled her voice almost completely. She went on to some considerable triumphs, and I enjoyed a number of those later performances a great deal. But the sheen and bloom were gone, replaced by a steely quality, particularly when Tebaldi strove for volume in the middle and upper reaches of her voice. That steel could have its own attractions, but it sometimes turned very ugly. If Tebaldi remains a personal preference for many people, neither I nor anyone else should try to dissuade them; besides, as I've learned from considerable experience, it's hopeless in any case. But such preferences in themselves need not signify greater matters, if that is all they are.

Callas's achievements were unequalled by any other opera singer of her time, and very few singers before that era or afterward have had the kind of impact she did. This is true not only with regard to the transcendent performances she gave at her best, as great as they were. She restored an entire branch and many works to the operatic repertoire that had been set aside for decades, lacking an interpreter of her special gifts to make those operas come alive again for contemporary audiences. It was Callas who opened the door, through which Sutherland, Caballe, Sills and many others followed. Callas's achievement is made even more remarkable by the brevity of the most significant part of her career: it lasted less than a decade, from the early to late 1950s. Those were the years that saw one stunning realization after another: the Visconti Traviata, the revival of Anna Bolena, a series of magnificent Normas, Lucia of course, to say nothing of Medea.

Many of the criticisms of Callas can strike one as odd in a way, as if they convey a biting, very personal edge: it is as if the critic is offended deep in his soul, for a reason he thinks you already know, but which he would prefer not to identify. In fact, it's not so mysterious: many people will acknowledge Callas's greatness. But they cannot forgive Callas for one reason above all others: Callas was great, and she knew it. In a culture drowning in mediocrity, one which idolizes the mundane, the commonplace, and often even the repellent, and turns people we would not care to know in our own lives into instant celebrities who are forgotten the next week, true greatness makes us profoundly uncomfortable. We don't know how to relate to it, and we think it reflects badly on us. Callas herself was wonderfully clear about the standards she would prefer to be employed: "I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not the devil either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged."

Many of us will permit Callas her greatness, provided she is humble about it. Genuine greatness cannot be humble in this way, simply to make mediocrity comfortable: to do so makes the achievement impossible. The extraordinary would become ordinary once more. Callas would have none of that; she sought to transcend the standards others had unthinkingly accepted, standards low enough that others could be assured of meeting them. She insisted on the absolute best from herself; when she could not meet her own standards, her failure tormented her. And she insisted on the best from her listeners; when we failed, as many of us did, we blamed her for making us aware of our own limitations.

Conrad writes very powerfully about the nature of the demands Callas placed on herself:

Callas saw her art as servitude. She was an aggressor toward her audiences, assuming that her voice would be disliked when first heard and schoolmarmishly remarking 'the public has to be taught'; she was even more brutally unsparing toward herself. During the 1967-68 broadcast season at the Met, she gave a radio interview in which she recurs to the idea of punishing the voice into obedience. 'You must serve music,' she says or 'the first person we serve must be the composer'; then she reiterates 'we are just servants of art.' She acknowledges that the voice will be recalcitrant, maybe incapable: it must acquire the virtuosity of an instrument, she says, 'whether we like it or not--or whether we can.' With disciplinary sadism, she castigates a voice which is self-indulgent, interested only in being beautiful. The image she uses is revealingly destructive: 'it isn't enough that you have a beautiful voice; you must take this voice and break it up into a thousand pieces, so she will serve you.'...Speaking of the demands she made of herself, she says, 'You set yourself a standard which is always a whip. You're whipping yourself always, like a soldier.' Hence her inability to forgive herself when the voice failed her, and her contempt for the easy way out. She couldn't skim through the music, slurring over difficulties; for her there had to be the self-inflicted punishment of an outright disaster--a last, voiceless Norma in Paris in 1965.

Callas bestowed her own unsparing integrity on the characters she played: they were versions of herself, sacrificial victims or (failing that) aspostates.

This kind of "unsparing integrity" exacts a terrible toll. Yet when such demands are met, and Callas met them so often that the feat can only stagger us in its magnitude, the result is greatness of a kind we encounter only on very rare occasions in our lives -- and then, only if fortune favors us.

Callas was fully aware she was attempting a totality of musicianship, expressivity, acting and communication that can only be achieved at great cost. She transformed her body, precisely so that the physical embodiment would not betray the ideal. How could she portray a courtesan dying of consumption (in Traviata) or a fragile, virginal young girl (in La Sonnambula) if she were obese? She couldn't, so the weight was banished by an act of willpower. She had different rules for the purposes that engaged her, rules that were not ours: "Don't talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddamn rules." As Conrad explains above, those rules were applied most unforgivingly to herself.

Callas's art, and the manner in which the artistic demands she made of herself affected her life, often put me in mind of part of Victor Hugo's credo. Hugo, a magnificent writer whose work is sorely neglected today, wrote the following in 1827, in the preface to his play, Cromwell. That preface became the rallying cry of the Romantic movement in literature. But what Hugo said encompassed much more than literary matters -- it represented an entire perspective on human life and achievement, and a way of viewing the world and man's place in it:

[T]he modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a mutilated nature will be the more beautiful for the mutilation; if art has the right to duplicate, so to speak, man, life, creation; if things will progress better when their muscles and their vigour have been taken from them; if, in short, to be incomplete is the best way to be harmonious. Then it is that, with its eyes fixed upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and under the influence of that spirit of Christian melancholy and philosophical criticism which we described a moment ago, poetry will take a great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations—but without confounding them—darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of poetry. All things are connected.

For Callas, art at its peak had to express both darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime: for her, too, "all things are connected."

In the very last paragraph of A Song of Love and Death, Peter Conrad captures the unique power of opera as well as any description I have ever read:

Opera is a sport, a display of physical and technical prowess. At the same time it is a form of almost religious aspiration, reaching for the sky from which music first poured down like Apollo's sunlight. Dancers leap into that lost altitude; singers send out their top notes on exploratory forays, and use their scales as Jacob's ladders. One word defines its visceral effect and its lofty ambition, and that is the first word uttered by Verdi's Otello as he whirls out of the storm. Opera's business is exultation.

Callas's art was the purest embodiment of that aspiration, and she provided that kind of exultation: she made the human divine. She remained fully and tragically human, but infused with the goddess. She demanded that we raise ourselves up, to meet her on that exalted plane. If we couldn't or wouldn't, we laid the blame at her feet, rather than confront our own failings.

Many of us recoil at the sight of genuine greatness: we seek to minimize it, find fault with it, or diminish it. If actual faults present themselves, we seize on them with an eagerness that is both revealing and deplorable. If those faults are not enough, we invent others. If through one of those infrequent miracles that grace our existence, another Callas were to come upon the scene today, I very much doubt she would survive for long -- and if she did, I hate to think what the cost would be.

But greatness of this kind cannot be denied in the end. Decades from now, and even in hundreds of years, Callas's art will be remembered by those who search history for the greatest of achievements, and who treasure and guard them as the most precious of rare gems. She will live, when we have been long forgotten. At the opening of his valuable book, The Callas Legacy, John Ardoin, an unusually perceptive commentator, offers the lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay that many think of in connection with Callas's life:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.

More and more, I am led to the conclusion that the brightest and fiercest flames last the shortest time, in every field of human endeavor. Perhaps the failing is ours -- in the comfort we seek from the mediocre and that which does not require us to raise ourselves up, and in our resistance to those achievements that transcend the boundaries of what we view as even possible. Or perhaps the brevity is inherent in the achievement itself: when we break the bounds of what most humans are capable of doing, the person who does so cannot tolerate the impossible strain for very long. Yet they cannot strive for less: that, too, would destroy them.

Whatever the explanation may be, such greatness is eternal. It will last as long as mankind does, and as long as we remember what is possible when we strive for perfection, and approach as near to it as we can. Perhaps, finally, that makes the terrible costs that Callas endured worth it in the end: that she will live forever.

For you, truly and incomparably La Divina: now and always.

"Suck It Up": The Denial Continues, and Kills Once More

2005-09-06T06:07:00.000-07:00

The denial of her pain by others killed Sylvia Plath, as described by Alice Miller:

Sylvia Plath's life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a result of her sensitivity, she suffered much more intensely than most people from the frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person. In all her letters she assures her mother how well she is doing. The suspicion that her mother did not release negative letters for publication overlooks the deep tragedy of Plath's life. This tragedy (and the explanation for her suicide as well) lies in the very fact that she could not have written any other kind of letters, because her mother needed reassurance, or because Sylvia at any rate believed that her mother would not have been able to live without this reassurance.

...

We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self -- at the expense of life itself.

The same denial kills too many of those who have served in our military, as discussed in the second half of the same essay -- and as noted in the news story I excerpted here:

His nephew had enlisted in the Army. He and a buddy from a suburban Midwestern city had been to Iraq and back.

"We're not getting the whole story," the uncle told me as we stood in a sun-drenched meadow. His nephew had recounted the horrors of war to his uncle. He had told his uncle that they shot at anything that moved. He had bared his tormented soul to someone he trusted, someone who loved him, someone who had brought him to these mountains for peace and solitude and new experiences.

...

One summer night, the two Iraq war veterans drank too much. The buddy had a new sports car, a "welcome home" gift from his father. These two young veterans sped down a highway careening and crashing the new sports car. Both died.

Their names were not seen on any national TV news program listing those who gave the ultimate price. Their names will not appear on any war memorial of those killed in the Iraq war. But their lives were cut short by the horrors of war just as though they had been targeted by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

I think it helped to kill Iris Chang -- at the age of 36:

Iris Chang may have been yet another victim of the continued, unending denial which permeates our culture, and our world. If I am correct, she finally felt that killing herself was “the only possible way to express [her] true self." No one wanted to hear about what most concerned her and, even if they listened, they did so only with great reluctance, and they didn't fully grasp what she was trying to communicate.

And now, similar denial has killed two New Orleans police officers [link no longer working]:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Life wasn't supposed to end this way for Sgt. Paul Accardo: alone in chaos.

He wrote a note telling anyone who found him who to contact - a fellow officer. He was precise, and thoughtful, to the end. Then he stuck a gun into his mouth and killed himself.

Accardo was one of two city cops who committed suicide last week as New Orleans descended into an abyss of death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. He was found in an unmarked patrol car on Saturday in a downtown parking lot.

His funeral was planned for Tuesday.

Back when life was normal and structured, Accardo served as one of the police department's chief spokesmen. He reported murders, hostage situations and rapes in measured words, his bespectacled face benign and familiar on the nightly news.

"Paul was a stellar guy. A perfectionist. Everything had to be just right," recalled Sgt. Joe Narcisse, who went to police academy with Accardo and worked with him in the public affairs office.

...

But in New Orleans for the past week, the chaos seemed endless.

Like the rest of the department, Accardo worked long, difficult days - sometimes 20 hours. He waded through the mass of flesh and stench in the Louisiana Superdome. He saw the dead in the streets.

Defillo remembered how bad Accardo felt when he was unable to help women stranded on the interstate and pleading for water and food. One woman said her baby had not had water in three days.

He even wanted to stop and help the animals lost amid the ruin of New Orleans, Defillo said.

Unable to stop the madness and hurt, Accardo sank into depression.

Narcisse remembered being on the telephone with him, complaining about the flooding when his old academy buddy cut him off mid-sentence: "Joe. Joe. I can't talk to you right now." He couldn't handle it anymore, Narcisse said.

"It was like you were having an awful conversation with someone who died in your family," he said.

Accardo - who also lost his home in the flood waters - looked like a zombie, like someone who hadn't slept in year, Defillo said. But so did all the others on the force. Some have failed to report for duty, while others have turned in their badges. Vacations and counseling were ordered for those who have remained.

But the captain said he never thought Accardo would kill himself.

"We kept telling him, 'There's going to be a brighter day, suck it up,'" Defillo said. "He couldn't shake it."

Most of the friends and relatives of those who commit suicide never think they will take their own lives -- until they do. And their major advice is always the same: don't feel the pain. Deny it. "Suck it up."

But some people can't and won't deny the pain. As the horrors accumulate, and when far too few people will listen when those who feel the pain all the way down want to talk about it, we should not wonder when the pain finally becomes too great.

And yet, some will still say that a man like Sergeant Accardo was "weak," and that he "couldn't handle it anymore." If he had been "stronger," he would have been able to "shake it."

For some people, when "handling it" means that they must kill their souls in slow motion, the price is too high. And almost no one will acknowledge just how horrifying the truth is.

So sometimes they kill themselves. Don't wonder why. Most people who wonder know why -- they just won't admit it. Even now.

Even now.

The Ignored Casualties of War

2005-04-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

A remembrance of the casualties almost never noted [link no longer working]:

The Wasatch Mountains of Utah are about as far away from a war zone as you can get. In the waning days of last summer, when the wildflowers were not yet gone, a casual hike turned into a horrible reminder.

Seeing a business acquaintance along the trail was a surprise. Usually, I see him behind a customer service counter. But I recognized him with his backpack passing on the trail.

He reminded me of his name. I asked how he was doing. Not so well, he said.

The trail we were on was a place he used to bring his favorite nephew. The uncle had come up to the tall pines, the stands of aspen and the unrestricted views of the peaks to remember. And to try to forget.

His nephew had enlisted in the Army. He and a buddy from a suburban Midwestern city had been to Iraq and back.

"We're not getting the whole story," the uncle told me as we stood in a sun-drenched meadow. His nephew had recounted the horrors of war to his uncle. He had told his uncle that they shot at anything that moved. He had bared his tormented soul to someone he trusted, someone who loved him, someone who had brought him to these mountains for peace and solitude and new experiences.

...

One summer night, the two Iraq war veterans drank too much. The buddy had a new sports car, a "welcome home" gift from his father. These two young veterans sped down a highway careening and crashing the new sports car. Both died.

Their names were not seen on any national TV news program listing those who gave the ultimate price. Their names will not appear on any war memorial of those killed in the Iraq war. But their lives were cut short by the horrors of war just as though they had been targeted by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

The Endless Wounds of War, and a Remarkable Story of Hope

2004-12-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

[At the conclusion of one of the earlier essays referred to below, I wrote:

When the mechanisms of denial become deeply engrained mental habits and patterns of behavior, they will encompass the enemy -- or those "lesser" people we say we are "liberating" -- and finally the members of our own military.

These are some of the additional ways in which the denial continues -- and the horrors go on.

And the corpses pile up.

The fact that stories like that of Alan Babin receive so little attention from those who support our current foreign policy is additional proof of the mechanisms of denial that I discuss in "The Roots of Horror" series.]

Two articles today speak to one of the most revealing symptoms of the depths of the denial that permeates our culture generally, and the attitude of many Americans toward the war in Iraq in particular. In several essays from my series on "The Roots of Horror," I discussed the widespread denial of the death, destruction and suffering endured by Iraq civilians. That is deplorable and unforgivable, but not altogether surprising in view of the remarkable insularity of most Americans: pain suffered by others might be more real to them if it were covered regularly in our media, especially on television. But of course, it isn't for the most part.

What is truly extraordinary is the extent to which many Americans deny the pain and suffering endured by those Americans who are actually fighting the war that the hawks and their supporters lobbied for endlessly. That the Americans who engage in this particular form of denial include Bush and many of those in the administration is much worse than deplorable; it is profoundly contemptible, and it reveals the extent to which the actual lives of individual human beings have almost no significance at all to them.

Bob Herbert discusses this in his current column, which you should read in its entirety. Some excerpts:

Greg Rund was a freshman at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 when two students shot and killed a teacher, a dozen of their fellow students and themselves. Mr. Rund survived that horror, but he wasn't able to survive the war in Iraq. The 21-year-old Marine lance corporal was killed on Dec. 11 in Falluja.

The people who were so anxious to launch the war in Iraq are a lot less enthusiastic about properly supporting the troops who are actually fighting, suffering and dying in it. Corporal Rund was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. Because of severe military personnel shortages, large numbers of troops are serving multiple tours in the war zone, and many are having their military enlistments involuntarily extended.

...

We don't have enough troops because we are fighting the war on the cheap. The Bush administration has refused to substantially expand the volunteer military and there is no public support for a draft. So the same troops head in and out of Iraq, and then back in again, as if through a revolving door. That naturally heightens their chances of being killed or wounded.

A reckoning is coming. The Army National Guard revealed last Thursday that it had missed its recruiting goals for the past two months by 30 percent. Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, who heads the National Guard Bureau, said: "We're in a more difficult recruiting environment, period. There's no question that when you have a sustained ground combat operation going that the Guard's participating in, that makes recruiting more difficult."

Just a few days earlier, the chief of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, told The Dallas Morning News that recruiting was in a "precipitous decline" that, if not reversed, could lead to renewed discussions about reinstatement of the draft.

...

As the war in Iraq goes more and more poorly, the misery index of the men and women serving there gets higher and higher. More than 1,300 have been killed. Many thousands are coming home with agonizing wounds. Scott Shane of The Times reported last week that according to veterans' advocates and military doctors, the already hard-pressed system of health care for veterans "is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war."

Through the end of September, nearly 900 troops had been evacuated from Iraq by the Army for psychiatric reasons, included attempts or threatened attempts at suicide. Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, an assistant secretary of defense for health affairs from 1994 to 1997, said, "I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war."

To appreciate how devastating the wounds suffered by our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan can be and how that suffering expands to include many additional people, you should read all of this article in The Washington Post. It's very difficult going but, as I have sometimes said before, attention must be paid to these issues.

The Post story tells the story of the very young Alan Babin:

Pfc. Alan Babin, like everyone else in his 41-man 82nd Airborne Division platoon, had spent the early morning hours of March 31, 2003, crouching beside an abandoned cement factory in Samawah, Iraq, watching the accruing light of day slowly sketch details of the landscape: shallow drainage ditches flanking a road, a clearing of sparse marsh grass, a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. On the other side of the river, minarets rose above the flat tops of boxy buildings. The soldiers had been forewarned that an Iraqi paramilitary group hiding among those buildings might be ready to fight. Shortly after the call to prayer blared from a mosque's loudspeaker, the tight rattle of AK-47 fire confirmed the prediction.

Alan was the platoon's lone medic, and he stayed near the center of the formation to run to anyone who might need him and his rucksack of medical supplies. Officers shouted into their radios, instructing infantrymen to adjust position in response to the sporadic influx of bullets, grenades and mortars. Pfc. Joe Heit, lying prone in a small clearing of grass, heard someone say that an enemy vehicle was approaching, and he rose to his knees to look.

Another call crackled through radio headsets: "Heit is hit!"

A bullet had shattered Heit's glasses, nicked the soft skin at the corner of his eye socket, punctured the cartilage of his ear and exited the back of his helmet. He was dazed and a little bloodied, but otherwise fine.

Alan had no way of knowing the injury was minor. ...

Alan ran about 15 feet across the clearing toward Heit before he himself was hit. The bullet cored him, blowing a hole in his gut roughly the size and shape of a football. It grazed his liver, caught the spleen, destroyed 90 percent of his stomach, nipped the pancreas and bored numerous holes in the coils of his small intestine. He spun on his heels and fell onto the seat of his pants, his legs stretched straight out in front of him. His back was propped against his rucksack, and his helmet slipped over his eyes. To some of the other soldiers catching a glimpse of him there, he appeared as a figure in casual repose, a catnapper with a dark stain spreading under his shirt.

In a series of events which is close to miraculous given his injuries and also a testament to the great advances in medical technology, Babin survived. But the ordeal he and his family have been through was agonizing, and it continues to be, every single day:

Of the more than 3,500 U.S. military casualties from Iraq treated at Walter Reed, none has spent more time there than Alan. In seven months, he underwent more than 70 surgeries that related to his still-gaping abdomen, his tracheotomy, the drainage shunt that ran from his brain down his neck and felt like a stiff vein to the touch. He fell under the spell of aggressive infections from a fugitive strain of bacteria that kept skipping from one bodily system to another. The burns on his arms and legs required a series of skin grafts. His compromised immune system opened the door to meningitis and a stroke.

The doctors in the surgical intensive care unit kept saying they hoped for reconstructive abdominal surgery and a full recovery -- walking, talking, eating. Then they'd add it was too early for definite answers.

It should also be noted that, in addition to the horrific physical and emotional costs, the financial demands imposed on families like Alan Babin's are incomprehensibly enormous. In the Babins' case, those expenses were offset in an amazing manner by the generosity of their friends and neighbors:

On this day, several of the friends waiting with Al Sr. at the Air Force base were the same ones who had spurred a fundraising effort that helped Al and Christy afford to travel to and from Washington on his policeman's salary. The town held carwashes and golf tournaments, appealing to Round Rock's patriotic instinct to help a kid everyone was calling a local hero. The regional home builders' association went so far as to build an addition onto the Babins' house -- a customized, wheelchair-accessible downstairs bedroom and bathroom that Alan could use as he gained the strength to walk on his own. They furnished it with a flat-screen TV and a SurroundSound stereo system. Not only did they install hardwood flooring in that room, but they extended it throughout the rest of the ground floor. When Al Sr. called Rosie in Washington to tell her about that surprise, his voice was choked with tears.

Even some very well-known people involved themselves in Alan's story:

People all over central Texas had heard about Alan through periodic local news reports and word of mouth, which spread mostly through the civic organizations such as the Lions Club, which Rosie had been deeply involved in before Alan's injury. In March, Rosie found herself on the phone with a familiar male voice: high-pitched, with a Texas twang that seemed to come straight from the nose.

"This is Ross Perot . . ." He had gotten the Babins' number through someone in the Texas governor's office who'd heard about Alan, and within days had arranged for Alan to see his doctors for a new CAT scan and MRIs. He then surprised the Babins with a customized van: a 2004 Ford Econoline with 57-inch raised side doors and a wheelchair lift. Soon, they negotiated a deal with the rehab center that let them take Alan home on weekends to try out the new bedroom that had been added onto the side of the house. Al Sr. would sleep outside the bedroom door on an inflatable mattress, so he'd be close in case anything went wrong. He and Rosie sometimes likened their lives to those of the parents of a newborn.

"It's not that bad," Al Sr. said after he had rolled off the mattress one morning.

He put a pot of coffee on in the kitchen before getting Alan ready for the day -- a body wash, a clean shave, a change of clothes. Things had settled into a routine. The scans performed by the doctors provided by Perot reconfirmed that the ventricles that carry cerebrospinal fluid in the brain were swollen, but the swelling didn't appear as significant as had been feared, and its effect on Alan's brain was unclear. The scans didn't rule out brain damage, but by the summer Alan was dispelling the worst of the family's fears on his own.

By early September, Alan was responding in his physical therapy sessions more quickly and was able to lift his fingers more easily on command, even though the effort still wiped him out. His lips, if he concentrated, began to form words, and he was almost to the point where he could push enough air through his throat to vocalize -- but not quite. Very slowly, he was becoming himself again.

I urge you to read the entire article -- and marvel at the ability of people of incredible strength and determination to withstand the most unimaginable suffering, and still survive. I doubt you will be able to read the Babins' story without at least a few tears coming to your eyes; I certainly couldn't.

And then wonder about the studied refusal of our leaders and of many hawks ever to discuss, or even to note, stories like this one. I could offer my own judgment of such people, but it would hardly be polite. Besides, I am certain you can draw the appropriate conclusions yourself -- as I am sure you will.

So read it. It would seem to be the very least we can do -- those of us who can walk, and talk, and pursue our dreams without requiring others to bathe us every day, and without needing others to be able to do...anything at all.

In the end, and despite all the suffering he has endured, the story of Alan Babin and his family is one of hope, and a testament to the ability of people to endure and struggle for more life, even when most people would have given up long ago. And such a story seems particularly appropriate for this time of year.

The Indifference and Denial that Kill

2004-11-30T09:35:00.000-08:00

I have been intending to write about Iris Chang's death for several weeks, since she died earlier in November. Chang was best known for The Rape of Nanking, a book which told the story, for the first time in any detail, of the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China during World War II. We will never know what demons finally detroyed Iris Chang. Whatever their particular nature, they finally won the battle they had waged with her, a battle that had probably gone on for many years.

On November ninth, Iris Chang shot herself. She was 36 years old.

I have a theory about what might have been responsible for Chang's suicide, at least in part. The idea has haunted me for the past several weeks. I kept putting it aside, both because I found it too painful to think about -- and because I have too many of my own problems right now. But the theory kept coming back to me, because I think one of the demons that tormented Chang may be the same one that has tormented me for much of the past year.

Some clues are sprinkled through this Salon article about Iris Chang, by a fellow journalist who was Chang's friend for many years. In their last conversation before Chang's death, Iris Chang told Paula Kamen: "I just wanted to let you know that in case something should happen to me, you should always know that you've been a good friend." I think that final conversation makes it very clear that Chang had already decided she would take her own life. She must have concluded she couldn't win the battle that was raging inside her.

At the very end of her article, Kamen writes:

Before we finally hung up, she said one last time: If anything happened to her, I had to let people know what she was like before this happened.

And I said I would.

Kamen has kept her word, in an admirable fashion that I think would have pleased Chang.

The first part of the article tells of the women's experiences in college, and how Kamen "would have liked" Chang more if she hadn't always found herself "eating Iris' dust." Chang was always at least one step ahead of her classmates, and she managed to get published in places that seemed hopelessly out of reach to everyone else. From the summer-magazine internship in New York City available to only one student at their journalism school, to an internship with a Chicago daily newspaper, to becoming a college stringer for The New York Times covering the Urbana-Champaign area (after publishing six of her articles, the Times "told her to stop, so the paper would not raise eyebrows by disproportionately covering Champaign") -- Iris Chang was always there first.

Kamen is very open about the resentment she felt upon always finding herself in Chang's shadow. I'm sure many other people resented Chang as well. Kamen appears to think Chang was unaware of that resentment. I doubt that a woman as sensitive as Chang's work revealed her to be was oblivious to it; perhaps she simply considered it unavoidable, but ultimately unimportant. In any case, Chang actively pursued her friendship with Kamen, and was very encouraging to Kamen about Kamen's own work. Kamen finally realized part of the "Iris Code": "Think big. Almost to the point of being naive."

In later years, Kamen fully embraced the Iris Code:

By that time, I was definitely a firm convert to the Iris Code -- to the point of spreading the gospel. When I occasionally went to universities to speak on my books, and then was a guest at writing classes, I would lecture students to "Iris Chang" it. She had become a verb to me. An action verb.

"Just think big!" I told them. "That's half the battle! What do you have to lose? If someone turns you down, they turn you down, so what? And then you move on. Just get a sense of entitlement, will you? It doesn't matter if you're in the Midwest. Or if you're at a public school. Just decide what you want and go get it. To the point of being naive. Your voice is not your voice. It's the voice of your generation! Just Iris Chang it!" I explained, almost taking on her passionate tone as I spoke.

With regard to my theory about one of the demons that may have tormented Chang, here's the first major clue, in Kamen's description of Chang's best-known work:

In 1997, she published her blockbuster "The Rape of Nanking." Then, I was really impressed.

She had made a major historical discovery: a hidden Nazi diary chronicling the massacres by the Japanese in China in new detail. In China, the WWII atrocities have long been a national nightmare, and they have received attention from historians and academics over the years. But it took Chang's energy, will and engaging writing style to make the massacre come alive to a popular audience in the West. From reading her letters, I knew how hard she had worked on that book. She traveled through China on her own and challenged the U.S. government for long-classified documents. She was genuinely shocked at the atrocities she had exposed, and reacted with a pure, honest rage -- like someone seeing evil for the very first time. She couldn't understand the possibility of knowing about such things and not writing about them. Part of the power of her interviewing was that she had no filters to block out anything that was being said to her; I suspect she didn't even know that people came with filters.

And here's another clue:

The last time I saw Iris was in the spring of 2003, when I went to see her read in Chicago for her third book, a history of the Chinese in America. She was in good spirits, and we had a good time afterward going out for stuffed pizza in a small group and hearing about her latest adventures. I was curious about her next project, and the stories she was gathering for it. I knew they were intense, like those she had covered for "The Rape of Nanking." As a sign of the darkness of the interviews' content, a typist hired to transcribe them cried all the way through the work. The interviews covered the brutal ordeals suffered by U.S. soldiers during the Bataan Death March in the Philippines in World War II. For about four years, their Japanese captors starved and tortured them with unimaginable cruelty. A soldier, for example, would be ordered to bury his friend alive. If that person refused, they would make someone else bury him alive.

In these interviews, the surviving elderly soldiers also complained that the U.S government had turned a blind eye to them. Besides feeling abandoned while they were prisoners, the men were upset that the United States did not adequately prosecute the captured Japanese offenders. Some of the men talked about expecting finally to come home to the U.S. to great fanfare, to see "the rockets' red glare." But no one at home seemed interested in what they had gone through. "'But then, there was no rockets' red glare,'" one subject said, over and over again.

As was the case with many of her other subjects, that interview was probably the first time that soldier had talked about his experiences in the war. A war in which his comrades had sacrificed so dearly, some with their lives, and others, with their sanity. While this material was difficult, I hoped that the book would do the same for the Bataan Death March that "The Rape of Nanking" had done for the atrocities at Nanking, that it would raise a new level of awareness about this largely forgotten chapter of history. Iris represented these men's last hope to get their stories told.

I suspect that, at some point, Chang may have realized she was confronting evil -- not once, but twice. And I think it was the second time that she looked evil in the face that may finally have destroyed her.

Certainly, Chang had a great success with The Rape of Nanking. There was that Nazi diary, and people could focus more easily on the atrocities that had been committed -- because the atrocities had been committed by them, the Japanese whom the U.S. government had completely dehumanized as an entire population during World War II. Not only were the Japanese subhuman for many Americans (at least, throughout the period of World War II), but they were the enemy. It wasn't so difficult to acknowledge the horror of what they had done.

And while the Japanese were the initial villains in the Bataan Death March story, another villain was subsequently introduced into the storyline. After the unimaginable cruelty and torture to which they had been subjected, the soldiers who had managed to survive found that "no one at home seemed interested in what they had gone through. "'But then, there was no rockets' red glare,'" one subject said, over and over again."

"No one at home seemed interested in what they had gone through." That's the key.

I have been writing about this kind of denial at great length, in my series on "The Roots of Horror." In numerous entries, I have described how this mechanism of denial is initially set in early childhood. The young child must first deny his own pain, simply to survive. Acknowledging it, and experiencing it, fully might kill him. I recently discovered just how true that is, by recalling some very early childhood memories. Simply remembering certain things almost killed me over the last two months. I'm still not entirely certain how I survived, and I'm in the process of putting myself back together even now.

So to survive, we deny and repress the full experience of the pain we experience. As we mature, and if we do not surface those feelings -- which also lead to profound rage at the cruelty we suffer at the hands of adults who are supposedly devoted to nurturing us, and who tell us they are only being cruel "for our own good" -- we deny the pain of others in the same way, and for the same reasons. If we acknowledge the immense pain felt by others, that will trigger our own feelings of pain. And those feelings are much too threatening, and they represent a great danger that cannot be allowed to come too close. See my earlier essays for many more details and examples of how these dynamics manifest themselves.

Kamen offers a few more clues about what might have caused this tragedy, in the details of that final phone conversation with Iris Chang. Kamen says: "She talked about her overwhelming fears and anxieties, including being unable to face the magnitude -- and the controversial nature -- of the stories that she had uncovered." Chang believed she suffered from real, physical problems. Her family thought "it's internal" -- as if what happens in our mental and emotional life does not have physical effects, as well. (I add that, even if the ultimate cause is psychological, at certain points genuine physical ailments can arise which may require treatment as well. But adequate and appropriate treatment requires a doctor and/or a psychologist who understands and is sympathetic to all the issues involved, and such professionals are tragically still rare and difficult to find. And simply prescribing pills to make us "feel better" is no solution at all in the long-term, although it may sometimes be necessary to avoid a person taking her own life in the short-term.)

Kamen also writes this telling sentence: "She was fixated on not seeing herself as having anything wrong with her." I suspect the message that there was something "wrong with her" was the message conveyed by her family, who thought all her problems were "internal."

Here is what I wonder about. Chang was researching and writing about the most monstrous cruelties that we can imagine, and we probably can't even imagine -- not even in our worst nightmares -- many of the details the survivors of the Bataan Death March told Chang. And after the unbearable torture they had miraculously managed to survive, they found that, "No one at home seemed interested in what they had gone through." No one wanted to know about the torments they had been forced to endure, and no one wanted to know about the torment they might still experience.

I strongly suspect that Chang suffered some of the same torments herself. Kamen notes that Chang "had no filters to block out anything that was being said to her." Chang was fully open to the pain suffered by the people she wrote about; she acknowledged it completely, and allowed it to become completely real. Most people cannot or will not do that.

But I think Kamen is wrong when she says that she suspects Chang "didn't even know that people came with filters." I think that was what Chang was discovering -- and that discovery may have been the demon that finally destroyed her. Chang may have been unaware of people's "filters" at one time, but I think she felt the full impact of our culture's widespread denial in her final years. Just as the Bataan survivors discovered that no one "seemed interested in what they had gone through," Chang may have found that people still were not interested in it. While people might be willing to acknowledge the horrors in which the enemy engaged, they are not so willing to acknowledge the horrors they themselves perpetrate -- or the horrors that may have been perpetrated by the United States. Many people still refuse to acknowledge that U.S. forces committed atrocities of their own in Vietnam.

And Chang's own family thought her immense feelings of pain and anger -- anger directed both at the Japanese, but also and perhaps more significantly at an American public that still insisted on denial and avoidance -- signified that there was something "wrong with her." What we ourselves refuse to acknowledge, we condemn in others: we insist on making it their problem, when in fact it is our own.

The final catastrophe may have been Chang's growing realization that there was no one who fully understood or felt what she was feeling, that there was no one who was willing to listen when she spoke about the demons that haunted her. Her feelings represented a "problem" that needed to be fixed. The idea that her reaction was completely appropriate -- and more than that, completely healthy -- was intolerable to those around her. And she probably suspected that much of the audience for her new book would engage in the same denial. To acknowledge the full truth of the horror, including all of its sources -- even and especially when one of them is our own culture of denial -- is more than most people are capable of, or willing to undertake.

I do not compare my writing here to Chang's work. She wrote several books; although I have written five or six books' worth of essays, those essays have not been published in book form, at least not yet. I do not reach the kind of audience that Chang did. Yet, particularly in connection with my "Roots of Horror" series, I have many of the feelings that I suspect Chang may have felt. It astonishes me that very, very few people appear to think my writing on this subject is of any importance at all. Almost no one ever mentions that series or any of the entries in it, and almost no one ever discusses it, not even to criticize it. And even though I understand the mechanism of denial involved, and even though I have written about that mechanism at great length, the studied and purposeful avoidance of these dynamics -- when we see them being reenacted yet again, in our entire approach to foreign policy and more specifically in connection with the still unfolding horrors in Iraq -- fills me with unspeakable sadness, and it also makes me feel tremendous anger.

The anger arises directly out of the consequences of this continued denial: many innocent people continue to suffer untold pain and awful, horrific injuries because of what we do. And many people have been killed and continue to die as the result of our policies. Yet many people tell me that my feelings of sadness and rage are my problem, not theirs, not our country's, and not the world's. They tell me that I should write about something else, that I'm wasting my time, and that I'm only engaging in groundless psychological speculation -- even when more and more evidence confirming the truth and reality of these dynamics arrives every day, with numerous news stories.

Despite all the naysayers, I will continue writing about these issues. I do not believe there are any more important issues to be discussed. But I often feel that no one wants to hear about it, and that they would prefer that I simply keep quiet. I suspect that Iris Chang may have had some of those same feelings, when she was repeatedly told that her feelings were her problem and that something was "wrong with her."

As an additional important piece of evidence, recall my entries about the dynamics of suicide. In particular, recall Alice Miller's description of the causes of Sylvia Plath's suicide:

Sylvia Plath's life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a result of her sensitivity, she suffered much more intensely than most people from the frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person. In all her letters she assures her mother how well she is doing. The suspicion that her mother did not release negative letters for publication overlooks the deep tragedy of Plath's life. This tragedy (and the explanation for her suicide as well) lies in the very fact that she could not have written any other kind of letters, because her mother needed reassurance, or because Sylvia at any rate believed that her mother would not have been able to live without this reassurance. Had Sylvia been able to write aggressive and unhappy letters to her mother, she would not have had to commit suicide. Had her mother been able to experience grief at her inability to comprehend the abyss that was her daughter's life, she never would have published the letters, because the assurances they contained of how well things were going for her daughter would have been too painful to bear.

If a sensitive child like Sylvia Plath intuits that it is essential for her mother to interpret the daughter's pain only as the consequence of a picture being damaged and not as a consequence of the destruction of her daughter's self and its expression--symbolized in the fate of the pastel--the child will do her utmost to hide her authentic feelings from the mother. The letters are testimony of the false self she constructed (whereas her true self is speaking in The Bell Jar). With the publication of the letters, her mother erects an imposing monument to her daughter's false self.

We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Many parents are like Sylvia's mother. They desperately try to behave correctly toward their child, and in their child's behavior they seek reassurance that they are good parents. The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give too little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child--well behaved and dutiful--of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.

Also recall Miller's title for her chapter about Plath: "Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering" (which appears in Miller's book, For Your Own Good).

I have emphasized Miller's key sentence before: "We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself."

Iris Chang may have been yet another victim of the continued, unending denial which permeates our culture, and our world. If I am correct, she finally felt that killing herself was "the only possible way to express [her] true self." No one wanted to hear about what most concerned her and, even if they listened, they did so only with great reluctance, and they didn't fully grasp what she was trying to communicate.

I know those feelings all too well, every single one of them. And thoughts of suicide came uncomfortably close over the last two months. I think I have turned the corner and that the worst is behind me, even though a long struggle still lies ahead of me. I now have to rebuild my life, in almost every area. And if only a handful of people seem to understand what I'm talking about...well, that will have to suffice. I do not intend to give up, or to stop writing about these issues. They are much too important, and I am convinced I have something of significance to say -- even if the world does not care to acknowledge it.

I will offer some more details about what I have learned over the last few months very soon. And I will also write about some of the suicides of soldiers who had served in Iraq, since they reveal many of the identical dynamics. In the meantime, I urge you to read (or perhaps reread) some of the earlier entries in my series on "The Roots of Horror." Most of all, I desperately wish that more people understood and appreciated the underlying causes involved -- and realized at long last that the costs of continued denial can be too terrible to contemplate.

And that denial may have been what finally killed Iris Chang. The world's overwhelming indifference to pain and suffering finally may have been more than she could bear. More of us should keep that possibility in mind. Life is terribly precious, and the fact that Iris Chang's life has ended so tragically, when she still had so much of it before her and when she might have given us so much more wonderful and crucially important work, should cause all of us to wonder why.

And to make it our goal that such tragedies do not continue to be repeated every day, without end. Is facing the truth, fully and without fear, truly more terrifying than death itself? For far too many people, it appears that it is. But if anything could ever be wrong, that surely must be. Someday, it has to stop.

To Destroy the World, II: The Case of Fallujah, and Ralph Peters

2004-11-20T13:56:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I quoted one expert on the Middle East as follows:

The insurgents don't need a safe haven like Falluja to run down the clock. "In fact, Maoist tactics would argue against trying to settle in a city and hold it at this stage of a weak insurgency, and for using the population as a sea to swim in," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It is absurd, Mr. Cordesman adds, to believe that destroying Falluja and then rebuilding it will win support for the Americans and the interim government. The American military said it has put aside $100 million for reconstructing the devastated city. But that does not solve the much bigger problem of unemployment, now at 60 percent nationwide. That is a motivating factor for young men joining the insurgency.

"How much money and aid effort does it really take," Mr. Cordesman said, "to jump-start an economy rather than provide welfare for Falluja?"

For those who still want to believe that completely destroying various parts of Iraq will end the "insurgency" -- when such destruction ensures, among other things, that growing numbers of ordinary Iraqis hate us virulently enough to do us grave harm -- consider just part of today's news [link no longer working]:

Insurgents battled American troops in the streets of Baghdad on Saturday, killing a U.S. soldier in an ambush and gunning down four government employees in signals that the guerrillas remain a potent force despite the fall of their stronghold of Fallujah. Nine Iraqis also died in fighting west of the capital.

In Fallujah, where U.S. Marines and soldiers are still battling pockets of resistance, insurgents waved a white flag of surrender before opening fire on U.S. troops and causing casualties, Marine spokesman 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert said Saturday without elaborating.

Al-Arabiya television quoted Iraqi guerrillas fleeing Fallujah as saying they had run out of ammunition and many fighters who stayed behind were badly wounded.

U.S. troops in the northern city of Mosul found the bodies of nine Iraqi soldiers Saturday, all shot in the back of the head. The military first reported that seven of the victims were beheaded, but a second statement issued later Saturday said those reports were false.

Four decapitated bodies found earlier in the week in Mosul have not been identified, the military said Saturday. American and Iraqi forces detained 30 suspected guerrillas overnight in Mosul, the U.S. military said. ...

But the widespread clashes in Baghdad -- which broke out early Saturday in at least a half-dozen areas -- and other areas of central and northern Iraq (news - web sites) underscored the perilous state of security in this country after 18 months of American military occupation -- and just more than two months before vital national elections.

One American soldier was killed and nine were wounded in an ambush in central Baghdad. Five other U.S. soldiers were injured in a car bombing on the road to Baghdad's airport -- considered by U.S. authorities among the most dangerous routes in the country. ...

The heaviest fighting in the capital took place in the Azamiyah district, a largely Sunni Arab quarter, where insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades and small weapons at a police station, killing one policeman, Iraqi officials said.

Anger among Sunnis rose after Iraqi troops backed by U.S. soldiers Friday raided the Abu Hanifa mosque in Azamiyah -- one of the most revered sites in Sunni Islam. Three worshippers were killed, witnesses said.

A number of U.S. armored vehicles were seen in flames, including a U.S. Army Humvee with what appeared to be a body in the driver's seat. Smoke rose from burning shops along a commercial street as U.S. helicopters circled overhead and ambulances raced to the scene. ...

A suicide driver blew up his vehicle shortly after noon at an intersection on Saadoun Street, a bustling commercial street. One Iraqi civilian was killed and another wounded in the blast, which sent black smoke rising above the city center and set several cars ablaze.

Gunmen chased down a vehicle carrying Ministry of Public Works employees on their way to work Saturday, opening fire and killing four of them, a ministry spokesman said. Amal Abdul-Hameed -- an adviser to the ministry in charge of urban planning -- and three employees from her office died, spokesman Jassim Mohammed Salim said.

To the west of the capital, U.S. troops clashed with insurgents Saturday near the local government building in Ramadi, and hospital officials said nine Iraqis were killed and five were wounded. ...

Elsewhere, saboteurs blew up an oil well near the northern city of Kirkuk -- the sixth such attack in the last 10 days, oil officials said. Insurgents regularly attack Iraq's oil infrastructure, which provides much of the revenue for reconstruction.

Clashes occurred between U.S. troops and insurgents in Qaim along the Syrian border and in Samarra, where mortar shells struck a U.S. base but caused no casualties. Five Iraqis were hurt in the Qaim fighting, the local hospital reported.

In Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, police said gunmen killed an Iraqi police colonel and his driver as they headed south to Baghdad.

After reading all these details, we then happen upon this delusional passage, delivered straight from The Twilight Zone:

In New York, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations (news - web sites) said his government has "a good chance" of being able to hold the elections in January but might have to postpone them if violence escalates or Sunni Muslims decide to boycott.

Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie told a news conference Friday that "what happens in the next weeks will be important" in determining whether the insurgents can rally after losing their Fallujah base.

Yeah, "losing their Fallujah base" seems to have done the trick.

You truly have to wonder how much evidence it will take before the war planners begin to question the assumptions upon which they rely. How many people have to die for God's sake, before they start to grasp that what they are doing is not working? This is why I have said many, many times that the psychological imperatives that ultimately explain what is happening in Iraq are beyond and inaccessible to reason. There is no number of deaths that will satisfy these monsters without consciences.

All of which reminds of a profoundly repellent column by neocon hawk extraordinaire, Ralph Peters. There is a great deal that could be said about this piece of absolutely sickening garbage, especially in light of the fact that it is an almost perfect clinical example of an eliminationist pathology of immense, unreasoning hatred. So much evil concentrated in one newspaper column is an achievement rare to behold. So I will confine myself to noting one aspect of Peters' hate-filled rant, as captured in these excerpts:

We should move against Fallujah immediately -- with the support of Iraq's interim prime minister. We have an ideal window for action while our enemies, from al Qaeda and the French to al-Jazeera and the BBC, are bewildered by their failure to dictate our election's outcome. Their vicious attempts to change our government failed. Now they're wondering what on earth to do.

While they're scrambling, we should be shooting. ...

And when the president gives the order to finish the job in Fallujah, the Washington civilians need to get out of the way of our Marines and soldiers. Send the lawyers on a Caribbean cruise. Our troops know how to do this job. We need to trust them.

We must not be afraid to make an example of Fallujah. While we always seek to fight humanely, the most humane thing we can do in that tormented city is just to win, to burn out the plague of fanaticism and prove to Iraq's people that the forces of terror will not be allowed to enslave them.

We need to demonstrate that the United States military cannot be deterred or defeated. If that means widespread destruction, we must accept the price. Most of Fallujah's residents -- those who wish to live in peace -- have already fled. Those who remain have made their choice. We need to pursue the terrorists remorselessly.

That means killing. While we strive to obey the internationally recognized laws of war (though our enemies do not), our goal should be to target the terrorists and insurgents so forcefully that few survive to raise their hands in surrender. We don't need more complaints about our treatment of prisoners from the global forces of appeasement. We need terrorists dead in the dust. And the world needs to see their corpses.

Let potential terrorist recruits get a good, hard look at their probable fate. And let them see a U.S. Marine standing proudly and fearlessly in the center of Fallujah. ...

Many other difficult tasks lie ahead ahead, from helping the Iraqis conduct their country's first free national elections, through assisting the Afghans as they consolidate their remarkable progress, to hunting down Islamic terrorists wherever they go to ground.

We can do it. And the American people know it. They just said so.

Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage, reduced to shards, the price will be worth it. We need to demonstrate our strength of will to the world, to show that there is only one possible result when madmen take on America.

Note the number of extraordinary details in this one piece: our enemies apparently include all "the French" and "the BBC" (and al Jazeera as well) -- so I assume they, too, will be hunted down and eliminated in the near future, since Peters lists them along with Al Qaeda; "We don't need more complaints about our treatment of prisoners from the global forces of appeasement" -- no matter how well-founded in fact (and videotape) those complaints might be, and no matter how counterproductive and self-destructive our behavior might have been; and so on.

But the most striking aspect of Peters' opening of his rotted soul is his entire perspective: "We must not be afraid..."; "We need to demonstrate ..."; "We must accept the price..."; "We can do it..." It's all about us -- despite the fact that we invaded a country that didn't threaten us, and despite the fact that we are killing an unconscionable number of innocent civilians. And regardless of the fact that our actions create more terrorists by the minute. Never mind any of that. We must show them that we mean business now! We must demonstrate that we can kill every single goddamned one of them, even if we have to completely destroy an entire country to do so.

And even when that inevitably will mean that more terrorists will take up arms against us, and try to do us much more significant harm next time. None of that matters to Peters. It's all about us -- which means it's all about him.

This is as pure an example of the deeply destructive mechanism identified by Alice Miller as you are ever likely to find (from Breaking Down the Wall of Silence):

This year [1991], another war has come to an end. Once again, it is clear that even the most efficient weapons cannot eliminate hatred. Even the most sophisticated weapons are powerless against the will of one single individual who would not hesitate to destroy the world so long as he could achieve his goal--to revenge himself for his repressed injuries, to amass power, govern, and take possession of the world around him, all to avoid his feelings of pain.

One might expect that the millions of people who, thanks to television, watched the events of the Gulf War unfold would be eager to understand the causes of this urge to destroy. Sadly, the opposite seems to be true, at least in the public domain. Neither politicians, experts of various sorts, nor even the majority of journalists asked the essential question: What makes a person wish to destroy the world? ...

We must acknowledge what can already be acknowledged, in order to prevent the destruction and self-destruction of humankind. The oils wells burning in Kuwait confront us inescapably with the sad truth that technology alone is not sufficient to protect us from the consequences of denied, and thus uncontrolled, emotions. Without facing up to their origins--the production of hatred in childhood--we will be unable to resolve such hatred and put an end to the work of devastation. ...

Such a person demands order and uses violence to achieve it, just as he or she learned as a child: order and cleanliness at any price is the motto, even if it is at the price of life. The victims of such an upbringing ache to do to others what was once done to them. If they don't have children, or their children refuse to make themselves available for their revenge, they line up to support new forms of fascism. Ultimately, fascism always has the same goal: the annihilation of truth and freedom. People who have been mistreated as children, but totally deny their suffering, use the mottoes and labels of the day. They thereby meet the approval of others like them because they have are also helping to conceal their truth. They are consumed by the perverse pleasure in the destruction of life that they observed in their parents when young. They long to at last be on the other side of the fence, to hold power themselves, passing it off, as Stalin, Hitler, or Ceausescu have done, as "redemption" for others. This old childhood longing determines their political "opinions" and speeches, which are therefore impervious to counter arguments. As long as they continue to ignore or distort the roots of the problem, which lie in the very real threats experienced in their childhood, reason must remain impotent against this kind of persecution complex. The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person.

There is still more from Miller in that earlier entry.

Men like Ralph Peters reveal the truth of Miller's observations, including this statement: "The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason." Reason did not lead them to their conclusions, and no amount of evidence will dissuade them from the course they are determined to follow.

Give up trying to reason with them. They will stop when the insurmountable accumulation of failures -- and of deaths -- finally grinds their efforts to a halt and not one moment before, just as the catastrophe of Vietnam demonstrated.

Just pray that they don't destroy the world before we reach that point. Pray as hard as you can.

The Apocalyptic Crusader: Redemption, Purification and a New World -- through Sacred Violence and Death

2004-09-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

Because it has many points of relevance to the issues I have been discussing in my series of essays based on Alice Miller's work, I strongly recommend you read the entirety of an excerpt from Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. The excerpt is by James Carroll, and here are a few notable passages:

Nightmare in broad daylight. New York’s World Trade Center collapsed not just onto the surrounding streets but into the hearts of every person with access to CNN. Hundreds of millions of people instinctively reached out to those they loved, grateful to be alive. Death had shown itself in a new way. But if a vast throng experienced the terrible events of 9/11 as one, only one man, the president of the United States, bore a unique responsibility for finding a way to respond to them.

George W. Bush plumbed the deepest place in himself, looking for a simple expression of what the assaults of Sept. 11 required. It was his role to lead the nation, and the very world. The president, at a moment of crisis, defines the communal response. A few days after the assault, George W. Bush did this. Speaking spontaneously, without the aid of advisers or speechwriters, he put a word on the new American purpose that both shaped it and gave it meaning. "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism."

Crusade. I remember a momentary feeling of vertigo at the president’s use of that word, the outrageous ineptitude of it. The vertigo lifted, and what I felt then was fear, sensing not ineptitude but exactitude. ...

My subject had been the passing scene, but once George Bush launched his crusade, it became my only subject. Week after week, despite myself, I wrote, in my column in the Boston Globe, of almost nothing else. This is the record of what I witnessed, and I offer it here to mark the most extraordinary shift in American meaning and purpose of which I am aware. ...

For George W. Bush, "crusade" was an offhand reference. But all the more powerfully for that, it was an accidental probing of unintended but nevertheless real meaning. That the president used the word inadvertently suggests how it expressed his exact truth, an unmasking of his most deeply felt purpose. “Crusade,” he said. Later, his embarrassed aides suggested that he had meant to use the word only as a synonym for struggle, but Bush’s own syntax belied that. He defined crusade as war. Even offhandedly, he had said exactly what he meant.

With regard to the Crusades of almost a millennium ago, launched against the "infidel" Muslim, Carroll writes:

In the name of Jesus, and certain of God’s blessing, crusaders launched what might be called "shock and awe" attacks – laying siege, first, to the Asia Minor city of Nicaea, where they used catapults to hurl the severed heads of Muslim defenders over fortified walls. In Jerusalem they savagely slaughtered Muslims and Jews alike – practically the whole city. Eventually, Latin crusaders would turn on Eastern Christians, and then on Christian heretics, as blood-lust outran the initial "holy" impulse. That trail of violence scars the earth and human memory even to this day – especially in the places where the crusaders wreaked their havoc. And the mental map of the Crusades, with Jerusalem at the center of the earth, still defines world politics. But the main point, in relation to Bush’s instinctive response to 9/11, is that those religious invasions and wars of long ago established a cohesive Western identity precisely in opposition to Islam, an opposition that survives to this day.

With the Crusades, the violent theology of the killer God came into its own. To save the world, in this understanding, God willed the violent death of God’s only beloved son. Here is the relevance of that mental map, for the crusaders were going to war to rescue the site of the salvific death of Jesus, and they displayed their devotion to the cross on which Jesus died by wearing it on their breasts. When Bush’s remark was translated into Arabic for broadcast throughout the Middle East, the word “crusade” was rendered as “war of the cross.”

I interject here that Alice Miller is the only writer of whom I am aware who has sufficiently explained the psychological meaning and the ultimate roots of "the violent death of God’s only beloved son." I will return to this subject and explain Miller’s views further in the near future.

And here is what, in my view, constitutes the first part of the real key to the fundamental error, and the great danger, in the approach of the Bush administration:

Before the Crusades, Christian theology had given central emphasis to the resurrection of Jesus, and to the idea of incarnation itself, but with the war of the cross, the bloody crucifixion began to dominate the Latin Christian imagination. A theology narrowly focused on the brutal death of Jesus reinforced the primitive notion that violence can be a sacred act. The cult of martyrdom, even to the point of suicidal valor, was institutionalized in the Crusades, and it is not incidental to the events of 9/11 that a culture of sacred self-destruction took equally firm hold among Muslims. The suicide-murderers of the World Trade Center, like the suicide-bombers from the West Bank and Gaza, exploit a perverse link between the willingness to die for a cause and the willingness to kill for it. Crusaders, thinking of heaven, honored that link, too.

Here is the deeper significance of Bush’s inadvertent reference to the Crusades: Instead of being a last recourse or a necessary evil, violence was established then as the perfectly appropriate, even chivalrous, first response to what is wrong in the world. George W. Bush is a Christian for whom this particular theology lives.

And here is another part of the key:

But sacred violence, once unleashed in 1096, as in 2001, had a momentum of its own. The urgent purpose of war against the "enemy outside" – what some today call the "clash of civilizations" – led quickly to the discovery of an "enemy inside." The crusaders, en route from northwestern Europe to attack the infidel far away, first fell upon, as they said, "the infidel near at hand." Jews.

...

Doctrinal uniformity, too, could be enforced with sacred violence. When the U.S. attorney general defines criticism of the administration in wartime as treason, or when Congress enacts legislation that justifies the erosion of civil liberties with appeals to patriotism, they are enacting a Crusades script.

Carroll goes on to explain why specifically religious war is the danger, and how, "[d]espite our much vaunted separation of church and state, America has always had a quasi-religious understanding of itself."

Carroll also mentions another point I have analyzed (in Carroll’s view, when "end-time millennialism" convinces those on both sides that they are "ushering in the new age"):

Robert Jay Lifton shows how this phenomenon manifests itself now, with Islamist and American apocalyptic visions in fierce competition, both aimed at "purification and renewal." In his book "Superpower Syndrome," Lifton observes, "We are experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamist forces, overtly visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be restrained and reasonable but no less visionary in their projection of a cleansing war-making and military power."

This is very close to the truth – but it is not the full, psychological truth.

In a previous essay in my Miller series, which began with an examination of the scorn and contempt that many hawks heaped on Spain in the wake of the Spanish election last spring, I spoke of the ultimate roots of the hawks’ reaction. After setting forth an excerpt from Miller’s book, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (which you need to read to understand my comments more fully), I wrote:

In light of Miller’s analysis, we can now see the real tragedy of the terrorist attacks in recent years – the attacks of 9/11, the attack in Madrid, and all the other atrocities that we have witnessed. The people who commit such monstrous acts are the perfect embodiments of the mechanism Miller describes: these are people who were terribly abused as children (read any description of the kind of education and upbringing endured by any terrorist), yet they deny their own history and their own immense pain, and idealize and venerate their elders, and their religious leaders.

Now, as adults, since their denial continues, they seek revenge – and no mounting toll of bodies will sate their need, and their arguments are impervious to reason: [quoting Miller] "The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason."

Such terrorist attacks demand a response, and they demand that our political leaders protect us from future attacks, to the extent possible. But a reasoned response would be one targeted to those who represent the danger: it would be an attack on the terrorist networks themselves, not on a third- or fourth-rate dictatorship that represented no substantial threat either to its neighbors, or to us.

But those who plan and implement our current foreign policy, as well as those who defend them, have adopted a different strategy, which arises from a different source altogether. They are using the threat of terrorism as a springboard to remake the entire world, one area at a time – utilizing the Utopian delusion of “nation-building” as their rationale, and as their rationalization. They ignore the lessons of history, which show that such a delusion is simply that – a delusion, one that it is doomed to fail; they ignore the huge costs in both human life, and economically; and they ignore that our current course provides a recruiting tool for our enemies that the terrorists themselves could only dream about, and would not be able to provide themselves, if we did not offer it to them.

But the hawks and their defenders ignore all this – and they ignore the indisputable fact that rather than minimizing the dangers we face, our present course only increases them – because they are not focused on the reality of the threat that faces us. And this leads to the additional tragedy now unleashed by the terrorist attacks of recent years, and it is this tragedy that almost no one cares to name, or to face.

The fact that we have been attacked by monsters who seek revenge for the injuries they themselves have suffered in the past, and particularly in their childhoods, has provided a morally defensible "cover" for the hawks now to engage in a similar revenge fantasy, arising out of the injuries that they have suffered in the past, and in their childhoods – and it takes the form of their desire to remake the world, of their plans of “nation-building,” and of their desire to impose their will on the rest of the world by military force, one country at a time.

This is the source of the rage and condemnation you see directed at the people of Spain. The hawks are saying, in effect: "How dare you disobey and disagree with us? How dare you question the wisdom of our course? How dare you suggest that you might have another plan of action which would achieve the end we say we care so much about, and would achieve it more effectively, and create less new dangers in doing so? Don’t you understand that we know best, and that we are not to be questioned? How dare you?"

This is the voice of the enraged parent – who inflicts untold cruelties on his child, all the while proclaiming that he is committing monstrous acts for the child’s own good. And, in fact, this is precisely what the hawks tell anyone who disagrees with them, and what they tell the entire rest of the world: we know what is best for you, not your own citizens, and not your own leaders. We do, and you had better do what we say -- or else.

No, we are not at the point where another Hitler or Stalin could grab the reins of power here in the United States – not yet. But the longer the indeterminate “war on terror” goes on, and the more attacks there are, the greater the likelihood becomes that either this administration or a succeeding one will finally impose an authoritarian dictatorship on us. All the required pieces are now being put in place, as revealed for example in this series about Ashcroft’s unremitting attacks on individual rights, and on the personal liberty of us all.

In this deeper sense, commentators and writers such as David Brooks, Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, James Lileks, Andrew Sullivan, and Steven den Beste [all of whom I quoted in the earlier post] are the harbingers of the horrors that might yet come. They are the people who will tell us, in a moment of great national and world crisis, that what we need is more "discipline" – despite the fact that it is mindless, cruel, unnecessary "discipline" that caused the initial horrors. And they will tell us that anyone who dares to disagree is a "fifth columnist," who is aiding the enemy – and who must be made to shut up and go away, or perhaps simply to disappear forever.

Then, in another thirty or forty years, assuming that mankind survives and people in the future study how it was that horrors visited the world yet again despite all the warnings of history, they will be the people who will say: "But we never knew it would come to that. We just did what we thought was required for our own survival." And one or two might even add that they "were only following orders."

What you are hearing now is the voice of the thug – which in truth is the voice of the abused child, grown to adulthood, and still denying his own pain, and therefore denying the pain of everyone else. And the child now seeks to revenge himself upon an external enemy, any external enemy, and the terrorist attacks have provided the perfect opportunity to unleash destruction, but destruction on a scale that Hitler and Stalin could only dream of.

Do I think catastrophe can be avoided? Perhaps. It is too soon to tell. But many of the signs are not hopeful, and the longer the “crisis” goes on, the greater the danger becomes.

The dangers that confront us today present an additional problem, since they do genuinely constitute a grave threat, "an authentic global crisis that requires an urgent response," as Carroll puts it. However, as Carroll also discusses, "the Bush administration is taking steps that, instead of meeting the danger, make it far worse." [Added 1/29/06: in fact, I would not make this point in the same manner today. I think the talk of a "global crisis" is exaggerated in many significant respects, and I will return to this issue soon and explain how my thinking has developed.]

Even though we employ somewhat different terms, the extent to which Carroll and I are describing the same phenomenon is very striking to me. The dynamics we both discuss involve redemption through death on a mass scale, leading (its exponents hope) to an entirely new world – and the greater the scale of death and destruction, the better, from the perspective of the apocalyptic-millennialist world view. The same dynamics also lead to an "external" and an "internal" enemy. This time, the internal enemy comprises not only Muslims and Arabs, but everyone who fails to echo the administration line, and who thereby proves himself to be a "fifth columnist" who wants "the other side" to win, whether he will admit it or not. There are other similarities as well, and I will return to all these issues very soon.

In the meantime, I urge you to read Carroll’s article. He summarizes what I consider to be many of the crucial elements of the psychological mechanisms now at work around the world, on the parts of both our enemies and of many of our defenders, too. And that is the greatest danger of all: because both sides are utilizing the same overall framework, one animated and given tremendous emotional impetus because of the deep and powerful psychological forces at work, today’s conflict could all too easily lead to worldwide conflagration, on a scale we have never before witnessed. And I say that fully mindful of the enormity of the destruction of both World Wars.

That prospect is one which rightfully can keep you awake at night, if only in a vain attempt to prevent the nightmares from coming. I myself have had little luck with such preventive measures, but perhaps you will have more success.

So, there will be much more on all of this. And may you nonetheless have pleasant dreams in the meantime, although that prospect grows increasingly unlikely in our world today, at least so long as we remain on our present course.

When the Demons Come

2004-08-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

Because the majority of people still will not allow themselves to see the connections between the small cruelties of everyday life and much larger, more terrible, genuine atrocities, I will go over certain issues once again -- very slowly and deliberately this time, trying once more to encourage people to at least consider the interrelationships among various stories.

When I began my lengthy series on "The Roots of Horror," a series which relies in significant part on the work of author-psychologist Alice Miller, I said the following at the very outset:

As I indicated in [a post] last week, just at the time I became so deeply discouraged about the state of public debate (yet again), I had been about to begin a series of articles concerning a subject which is almost entirely neglected -- a subject which is crucial to understanding the precise manner in which world events are now playing out, and which is indispensable to grasping why people cling to ideas and theories which facts repeatedly demonstrate are incorrect and, what is much worse than being merely false, are profoundly destructive.

I have decided that I will go ahead with these posts -- although I do not delude myself that they will be widely read, or much discussed. For reasons which will become clearer later in this discussion, this failure to pay attention to these issues, and the stubborn refusal to acknowledge their demonstrable importance and explanatory power, are in themselves confirmation of the crucial nature of these ideas. For the majority of people, certain identifications -- no matter how well-documented and how strongly proven -- are simply too dangerous to be countenanced. And thus the tragedy of world history is reenacted over and over, and into our own times.

Many events covered in the daily news since I wrote that in February [of 2004] have continued to show, in numerous ways, just how crucial these particular issues are. In that same post, I excerpted a news story which almost no one even noticed, either when it first appeared or in the time since:

RICE, Texas - A fifth grader with a rare deformity says two teachers put him on display for a science lesson.

Robert Will Harris has Stahl's ear, which causes points to form on the ears. He and family say two fourth-grade teachers at his school used his deformity to teach a lesson in genetics.

The boy says the teachers pulled him from his class twice in one day and took him to their classrooms to show his ears.

Officials with the Rice Independent School District acknowledge the incidents happened, but say the teachers meant no harm. They say the teachers were simply trying to teach genetics and family traits.

The family says the boy's ears have nothing to do with genetics. His parents say they no longer want their son used for show and tell.

About this story, I said:

Several aspects of this exceedingly brief report deserve the most serious attention -- and as I indicated, that very brevity is central to its significance. First, note that the adults involved -- who were teachers, keep in mind -- insist that they "meant no harm," as if that insistence on their "innocent" motives exonerates them of responsibility, and blame.

Second, and much, much more important: please note what is not mentioned in this story. How do you think these incidents affected the child? Robert Will Harris is in elementary school -- and he is probably no older than nine or ten. How do you think a ten-year-old would feel about being used for "a lesson in genetics," because of "his deformity"?

Despite my very deep revulsion at the unnecessary deaths in Iraq, the deaths of both American soldiers and of innocent Iraqis, I have to say that this may well be the most deeply disturbing and most disgusting story I have read in the last year. And I say that for the following reason: it is society's refusal to acknowledge the profound damage that is inflicted on innocent children in innumerable ways, every single day, that is the deepest root of most, if not all, of the evils that confront us today.

Here is another example of the same underlying phenomenon -- and of the same kind of unthinking, incalculably damaging cruelty -- from the news just yesterday:

The practice of "hot saucing" a child's tongue as a method of discipline may seem cruel to some parents, but those who regularly use the punishment say it teaches their charges valuable and long-lasting lessons.

Lisa Whelchel, who played Blair on the popular 1980s TV series Facts of Life, is an advocate and practitioner of "hot saucing." Whelchel, the author of Creative Correction: Extraordinary Ideas for Everyday Discipline, says the practice worked for her children when other disciplinary actions did not.

"It does sting and the memory stays with them so that the next time they may actually have some self-control and stop before they lie or bite or something like that," Whelchel said on ABC News' Good Morning America.

Whelchel says she would have never used hot sauce to discipline her three children if it caused lasting damage. The actress-turned-home-schooling mom suggests using just a dab of hot sauce, placing it on your finger, then touching your finger to the child's tongue.

Let us pause right there for a moment. I do not know precisely how someone like Whelchel convinces herself that this practice does not cause "lasting damage." Obviously, she is only considering the possible physical effects, although even there evidence exists that for some children at least, the dangers might be serious enough to threaten their lives, as we shall see in a moment. But beyond this -- and ultimately much more important -- is what the child is likely to conclude when he is told by his mother that the deliberate infliction of pain is just another way of showing "love," and that humiliation is a proper means for one person to show affection and concern for the well-being of another, epecially when that person is a defenseless child.

One therapist quoted in the story sees this obvious fact -- that is, a fact which would be obvious, if people had not learned how to blind themselves to clearcut truths:

Boston family therapist Carleton Kendrick says he is vehemently against hot saucing or corporal punishment of any kind.

"There's no room for pain and humiliation and fear in disciplining healthy children," Kendrick said. "I think it's a rather barbaric practice to say the least."

The key to the kind of rationalization used by people like Whelchel can be seen in this passage:

Whelchel says she's been aware for some time that many people are strongly opposed to hot saucing, (which was covered in The Washington Post earlier this month) a form of discipline that's been around for decades, but she says she believes in many different creative ways to discipline, including this one.

"It's totally against popular opinion in culture these days," Whelchel said. "I prefer my child receive a small amount of pain from my hand of love than to encounter a lot more pain in life," she said.

So deliberately inflicting pain on even a very young child, and possibly putting his life in danger, is merely being "creative." And she only inflicts pain and fear now supposedly to prevent the child from encountering "a lot more pain in life," from other people. And what kind of message is that to give a young child?

The practice of "hot saucing" was dealt with at greater length in the Washington Post story. Some excerpts are worth noting, because they make the transparent rationalizations even clearer:

"Hot saucing," or "hot tongue," has roots in Southern culture, according to some advocates of the controversial disciplinary method, but it has spread throughout the country. Nobody keeps track of how many parents do it, but most experts contacted for this story, including pediatricians, psychologists and child welfare professionals, were familiar with it.

The use of hot sauce has been advocated in a popular book, in a magazine for Christian women and on Internet sites. Web-based discussions on parenting carry intense, often emotional exchanges on the topic.

But parents aren't the only ones asking "to sauce or not to sauce?" Several state governments have gotten involved in the debate. In Michigan in 2002, a child care center was sanctioned for using hot sauce to discipline a child. The mother of the 18-month-old boy reportedly gave the child care workers permission to use the sauce to help dissuade her son from biting other children.

Virginia's child protective services agency lists hot saucing among disciplinary tactics it calls "bizarre behaviors." The list includes such methods as forcing a child to kneel on sharp gravel, and locking him in a closet.

Like some other parents who use hot sauce, Crosen believes it is an appropriate punishment for "defiant talk. . . . I use it when the mouth is the offending party. He needs to learn to control what's coming out of his mouth. If it's his tongue that gets him in trouble, it's his tongue that gets punished."

As a Christian, she believes that "children need to respect and obey [parents] or they won't learn to respect and obey God. God won't hot sauce you, but you need to learn consequences."

I interject here that this phenomenon -- first learning to fear and obey the parent, and then transferring that same psychology to God -- is one that you can see displayed in front of the entire world, as in the case of Mel Gibson, as I wrote about here at length. And it is the denial of all of this that also allows someone like Gibson (and his father) to deny the overwhelming reality of the Holocaust, as I also discussed.

Continuing with the news story:

Kendrick says parents who use the technique are "at the very least . . . ill-informed." He pointed out that many parents are not aware that hot sauce can burn a child's esophagus and cause the tongue to swell -- a potential choking hazard.

"There are many different kinds of hot sauce on the market, and parents who say they know the dilution to use so it won't sting, or say they only use one drop, are wrong," Kendrick said. "It's done because it hurts. It stings. It burns. It makes you nauseous."

Capsaicin, the substance that makes peppers hot, inflames membranes in the eyes, nose and mouth. While many adults find this feeling pleasurable, capsaicin can cause negative reactions even in the third of the adult population that has no tolerance for ingesting it, according to Joel Gregory, publisher of Chile Pepper magazine.

There are additional risks for children. Giorgio Kulp, a pediatrician in Montgomery County, said that the risk of swelling as well as the possibility of unknown allergies make the use of hot sauce on children dangerous.

So much for the notion that this practice poses no real danger to the child. Moreover, as I have indicated, the physical consequences, as dangerous as they might be in an individual case, are among the least severe of the traumatizing effects of this kind of abuse. The psychological damage can last a lifetime, and can lead to incomprehensible horrors.

Confirming some of the details from these stories, and as Alice Miller often notes, religion frequently provides the justification for such cruelty to children. But don't take my word for it -- listen to Dr. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family fame, who constantly appeals to God and the Bible as justification for an endless number of cruelties to children. And Dobson unwittingly gives the game away right here, in answer to a question:

I have spanked my children for their disobedience, and it didn't seem to help. Does this approach fail with some children?

Children are so tremendously variable that it is sometimes hard to believe that they are all members of the same human family. Some kids can be crushed with nothing more than a stern look; others seem to require strong and even painful disciplinary measures to make a vivid impression. This difference usually results from the degree to which a child needs adult approval and acceptance. The primary parental task is to see things as the child perceives them, thereby tailoring the discipline to his or her unique needs. Accordingly, a boy or girl should never be so likely to be punished as when he or she knows it is deserved.

In a direct answer to your question, disciplinary measures usually fail because of fundamental errors in their application. It is possible for twice the amount of punishment to yield half the results. I have made a study of situations in which parents have told me that their children disregard the threat of punishment and continue to misbehave. There are four basic reasons for this lack of success ...

3. The spanking may be too gentle. If it doesn't hurt, it doesn't motivate a child to avoid the consequence next time. A slap with the hand on the bottom of a multidiapered 30-month-old is not a deterrent to anything. Be sure the child gets the message -- while being careful not to go too far.

This could not possibly be clearer: the explicit goal is to crush the child so that he will always be obedient to the parent. Whatever the parent says must be followed -- whether it is irrational, whether it is completely unjustified, whether it is directly opposed to the child's actual needs, whether it can be defended on any grounds or not. Whatever the parent says or demands, the child must obey. And to ensure this unthinking, unquestioning obedience, pain is required.

The great tragedy, of course, is that in one way or another, most parents believe this as much as Dobson does, and they raise their children accordingly. Usually, they are not so explicit about it, but the principle is identical. Also note, as I have also stressed repeatedly in my many entries concerning this subject, that undoubtedly the most common forms of child abuse do not involve physical mistreatment at all: most of it is psychological -- using, for example, the unstated threat of the withdrawal of the parent's love if the child does not do as he is told, that is if the child does not follow orders.

Most parents instill this willingness to follow orders, this obedience to authority, in their children to varying degrees. And in a brief summary of Miller's central thesis that I have set forth several times before -- and which I repeat here because of its crucial importance -- it is this underlying psychology which can lead to horrors in the world at large:

By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their "good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.

In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using "violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:

"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."

The translation of the transparent rationalizations used by people like Whelchel and Dobson for practices such as "hot saucing" is the one that parents always use for brutalizing children: 'This is for your own good." As I have noted before, this lie is the key lie that unleashes horrors on the world. And the same exact lie is used to justify actual torture, as I have also documented [in another essay].

In one of the stories I discussed there, a Canadian judge said of one couple that their actions were "underscored by good intentions," and that there was "no evidence" that the parents "were sadistic." He then imposed a shockingly light sentence. As I noted, summarizing the story's details:

Putting a young boy in a makeshift, padlocked cage is not sadistic. Tying children to their beds, with handcuffs, is not sadistic. Keeping children in diapers when they are too old to need them -- if only they could get to a bathroom -- subjecting them to "rectal examinations," and beating them often is not sadistic. And creating such fear in children that they will eat their own feces and drink their own urine is not sadistic.

Any person who defends or minimizes such acts to any extent at all is capable of inflicting the most unimaginable tortures on anyone. If you wonder what makes possible horrors such as those which occurred in the Third Reich, wonder no more.

Please note the following -- and try to see the obvious similarity, which far too many people still continue to deny. All of these practices -- from "hot saucing" and spanking on one end of the spectrum, to locking young children up, performing "rectal examinations," and depriving children of nourishment to the extent that they will eat their own feces and drink their own urine at the other -- are all justified on the grounds that the parent or other authority figure does all of this with "good intentions," and that he does it for the child's own good.

People should not then wonder when adults engage in horrific acts on a much, much wider scale. But it is this widespread denial that allows adults to avoid seeing the obvious connections -- and that allows them to believe that the United States, and the United States military, are incapable of any wrongdoing at all, that the United States is and always has been right, and that nothing we do or have ever done can be deeply, profoundly wrong. As I noted just last week, it is this denial -- and the desperate need to maintain that denial even in the face of mounting horror -- that causes the most vehement hatred of John Kerry. It is not that Kerry might elaborate on his own past, or possibly make his own actions appear more heroic than they actually were. It is not that Bush might suffer by comparison to Kerry's actions in Vietnam. What arouses the deep animus toward Kerry is that, when he returned from Vietnam, he dared to speak the truth about what many other veterans had already testified to, had acknowledged, and had experienced.

Thus, it does not matter to the deniers that we have a lengthy series from the Toledo Blade about the actions committed by one unit in Vietnam. In the opening installment of that lengthy series (and here is a page with links to all the articles, and other related ones), we learned the following:

The platoon - a small, highly trained unit of 45 paratroopers created to spy on enemy forces - violently lost control between May and November, 1967.

For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians - in some cases torturing and mutilating them - in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public.

They dropped grenades into underground bunkers where women and children were hiding - creating mass graves - and shot unarmed civilians, in some cases as they begged for their lives.

They frequently tortured and shot prisoners, severing ears and scalps for souvenirs.

A review of thousands of classified Army documents, National Archives records, and radio logs reveals a fighting unit that carried out the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War - and commanders who looked the other way.

For 41/2 years, the Army investigated the platoon, finding numerous eyewitnesses and substantiating war crimes. But in the end, no one was prosecuted, the case buried in the archives for three decades.

No one knows how many unarmed men, women, and children were killed by platoon members 36 years ago.

At least 81 were fatally shot or stabbed, records show, but many others were killed in what were clear violations of U.S. military law and the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

Based on more than 100 interviews with The Blade of former Tiger Force soldiers and Vietnamese civilians, the platoon is estimated to have killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in those seven months.

"We weren't keeping count," said former Pvt. Ken Kerney, a California firefighter. "I knew it was wrong, but it was an acceptable practice." ...

Among the newspaper's findings:

-- Commanders knew about the platoon's atrocities in 1967, and in some cases, encouraged the soldiers to continue the violence.

-- Two soldiers who tried to stop the atrocities were warned by their commanders to remain quiet before transferring to other units.

-- The Army investigated 30 war-crime allegations against Tiger Force between February, 1971, and June, 1975, finding a total of 18 soldiers committed crimes, including murder and assault. But no one was ever charged.

-- Six platoon soldiers suspected of war crimes - including an officer - were allowed to resign during the investigation, escaping military prosecution.

-- The findings of the investigation were sent to the offices of the secretary of the Army and the secretary of defense, records show, but no action was taken.

-- Top White House officials, including John Dean, former chief counsel to President Richard Nixon, repeatedly were sent reports on the progress of the investigation.

To this day, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command refuses to release thousands of records that could explain what happened and why the case was dropped. Army spokesman Joe Burlas said last week it may have been difficult to press charges, but he couldn't explain flaws in the investigation.

The Army interviewed 137 witnesses and tracked down former Tiger Force members in more than 60 cities around the world.

But for the past three decades, the case has not even been a footnote in the annals of one of the nation's most divisive wars.

But another crucial aspect of this history is one I noted in an earlier post about this (quoting a NYT story):

In recent telephone interviews with The New York Times, three of the former soldiers quoted by The Blade confirmed that the articles had accurately described their unit's actions.

But they wanted to make another point: that Tiger Force had not been a "rogue" unit. Its members had done only what they were told, and their superiors knew what they were doing.

"The story that I'm not sure is getting out," said Mr. Causey, then a medic with the unit, "is that while they're saying this was a ruthless band ravaging the countryside, we were under orders to do it."

Burning huts and villages, shooting civilians and throwing grenades into protective shelters were common tactics for American ground forces throughout Vietnam, they said. That contention is backed up by accounts of journalists, historians and disillusioned troops.

The tactics — particularly in "free-fire zones," where anyone was regarded as fair game — arose from the frustrating nature of the guerrilla war and, above all, from the military's reliance on the body count as a measure of success and a reason officers were promoted, according to many accounts.

By the way, the neighbor of mine I mentioned only yesterday served in Vietnam, and it was that experience that led to many of the physical problems he has today. Moreover, I have discussed with him on several occasions the practice of cutting ears off of dead Vietnamese. He confirms that practice very matter of factly -- and he says it was the "easiest way" to keep track of the number of your kills. He says that everyone did it, and no one thought there was anything the least remarkable about it.

But as I discussed in that earlier post, certain writers continue in their massive denial that the United States military could ever have committed such acts, no matter how well-known or extensive the evidence documenting these practices is. Rich Lowry was one of the writers I mentioned then -- and Lowry continued his denial more recently. And here you can see very plainly his rage at John Kerry for telling the truth about these issues:

Recounting the work of the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation — a since-discredited project that gathered first-person accounts of alleged atrocities from American vets — Kerry spoke of "war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." In his telling, the American war was simply a criminal undertaking. Kerry said the men "relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do." ...

Kerry's defenders argue that in 1971 he was only repeating stories told by other veterans. These stories should have been incredible to anyone with the least bit of respect for American soldiers, especially someone who had just served with them. But Kerry repeated the stories anyway in order to cast the war in the worst possible light. Even now he won't disavow them. Pressed on Meet the Press about the testimony, Kerry said, "I'm not going to quibble, you know, 35 years later that I might not have phrased things more artfully at times." Phrased more artfully?

Kerry refuses to admit that he burst onto the national scene by telling a shameful falsehood about American servicemen. In his testimony, he even traded on the notion that the vets had been made into war-damaged freaks — the country has created "a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence." Kerry is perfectly happy to stand with members of this monstrous body of war criminals, victims and misfits now that they suit his political purposes. As for those vets who don't, they are "liars." The Swift Boat veterans seem unfazed by the charge, since they, after all, have been called worse by John Kerry.

With regard to the additional Big Lie -- that the Winter Soldier investigation has been "discredited" -- I recommend this post to your attention, one I only discovered this week.

And as for Lowry's contention that it is a vicious lie that the Vietnam War turned many veterans into "war-damaged freaks," I will let the Tiger Force veterans speak for themselves, as set forth in one of the concluding parts of the Toledo Blade investigation:

For Barry Bowman, the images return at night.

The elderly man praying on his knees. The officer pointing a rifle at the man's head.

The shot.

That piercing shot.

Before it's over, the old man drops to the ground - his body twitching in the blood-soaked grass.

Over and over, Mr. Bowman relives the execution of the Vietnamese villager known as Dao Hue.

Despite years of therapy, the former Tiger Force soldier is still deeply troubled by the brutal shooting he witnessed as a young medic in the Song Ve Valley.

He's not alone.

Of the 43 former platoon members interviewed by The Blade in an eight-month investigation of Tiger Force, a dozen expressed remorse for committing or failing to stop atrocities.

They share some of the same symptoms - flashbacks or nightmares - and over the past 36 years have sought counseling, they said.

Nine have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a psychiatric condition that can occur following life-threatening experiences.

To this day, they wrestle with memories of Tiger Force's rampage through more than 40 hamlets in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in 1967.

Mr. Bowman, who was standing next to Mr. Dao when he was shot to death by a platoon leader, said he remains shaken by the unprovoked attack on the 68-year-old man as he prayed for mercy.

"It was devastating," he said.

For many, the images never fade.

When Douglas Teeters closes his eyes, he sees villagers being shot as they wave leaflets that guaranteed their safety.

He takes anti-depressants and sleeping pills, but he can never seem to get enough rest, he said.

Mr. Teeters is among the one-in-six Vietnam veterans - about 500,000 - who have been treated for PTSD. ...

Mr. Teeters said he struggles with his own acts - the executions of captured soldiers - and the actions of former platoon members in the deaths of villagers.

"The killing haunts me every minute of my life,'' he said in a recent interview. "To survive, you had to say, `The killing don't mean nothing.' That's how you got through it, man. But eventually, it all catches up with you.''

Former Sgt. Ernest Moreland refuses to talk about his role in the stabbing death of a detainee near Duc Pho, saying he fears he could be charged. But he said he still tries to rationalize the killing.

"The things you did. You think back and say, `I can't believe I did that.' At the time, it seemed right," he said. "But now, you know what you did was wrong. The killing gets to you. The nightmares get to you. You just can't escape it. You can't escape the past."

He is among nine of the veterans interviewed who said they turned to drugs or alcohol to ease their pain after returning from Vietnam.

"I drank too much. I got into a lot of fights," said Mr. Moreland, who now lives in Florida.

It wasn't until four years ago that he sought help. "I came very close to committing suicide,'' he said. ...

A culture existed in Tiger Force that embraced the executions of prisoners and civilians - one encouraged by officers and sergeants.

One former sergeant now being treated for PTSD said he wanted his men to kill without hesitation.

"It didn't matter if they were civilians. If they weren't supposed to be in an area, we shot them," said William Doyle, 70, of Missouri. "If they didn't understand fear, I taught it to them."

He said he and others also cut off the ears of numerous dead Vietnamese to scare enemy soldiers.

Experts say body mutilations are classic symptoms of soldiers in secondary stages of PTSD in which fear turns into anger, said Dr. Baker, who treats veterans at the Cincinnati Veterans Affairs Medical Center. "They kick into a second stage - a rage mode."

Former platoon medic Joseph Evans, who lives in Atlanta, said in a recent interview that he severed ears. "You fall into this unbelievable frustration," said Mr. Evans, 59, who has been treated for PTSD. "You're burned and you're fried and you're scared, and you do it to make light of the burden you're underneath." ...

William Carpenter said before he dies, he wants to return to the Song Ve Valley.

The 54-year-old former platoon specialist wants to go to the rice paddy where Tiger Force soldiers killed four elderly farmers.

He wants to apologize to their families.

Thirty-six years later, he said the assault on 10 farmers remains a vivid memory. "I want to tell them how sorry I am that it happened," said Mr. Carpenter, of Rayland, Ohio, who has been treated for PTSD.

Experts say one way of coming to terms with the disorder is to openly acknowledge past actions.

Mr. Carpenter said he didn't fire on the farmers but never reported the atrocity to commanders.

Like other former Tiger Force members, he said he can justify many of the aggressive acts toward villagers, but he said it's "in the middle of the night when the demons come that you remember. That you can't forget."

It's easy enough for people like Lowry to deny the overwhelming reality of this history. The demons don't come for him.

And today, we see all of this all over again -- with the contemptible attempts to minimize the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, in other prisons, and possibly in a manner spread even more widely throughout Iraq. As was true with Vietnam -- and the truth that Kerry spoke, but that the deniers do not want to hear -- the fault and the ultimate responsibility do not lie with the individual soldiers, but with the political and military leaders who embarked on a course that was disastrously wrong and ultimately deeply destructive to ourselves and to our nation, as well as to the Vietnamese then, and the Iraqis now.

As I said in the earlier post discussing Lowry's denial (and Andrew Sullivan's, too):

With no effort at all, you could multiply examples such as these a thousandfold, every single day. In this manner, defenders of our current foreign policy wipe out of existence all the facts, all the costs, all the deaths, and anything else that might bring into question what is an absolute of their faith: the United States is right, what we have done and are doing in Iraq is right, our military is right, we are inherently unable to make mistakes, and the authorities must not be questioned.

These are the victims described by Miller -- now grown into adulthood, continuing their denial, with additional authority figures added to the ones they first had. Besides the original parent, they now revere our government and our military and, beyond a certain point, nothing they do is to be challenged. As I have discussed, to do so would bring into question these individuals' entire false sense of self, it would undermine their worldview completely, and it represents a threat that cannot be allowed to come too close. As always, what is dispensable in all this are facts, untold national wealth, reputation and prestige, and above all, the lives of human beings.

As I have said before, it is in this manner that horrors are unleashed upon the world. And if this mentality is carried far enough, you will finally end up with the kind of thinking, and the kind of psychology, that lies behind the journal entry from World War II (written by a German soldier) that I quoted in the previous part of this essay:

"On a roundabout way to have lunch I witnessed the public shooting of twenty-eight Poles on the edge of a playing field. Thousands line the streets and the river. A ghastly pile of corpses, all in all horrifying and ugly and yet a sight that leaves me altogether cold. The men who were shot had ambushed two soldiers and a German civilian and killed them. An exemplary modern folk-drama. (1/27/44)"

If you never allowed your authentic self to develop (or your parents never allowed you to develop one), if you denied and continue to deny the reality of your own pain, then you will deny the pain of others, even as the corpses pile up -- and you will be prepared to believe anything.

And the horrors continue, beyond all human reckoning -- and without end.

It is the people who deny all these truths who make the horrors possible, and who help to ensure the repetition of them in the present, and into the future.

And in every case that I know of, both through extensive reading and through conversations with hundreds of people over the years, and without a single exception, the deepest roots of horrors such as these lie in childhood -- and in parents who inflict untold cruelties on defenseless children. And it lies with those parents or other authority figures who always maintain, no matter how undeniably cruel and dangerous their practices are, that they do it "for the child's own good" -- which is, of course, exactly what we now as a nation tell the Iraqis. And we say it to the Iraqis, whom we supposedly went to "liberate," while we imprison them, abuse and torture them, and make a horrific situation even worse every single day.

It is long, long past time for people to begin to see and admit the truth -- before it is finally too late. If we don't, the demons will come for all of us.

The Practice of National Self-Deception and Denial

2004-07-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

In connection with the abuses at Abu Ghraib (and at many other prisons in Iraq and elsewhere), you can now see the practice of denial raised to a refined art form, an art form that is painfully obvious in its transparency for anyone paying attention:

A new Army report concludes that military detention operations in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from poor training, haphazard organization and outmoded policies, but that these flaws did not directly contribute to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.

The report, by Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, the Army inspector general, found no evidence that any systemic problems caused the abuses. Instead, his five-month inquiry blamed the "unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate monitoring, supervision and leadership over those soldiers."

The 321-page report, the first of at least seven military inquiries into prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan to be released in the next few months, left many contentious issues still to be addressed by Army criminal investigators and the other inquiries. ...

The report is likely to inflame debate over how far up the chain of command culpability extends. Its findings contradict those of an earlier Army inquiry, by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who concluded military police at Abu Ghraib conducted "systemic and illegal abuse of detainees." A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross in February found that "methods of ill treatment" were "used in a systematic way" by the United States military in Iraq.

Some Democrats privately accused the Army of delaying the release of the report until today so it would be overshadowed by news coverage of the final report of the commission looking into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, an accusation Army officials denied. The Army did not post a copy of General Mikolashek's report on its Web site until early this afternoon, and even Army public affairs personnel said they had difficulty gaining access to it.

Moreover, aspects of the inspector general report appear to contradict its central conclusion.

The report said that poor training in the handling of detainees increases the risk of abuse. A major finding of the report was that many military police and intelligence officials were poorly trained for their tasks in detention operations.

The report also found that many of the policies relating to detention operations were unclear, ambiguous and poorly carried out.

The report found that the potential for abuse increased when interrogations were conducted in "an emotionally charged environment by untrained personnel who are unfamiliar with the approved interrogation approach techniques." A major finding of the report was the military suffers from a shortage of experienced interrogators and interpreters.

Finally, the report concluded that "a command climate that encourages behavior at the harsher end of the acceptable range of behavior towards detainees may unintentionally increase the likelihood of abuse." In his testimony to the committee on Thursday, General Mikolashek said that at many detention centers, "It was a less than ideal command climate."

And about this purposeful denial of the obvious, the NYT editorialized as follows:

The authors of this 300-page whitewash say they found no "systemic" problem - even though there were 94 documented cases of prisoner abuse, including some 40 deaths, 20 of them homicides; even though only four prisons of the 16 they visited had copies of the Geneva Conventions; even though Abu Ghraib was a cesspool with one shower for every 50 inmates; even though the military police were improperly involved in interrogations; even though young people plucked from civilian life were sent to guard prisoners - 50,000 of them in all - with no training.

Never mind any of that. The report pins most of the blame on those depressingly familiar culprits, a few soldiers who behaved badly. It does grudgingly concede that "in some cases, abuse was accompanied by leadership failure at the tactical level," but the report absolves anyone of rank, in keeping with the investigation's spirit. The inspector general's staff did not dig into the abuse cases, but merely listed them. It based its findings on the comical observation that "commanders, leaders and soldiers treated detainees humanely" while investigators from the Pentagon were watching. And it made no attempt to find out who had authorized threatening prisoners with dogs and sexually humiliating hooded men, to name two American practices the Red Cross found to be common. The inspector general's see-no-evil team simply said it couldn't find those "approach techniques" in the Army field manual.

...

Mr. Warner has admirably resisted pressure from the White House and Republican leaders in Congress to stop his investigation. But he is showing signs of losing appetite for the fight. Mr. Warner held only one hearing in the last month - on the new report - and agreed to the ground rules on the Red Cross reports. We've always been skeptical that the Defense Department can investigate itself credibly, and now it's obvious that it plans to stick to the "few bad apples" excuse. The only way to learn why innocent Iraqis were tortured by American soldiers is a formal Congressional inquiry, with subpoena power.

I recommend that you read the entire editorial, which contains additional details about how this whitewash is being accomplished.

"Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill"

2004-07-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

In a number of essays in this series, I have talked about the emotional dynamics underlying the phenomenon now amply and horrifyingly documented in the following article.

Here are some extended excerpts from an LA Times piece [link no longer working]:

NAJAF, Iraq (news - web sites) -- Tucked behind a gleaming machine gun, Sgt. Joseph Hall grins at his two companions in the Humvee.

"I want to know if I killed that guy yesterday," Hall says. "I saw blood spurt from his leg, but I want to be sure I killed him."

The vehicle goes silent as the driver, Spc. Joshua Dubois, swerves around asphalt previously uprooted by a blast.

"I'm confused about how I should feel about killing," says Dubois, who has a toddler back home. "The first time I shot someone, it was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever felt."

Dubois turns back to the road. "We talk about killing all the time," he says. "I never used to talk this way. I'm not proud of it, but it's like I can't stop. I'm worried what I will be like when I get home."

The men aren't Special Forces soldiers. They're just ordinary troops with the Army's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment serving their 14th month in Iraq, much of it in daily battles. In 20 minutes, they will come under attack.

Many GIs and Army psychiatrists say these constant conversations about death help troops come to grips with the trauma of combat. But mental health professionals within and outside the military point to the chatter as evidence of preventable anguish.

Soldiers are untrained, experts say, for the trauma of killing. Forty years after lessons learned about combat stress in Vietnam, experts charge that avoidable psychological damage goes unchecked because military officials don't include emotional preparation in basic training.

Troops, returning home with untreated and little-understood mental health issues, put themselves and their families at risk for suicide and domestic violence, experts say. Twenty-three U.S. troops in Iraq took their lives last year, according to the Defense Department -- an unusually high number, one official acknowledged.

On patrol, however, all that is available is talk.

"Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill," Hall says. "It's like it pounds at my brain. I'll figure out how to deal with it when I get home."

Home is the wrong place for soldiers to deal with combat experiences, some experts say.

"It's complete negligence," says Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a retired psychology instructor at West Point who trains law enforcement officers and special operations soldiers.

"The military could train soldiers to talk about killing as easily as they train them to pull the trigger. But commanders are in denial. Nobody wants to accept the blame for a soldier who comes home a wreck for doing what his country asked him to do," he said.

The emotional and psychological ramifications of killing are mostly unstudied by the military, defense officials acknowledge.

"The idea and experience of killing another person is not addressed in military training," says Col. Thomas Burke, director of mental health policy for the Defense Department. "Training's intent is to re-create battle, to make it an automatic behavior among soldiers."

...

Much of the military's research on killing and battle stress began after World War II, when studies revealed that only a small number of troops -- as few as 15% -- fired at their adversaries on the battlefield.

Military studies suggested that troops were unexpectedly reluctant to kill. Military training methods changed, Grossman and others say, to make killing a more automatic behavior.

Bull's-eye targets used in basic training were replaced with human-shaped objects. Battlefield conditions were reproduced more accurately, Burke says. The goal of these and other modifications was to help soldiers react more automatically.

The changes were effective. In the Vietnam War, 95% of combat troops shot at hostile fighters, according to military studies.

Veterans of the Vietnam War also suffered some of the highest levels of psychological damage -- possibly as many as 50% of combat forces suffered mental injury, says Rachel MacNair, an expert on veteran psychology. Most notable among the injuries was post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition contributing to violent outbursts years after soldiers leave battlefields.

"The more soldiers ignore their emotions and behave like trained machines rather than thinking people, the more you invite PTSD," says Dr. David Spiegel with the Stanford School of Medicine.

Military officials say there have been changes in treating psychological trauma since Vietnam. ...

The men of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment's Alpha and Charlie companies are resting and playing cards in the shade of a staircase here, and the talk turns to killing.

"I enjoy killing Iraqis," says Staff Sgt. William Deaton, 30, who killed a hostile fighter the night before. Deaton has lost a good friend in Iraq. "I just feel rage, hate when I'm out there. I feel like I carry it all the time. We talk about it. We all feel the same way."

Sgt. Cleveland T. Rogers, 25, avoids dwelling on his actions.

"The other day an Iraqi guy was hit real bad, he was gonna die within an hour, but he was still alive and he started saying, 'Baby, baby,' telling me he has a kid," Rogers says. "I mentioned it to my guys after the mission. It doesn't bother me. It can't bother me. If it was the other way around, I'm sure it wouldn't bother him."

...

Grossman says training troops to have therapeutic discussions about killing is "not that hard." His curriculum, used by law enforcement officers and in the wake of traumas such as school shootings, focuses on mental and physical techniques to consciously manage anxiety and other emotional reactions to killing.

"To make killing instinctual, rather than conscious, is inviting pathological, destructive behavior," Grossman says. "We have to give soldiers a vocabulary to talk through emotions and teach them not to be embarrassed by troubling feelings."

Grossman says his suggestions have been overlooked by military commanders who are uncomfortable with the emotionally destructive aspects of military service. ...

"During the heat of the battle the adrenaline is such you don't really think about it," says Capt. Brandon Payne, 28. "Once that adrenaline wears off, though, it gets tough. Some kids, it rolls right off their backs. Some, it's like they break down a little more each day."

Payne is as conflicted as his troops about making sense of war. Reconciling duty with ethics, he says, seems more complicated in Iraq.

"I'm a Christian. I feel I'm saving my soldiers' lives by destroying as many enemy as I can. But at the end of each day, I pray to God. I worry about my soul," he says.

"Every time a door slams, I flinch. I'm hoping it will just go away when I get home."

It won't "just go away." This kind of lasting emotional damage is still another reason, among many others, why war should always, always, always be the very last resort -- and not the first. And it is an unanswerable objection to so-called "optional" wars -- at least, it should be unanswerable to anyone who is remotely humane and civilized. I can also confirm one part of the above story from my own experience. I have known a number of Vietnam War veterans in my life, well over ten as I review them in my mind. Almost without exception, they have exhibited severe emotional problems (of which most of them were also very painfully aware themselves), and the memories of what they experienced have never left them. But they will almost never talk about the horrors they witnessed with anyone, which is yet another part of the problem.

And from an earlier post, here is a very brief summation of part of the mechanism lying beneath the psychology of a soldier who feels "exhilaration" about killing or who "enjoys" it:

By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their "good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.

In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using "violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:

"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."

It is one thing for a soldier to have to kill genuine enemies who are trying to kill him -- although even in that circumstance, one might expect a reaction along the lines that a necessary action was taken, together with an acknowledgment that it is nonetheless tragic in a more general sense that lives were lost (particularly since, in this case, there is no compelling reason of national self-defense for us to be in Iraq in the first place). Killing another human being should be hard, and not automatic, even when it is absolutely necessary and, I would submit, even in war. If it is not, you practically guarantee that you will end up with ex-soldiers with emotional problems that will inevitably cripple them for life.

But whenever a soldier feels any kind of pleasure or even joy in killing, you can be sure that some underlying emotional dynamic has been tapped into -- along the lines discussed by Alice Miller in her work. And in that case, it is absolutely necessary to address those underlying issues, if lasting damage is to be avoided. Given the fact that the military -- just as is true of our society in general -- studiously avoids all these issues, since the great majority of people find them far too painful to deal with, it is hardly surprising that a significant number of soldiers commit suicide (as I discussed in The Suicide Taboo, and that discussion also analyzes the military's great reluctance to acknowledge suicide at all, since it supposedly represents some terrible kind of "weakness"), or inflict horrendous violence on family members (and/or others) after they return home.

Avoidance of crucial psychological issues comes at a great price -- and one would think that the mounting costs of all kinds would cause both our military and our culture more generally finally to take note of the ultimate causes of these kinds of problems. But as I have often noted before in this lengthy series on "The Roots of Horror," the human capacity for denial is unending, even when the cost is tremendous loss of life and an infinite amount of suffering.

From Mild Smacking to Outright Sadism, Torture and War: The Lie of "Well-Intentioned" Violence

2004-07-05T05:35:00.000-07:00

I had begun this essay with a different title: A New Law for Adults -- Moderate Assaults Now Permitted. Can you imagine for one moment that anyone would assent to a law of the kind suggested by that statement? Think about the howls of justified outrage that would greet a proposal to pass a law stating as follows:

After review of many studies and having consulted the opinions of numerous experts, we have concluded that it is sometimes acceptable for one spouse to smack the other, if he or she does so to inflict "moderate punishment" for disapproved behavior. However, we emphasize that this new law should not be taken as permission for any adult to go further. Any violence engaged in by one spouse which results in genuine physical or mental harm to the other will be prosecuted to the full extent permitted by other applicable laws.

With the exception of the most emotionally deadened and hardened people, those people who do not care too much about the extent to which they might reveal their own propensities to violence, I cannot imagine that anyone would view such a law as justified, moral or even humane in the most basic sense. Yet, when it comes to the most defenseless human beings of all -- infants and young children -- even an allegedly "civilized" nation sees fit to treat those children as insensate, unfeeling objects, and as property belonging to parents, who may now feel free to inflict violence on their children [link no longer working], allegedly "for their own good":

British lawmakers on Monday voted against a ban on parents spanking their children, and decided instead to tighten existing rules.

After a three-hour debate in the House of Lords, peers rejected the ban by 250 votes to 75.

Instead, they voted by 226-91 to allow moderate spanking, but make it easier to prosecute parents who physically or mentally abuse their children by spanking.

...

Britain is out of step on the issue with several European countries, including Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Austria, where all physical punishment of children is illegal.

Pressure groups insist children must have the same legal protection from being hit as adults and had called for the law to be changed. Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has repeatedly shied away from a ban, fearing it will be accused of intruding into family affairs.

The current law dates back to a case in 1860, when a judge ruled that physical punishment of children should be allowed as a "reasonable chastisement.'' ...

In the House of Lords on Monday, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Lester successfully proposed a measure to allow moderate spanking, but remove the "reasonable chastisement'' defense if parents harmed a child physically or mentally. If the amendment is also approved by the Commons, the new law will make it easier for authorities to prosecute violent parents.

Several peers called for an outright ban.

"Smacking can lead to battering which can lead to death," said Liberal Democrat peer Lord Thomas. "We are presented with medical reports, social service records, school records and one can see the route to death which starts with the initial smack."

Independent peer Lord Ackner disagreed. "I think we are overlooking that parents have a unique relationship with their children and in order to fulfill their parental responsibilities they have powers which they don't possess in relation to anyone else," he said.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith backed Lester's measure and said it would "have the effect of preventing harm to children without criminalizing parents for minor disciplinary steps."

Blair's government ordered its Labour peers to vote against a ban, but allowed them a free vote on Lester's amendment.

"The government wants an outcome that maintains the balance between the parent's right to discipline and protecting the child," said Blair's official spokesman. "That is why we don't want to criminalize parents. That is why we are opposed to outright bans."

It is a measure of the limitless denial in which the great majority of people live that the leaders of a country can seriously offer arguments such as those quoted above to justify violence against children. And make no mistake: any kind of smack, no matter how "light" or "moderate," is violence. But Blair's government doesn't "want to criminalize parents," for committing criminal acts.

It is indeed true that parents have a "unique relationship" with their children. Children depend on their parents for everything -- for shelter, for food, and for emotional and mental support and sustenance, for their very survival. That same total dependence is then used by some adults to justify violence against those same children, violence which those same parents would not be permitted against any adult. But many people are so deluded that they believe it is part of "their parental responsibilities" to assault their own children.

How would you feel if the following happened? You are at dinner with a friend. The friend expresses disapproval of your table manners. When you fail to conform to his suggested changes in your behavior, he stands up, walks over to your chair and says: "I'm sorry, but I'm only doing this for your own good." And then he slaps you.

Would you be outraged? Would you feel violated, in your person and autonomy? Would you not want to be friends any longer with a person who would permit himself such behavior, who would allow himself to believe that he was justified in inflicting physical violence on another human being? Yet we see parents do this kind of thing with children in restaurants and other public places all the time. God only knows what they might permit themselves at home, in private. And precisely because children are dependent on their parents for their survival, and because children have nowhere else to go -- they can hardly change parents with the ease with which an adult might look for a new friend -- the damage inflicted is incalculable, and likely to last a lifetime.

In another news story from today, we see a demonstration of the other end of this continuum -- and the unbelievable horrors to which this kind of denial can lead [link no longer working]:

OSHAWA, Ont. (CP) - Two brothers kept caged and chained in their family home over 13 years reacted bitterly Monday after their adoptive parents were sentenced to nine months in jail for treatment the judge said was horrendous but well-intentioned.

The boys, who were adopted as toddlers and raised in nearby Blackstock, said their parents deserved longer terms and complained the judge appeared to blame them in part for their ordeal.

"I don't feel (justice) has been served," said one boy, 17, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with his 18-year-old brother.

"I feel they should get more time."

Even close relatives of the couple denounced the sentence as too lenient given the judge's description of the boys' treatment as "near torture." ...

When investigators visited the ramshackle two-storey farmhouse northeast of Toronto, one boy was found in a makeshift cage that was strapped to a wall and padlocked.

They were often tied to their beds, sometimes handcuffed. At one time, one brother was forced to sleep in a bare dog cage.

They were kept in diapers because they couldn't get to the washroom, subjected to rectal examinations and often beaten with a variety of household implements.

They lived in such fear, court heard, they ate their own feces to hide evidence of accidents and, deprived of water, felt compelled to drink their own urine. ...

Ontario Court Judge Donald Halikowski blasted the couple's "ill-informed system of discipline" as demeaning and damaging to the boys.

However, Halikowski said their behaviour was "underscored by good intentions," that there was no evidence the parents were sadistic. ...

Child welfare workers rejected Halikowski's suggestion that the apprehension of the boys may have caused them more emotional damage than the abuse from their parents.

"We are disappointed," said Wanda Secord of the Durham Children's Aid Society.

"We had hoped for a stronger sentence."

The younger son has denounced his adoptive mother as a "stupid bitch" and said he didn't have a childhood "because of her stupidness."

The older boy said the "unbearable" crib incidents had continued to haunt him.

If you had any doubts about the immense significance of Miller's work, this ought to convince you once and for all. The crucial point to note is that the justifications offered for this monstrous sadism are precisely those justifications offered for "mild smacking." This judge -- like many other adults -- appears to sincerely believe that these adults' actions were "underscored by good intentions," and that there was "no evidence" that the parents "were sadistic." The light sentences he imposed only underscore the depth of his own denial.

Note the ungraspable magnitude of this denial: Putting a young boy in a makeshift, padlocked cage is not sadistic. Tying children to their beds, with handcuffs, is not sadistic. Keeping children in diapers when they are too old to need them -- if only they could get to a bathroom -- subjecting them to "rectal examinations," and beating them often is not sadistic. And creating such fear in children that they will eat their own feces and drink their own urine is not sadistic.

Any person who defends or minimizes such acts to any extent at all is capable of inflicting the most unimaginable tortures on anyone. If you wonder what makes possible horrors such as those which occurred in the Third Reich, wonder no more.

I had wanted to return to my series on "The Roots of Horror." Very regrettably, these latest news stories provide the opportunity. The denial which underlies the justifications for the new law in Britain and for the judge's comments is the same denial that leads to criminal adults, depressed and sometimes suicidal adults, incalculable suffering, unprovoked wars of aggression, and any number of other horrors. I have talked about some of those issues in previous entries in this series, and I will have much more to say on these topics and a number of others in the coming weeks.

For the moment, I will only review a few salient points. The analysis I am offering in this series is derived in significant part from the work of Alice Miller. (Here is Miller's website, with links to her books and various articles.) In a post several months ago, I explained why I began to seek again for underlying causes, and I used the continued and altogether remarkable resistance on the part of many supporters of our current foreign policy to acknowledge obvious gaps and inconsistencies in their arguments. After discussing a number of other factors, I wrote:

There is another area that appears to be pointedly neglected by many hawks: the human costs of our actions over the last year. Our government follows this course as a matter of policy: our own non-fatal casualties are significantly undercounted and/or ignored, and the deaths and injuries to innocent Iraqis are almost never mentioned. It is as if, in a very deep sense, these human costs of our policies are not fully real to certain people, or they refuse to allow them to become real. One would think that a strong advocate of our foreign policy would at least have the good grace to acknowledge the costs to American soldiers and to their families, even if they won't mention dead Iraqis, but they almost never mention either of these subjects.

At a certain point, one is justified in thinking that much deeper psychological mechanisms are involved -- and to conclude that the manner in which the debate about foreign policy has been and continues to be conducted obviously involves much more than the surface issues which people are willing to identify. Repeated denial and avoidance, across a wide range of issues and engaged in by very large numbers of people, requires an explanation which consists of more than noting that people will look for information that tends to support what they already believe. That is certainly true -- but it isn't enough to explain many people's seemingly limitless ability to deny what is literally screaming in their faces.

So I began rereading Alice Miller. Here is one obvious and very important point about why her work has so much explanatory power: the one universal experience that all of us share -- an experience that crosses almost all cultures, all economic classes, and all political systems -- is that we have all been children. And as Miller demonstrates in her books in great detail, the experiences of early childhood leave patterns of thinking, feeling and behavior which last all our lives. This crucial fact is confirmed more and more, by numerous studies. Miller further shows that the most basic of the mechanisms that she analyzes are to be found in every culture, and in every historical period -- most notably, the commandment that we are to obey and respect our elders, and especially our parents.

Thus, all the facets of the denial-obedience mechanism that I summarized at the beginning of this entry are not to be found only in the United States, or only in the last century. These results can be observed throughout all of mankind's history, in every culture, and across the entire world.

Here is the very brief summary of the denial-obedience mechanism that I set out in that earlier post (and I must stress again that, for a full appreciation of Miller's argument, you need to consult her books):

By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their "good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.

In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using "violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:

"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."

Returning to the two news stories, here is Miller explaining part of the mechanism that underlies the denial of many (if not most) adults with regard to the cruelty and even outright sadism that is inflicted on countless children. In discussing an excerpt from a book by Phil Donahue (the full excerpt is in this post), Miller notes:

Although Donahue's discussion ostensibly proceeds from the question of which parental behavior might exert a traumatizing and lasting effect on the child, and although it would appear to give priority to concern for the child, the second paragraph shows that basically it is concerned only with liberating parents from justified guilt feelings. They are assured that their actions pose no danger: The child will suffer no harm if he knows that he is being tormented out of "love" and "for his own good." This kind of reassurance that relies on untruths is based on the statements of "experts" quoted here and, I need hardly say, corresponds to the wishes of all parents who are not prepared to question their own behavior.

But might not there be a different way, other than reassurances? Might not one explain to the parents, in all honesty and frankness, why they traumatize their children? Not all of them would stop tormenting their children, but some would. We can be certain, however, that they would not stop if they were told, as were their own parents thirty years earlier, that one slap more or less does no harm, provided they love the child. Although this phrase contains a contradiction, it can continue to be handed down because we are used to it. Love and cruelty are mutually exclusive. No one ever slaps a child out of love but rather because in similar situations, when one was defenseless, one was slapped and then compelled to interpret it as a sign of love. This inner confusion prevailed for thirty or forty years and is passed on to one's own child. That's all. To purvey this confusion to the child as truth leads to new confusions that, although examined in detail by experts, are still confusions. If, on the other hand, one can admit one's errors to the child and apologize for a lack of self-control, no confusions are created.

If a mother can make it clear to a child that at that particular moment when she slapped him her love for him deserted her and she was dominated by other feelings that had nothing to do with the child, the child can keep a clear head, feel respected, and not be disoriented in his relationship to his mother. While it is true that love for a child cannot be commanded, each of us is free to decide to refrain from hypocrisy.

In that post, I commented: "For these reasons, my view is very simple: it is always wrong to hit, slap or spank a child. Always."

But some adults who are prepared to deny the damaging effects of spanking and "light smacking" will use the same arguments to "justify" outright sadism -- just as the judge did. He clings to the notion that "good intentions" lie behind parents' terrifying their children to the extent that those children will eat their own feces and drink their own urine.

What is crucial to see -- and what I know many people will nonetheless deny -- is that these are not different phenomena. They spring from the same roots, have the same ultimate causes, and lead to similar horrors, which differ only in degree, but not in kind. And those same causes lead to the torture, exterminations, war and other nightmares that the world sees over and over again.

As I indicated, I will have much more to say on this subject in the near future. For now, I will leave the final word to Alice Miller. Here is an excerpt from her article entitled, "Every Smack Is a Humiliation":

Many researchers have already proved that corporal punishment can indeed produce obedient children in the short term but, in the long term, it will have serious negative consequences on the child's character and behavior. This disastrous development toward later crimes can be prevented if there is at least one single person who loves and understands the child. During their whole childhood, dictators like Hitler, Stalin or Mao never came across such a helping witness. They learned early on to glorify cruelty and hypocrisy and to justify these actions while committing crimes against millions of people. Millions of others, also exposed to physical maltreatment in childhood, helped them to do so without the slightest remorse.

Children should not be the scapegoats for the painful experiences of adults. The claim that mild punishments (slaps or smacks) have no detrimental effects is still widespread because we learned this message at a very early age from our parents, who had taken it over from their own parents. This conviction helped the child to minimize his suffering and to endure it. Unfortunately, the main damage it causes is precisely our numbness, as well as the lack of sensitivity for our children's pain. The result of the broad dissemination of this damage is that each successive generation is subjected to the tragic effects of seemingly harmless physical "correction." Many parents still think: What didn't hurt me can't hurt my child. They don't realize that their conclusion is wrong because they never challenged their assumption. ...

It is imperative to launch such legislation—prohibiting corporal punishment—all over the world. It does not set out to incriminate anyone but is designed to have a protective and informative function for parents. Sanctions could simply take the form of the obligation for parents to internalize information available today on the consequences of corporal punishment. Information on the "well-meant smack" should therefore be broadcasted to all, since unconscious education to violence takes root very early and inflicts disastrous imprints. The vital interests of society as a whole are at stake.

UPDATE: And if you had wondered about the even more specific relevance of this to other foreign policy events, you shouldn't wonder about that any longer, either:

According to information from the International Red Cross, more than a 100 children are imprisoned in Iraq, including in the infamous prison Abu Ghraib.

The German TV magazine "Report" revealed that there has been abuse of children and youth by the coalition forces.

Mainz - "Between January and May of this year we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations" the representative of the International Red Cross, Florian Westphal, told the TV station SWR's Magazine "Report Mainz". He noted that these were places of detention controlled by coalition troops. According to Westphal the number of children held captive could be even higher.

The TV Magazine also reported of evidence and eye witness reports according to which U.S. soldiers also abused children and youthful detainees. Samuel Provance, a staff sergeant stationed in the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison said that interrogating officers had pressured a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police had only intervened when the girl was already half undressed. On another occasion, a 16 year old was soaked with water, driven through the cold, and then smeared with mud.

As Miller notes in her article entitled "The Origins of Torture in Endured Child Abuse" (at her site, under Articles):

Many people have claimed to be appalled by the acts of perversion committed by American soldiers on ADULT people, Iraqi prisoners. Amazingly, I have never heard of any such reaction in response to the occasional attempts to expose similar practices committed towards CHILDREN as for instance in British and American schools. There, these practices come under the heading of "education." But the cruelty is the same. The world appears to be surprised that such brutality should rear its head among the American forces.

After all, America presents itself to the international public as the guardian of world peace. There is an explanation for all this, but hardly anyone wants to hear it.

And so now it is revealed that the coalition forces have abused children, as well as adults. That is hardly surprising; in fact, given the underlying causes identified by Miller, it is inevitable.

I urge you to read Miller's entire piece, as well as the other articles at her site.

When Life and Happiness Are Not Enough: The Tragedy of the Unborn Self

2004-06-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

In his latest column, Justin Raimondo examines the gathering backlash against the neoconservatives' policies. At one point, Raimondo inquires into certain of the sources of the neoconservatives' goals, and he points to an extraordinarily revealing article by Corey Robin that I hadn't seen before.

Here are a few key excerpts from the Robin piece:

In 2000 I spent the tail end of the summer interviewing conservative patriarchs William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol. I was writing about the defections to the left of several younger right-wing intellectuals and wondered what the conservative movement's founding fathers thought of their wayward sons. But Buckley and Kristol were less interested in these ex-conservatives than they were in the sorry state of the movement and the uncertain fate of the United States as a global imperial power.

The end of communism and the triumph of capitalism, they suggested, were mixed blessings. Americans now possessed the most powerful empire in history. At the same time, they were possessed by one of the most anti-political ideologies in history: belief in the free market as a harmonious international order of voluntary exchange requiring little more from the state than the enforcement of laws and contracts. This ideology promoted self-interest over the national interest -- too bloodless a notion, Buckley and Kristol argued, upon which to found a national order, much less a global empire.

"The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market," Buckley told me, "is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." Kristol confessed to a yearning for an American empire: "What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?"

Note the disdain for a state which merely enforces "laws and contracts." This kind of minimal role for the state necessarily leads to the assumed, but unexplained, negative result of "self-interest over the national interest." And conservatism's "emphasis" on "the market" is "boring." The article goes on:

But because of its devotion to prosperity, he added, the United States lacked the fortitude and vision to wield imperial power. "It's too bad," Kristol lamented. "I think it would be natural for the United States . . . to play a far more dominant role in world affairs. . . to command and to give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world -- Africa in particular -- where an authority willing to use troops can make . . . a healthy difference." But not with public discussion dominated by accountants. "There's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what?" he said. "I think it's disgusting that . . . presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people."

I previously analyzed Kristol's reverence for a government that will "command" and "give orders," and his view that "[p]eople need that." I have not referred to the neoconservatives as neofascists for no reason; in fact, as my earlier post indicated, I had many reasons for the designation -- and these comments of Kristol's clearly reveal what some of them are.

Robin then turns to the neoconservative reaction to 9/11, and the following paragraph is the key in many ways to the underlying phenomenon that concerns me here:

To understand this reaction to 9/11, we must examine the state of mind of American conservatives after the end of the Cold War. For neoconservatives, who had thrilled to the crusade against communism, all that was left of Ronald Reagan's legacy after the Cold War was a sunny entrepreneurialism, which found a welcome home in Bill Clinton's America. While neocons favor capitalism, they do not believe it is the highest achievement of civilization. Like their predecessors -- from Edmund Burke, Samuel Coleridge and Henry Adams to T.S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger and Michael Oakeshott -- today's conservatives prize mystery and vitality over calculation and technology. Such romantic sensibilities are inspired by questions of politics and, especially, of war. It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and markets.

The terminology employed here must be translated, so that we can grasp what is actually being said. When Robin (and/or the neoconservatives themselves) refer to "mystery and vitality," what they most likely mean is mysticism or faith, and emotion -- but emotion divorced from thought, "pure" emotion as an end in itself. And when they refer to "calculation and technology," they mean logical, rational thought, and applied thought, or applied science, i.e., technology.

As I noted in my earlier examination of Kristol's article "The Neoconservative Persuasion," a religious outlook permeates the neoconservative mindset; indeed, mysticism and faith are the foundation of the neoconservative perspective, in every important respect. The terms in which the dichotomy is presented by Robin reveal, once again, another variant of the mind-body dichotomy: the idea that there is an inherent conflict between man's mind or soul, which represents his "higher" aspirations, and man's body, which embodies the "lower" earthly realm, and which for reasons that are never named is markedly inferior and somehow unworthy. Thus, according to the neoconservatives, we need " a world that is about something more than money and markets" -- i.e., a world which is "aspirational" and devoted to some sort of "ideals," rather than merely being devoted to "money and markets," or in other words, to the life of man here on earth, dealing with such unworthy matters as goods and services.

But here is the key, which most people do not or will not grasp: when neoconservatives (and many others, including many liberals as well) deride "money and markets" and "mere" self-interest in this manner, what they are attacking is an individual's right to "mere" personal happiness. For such people, your own personal happiness is not enough to justify your existence: you need something more, something that will make your life "meaningful" and "important."

And that is where 9/11 comes in:

Immediately following 9/11, intellectuals, politicians and pundits seized upon the terrorist strikes as a deliverance from the miasma Buckley and Kristol had been criticizing. Even commentators on the left saw the attacks as stirring a sleeping nation; Frank Rich announced in the New York Times that "this week's nightmare, it's now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream."

What was that dream? The dream of prosperity. During the 1990s, conversative David Brooks wrote in Newsweek, we "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, Jacuzzis and gas grills." This ethos had terrible consequences. It encouraged a "preoccupation with one's own petty affairs," Francis Fukuyama wrote in the Financial Times. It also had international repercussions. According to Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, the cult of peace and prosperity found expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy, which made it "easier for someone like Osama bin Laden to rise up and say credibly, 'The Americans don't have the stomach to defend themselves. They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They are morally weak.'"

But after that day in September, the domestic scene was transformed. America was now "more mobilized, more conscious and therefore more alive," wrote Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine. Writers welcomed the moral electricity coursing through the body politic, restoring patriotism and bipartisan consensus.

Internationally, 9/11 forced the United States to reengage with the world, to assume the burden of empire without embarrassment or confusion. The mission of the United States was now clear to conservatives: to defend civilization and freedom against barbarism and terror. As Condoleezza Rice told Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker, "I think the difficulty has passed in defining a role. I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen." An America thought to be lulled by the charms of the market was now willing to sustain casualties on behalf of a U.S.-led global order.

An important distinction should be kept in mind here. I would never deny that the attacks of 9/11 required a response (and I think almost no one has advocated such a position, despite some hawks' contentions to the contrary); in fact, I have indicated on numerous occasions that I believe they did require a decisive response. But if one were genuinely concerned with eliminating future terrorist threats, one would focus on all the causes that led to them. None of those causes excuse such acts of barbarity, but they explain some of the forces that led to such a horrifying result -- and they also point the way to changes in our foreign policy that would minimize the risks to us. Among those changes would be a drawing back from, and finally the ending of, our aggressively interventionist foreign policy, a policy of meddling all over the world which has led to blowback in countless forms.

But what we see in the reaction of the hawks and the neoconservatives to 9/11, a reaction which includes their grand design of remaking the world one continent at a time, is something altogether different: their response is not directed only at eliminating the terrorist threat. Actually, the truth is even more dangerous than that: in the deepest sense, I do not think their response is genuinely dictated by that goal at all. Remember: as the Robin piece points out, the conservatives' dissatisfaction with a minimal government devoted "only" to enforcing laws and contracts, and which "merely" promotes "self-interest," long predated 9/11. They were aching and impatient to put a much larger plan into operation -- and 9/11 tragically became the perfect launching pad for their global design.

Robin provides even more evidence to support this view:

For some conservatives, Clinton's promotion of free trade and free markets was anathema. Though conservatives reputedly favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine -- all the comforts of bourgeois life -- they disdained Clinton for his pursuit of these very virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society that lost its sense of depth and political meaning. "In that age of peace and prosperity," Brooks would write, "the top sitcom was 'Seinfeld,' a show about nothing."

Thus does David Brooks -- the perfect embodiment of utterly conventional, conservative thinking -- reveal the petty, ugly truth of the conservatives' "ideals": concern with peace, prosperity, affluence (read: "comfort") and personal happiness is...nothing. If anyone still believed that conservatives were concerned with ideals or with the intellect -- or with the individual's right to the pursuit of happiness -- they have no excuse to believe it any longer.

Robin then goes on to describe the desires of certain conservatives in terms that recall some of the rhetoric of the most despised dictators from history, including several of those from the twentieth century:

Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives argued, betrayed an unwillingness to take on a world of power and violence, of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtu, qualities many conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity. But there was another reason for the neocons' dissatisfaction. Clinton, they claimed, was reactive and haphazard rather than proactive and forceful.

Sept. 11 has given the neocons an opportunity to articulate, without embarrassment, the vision of imperial American power that they have been harboring for years. Unlike empires past, this one will be guided by a benevolent goal -- worldwide improvement -- and therefore will not generate the backlash previous empires have generated.

As Raimondo points out in his column, and as events demonstrate daily, this hope for a minimal or non-existent backlash appears to have been badly misplaced, to understate the problem considerably.

And, of course, none of these appeals of the hawks and those who share their vision would be complete without the call to sacrifice:

For the Kristol-Buckley model conservatives, this is a heady moment, when their ambivalence -- not about capitalism per se, but about the culture of capitalism, the elevation of buying and selling above political virtues such as heroism and struggle -- may finally be resolved. No longer hamstrung by the numbing politics of affluence, they believe they can count on the public to respond to calls of sacrifice and destiny. With danger and security the watchwords of the day, the country will be newly sanctified. The American empire, they hope, will allow America to have its market without being deadened by it.

The fact that the war against terrorism has not yet imposed the sacrifices on the population that normally accompany national crusades has provoked occasional bouts of concern among politicians and cultural elites. "The danger, over the long term," wrote the New York Times's R. W. Apple, "is loss of interest. With much of the war to be conducted out of plain sight by commandos, diplomats and intelligence agents, will a nation that has spent decades in easy self-indulgence stay focused?"

We see, then, that even though this problem lies primarily with the neoconservatives and those who have been driving our foreign policy, it also extends to liberals and many others. All of them decry the obsession with personal happiness alone. Almost with one voice, they all cry: "Why, personal happiness isn't enough! All the great thinkers have said so! You must have some greater vision, some cause greater than yourself, in which your petty concerns will be submerged -- and which will raise you up! It is only by means of sacrifice, suffering, pain and death that your paltry existence can be sanctified, and justified. That is what idealism means, and what it demands!"

To which I would submit the only proper reply is: "Oh, really? Why? Who said so? My personal happiness is more than enough for me. Why isn't your own happiness good enough for you?" I'll come back to that question in a moment.

In fact, this search for a grand design by the neoconservatives goes back further than Robin's piece indicates. In the final part of my first foreign policy essay over a year ago, I wrote:

In the last 40 years, the Republicans and the Democrats have been slowly morphing into one undifferentiated whole. This process had been going on earlier, but in recent decades, it has accelerated significantly. Now both parties explicitly want and support a huge, oppressive regulatory state, and they argue over only which particular interests should be the beneficiaries of government favors. And, as is always the case, there is only one consistent loser: the average American taxpayer, who foots the bill for the entire pernicious enterprise, who is not "well-connected" and who has no special "interest group" to lobby on his behalf.

Moreover, just as the Republicans and the Democrats have become one nearly inseparable "big government" party, the Republicans -- and especially the neoconservatives (and now even some alleged libertarians) -- have adopted the language of the progressives of the early twentieth century: these people now speak of "national greatness," and of our "mission" to spread our "democratic institutions" around the globe. And how are we to do this? In the manner proposed by the earlier progressives: by massive foreign intervention, to be supported and paid for by the American taxpayer -- and also to be paid for with the blood of Americans.

Now, you would think the fact that neoconservatives and libertarians are now proudly proclaiming the slogans of those they used to deride would give them at least a moment's pause -- but it doesn't. Two unusually perceptive observers, Virginia Postrel and Jim Glassman, noted this phenomenon six years ago (highlights added) [Ed: I must now unfortunately add that it appears that neither Postrel nor Glassman at all appreciates the relevance of their own earlier observations to the current foreign policy crisis]:

"How you feel about the state of 'conservatism,' and of the world, depends on what you want to conserve. Simply conserving free institutions--which define the neutral rules of the game--is not enough for many conservatives, who confuse small government with no government, and neutral government with vice.

"Freedom makes them very nervous. 'Wishing to be left alone is not a governing doctrine,' wrote William Kristol and David Brooks on this page [in the Wall Street Journal] two weeks ago. They offer their own governing doctrine, 'the appeal to American greatness'--a kind of wistful nationalism in search of a big project.

"Unfortunately, for them the Cold War is over. So what's a national-greatness government to do? It could go looking for the next war, hope for another Great Depression, or sponsor a trip to Neptune. Or, as we would prefer, it could step back and let the inventiveness, passion, imagination, and technological genius of Americans produce American greatness. Toward that end, government could start exercising some self-restraint: cutting taxes, regulating and spending less, treating its citizens as equals before the law. ...

"These conservatives view America's very creativity and exuberance a cause for dismay. Conserving free institutions doesn't satisfy their desire to discipline a rambunctuously productive country. Freedom makes them uncomfortable, because it entails a dynamic, open-ended future rather than prescribing a static, politically determined one. ...

"We now worry that the conservative movement has abandoned the ideal of conserving simple rules in favor of a governing doctrine indistinguishable from the manipulative statism of its opponents.

"Indeed, the pessimism of this weekend's international congress reflects the fear that Hayek attributed to conservatives. So does Messrs. Kristol and Brooks's proposed governing doctrine, which is best understood as William James's 'moral equivalent of war'--a desire to engineer a purpose for Americans who seem too dangerously decadent to be left to their own devices.

"But it's one thing to pursue genuine national interests through foreign policy, quite another to cook up schemes just to give government something to do and the American people something to rally around. Harking back to the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and New Republic co-founder Herbert Croly, Messrs. Kristol and Brooks seek the promise of American life in collective pursuits directed from Washington according to their own cultural prejudices. They have embraced Croly's claim that it is not enough to allow America's future to emerge 'merely by virtue of maintaining intact a set of political institutions and by the vigorous individual pursuit of private ends.' Or, as Mr. Brooks put it in the Standard, if Americans 'think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities, they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose.'"

Now, confronted by the threat of terrorism, conservatives and many libertarians have all jumped on the same bandwagon -- but now their program is not simply the "moral equivalent of war." They have an actual war -- and if we take them at their word, it is only the first of many.

These conservatives and all others who propose a series of wars to topple despotic regimes, to be followed by perhaps decades of nation-building so as to inculcate other countries with our "democratic institutions," are the Herbert Crolys of today: they endorse statism as a political philosophy, with an increasingly powerful central government dictating and intruding into more and more aspects of our lives.

And now we must come back to the underlying question: what are the causes of this ceaseless quest on the part of so many for some "grand design," some great cause which will give their lives "meaning"? And what do they mean by "meaning" in this context? Why isn't personal happiness a sufficient goal? What is the emptiness in their souls that they are seeking to fill, and how did it arise?

I firmly believe that one of the major keys, if not the major key, can be found in the critically important work of Alice Miller, which work has been the basis for a long series of essays I have been writing, entitled "The Roots of Horror." At the beginning of an early installment of that series, I summarized some of the major elements of Miller's theory (and it should be kept in mind that Miller refers to "poisonous pedagogy," by which she means the multitude of abuses that virtually all children are subjected to under current methods of child rearing, and many of those abuses need not be physical in nature at all):

By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their "good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.

In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using "violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:

"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."

The dynamics identified by Miller can be seen in the refusal of most hawks to question authority -- and they also can be seen as underlying the abuses of Iraqi prisoners, as Miller herself has discussed [see the Miller excerpts toward the conclusion of that essay].

But here you have the deep tragedy which underlies the endless search for "meaning," and the inability of many neoconservatives (and many others, to be sure) to find fulfillment in "mere" personal happiness. Because autonomy in the sense discussed by Miller never existed for these people -- that is, because a genuine, authentic self was never allowed to develop -- such people have no self to be satisfied, or to be happy. The achievement of personal happiness, in the deepest sense, first requires the existence of a firsthand, genuine, vital self -- which both knows itself and knows those particular values which will lead to its happiness. But if that self was never allowed to be born in childhood, and if the adult is unable or unwilling to develop an authentic self later in life, genuine personal happiness is a phantasm that will never be actualized.

In such a case, the person will be driven to search for "mystery," "vitality," a great "crusade," or some version of "national greatness" -- and he will view with scorn such things as "markets," and the enforcement of laws and contracts, and peace, and prosperity. In this way, too, death, suffering and destruction become "romanticized" -- because they carry the promise of greater "meaning."

This underlying mechanism also explains two other related issues. The first is one I commented on in explaining why I was driven back to a consideration of Miller's work:

With regard to Miller's point that the idealization of authority figures is easily transferrable for those who have not been allowed to develop a true sense of self, events of the last few years have provided numerous examples. Let me emphasize one other point before moving on to some of the more notable ones. Nothing I am discussing here should be construed to mean that the ideas that people accept do not matter. In fact, as most of my writing here demonstrates, I view ideas, and whether they are true or false, as of critical importance. But the truly notable phenomenon is the following one: many of the ideas that people have accepted, in some cases even for thousands of years, can easily be shown to be wrong. So the obvious question arises: if the ideas are demonstrably wrong -- and as is often the case, when the consequences of certain ideas can easily be shown to be disastrous, and even horribly destructive -- why do people still cling to them so desperately, and absolutely refuse to give them up?

And this is where Miller's work is invaluable. Such tenacity in the face of overwhelming evidence cannot be explained simply by saying, "Well, they just refuse to think. And when someone refuses to think, no one else can make him." Obviously, certain people refuse to think at a certain point. But the question remains: Why? If one looks at the life histories of the great majority of people, keeping in mind Miller's work and her detailed personal histories of a number of individuals, the answer is clear: they dare not question the goodness of the authority figure, the dare not acknowledge the pain they have experienced as the direct result of the actions of the authority figure, and above all they dare not say: the authority figure is wrong. This underlying mechanism of obedience is set very, very early in life -- and the thought of dislodging it later on literally causes the adult to panic, in a sense that threatens his precarious (and false) sense of self. So the adult will do anything to avoid having to question the authority figure.

And the second, related issue that Miller's work explains is that, no matter how many times in history our nation and many others have stumbled across the tragedies of imperial ambitions, no matter how many people have died, and no matter how great the destruction, humanity seems determined to repeat the same errors over and over again, without end. That fact alone would suggest that an underlying cause has still not been addressed, and continues to exact its fearful price.

I think that cause is the one identified by Miller: that for far too many people, their genuine selves were never permitted to develop, and many of them are thus led to find meaning in domination, control, conquest, war, and death. It is almost as if, because they themselves were never born in the deepest, most meaningful sense, they are capable only of bringing suffering or death to others, thus reducing the rest of the world to the state of their own still-born souls.

The real tragedy today, of course, is that one of the ultimate causes of all these horrors has undoubtedly been identified -- but most people find the subject far too threatening and are unwilling even to discuss it. Thus the horrors continue, even into our own times -- and perhaps still further into the future.

And all that is required to stop those horrors is the willingness to see the truth, and to name it. Surely that can't be more difficult than to endure the death and destruction we continue to see, day after day and year after year. Can it?

The Horrors Against Women

2004-05-23T08:49:00.000-07:00

Via The Guardian, we learn the following:

The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.

The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.

Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, "happening all across Iraq". ...

Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US military in January, headed by Major General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed that the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor" was entirely and devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women detainees - who form a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000 people in US custody since last year's invasion - have also been abused. Nobody appears to know how many. But among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report, images of a US military policeman "having sex" with an Iraqi woman. ...

In Iraq, the existence of photographs of women detainees being abused has provoked revulsion and outrage, but little surprise. Some of the women involved may since have disappeared, according to human rights activists. Professor Huda Shaker al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University who is researching the subject for Amnesty International, says she thinks "Noor" is now dead. "We believe she was raped and that she was pregnant by a US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to her house. The neighbours said her family had moved away. I believe she has been killed."

Honour killings are not unusual in Islamic society, where rape is often equated with shame and where the stigma of being raped by an American soldier would, according to one Islamic cleric, be "unbearable". The prospects for rape victims in Iraq are grave; it is hardly surprising that no women have so far come forward to talk about their experiences in US-run jails where abuse was rife until early January.

One of the most depressing aspects of the saga is that, unaccountably, the US military continues to hold five women in solitary confinement at Abu Ghraib, in cells 2.5m (8ft) long by 1.5m (5ft) wide. ...

Nevertheless, there remain extremely troubling questions as to why these women came to be here. Like other Iraqi prisoners, all five are classified as "security detainees" - a term invented by the Bush administration to justify the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or legal access, as part of the war on terror. US military officials will only say that they are suspected of "anti-coalition activities". ...

The women appear to have been arrested in violation of international law - not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter instead.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, whose devastating report on human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners was delivered to the government in February but failed to ring alarm bells, says the problem lies with the system. "It is an absence of judicial guarantees," says Nada Doumani, spokesperson for the ICRC. "The system is not fair, precise or properly defined."

Relatives who gathered outside Abu Ghraib last Friday said it was common knowledge that women had been abused inside the jail. Hamid Abdul Hussein, 40, who was there hoping to see his brother Jabar freed, said former detainees who had returned to their home town of Mamudiya reported that several women had been raped. "We've know this for months," he said. "We also heard that some women committed suicide."

While the abuse may have stopped, the US military appears to have learned nothing from the experience. Swadi says that when she last tried to visit the women at Abu Ghraib, "The US guards refused to let us in. When we complained, they threatened to arrest us."

I look forward to hearing from the most dedicated defenders of Bush and our foreign policy that this isn't really all that bad, since Saddam Hussein was so much worse.

Frankly, anyone who finds comfort in that kind of argument and who offers it with any degree of seriousness is not much better, in principle, than Saddam Hussein or our enemies in the "War on Terror."

Certain people, including many of those in this administration and among its advocates, had better try to locate their moral center quickly before they lose it altogether, and for all time.

To Destroy the World: The Case of Saddam Hussein

2004-05-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

Alice Miller, in the Preface to Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (first published in October 1991):

This year, another war has come to an end. Once again, it is clear that even the most efficient weapons cannot eliminate hatred. Even the most sophisticated weapons are powerless against the will of one single individual who would not hesitate to destroy the world so long as he could achieve his goal--to revenge himself for his repressed injuries, to amass power, govern, and take possession of the world around him, all to avoid his feelings of pain.

One might expect that the millions of people who, thanks to television, watched the events of the Gulf War unfold would be eager to understand the causes of this urge to destroy. Sadly, the opposite seems to be true, at least in the public domain. Neither politicians, experts of various sorts, nor even the majority of journalists asked the essential question: What makes a person wish to destroy the world? ...

We must acknowledge what can already be acknowledged, in order to prevent the destruction and self-destruction of humankind. The oils wells burning in Kuwait confront us inescapably with the sad truth that technology alone is not sufficient to protect us from the consequences of denied, and thus uncontrolled, emotions. Without facing up to their origins--the production of hatred in childhood--we will be unable to resolve such hatred and put an end to the work of devastation.

It is in no way an exaggeration to say that every tyrant, without exception, prefers to see thousands and even millions of people killed and tortured rather than undo the repression of his childhood mistreatment and humiliation, to feel his rage and helplessness in the face of his parents, to call them to account and condemn their actions. Not without reason, that is what he fears the most and what he is constantly seeking to avoid by all available means. Once we have understood the mechanisms by which repressed feelings are acted out, we will find a way to protect ourselves from their consequences--not by producing more weapons, but by fighting for more truthfulness and awareness.

From later in the same book:

Every abused child must totally repress the mistreatment, confusion, and neglect it suffered. If it were not to do so, it would die. The child's organism could not withstand the dimensions of this pain. Only in adulthood do other ways of handling our feelings become available to us. If we do not make use of these opportunities, then what was once the life-saving function of repression can turn into a dangerous, destructive, and self-destructive power. The careers of such tyrants as Hitler or Stalin show how previously suppressed revenge fantasies can lead to destructive actions of near-indescribable proportions. We do not encounter this phenomenon in the animal kingdom because no young animal will ever be trained by its parents to such a complete denial of its nature in order to make of it a "good" animal. Only human beings behave so destructively. Descriptions of the childhoods of Nazi criminals, and of Vietnam volunteers, the Green Berets, show that mindless programming to destructiveness always begins with a brutal upbringing aimed at enforcing unthinking obedience and total contempt for the child. ...

To suppress the feelings, perceptions, and impulses of a child is to commit psychic murder. The experiences [Rudolf] Hoess went through in his youth gave him a thorough grounding in the grammar of death. He simply had to wait thirty years, whereupon Hitler's regime presented him with the opportunity to practice the skills he had learned.

Thousands of his contemporaries functioned in just the same way. Instead of exposing and condemning the criminal behavior of their parents, they uniformly praised and defended it. Had a consciousness of the absurdity and dangerousness of brutal childrearing already existed, monsters like Hoess could never have been possible. The susceptibility to blind obedience and the demand for a man like Hitler simply would not have existed in Germany. ...

The young people demonstrating [in Central and Eastern Europe] in 1989 were capable of exposing the emptiness, terror, mendacity, and destructiveness of Stalinism--all the things with which their parents and grandparents came to terms--because as children they were allowed more freedom than the older generation. To be conscious of unfreedom one must have a concept of what freedom and respect for life are.

A person who has never experienced this as a child, who has only known and been exposed to extreme violence, brutality, and hypocrisy, without ever having come across a single helping witness, does not demonstrate for freedom. Such a person demands order and uses violence to achieve it, just as he or she learned as a child: order and cleanliness at any price is the motto, even if it is at the price of life. The victims of such an upbringing ache to do to others what was once done to them. If they don't have children, or their children refuse to make themselves available for their revenge, they line up to support new forms of fascism. Ultimately, fascism always has the same goal: the annihilation of truth and freedom. People who have been mistreated as children, but totally deny their suffering, use the mottoes and labels of the day. They thereby meet the approval of others like them because they have are also helping to conceal their truth. They are consumed by the perverse pleasure in the destruction of life that they observed in their parents when young. They long to at last be on the other side of the fence, to hold power themselves, passing it off, as Stalin, Hitler, or Ceausescu have done, as "redemption" for others. This old childhood longing determines their political "opinions" and speeches, which are therefore impervious to counter arguments. As long as they continue to ignore or distort the roots of the problem, which lie in the very real threats experienced in their childhood, reason must remain impotent against this kind of persecution complex. The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person.

It is our access to the truth that can enable us to prevent such people, who yearn for the "order" spawned by violence, from realizing their destructive plans. Fascism will have had its day once society ceases to deny the knowledge we already possess about the production of brutality, violence, and dehumanization in childhood and minimize its dangers. Once this has happened, it won't have a chance in this society. It is not enough to unmask Stalinism and Nazism as mere lies. As long as we do not recognize the circumstances to which they owe their success, these and similar lies can continue to exist, dressed up in forms in keeping with the "Zeitgeist." Fascism is a psychic attitude that floats the latent history of destruction to the surface.

The nature of fascism is not determined by political or economic circumstances. For a long time, people sought to "explain" Hitler's success by pointing to the catastrophic economic situation of the Weimar Republic, and in doing so they sought to collectively deny the origins of Hitler's urge toward revenge, destruction, and power. But we eventually desperately need the truth.

It is not enough to see the surface and describe that. We have to recognize, and defuse, the production of paranoid confusion, which takes place in childhood. ...

Can one have a dialogue with such people? I believe we must keep trying because this may, indeed it very likely will, be their first opportunity of encountering an enlightened witness. How they make use of this encounter is something over which we have no influence. but we should at least make use of the occasion. Life failed them--something that is, I suspect, true of all prison inmates. One should try to show them that they had the right to respect, love, and encouragement in their childhood and that this right was denied them, but that this does not give them the right to destroy the lives of others. We must also show them that destruction is a dead end. Even millions of corpses could not sate Hitler's hunger for revenge or dispel his hatred. We have to show them that what was passed off on them in childhood as "a good upbringing" was a base, mendacious, and idiotic ideology in which they had to believe in order to survive, and that they now wish to recirculate at the political level. And we have to show them that the people who cheated them, who engendered their misery, their hunger for power and destruction, were not Jews or Turks or Arabs or Gypsies, but their very own parents--clean, orderly citizens, godfearing, respectable churchgoers.

From a New York Times story just two days ago:

It is no surprise to Jerrold M. Post, the founder of the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior at the C.I.A., that Saddam Hussein grew up to be one of the world's most dangerous dictators and a member of President Bush's axis of evil.

"Of all of the leaders I've profiled, his background is assuredly the most traumatic," Dr. Post said in an interview this week in his wood-paneled, African-artifact-filled office in Bethesda, Md., where he is a psychiatrist for patients whose personal struggles have typically not led to two American wars in the Middle East. "His troubles can really be traced back to the womb."

As Dr. Post recounts in his new book, "Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World" (Cornell University Press, $29.95), Mr. Hussein's father died, probably of cancer, in the fourth month of his mother's pregnancy with Saddam. Mr. Hussein's 12-year-old brother died, also of cancer, a few months later. The trauma left Saddam's mother, Sabha, so desperately depressed that she tried and failed to abort Saddam and kill herself. When Saddam was born, she would have nothing to do with him and sent him away to an uncle.

At 3 Mr. Hussein was reunited with his mother after she had married a distant relative, but he was then physically and psychologically abused by his new stepfather. Mr. Hussein left home and returned to live with the uncle when he was 8 or 9.

"So that would produce in psychoanalytic terms what we call 'the wounded self,' " Dr. Post said. "Most people with that kind of background would be highly ineffective as adults and be faltering, insecure human beings." But there is, Dr. Post said, an alternative path that a minority of wounded selves take: "malignant narcissism," the personality disorder that Dr. Post believes fueled Mr. Hussein's rise in Iraq. Perhaps most important, Dr. Post says, is that Mr. Hussein is a "judicious political calculator," not a madman.

Dr. Post, 70, the director of George Washington University's political psychology program, consults privately for the Department of Homeland Security and for Pentagon counterterrorism officials. In his view, the world's most dangerous leaders are often malignant narcissists, a category that he says he thinks includes Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il of North Korea and Hitler.

These leaders share four qualities, Dr. Post said: extreme self-absorption, paranoia, no constraints of conscience and a willingness to use whatever means necessary to accomplish goals. They have little empathy for the pain and suffering of their own people, Dr. Post said, but they also can't empathize with their enemies, a critical vulnerability in that "it's very important as an effective leader to get into the mind of your adversaries."

Mr. bin Laden in particular has little empathy for others, Dr. Post said, "and is really consumed with being God's prophet on earth." Mr. Kim, who Dr. Post says is consumed by self-doubt because he lives in the enormous shadow of his father, the founding leader of North Korea, once punished a subordinate who displeased him by sending him home naked. As for Mr. Hussein, Dr. Post says that he is not irrational and is in fact entirely predictable and over three decades in power "worked the international system to a fare-thee-well."

(I emphasize that I do not agree with all of Dr. Post's characterizations of the mechanisms at work here, and I do not think Alice Miller would, either. Nonetheless, Post has identified a significant part of the truth involved, a truth which most people would prefer to continue to deny.

Miller has distanced herself from her original training in psychoanalysis in no uncertain terms. As she says in Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: "Since the publication of my first books it has become clearer and clearer to me that the practice of psychoanalysis involved, on the part of the analyst, a continual evasion of the painful realities of childhood--at the patient's expense. Psychoanalytic theory makes this possible by providing the analyst with an appropriate conceptual alibi. This guarantees that the true stories of mistreatment and the neglect of childhood--of both patient and analyst--remain untold. In order to protect the truth about the deeds of parents, patients may be prevented from finding out how they came to such self-destructive behavioral patterns--why they are addicts, for instance; why they cause accidents or allow themselves to undergo unnecessary surgery. But without this confrontation with childhood we can never hope to understand the pattern.")

THE ROOTS OF HORROR: The Dynamics of Suicide, Revisited

2004-05-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

In several earlier posts about suicide and its underlying dynamics, I referred to Alice Miller's discussion of the relationship between Sylvia Plath and her mother. Miller makes a number of crucial points, which are applicable to many families:

Sylvia Plath's life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a result of her sensitivity, she suffered much more intensely than most people from the frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person. In all her letters she assures her mother how well she is doing. The suspicion that her mother did not release negative letters for publication overlooks the deep tragedy of Plath's life. This tragedy (and the explanation for her suicide as well) lies in the very fact that she could not have written any other kind of letters, because her mother needed reassurance, or because Sylvia at any rate believed that her mother would not have been able to live without this reassurance. Had Sylvia been able to write aggressive and unhappy letters to her mother, she would not have had to commit suicide. Had her mother been able to experience grief at her inability to comprehend the abyss that was her daughter's life, she never would have published the letters, because the assurances they contained of how well things were going for her daughter would have been too painful to bear. ...

If a sensitive child like Sylvia Plath intuits that it is essential for her mother to interpret the daughter's pain only as the consequence of a picture being damaged and not as a consequence of the destruction of her daughter's self and its expression--symbolized in the fate of the pastel--the child will do her utmost to hide her authentic feelings from the mother. The letters are testimony of the false self she constructed (whereas her true self is speaking in The Bell Jar). With the publication of the letters, her mother erects an imposing monument to her daughter's false self.

We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Many parents are like Sylvia's mother. They desperately try to behave correctly toward their child, and in their child's behavior they seek reassurance that they are good parents. The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give too little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child--well behaved and dutiful--of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.

As I commented: "And that is the most important, the absolutely crucial point: suicide is the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Most people do not grasp this at all." The balance of the earlier essay discusses how these mechanisms are now playing out with regard to many of our troops who have served in Iraq -- and the mechanisms include remarkable, but completely predictable, levels of denial on the part of the surviving family members.

And today, I came across this story [link no longer working]-- which shows, yet again, how these dynamics reveal themselves. As you read the following, notice the clues: the mother's desperate need to find an external agency to blame for this tragedy; the obvious distance that existed between the mother and her son (evidenced by, among other things, the mother not even knowing about the earlier suicide attempt); and the mother's clear, but unadmitted, guilt. On the basis of the mechanisms identified so convincingly in Miller's books, I can guarantee you that the ultimate causes of this tragedy do not lie in any of the events that immediately preceded this tragic death. They lie deep in the son's childhood, and in the family dynamics that shaped him:

HARWICH - Four years after the suicide of her 27-year-old son, Barbara Felton is still angry.

She's angry at her son, Mark Christopher Felton, for ending his life and scarring hers. But mostly she's furious with her son's friend for leaving an unlocked shotgun where her son could find it and use it during a moment of despondency.

"I told my counselor, 'I like being angry,'" Felton said. It not only feels good, the elementary-school computer teacher says, it's helping her do good.

Felton is among a group of Cape women who are converging on Washington, D.C., today for another Million Mom March to protest gun violence in America.

"This is what I feel I can do," Felton said during an interview at her house in Harwich. She promised during her son's eulogy in May 2000 that she would march in the new gun protest known as the Million Mom March.

The first march, held on Mother's Day 2000, came too soon after Mark's death for Felton to participate. The second march, occurring today, calls on Congress to renew a ban on assault weapons. The existing ban expires Sept. 13. ...

According to a fact sheet prepared by the organization, on average a person is killed by a gun every 18 minutes in America, giving the United States the highest rate of deaths from gunfire in the industrialized world.

The fact sheet also includes suicide statistics: It says that 1,273 children or teens have committed suicide with a firearm each year over the last 10 years. Each year more than 145 gun-related suicide victims were younger than 15. ...

What bothers Felton and other marchers is how quickly a suicidal idea can turn into reality if a gun is handy.

The afternoon that Mark committed suicide, he had just found out that a co-worker to whom he felt romantically attached was moving back in with an old boyfriend. He apparently took this move as a rejection, Felton said, and was thrown into despair.

After leaving his job at a Barnstable elementary school, where he was an aide for a student with special needs, Mark went to the apartment of a friend with whom he'd gone target shooting in the past.

According to Felton, the friend wasn't home, but the apartment was unlocked and guns, including a shotgun, were "laying around."

Felton's voice fills with fury when she talks about the guns.

"I don't believe this suicide was planned. I believe it was spur of the moment," she said. "I will never get over my anger at this negligent S.O.B. who left the apartment open with the guns available for anyone to get them."

In fact, Felton encouraged the district attorney's office to prosecute Mark's friend under a relatively new law that criminalizes unlawful storage of weapons. As a result, the friend was ordered to perform community service in a clinic for head injury patients. The case was continued without a finding, which means that if the young man did not commit another crime the case would be closed after a year.

In many ways, the prosecution helped Felton deal with her own despair. ...

Felton said she forgives Mark. "I don't believe this suicide was planned," she said, pointing out that the week before he died he bought two kayaks, one for himself and one for a long-term girlfriend. ...

But Mark also suffered from clinical depression and his dose of Paxil, a medication used to treat depression, had been increased right before his suicide, Felton said.

Looking back, it seems Mark struggled long before being diagnosed. His high school years were lackluster academically. While he loved Dean Junior College, the two-year Franklin college where he discovered sports broadcasting, he left the University of Utah without earning a four-year degree.

Moving back home with his mother, he discovered a niche in education and child care. He was a camp counselor and a special education assistant for a child with Down syndrome.

"People liked Mark," Felton said.

He didn't always like himself. After Mark's death, Felton found out from his girlfriend and a colleague that Mark had attempted suicide at least once before, by trying to suffocate himself while running a car engine. When that hadn't worked, he'd swallowed a bunch of over-the-counter medicines, only to throw up. ...

Felton said she wishes she'd known about the earlier attempt. And she believes that if the guns had not been available in his friend's apartment, Mark might have taken the time to think or seek out people for help.

As someone who has suffered from terrible depressions in my own life, I cannot tell you how angry Mrs. Felton's remarks make me. Certainly, I understand the deep agony and pain that she feels, but I still find it difficult to overlook certain of her comments -- particularly when they so clearly reveal the causes that led to this tragedy.

For example, it is rather immaterial at this point whether she "forgives" her son, and to talk about it in this manner reveals that she deeply blames him for taking his life, as if he hasn't already paid the greatest price possible. By implication, she also blames him for the emotions which led to his actions. But Mark is dead, he doesn't exactly give a damn about her forgiveness at this point. And to say that the suicide "wasn't planned" -- when he had previously tried to kill himself, when she was completely ignorant about that earlier attempt, and when he had been diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression -- and to justify her belief that it "wasn't planned" because he had just bought two kayaks, reveals a desperation to avoid the obvious that is painful to see, and verging on the ludicrous.

But this shows the lengths to which people will go to avoid facing profoundly uncomfortable truths. For Mark's mother to face the truth, she would have to be willing to set aside the obvious mythology that she has built up about her family relationships. Mrs. Felton ought to recognize that, in the final analysis, she didn't pull the trigger; her son did. In that sense, she is not responsible for her son's death.

But here is what she, and every other parent who engages in this kind of psychological dishonesty (which is the majority of them), is responsible for: she is responsible for not recognizing the enormous emotional distance that clearly existed between her and her son, and probably between all the members of this family. She is responsible for not seeing that her son probably had always felt unable to reveal his true feelings to his mother or to anyone else. Remember Miller's comment about Plath: "Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person."

Those words probably describe precisely how Mark Felton felt throughout most of his life, beginning in his childhood. And that is one of the major causes for his death. And his mother is responsible for refusing to admit, or it appears even honestly to seek for, the truth. Instead, she pretends that gun control laws would have solved this problem, and searches for any semi-plausible outside source to blame, rather than looking inward. It is remarkable to see that her search for an external villain even led her to encourage the prosecution of Mark's friend, a move that Mark himself might well have condemned.

This is the kind of family tragedy that is enacted every day, in countless families, only usually without this particularly horrible tragic ending. But this kind of emotional distance, the absence of the belief that one may communicate one's genuine feelings and not be "blamed" for them, and this sort of denial are common to almost every family. One of the results is the sort of deep, unreachable emotional numbness that can be seen in so many people today.

In these ways, too, the denial goes on...and the tragedies continue. And people still refuse to see the truth, even when it is screaming in their faces.

Instilling Obedience and Denial, Continued

2004-05-09T07:23:00.000-07:00

From an entry of mine only several days ago, about the obedience-denial mechanism so crucial to the military and prison command structure:

With regard to the comments that [Jeremy] Sivits would only have done this if "he was ordered to do it," one would think that people would not be so eager to fall back on the "I was only following orders" excuse, given that excuse's historical provenance and uses in the twentieth century. That observation, of course, depends on people's knowing the relevant history and understanding its significance, which many of these people might not. (The article is also disturbingly similar to all those stories about the "boy next door" who turns out to have been a serial killer -- when all his neighbors talk about what "a nice, sweet, gentle boy" he was. All that such stories reveal is how unperceptive the majority of people are about psychology, and how they allow themselves to be deceived by superficial appearances.)

The more important point is that there is a certain kind of person -- a person with a strong, genuine sense of self, who knows what he thinks is right and wrong, what is permissible and humane and decent, and what is not -- who, when ordered to commit acts which he considers to be monstrous, will simply say, with full and absolute moral conviction, "No, I will not do that." And he will also be prepared to suffer the consequences.

But it appears, not surprisingly, that not too many individuals of that kind are to be found in the military, or in our domestic prison system. I should immediately state that I do not believe that most of those in the military are capable of the kind of torture and abuse that appears to have gone on at Abu Ghraib, or even a majority of them. But neither is this kind of behavior that unusual in my view, and the American public -- aided and abetted by the equivocations that now flood over us hourly, from every source -- is now engaged in a dangerous exercise in denial. It is dangerous precisely because it denies important, and crucial, facts -- and thus makes the likelihood of the repetition of such horrors in the future that much more likely.

I say it is "not surprising" that many persons who will follow orders -- even when those orders may concern horrific kinds of behavior -- are to be found in our military for many reasons. Some of those reasons have been explained in my series on "The Roots of Horror." Here is a description of how these mechanisms work in part . ...

Note the elements that are present here, and how easily adaptable these elements are to the military, or to a prison system: idealization of the authority figure, which figure can be the military itself and/or a commanding officer; a loss of autonomy or, in other words, the lack of a genuine self - which means that "self" can be filled in with "values" provided by those in authority; and, most important of all, the total and absolute premium placed on obedience, as the greatest of the virtues. This is the kind of person who will never say "no" when confronted with a monstrous order -- and it is precisely for that reason that many such individuals are attracted to this sort of command structure in the first place.

Given the dynamics identified by Alice Miller, it was all too easy to predict precisely what is revealed in this story:

HYNDMAN, Pa. (AP) — The first U.S. soldier to face a court martial in connection with the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison grew up in a military family and "knows how to follow instructions," his father says.

Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits, 24, was trained as a truck mechanic, not a prison guard, and would have gotten in trouble had he not followed orders to photograph the abused prisoners, father Daniel Sivits told The Associated Press in an interview late last month.

"Apparently, he was told to take a picture and he did what he was told," Daniel Sivits said. "He was just following instructions."

With regard to where the ultimate responsibility lies, Daniel Sivits is correct about the following:

But Daniel Sivits, in an interview from April 30, said he thought the abuse scandal stemmed from a lack of leadership.

"All it is lack of leadership, lack of instruction and lack of standard operating procedure and everyone at the top is covering their butts," Daniel Sivits said. "My only question is this: Where was the leadership?"

But as to why Jeremy Sivits himself was willing to obey these particular orders, this is still the key to the explanation:

Daniel Sivits said he spent 22 years in the military and his son grew up in the military. "He knows how to follow instructions," he said.

One of these days, people will begin to acknowledge the truths identified by Miller -- and will start to alter the ways in which they raise their children, insisting on obedience and adherence to rules above all, insisting on the denial of the spontaneous, vital, authentic self, and insisting all the time that they do it "for the child's own good."

But until that day comes, horrors will continue to be unleashed on the world. And stories like the ones from Iraq will never end.

The Real Scandal

2004-05-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

Just the other day, I documented the decades-long history of severe abuse and officially-sanctioned rape in prisons here in the United States. Today, The New York Times discusses some of these same issues.

What the story makes indisputably clear is where the real nature of the Iraq abuse-torture scandal lies: it does not lie in the fact that it occurred at all, or that it supposedly involved only "a few" aberrant U.S. personnel. No: the true scandal lies in the fact that, given the history of prison abuse and rape here in the United States, and given how the U.S. went about reconstituting the criminal justice and prison system in Iraq --and given the particular individuals they selected for positions of authority and power -- the current scandal was the logical and inevitable result.

In other words, the current scandal was completely predictable, and in fact unavoidable, for anyone who was paying attention -- and for anyone who thought about these issues at all. Those qualifications would appear to exclude everyone in the current administration. That alone is grounds to fire every single one of them, either now or in the November elections.

Here are some excerpts from the Times article:

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.

In response to a request for an interview on Friday, Mr. McCotter said in a written statement that he had left Iraq last September, just after a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open Abu Ghraib. ...

In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in Texas, "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions."

In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by other inmates, even after he appealed to guards for help, and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave, being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different parts of the prison. The inmate, Roderick Johnson, has filed suit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Mr. Johnson.

And note this well:

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the problems in American prisons were not comparable to the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

Really? Why not? They appear to be precisely identical in many, if not most, fundamental ways.

These words of Ashcroft's now have a particularly awful and unintended resonance to them:

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter, he said, "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Monica Goodling, did not return phone calls on Friday asking why Mr. Ashcroft had chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm's operation of the Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice Department.

These additional details should also be noted:

In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing prescriptions for drug addicts.

In an interview with an online magazine, Corrections.com, last January, Mr. McCotter recalled that of all the prisons in Iraq, Abu Ghraib "is the only place we agreed as a team was truly closest to an American prison. They had cell housing and segregation."

But 80 to 90 percent of the prison had been destroyed, so Mr. McCotter set about rebuilding it, everything from walls and toilets to handcuffs and soap. He employed 100 Iraqis who had worked in the prison under Saddam Hussein, and paid for everything with wads of cash, up to $3 million, that he carried with him.

Another problem, Mr. McCotter quickly discovered, was that the Iraqi staff, despite some American training, quickly reverted to their old ways, "shaking down families, shaking down inmates, letting prisoners buy their way out of prison."

So the American team fired the guards and went with former Iraqi military personnel. "They didn't have any bad habits and did things exactly the way we trained them."

Don't be distracted by the inconsequential fact that McCotter left Iraq last September. That doesn't matter.

What does matter is that he was selected in the first place -- and that the entire system and culture of incarceration that he represents appears to have been transplanted intact from America to Iraq. And that system and that culture is one that relies on physical abuse, including rape, as a key means of prisoner control. That story has been a neglected scandal here at home for far too long -- and now the scandal has erupted in Iraq, as well.

As I said in my earlier post about U.S. prisons, it is long past time for people to wake up and face the truth about all this. It is a national disgrace of enormous proportions that the U.S. part of this story has been neglected for so long. Thus, inadvertent though it obviously was (in terms of drawing attention to these matters), the fact that these ghastly practices have now been carried into Iraq may finally shed some light on them.

There is one other aspect of this story that deserves extended attention: the use, both here and in Iraq, of humiliation based in the abhorrence of homosexuality. It is not true, as so many would prefer to believe, that our forces in Iraq use this particular means of humiliation only because of certain Muslim views of homosexuality. Remember the telling detail from the story excerpted above: "male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation." This practice in Phoenix has nothing to do with Muslim beliefs.

Such means of humiliation, which are reported with great regularity here in the United States (if one cares to read about them), arise out of our own culture's view of homosexuality: that it is disgusting, that it represents "weakness" in some unspecified way, and that it represents a failure of "masculinity." These views then serve as the basis for particularly heinous acts of humiliation, which serve to "break" the prisoner by making him appear to be one of the supposedly disgusting and "weak" homosexuals, whether or not he is in fact.

I will discuss these particular issues further, in a separate entry.

The Deep Rot and Corruption in Our Nation's Soul

2004-05-07T14:15:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to think that the story of the abuses perpetrated upon Iraqi prisoners and, just as significantly, the reaction to that story on the part of many in the administration and among the administration's defenders, are revealing a phenomenon of much deeper and greater significance: a profoundly disturbing rot and corruption that lies all too close to the soul of America. These thoughts are still taking shape in my mind, but I will be writing much more about this very soon.

The issues I am thinking about have a great deal to do with "The Roots of Horror," and the dynamics I have discussed in connection with events in Iraq. They also concern the fact that the Iraqi abuses mirror in many ways behaviors and practices that have been common, condoned and encouraged in prisons here in the United States for many decades, as I documented just yesterday. In connection with that post, a reader points out to me in an email that it is easy to overstate the importance of the 2003 federal law about prisoner rape, since it does not apply to non-federal jails and prisons. As noted in this article from 2001, rape is a commonplace in state prison systems -- and certain public officials seem to rejoice in that fact:

Here's what California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said at a press conference about Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth Lay: "I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey."'

Here's why Lockyer should be removed from his office of public trust: First, because as the chief law enforcement officer of the largest state in the nation, he not only has admitted that rape is a regular feature of the state's prison system, but also that he considers rape a part of the punishment he can inflict on others.

Second, because he has publicly stated that he would like to personally arrange the rape of a Texas businessman who has not even been charged with any illegal behavior.

Lockyer's remarks reveal him to be an authoritarian thug, someone wholly unsuited to holding an office of public trust.

But his remarks do have one positive merit: They tell us what criminal penalties really entail.

Contrary to some depictions of prisons as country clubs, they are violent and terrible places. More and more politicians propose criminal sanctions for more and more alleged misdeeds, and as a result ever more kinds of behavior are sanctioned by criminal penalties, perhaps now even selling electricity. Those found guilty of such crimes are put into cages, where they are deprived of their liberty and dignity and, as Lockyer so clearly acknowledged, raped and brutalized. What's worse, Lockyer has indicated that he believes that rape is an appropriate part of the system of punishments he administers. ...

So apparently singling out a man for a heinous threat is OK because he's the chairman of the world's largest energy trading company. That's according to the man who, as a state senator, sponsored California's 1984 hate-crimes law. Evidently the crusader against intimidation on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation feels no hesitation at all about intimidating someone and threatening him with the brutal use of physical force simply because he heads the world's largest energy trading company.

The most disturbing question is the one posed at the end of this column:

An Enron spokesman said that Lockyer's chilling stated desire to arrange the rape of Lay does not merit a response. The spokesman is wrong. Lockyer's remarks merit public disgrace and removal from office. After all, rape is not a form of legal justice in America-- is it?

The horrifying fact is that it appears that rape often is "a form of legal justice in America."

In a recent post, I included this firsthand testimony about a brief stay in New Jersey's prison system:

Having spent some time in a New Jersey jail before a false accusation against me was dismissed, I can tell you that the abuses shown in the Iraq photographs are common in many jails and prisons in the United States. I'd bet some of the reservists are jail and prison guards in the US in civilian life. They just did what jail guards in New Jersey normally do on the job. The only difference is that no one is ever allowed to bring a camera into a New Jersey jail.

The reader who alerted me to the Cato article about Lockyer says the following about Chip Frederick, one of the Americans at the center of the Iraqi prisoner story. Frederick had worked as a senior corrections officer at a medium security prison in Virginia. My reader says:

No wonder Frederick complains that he received no guidance from his superiors, thus leading him to think that he was just supposed to do what he normally does when working his civilian job as a guard in a State Prison.

How was he to know that Iraqis, unlike Americans, are supposed to have rights?

Think about that for a while. A long, long while.

Also in this connection, please note this equally disturbing op-ed in The New York Times, "My Life As a Guard." Here are a few excerpts:

It is a heady thing to have prisoners at your mercy. Prison officials in the United States often say that the job involves "care, custody and control." In New York, where I worked as a prison guard for almost a year in the late 1990's, training focuses mainly on the final element — control — but the care and custody are in some ways more crucial. Because therein lies the true test of the officer, the system and indeed the nation: how will you treat those who are helpless before you?

President Bush has said that "the practices that took place in that prison are abhorrent and they don't represent America." How, then, does such abuse happen?

Prison work is easier if you don't get too personal with the prisoners, don't empathize with them too much. Soldiering is probably the same: it's easier to fight the enemy if he is faceless, less than human. A military prison, then, has the potential to be the most heartless of worlds. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Third Geneva Convention, revised in 1949, addresses the rights of prisoners of war; the horrors of World War II were the great stimulus to the writing of the convention. The nations of the world, including America, were nearly unanimous that such atrocities should never be allowed to be visited upon anybody again, anywhere.

But here we see the faces of the American torturers of wartime prisoners — and they seem to be having a pretty good time. And the victims of this torture, it should not surprise us, are hooded and . . . faceless. ...

In the prison where I worked (and in most prisons, I suspect), there are two sets of rules. There are the official rules, which you learn during training and carry in a booklet in your pocket. And then there are the real rules — the knowing what you can and cannot get away with. ...

In a military prison during a time of war, it may be little harder to divine exactly who is in charge, and what's likely to happen if something goes wrong — if a prisoner dies during interrogation, for example. The discredited former commander of Abu Ghraib, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, has said that while the soldiers in the photos were technically under her command, military intelligence effectively ran the unit where the abuse took place.

What we do know about the treatment of prisoners in this "war on terror" (of which Iraq, we are told, is a part), is that the Geneva Conventions don't always apply — the prison at Guantánamo Bay, filled with hundreds of "enemy combatants" (who are not afforded the protections of P.O.W.'s) being Exhibit No. 1. Is Guantánamo different from Abu Ghraib? The administration would say yes. Then again, the new head of Abu Ghraib, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, was in charge of the interrogations at Guantánamo until just recently.

President Bush may indeed have felt "deep disgust" upon seeing these torture photos. Then again, the man who sets the tone for the entire war effort has never claimed to be the prisoner-protection president.

A deep rot has infected our country. In part, it grows out of the very old idea of "American exceptionalism" -- the idea that America is set above all other nations, and that we therefore have special entitlements. In other words: the rules that apply to others do not apply to us.

Our President obviously subscribes to this view completely. Indeed, it is the very basis of his preemptive foreign policy. We are the strongest nation in the world militarily -- and we therefore get to choose which nations are behaving in a manner acceptable to us, and which are not. And if they are not...well, then you get Iraq, even when Iraq constituted no serious threat to our national security.

The truly awful nature of this tragedy is that, once and in terms of its original founding principles, the United States was genuinely exceptional, in its recognition of individual rights and the sacred, central place that individual rights had in its most basic political structures. But those principles began eroding well over a century ago. And now, we are seeing the concentration of power in the New Fascist structure of society: the combining of semi-"private" businesses with government into one undifferentiated whole, where it is impossible to tell where the private sphere ends and the public sphere begins.

It is crucial to note that, as long as the original founding principles of this country dominated, we did not engage in foreign wars and occupations. But then, as those principles slowly began to crumble, we embarked upon an unending series of wars and occupations, which have continued with only brief interruptions since they began at the very end of the nineteenth century.

The America of today bears very little resemblance to the America that existed at its founding, or that continued for about a century after that. I am not referring to the obvious, superficial changes, in population growth, or in technological advances and the like. The deepest changes that have occurred reveal an American psychology that I think would have horrified the founders, and that would have been deeply alien to their own world outlook. This new psychology would have horrified the founders in its love of power for power's sake, in the reverence granted to military strength, and in the adulation of our ability to impose our "vision" on other countries and, in time, on the entire world, by means of brute military force.

This kind of role for the United States was hardly what our founders had in mind. And it leads to behavior -- both on the individual and the national level -- that is deeply repellent and horrifying. It should be noted that these behaviors are perfect mirror images of each other: what is sanctioned on the individual level becomes the foundation for national policy. The fact that certain kinds of behavior appear not to be repellent and horrifying to so many -- to all those people who make excuses for or attempt to minimize the Iraq story in a manner which ought to be deeply embarrassing to any genuinely civilized person -- is one of the most disturbing and revealing aspects of this phenomenon.