So on to the issue of torture.<\/p>\n
I’ve wrestled and wrestled with the issue; torture is obviously bad, but what is it about torture that is so expressly bad – why is it worse than the death and suffering that comes in war, or in the daily violence police officers do as a part of their jobs?<\/p>\n
In large part, it’s the fact of violence against captives; against the helpless, the unarmed, those incapable of resisting. But that didn’t get to the heart of what cleaves torture as an issue from violence as an issue. And why I – as someone who is decidedly not nonviolent – am so decidedly against and uncomfortable with issues of torture.<\/p>\n
I came to an answer, as I usually do, in an unplanned realization while reading a book.I just read ‘Savage Century: Back to Barbarism’ by Therese Delpech, a French policy wonk and public intellectual. It’s an interesting, depressing book, written in the dense yet breezy style of the French public intellectual – think Ellul – and it is about how thin the veneer of civilization is, and how mistaken we all are for assuming it to be solid, and how at risk we are in the coming decades of that veneer wearing through.<\/p>\n
The history of the last century showed the ease with which historical transformations of unprecedented violence could follow without warning on the heels of the best of times. As in Greek tragedy, crime engendered crime in the house of Europe, which twice set the rest of the world ablaze. From the experience, lessons were drawn for the reconciliation of the European nations. But what is now at stake is Europe’s capacity to assume international responsibilities in a deeply troubled world. And from that point of view, the internal lessons just mentioned are insufficient. The unprecedented historical eruption from which the entire twentieth century arose does not speak only for the madness of Europe and of national passions. It is evidence of a wider adventure concerning humanity as a whole: the sudden appearance of storms whose warning signs on the horizon we Europeans have too long pretended to ignore, storms no one can control once they have been unleashed. When such sudden acceleration of history occurs, it signals the defeat of political action, which can do nothing but run after events until it is swallowed up by them. If Europe has any message to transmit to the world, it is truly this one.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In passing, she recounts the brutality of the Nazis, the Soviets, Mao’s China, and North Korea. <\/p>\n
In some cases, as in China, examination of the past remains taboo. How much attention, for example, has been given to the scenes of cannibalism that took place in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in Guanxi in 1968? A terrifying account of them, barely repeatable stories of horrors, can be found in \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSteles rouges\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 by Zheng Yi. We learn that students sometimes ate their teachers, not in the course of a famine like the one that ravaged Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, but because years of daily brutality had brought about the resurgence of cannibalism as an act of supreme cruelty. The author of the book barely believed the rumors circulating about the villages where instances of cannibalism had occurred. But after collecting many accounts of practices even more terrible than those that had been reported to him – in paroxysmic scenes, some victims were eaten alive – Zheng reached a despairing conclusion: “A people that has incited its children to eat human flesh like savages had no hope for the future!” Worse, the collective madness was not completely devoid of “rationality.” Many bureaucrats climbed the ladder of power by means of such demonstrations of revolutionary faith:<\/p>\n
<\/i>In the modern period, when progressive Chinese men of letters inveighed against of the misdeeds of cruel officials who built their careers on assassinations, they often used this expression: “he does not hesitate to stain the feather in his cap with human blood.” But this expression is not suitable in the case of Wang Wenliu and other cadres in Wuxuan. In fact, to guarantee their success, they were not satisfied with merely killing human beings, they also ate them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
None of those acts would have been possible had it not been for the years of public confessions and public executions in China that twisted moral sense and the concept of justice. Nor would these acts have been possible in the absence of terrible mass pressure, which tolerates no resistance whatsoever.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She is using them as examples of what can happen – of the beast outside the circle of firelight that represents modern civilization – but I realized something else in reading this.<\/p>\n
Those societies could not operate without the level of – to us – insane violence – which maintained and even today in China and North Korea maintains public order.<\/b> The camps were not an aberration in Nazi policy; they
Nazi policy. Nazi society and the Nazi state could not have existed without them. The same truth applies to the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. The state is the Camp; some just live inside and some outside the wire.<\/p>\n So there are societies who exist only because of torture. Torture and the fear of torture – and death, and vanishing into ‘nonperson-ness’ in a distant camp – form the sole legitimizing principles of the society. And the relationship between the citizen whose person is secure from the state is fundamentally different from the relationship of the subject whose person is not.<\/p>\n
We aren’t one of those societies. We never have been, due to the happy accident of English Common Law and the freedom provided by the wilderness.<\/p>\n
And what that means is that we also know what we have to resist becoming. And pushing back on the issue of torture – being sure that we are on the right side of that line – is a damn good way to resist this.<\/p>\n
This isn’t just happy moral talk over a pitcher at the campus pub. While I have no qualms with having our enemies fear us – the reality is that the manner in which we deal with them is watched by those not (yet) our enemies. Who have to decide on whose side to stand.<\/p>\n