Friday, May 28, 2004
Abu Ghraib and the American Mind. posted by Richard Seymour
Explaining why American soldiers tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib is a tricky business. According to Christopher Hitchens, it was a "Prison Mutiny" , which is certainly compatible with the Bush administration's claim that these actions are the disparate, disorganised outrages of an undisciplined minority . (Rumsfeld, if you pursue the link, also stipulates that what took place in Iraq was "abuse, which is technically different from torture".) The immediate reaction of US military officials was that the soldiers were not properly taught the Geneva Convention rules about how to treat war prisoners , "as if," Slavoj Zizek adds, "one has to be taught not to torture and humiliate prisoners!" Martin Amis once observed in Koba the Dread, a frankly dire book about Communism, that "given total power over another, the human being's thoughts turn to torture". I beg to differ, although I do see a certain bleak authenticity in the statement - Amis is nothing if not alive to the possibilities for human evil. But human nature won't explain it for us either.Another reaction, which I think no less credible, is to discuss the torture in terms of authority and obedience , pace Stanley Milgram's infamous experiment. True, there is substantial evidence now to suggest that the soldiers were told to do what they did by Military Intelligence . And if Seymour Hersh is right, the orders originated from on high. However, the difference with Milgram's experiment is obvious enough - Milgram did not encourage his subjects to believe that they were engaging in torture, although the horror of that possibility must have crept up on them as they administered what they thought could be fatal jolts. Moreover, the subjects in Milgram's experiment evinced none of the enthusiasm that the US soldiers did when enacting those spectral scenes.
Another good reason to oppose this line of explanation is that it tails with the miserable excuses being offered up by Lynndie England :
"I guess it just goes with stuff that happens during war time … You know, going in and interrogating, and doing what you're told."
Or indeed Ivan "Chip" Fredericks :
"We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things...like rules and regulations. And it just wasn't happening."
A more likely explanation is that the order to torture elicited enthusiastic responses because of the way American soldiers (and, by logical extension, a good number of Americans) perceive Arabs. Take, for example, the book The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai. This book has been promoted as "one of the great classics of cultural studies", and described by Publisher's Weekly as "admirable", "full of insight" and with "an impressive spread of scholarship" . According to Seymour Hersh's article:
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
This return to the good old days of Orientalism should not amaze anyone in a culture that worries itself about such questions as For Whom the Bell Curves (it curves for thee). In fact, as Zizek notes, those scenes remind one of the "theatre of cruelty" that already pervades much of American cultural life (indeed, "theatre of cruelty" is a felicitous phrase - Antonin Artaud would have made gruelling work of them). He refers to the rituals of bullying at Army bases and high school campuses. So when a former interrogator told Fox News that the torture was no worse than "frat hazing" , he was right in precisely the sense that he did not intend. There are sides of American life which radiate cruelty triumphant - from the prison system to the poverty and squalor of life outside the steel barricades. In America, it is a crime to be poor . In Iraq, it is a crime worthy of electrode torture to complain .
The joy taken in cruelty in imperial nations is not new. Orwell once remarked that England was, very recently, a country in which a gentleman might boast of having kicked his wife to death. Hardy fellows that they were, they also knew how to kick recalcitrant natives to an early grave if they had to. For a large number of American soldiers, there is an erotic pleasure taken in humiliating and hurting Iraqis. Not for the first time, racism, imperialism, and sadism are a combustible but inseparable mix.