The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History (46 page)

I
f this book is to amount to anything more than a litany of horror and human degradation we must try to answer the basic question: what kind of mentality does it take to willingly inflict, or vicariously enjoy, the suffering of other human beings? We saw in Chapter 4 of Section II (Reforms of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) that over the course of a century or more, governments and individuals made valiant efforts to rectify the worst aspects of interrogation, punishment and the penal system. This seems only reasonable as, since the time of Classical Greece, there were thinking people who understood that torture, at least as a means of extracting reliable information, simply does not work. Almost anyone will confess to anything in an effort to ameliorate the pain.

Tragically, since the end of the Second World War the movement toward reform has not only slowed, but in many cases has actually reversed. Precisely to what degree the use of torture has increased is difficult to determine. In many cases the abuse of prisoners may not have increased but we are now more aware of it than we were in times past. In other instances there has been a demonstrable return to the ‘bad old days’. Without doubt there are nations where the institution of torture is as pervasive as it was four or five centuries ago. In much of the Middle East and South East Asia thieves still have their hands cut off, and serious crimes still bring about beheadings, many of which continue to be carried out in public ceremonies reminiscent of the guillotining of Revolutionary France or the hangings at London’s Tyburn Tree. According to Amnesty International, as late as the 1970s at least sixty countries continued to use severe corporal punishment as a means of dealing with crimes both large and small. In 1991, Barbados actually brought back the cat-o-nine tails as a means of punishing drug dealers.

For any nation, or group of people, to engage in the use of torture, a far more complex set of circumstances are required than the cruel whim of a dictator. Both the police and military must at least give their tacit consent, if not their full cooperation; the entire judiciary system must accept torture as useful and acceptable and, to some greater or lesser degree, depending upon how totalitarian the regime is, so must the people. In some cases this consent comes in the form of openly embracing torture while in others it takes the form of public denial that such goings-on take place while privately sanctioning them or dismissing the practice with a tacit acceptance. This last was the case in medieval and renaissance England, in Soviet era Russia and remains so in the United States and dozens of other countries to this day. If your immediate reaction is to deny that torture still takes place, particularly in seemingly civilised Western nations, consider the report released by Amnesty International on Wednesday, 23 May 2007. In its report AI concluded that the world is experiencing ‘a human rights meltdown’. ‘The politics of fear’, the report said, ‘are fuelling a downward spiral of human rights abuses … The “war on terror” and the war in Iraq, with their catalogue of human rights abuses have created deep divisions that cast a shadow on international relations. The US administration is treating the world as one giant battlefield for its war on terror.’

If one asks why torture continues to exist and is still being practiced by so-called civilised nations, the answer remains much the same as it was stated in Section I of this book: weak, insecure, paranoid leaders feel safer if they can identify, isolate and destroy one or more ‘enemy conspiracies’. Once this enemy (for the Spanish Inquisition it was heretics; for the Puritans of Salem, Massachusetts it was witches; for Joseph McCarthy it was communists; for Ronald Reagan it was ‘the evil empire’; for George Bush it was ‘the axis of evil’) has been identified, its agents can be rounded up and forced to confess their crimes and the names of their confederates. The more forced and public the confessions are, the better their propaganda value. This is why Middle East terrorists force their own victims to confess in front of video cameras. Hence the witch hunts begin.

This is not to deny that the world is under threat by a more than ample number of lunatics. We are up to our eyeballs in terrorists, political fanatics, fundamentalist zealots and dangerous people of every kind imaginable. But the truth is not as simple as governments would like us to believe – the conspiracies, if they actually exist, may not be nearly as organised or pervasive as we are told to believe. But governments and military leaders need to find simple, clean-cut solutions to easily identifiable problems. The problem as they see it, or at least as they like to sell it to the public, is that there is some great conspiracy out to destroy civilisation as we know it and all we have to do is find its members and crush them. It is on such neat, well-organised assumptions that Rome persecuted Christians, the Inquisition burned heretics and Hitler sent Jews to the gas chambers. The US, Great Britain and their allies use the same justification as the basis for the ‘War on Terrorism’. Of course, to be able to go after the bad guys (and spend the endless amounts of money required to do so) the governments and the military must convince their people (the voters who keep them in office) that there is a very real, identifiable, danger and that only Big Brother knows how to make the monster go away. Such convincing requires a major propaganda effort.

The first step in convincing an entire country that someone is out to get them is by identifying who that ‘someone’ is. Heretics must be identified and publicly humiliated, or tortured, into confessing their sins. Sometimes government gets a lot of help in this process. After pointing the finger at Islamic extremists, particularly those in Iraq, since the day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the biggest boost they could have asked for came on 11 September 2001, when a group of crazed terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As real as the threat from terrorists may be, it does not alter the fact that governments must identify the bogey man hiding in the closet, and it really doesn’t matter who the bogey man is or whether or not he presents any real danger. It would seem rather unlikely that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 but that made no difference to the US propaganda machine. Before the Islamic extremists it was the Soviet Union, before them it was the Nazis and before them it was the Unions. In every case, members of this vast conspiracy were arrested and paraded before the public like penitents at one of the Spanish Inquisition’s
auto-de-fes.
It is this turning of an otherwise invisible conspiracy into a tangible (but no longer acceptably human) object of ridicule that turns abstract fear into a very real object of hate and makes torture acceptable as official government policy.

Inevitably, to turn fear and paranoia into an institutionalised policy of torture, the enemy must be carefully chosen in such a way that they appear demonstrably unlike the rest of us. In medieval France, Spain and Germany it was Jews and heretics; in Hitler’s Germany it was Jews, communists, Poles and Russians; in Stalin’s Soviet Union it was Western Imperialists and counter-revolutionaries. In every case, a specific group was identified and demonised before the rack, burning post, gas chamber and firing squad were brought into action. Once a few heretics (or communists, or Jews, or terrorists) had been denounced as enemies of both God and man – that is to say, they no longer appeared to be quite human – then torturing them no longer seemed quite so horrible; in fact, it became everyone’s duty to support the just punishment of such ‘evil beings’. For an extended examination of just this kind of paranoia at work, read
Mein Kampf
, Adolf Hitler’s political polemic and the book partially responsible for bringing him to power. If this is too much for you to bear, we offer the following extract from a speech by US Senator Joseph McCarthy, the man who started America’s communist witch hunts in the early 1950s.

    How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall forever be deserving of the maledictions of all honest men …

Thanks to Senator McCarthy, and those who believed his rhetoric, hundreds of innocent men and women (from cleaning ladies to government clerks and movie stars) lost their jobs and were forever viewed with suspicion. Many went to prison and at least two (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) were sent to the electric chair. Like all despots, McCarthy insisted that all he was doing was defending his country and helping to make it safe. Hitler said exactly the same thing, so did Thomas de Torquemada and dozens of others from the beginning of time until the present day. Inherent in any such propaganda campaign is the necessity for the leader to convince his people that the hunting down and torture of members of this ‘invisible conspiracy’ is the only acceptable, patriotic thing to do. Just as in the Middle Ages, those who continue to deny the existence of witches risk being branded a witch themselves.

Convincing the majority of the population that there is a ‘clear and present danger’ is always easier during times of political or economic distress. When things are bad, people are already looking for someone to blame their problems on and when the government hands them a scapegoat on a platter they are all too willing to accept it so long as it is: a) simple to understand and, b) the victim doesn’t seem too much like one of their own family. Here too, propaganda plays a big part. During the Cold War, all Russians were portrayed in the Western media as being fat, dumpy and dressed in impossibly baggy, rumpled grey suits. How odd, then, that once the Cold War ended 200 million Russians instantly transformed themselves to look just like the rest of us.

Once the ‘enemy’ has been identified and the public has been convinced that they are not only an immediate threat to the survival of civilisation but are also, somehow, less than human, the single step from simmering hatred to institutionalised torture will inevitably be taken. When the former Yugoslavia descended into a self-devouring civil war in the late 1980s and early 1990s each side defined ‘the enemy’ by their religion. Christian and Islamic paramilitary groups spent nearly a decade destroying what had been by far the most stable and prosperous country in the old Communist Block. Each side, convinced that the other was to blame for whatever woes beset them, engaged in an orgy of beatings, rapes, murders, electric shock torture, physically damaging bondage, and heaven only knows what else. Since the 1960s similar situations of institutionalised torture have occurred in Vietnam, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Chile, Uganda, Malaysia, Iran, Iraq, Argentina, Sudan, Burundi and China. Sometimes the governments inflicted the madness on their own people – notably in Zimbabwe, Chile, Uganda and China – and other times it has been inflicted by invading powers as it was in Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, Iraq.