The snark about whether erstwhile torture advocates want to torture terrorist Scott Roeder is legitimate snark, of course, but it is sometimes worth drawing out into the open what lies underneath the apparent hypocrisy. Remember this famous passage from Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, in which James Wormold (who’s British) is chatting with Captain Segura (who’s Cuban)?
“Did you torture him?”
Captain Segura laughed. “No. He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.”…
“Who does?”
“The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal…. One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognise class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.”
“We’re not shocked by that any longer.”
“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.” (pp. 164-165 in the collected edition)
What Greene, and Segura, are wittily gliding over here is that the torturable class consists almost entirely of poor people, most of them with brown or yellow skins. Not the citizens of welfare states. Which raises the question, what about Americans? We don’t exactly have a welfare state, do we. And apparently some of us are torturable, to those who believe in torture. Just not ones who look like Scott Roeder or James von Brunn.
31 comments
June 11, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Jason B.
You know what pisses me off more than finding out my colleagues have read books I wish I had? Finding out that experts in other fields have read books I wish I had.
Hulk smash.
June 11, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Martha Bridegam
There have always been torturable classes in the United States. See the cases cited in Footnote Six of Miranda or any memoir of the Palmer Raids.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=384&invol=436#f6
June 11, 2009 at 8:16 pm
bitchphd
It’s been a while since I read Greene. But yes.
(Also note that we have an awful lot of people in isolation, sometimes for years, in prison here. Not to mention the rape thing. Of course it’s also true that the general support for “harsh detention policies” relies pretty heavily on racism.)
June 11, 2009 at 8:16 pm
shadowcook
Recently, I happened to watch for the 2nd time in 20 years the film version with Alec Guiness and Noël Coward. The incomparable Ernie Kovacs as Captain Segura delivered the little speech Eric provided. I think the movie stands up to the test of time (how could a film directed by Carol Reed fail?) not least because of the washroom scenes with Coward and Guiness.
June 11, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Vance
I had forgotten that Bill Lockyer’s infamous joke about prison rape referred to Ken Lay. Seen in the light of this post, the force of the joke must have lain in consigning such a member of the élite to the torturable class.
June 11, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Luisa
Pinochet’s thugs in Chile tortured and/or disappeared thousands of members of the middle class. The current president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, and her parents were among those arrested and tortured; her father died in custody. During the Dirty War in Argentina some 30,000 were arrested and murdered by the armed forces, including many middle-class students. Editor/publisher Jacobo Timerman [http://www.creators.com/opinion/molly-ivins/molly-ivins-november-14-1999-11-14.html] wrote about his arrest and torture by the military in Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number [http://www.amazon.com/Prisoner-without-Name-Number-Americas/dp/0299182444/ref=sr_1_1/175-5747302-5118940?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244776099&sr=1-1].
Dunno if you saw that Republican pol [in a Chris Matthews clip, IIRC] defending the Bush/Cheney “enhanced interrogations” by pointing out that a doctor was always present. A doctor was present when Timerman was tortured, for crissakes.
And the middle-class victims in Chile and Argentina were white. [A woman I know, an immigrant from Argentina, was recognized as "Latina of the Year" by some group or another here in SoCal and when her father heard about the award, he got very red in the face and shouted [in Spanish, the only language he knows], “We’re not latinos – we’re German!”
June 11, 2009 at 10:40 pm
adamhenne
This is what Agamben is on about, right? Not so much the power to kill (or torture), but the power to make killable (or torturable).
June 12, 2009 at 1:27 am
David Weman
“wittily gliding over”?
June 12, 2009 at 7:19 am
Ahistoricality
When I saw the title and first few lines of the post, I actually thought you were going to talk about the extent to which we’ve sacrificed dignity and restraint — aka ‘class’ — in the age of instant political shitstorms.
June 12, 2009 at 7:25 am
Anderson
As Martha points out, yeah, American police have tortured pretty much at will for quite a while. With scarcely any reprisal, as John Conroy discusses in his excellent, depressing book (w/ special focus on Chicago).
June 12, 2009 at 8:41 am
kid bitzer
but if not all classes are torturable, whereas police torture pretty much at will, then that suggests that not all classes are treated the same way by the police.
but that’s not possible.
more seriously: there are deep class issues involved with the police relations to the populace. roughly speaking, people like me hire the police to protect people like me from people like *them*.
for the one class, the police are employees and servants. for the other class, police are predators and oppressors.
the fact that only certain classes are “police-able” as it were also shows up in fiction. isn’t it a trope in polite british crime novels that poirot reveals that lord oldblood is the killer, and at the end of the scene he gives lord oldblood a revolver with which to do the decent thing, i.e. off himself, because, after all, we do not want to involve the police. that would be so déclassé.
June 12, 2009 at 8:57 am
Mikhail Emelianov
I second the Agamben reference here, it seems that those who are torturable aren’t necessarily constituting a class in traditional sense but certainly a class in relation to the legal arrangement that allows torture (“enhanced interrogation technics) with a doctor present and an overall endorsement by whoever is in charge.
June 12, 2009 at 9:37 am
drip
When you can taser a 72 year old woman during a routine traffic stop, the class of torturable people has undergone some shocking changes.
June 12, 2009 at 9:46 am
Martha Bridegam
In *The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism*, Naomi Klein suggests Chile 1973 represented one of the early, crude experiments in using intentionally appalling “shocks” to demoralize a population so it would accept the literally deadly economic injustices of privatization. (People do die from poverty and from the loss of public services.) She notes that subsequent “shocks” in places like Russia and New Orleans combined less (though some) direct violence with more economic atrocity in a mixture that has proven more acceptable to the international community.
It sounds like one of the major international lessons taken from Chile is that making the middle class torturable does effectively silence activism, but it’s still imprudent because it gets noticed too widely.
Here, though, as Mikhail notes, an accusation of sufficiently dastardly crime (true or not) is an effective declassing mechanism.
June 12, 2009 at 11:34 am
Chris
I actually thought you were going to talk about the extent to which we’ve sacrificed dignity and restraint — aka ‘class’ — in the age of instant political shitstorms.
And what does it say about our society that the word for dignity and civilized behavior *literally means* not being one of Those People? (Actually, not just one word but several – gentlemanly, ladylike, well-bred… that last making it explicit that it’s a hereditary class, not mere money.)
(“Christian” used to be used the same way, but is now deprecated for now-obvious reasons. I don’t know if “mighty white of you” was ever actually used non-ironically.)
June 12, 2009 at 1:19 pm
kid bitzer
“I don’t know if “mighty white of you” was ever actually used non-ironically.”
yup. i have heard it so used. (many decades ago, by virginians and north carolinians. it’s true that the context might be somewhat jocular, but they intended a sincere compliment, and the sincerity of the compliment was based on their belief that the attributes alluded to in this way–e.g. honesty, moral rectitude, generosity and largeness of spirit–were the nearly exclusive property of the white race.)
June 12, 2009 at 1:23 pm
eric
It has definitely been used non-ironically.
June 12, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Vance
“You’re on the square! You were white to me that time in Philly! Paddy always said you were one white dick! …”
(Hammett, “The Big Knockover”)
June 12, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Sir Gnome
Another oblique interjection:
The murky, structuralist underbelly of race and physical violence reminds me of a class discussion a few years ago in a Literature of the American West course. It was a discussion on racial identity and violence in the American West, within the context of the racial violence portrayed in Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” (McCarthy’s narrative toned-down the violence upon which its narrative was historically-based). The prof, Alex Kuo, pointed out that during WWII, G.I.’s in Europe would take small trinkets from dead, Anglo, Axis soldiers: dog tags, knives, bayonets, et cetera. In the Pacific Theater, as later in Vietnam, however, G.I.’s took physical body parts: scalps, ears, fingers, teeth… Within Anglo borders, the objects of signification (Nazi trinkets) were emblematic, fraternal, memorial, and historic; outside those borders, the objects of signification become carnal, ahistoric, primal. Ugh…
June 12, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Ahistoricality
Those are two very different kinds of trophies, but two significant differences come to mind: the first is the difference between a battlefield trophy and a souvenier; the second is the difference between a culture with a huge investment in material culture and visual signifiers and a culture whose militarism is improvised and whose equipment is largely undistinguished.
I’m not convinced, that is to say, that the WWII-Vietnam comparison is effective proof. There is, however, some evidence that the same difference existed in the European v. Pacific theaters….
June 13, 2009 at 7:35 am
Cruss
(McCarthy’s narrative toned-down the violence upon which its narrative was historically-based)
Is this even possible?
June 14, 2009 at 11:43 am
Adam Henne
Chile, torture, class, and Agamben make for some interesting combinations. As noted, Chile was kind of a laboratory for the neoliberal governmentality thing that combined radical privitization with authoritarian rule, hence making kidnapping and torture a necessary part of social life. It’s also the most class-conscious place I’ve ever been; Chilean Spanish has literally hundreds of idioms for subtle gradations of class identity. Everyone in any social situation is located on that spectrum from bum to snob, which can vary depending on an infinite number of secondary variables. This social trait definitely played a role in the impunity of the military dictatorship, and the lack of accountability afterward. Those disappeared and tortured could be either low-class bums, or snobby elitists, but in either case effectively othered enough to legitimate the violence.
June 14, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Adam Henne
Oh wait, and the Agamben part! The rationalization of state violence worked in two directions in Chile (and still does). The people say, “Well, those guys who were kidnapped were dirty bums/elite snobs, so they probably deserved it.” The dictatorship says, “This is a state of emergency; communist rebels are everywhere and we must act swiftly.” The Pinochet gov’t declared something like 14 separate states of emergency with the attendant “special powers.” So the state/sovereign that can declare itself the exception to the rule of its own law has a very clear Agamben-esque character that’s neatly illustrated in the Chilean case. Not like here in the US.
June 15, 2009 at 5:22 am
dave
“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
But you knew that, right?
June 15, 2009 at 6:29 am
ajay
The prof, Alex Kuo, pointed out that during WWII, G.I.’s in Europe would take small trinkets from dead, Anglo, Axis soldiers: dog tags, knives, bayonets, et cetera. In the Pacific Theater, as later in Vietnam, however, G.I.’s took physical body parts: scalps, ears, fingers, teeth…
Sir Gnome, Ahis: Kuo is wrong. GIs also took equipment trophies in the Pacific. Officers’ swords, hachimaki headbands and Rising Sun flags were particularly prized. They also took body parts as trophies from German soldiers. (Google “GIs German trophies”).
Ahis: if the description here -
“the difference between a culture with a huge investment in material culture and visual signifiers and a culture whose militarism is improvised and whose equipment is largely undistinguished”
- is meant to be a description of Imperial Japan, then you are off your rocker.
June 15, 2009 at 9:50 am
Sir Gnome
@ Ajay-
Kuo’s assertion was perhaps a bit off-hand, as it was intended more for the historical point about the act of troping the physical bodies of racial minorities or foreign “others” for social, economic, or political gain. Historically, the same applies to slavery, Japanese internment (contrasted to German internment, or lack thereof), and perhaps even the death penalty. I still think he is more or less correct, despite the fact that war assumes that such acts could be committed in any context. In terms of McCarthy’s narrative, the point is to subvert the idyllic notion that such expressive-violence, while directed at specific groups, is *not* universal or otherwise not an embedded part of our national origins.
June 15, 2009 at 10:21 am
Sir Gnome
Oops:
Supposed to be “Japanese-American internment” and “German-American internment”. That mistake has a significance of its own.
June 16, 2009 at 2:57 am
ajay
Well, his wider thesis may or may not be correct, but the example he cites as evidence – that US soldiers took equipment as trophies from Germans, but body parts as trophies from Japanese – is wrong. And if the accuracy or otherwise of his evidence doesn’t really make a difference to whether you believe his thesis, then it raises the question of why he needed to bother to give evidence at all, rather than simply presenting a short list of unproven assertions, receiving universal agreement, and then breaking early for lunch.
If he simply wanted to make the point that “GIs took body parts as trophies”, he would have been accurate.
June 16, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Sir Gnome
@ Ajay
Re:A defense of Professor Kuo against glib quips:
Weingartner, James J. ‘Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941-1945.’ University of California Press, 1992
-”To a much greater extent than Germans (and certainly Italians), Japanese became dehumanized in the minds of American combatants and civilians, a process facilitated by the greater cultural and physical differences between white Americans and Japanese than between the former and their European foes.” (p.1)
See also:
Dower, John. “War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War.” New York, 1986.
Harrison, Sam. “Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of Remembrance.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, v.12: 826 (2006).
-”Because of this disapproval officials censored, for instance, a photograph of a Japanese soldier’s decapitated head hung on a tree branch, probably by American soldiers, as a warning to others. Censored photographs lend support to the observation of John Dower and other scholars that Americans were far more likely to commit such atrocities against the Japanese than against European foes. In reviewing thousands of censored photographs and tens of thousands of uncensored ones, including some taken by soldiers for their own use, I never have encountered one documenting that American soldiers took as trophies body parts of European soldiers.”
Even has its own wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead
June 16, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Ahistoricality
if the description here – “the difference between a culture with a huge investment in material culture and visual signifiers and a culture whose militarism is improvised and whose equipment is largely undistinguished” – is meant to be a description of Imperial Japan, then you are off your rocker.
No, it was meant to refer to the original comparison: WWII Germany v. Vietnam. Thanks for the conditional, though.
June 17, 2009 at 2:39 am
ajay
In reviewing thousands of censored photographs and tens of thousands of uncensored ones, including some taken by soldiers for their own use, I never have encountered one documenting that American soldiers took as trophies body parts of European soldiers.”
Well, in eight seconds of Google Books search, I came across a book called \”The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians\” (by Chacon & Dye, 2007) which refers (p19) to US soldiers taking ears as trophies from German soldiers in WW1 and British soldiers during the War of Independence. But, I admit, no photographs.
Not to mention the scalping of German soldiers in both World Wars by US troops – but, since this was carried out by Native American GIs, it may not count.
I hope that\’s not too glib for you.