The TorTurers and Their Public / lingis

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The Torturers and Their Public

Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

1945, pictures of Auschwitz. Photographs of naked bodies piled up on top one another. During the war, the conflict was defined as a conflict of ideologiesNazi, Fascist, Democratic, and Socialist. After the publication of these pictures, Germany, land of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Heisenberg, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, became the land of death camps. 1972, Vietnam. Photograph of a nine-year-old girl running naked, screaming, burning with napalm. This picture is what remains of the war. The strategic importance of the Indochinese peninsula, of containing the spread of Soviet and Chinese Communism, the domino theorythis discourse has been forgotten. 2004, Abu Ghraib. Photographs of naked bodies piled up on top of one another. Derisive laughter of the torturers. Laughter of Spc. Sabrina Harman, her head bent next to the crushed head of a captive bludgeoned to death in Abu Ghraib prison. For Muslims from Morocco to Mindanao, from South Africa to Uzbekistan, the rhetoric of liberation collapses before these pictures. For the judgment of public opinion across the world, the reality of the American occupation of Iraq is defined by these pictures. Governments that practiced torture of prisonersCzarist Russia, Chile, Argentina, France in Algeriado not make public the practice of state torture; people are just disappeared. When the German public, after the war, came to know, their representatives acted to institutionally ban torture, and capital punishment too. No pictures have more insistently been propagated by the media than the pictures of Abu Ghraib; every American saw themand saw the subsequent revelations from Guantnamo, Bagram, Camps Bucca, Mercury, and Tiger and read reports from the far-flung Gulag of secret American prison camps. But for the American public they in the end provoked no question affecting national policy. In the presidential elections John Kerry made no allusion to them, and the public reelected, with a significant majority, George W. Bush, who promptly elevated Alberto Gonzales, who had defined the policy of state torture of captives, to the post of Attorney General. In 2004, a group of the nations top legal expertsAlan Dershowitz of Harvard, Jean Elshtain of the University of
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Chicago, Oren Gross of Minnesota, Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, and Richard Posner of the University of Chicago Law School, in a collective volume entitled Torture, sought for ways to institutionalize torture in the war on terror. From earliest times war has been a prime topic of artdepicted in epics such as the Mahabharata, the Iliad, the Jewish Bible, and in architectural monuments such as Angkor Wat, Chichen-Itz, and the cathedral of Santiago de Campostela celebrating the defeat of the Moors in Spain and the Spanish conquest of South America. This art depicted the ruler as sublime in himself, absorbing into his destiny the lives of nameless multitudes. It depicted the slaughter of armies and populations turning into golden radiance about the victorious ruler. High art worked to justify the slaughter of war, even when the campaign was not victorious, by depicting these deaths as redeemed in the heaven above by the anointed lord. Such are martyrs immediately received into the arms of God, such is the Christian Son of God who laid down his life for the salvation of men, and such are those fallen in battle. After the French Revolution, it is the nation that assumes the functions of God; the blood of those who die in war pulses through the nation and they live on in its immortality and glory. Francisco de Goyas set of 80 etchings, Disasters of War, finished in 1808 but not published until 1863, 49 years after the end of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, is the first great work of contemporary art. They depict close-up men cornered and disarmed and then castrated and dismembered, the butchering of the infirm and aged unable to fight or flee, the mutilation and slaughter of children. The great causes of the warthe Napoleonic armies heralding the Enlightenment advancing into the darkness and superstition of rural Spain, the resistance of the indigenous people and its loyalties, traditions, and valuesare invisible; soldiers, peasants, women, children tear at one another like so many rabid dogs. Goya depicts mutilated corpses covered with flies and picked at by vultures under dark skies, where there is no god above to witness, pity, and redeem so much agony, so many deaths. The classical art of wars and battlefields depicted, in and through the spectacle of mass slaughter, a transcendent sphere of the goodthey invoked the victorious Alexander, Charlemagne, or Joan of Arc absorbing into himself or herself the agony and death of the brave and redeeming them with his or her glory, or else invoked a transcendent God pitying, honoring, and redeeming those fallen in battle. With Goya both the glorious Napoleon and the glorious King of Spain have disappeared; God

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has disappeared. Their place is taken by the viewer, who in his horror and disgust, feels rising from his depths his own core moral instincts, an immanent sphere of the good. Thus, after having been first suppressed and not published until thirty-five years after his death, Goyas Disasters of War, depicting nothing but rabid and pointless slaughter, now rose to displace classical art to be proclaimed the great and essential humanist art of our time. Although Goyas pictures of war have been recognized as truthful to the point that they have virtually put an end to the classical art that glorified and redeemed agony and death in war, they had no effect on the forces that drive Europeans to war, to the wars in which they were to twice embroil most of the world. Does this make us think that humanist art has no power to affect the course of human conductor does it make us think that the humanist sentiments it provokesthe conviction of a core moral integrity in usactually functions to serve the war industry in our times? Jake and Dinos Chapman spoke of the secret pleasure of Goya barely concealed in his set of etchings of the horrors of war drawn with such artistic perfection. In the year 2000 they purchased for 50,000 pounds sterling a set of Goyas etchings, and painted grinning clown and puppydog faces over the faces Goya had depicted stricken with heart-wrenching pathos. By desecrating Goyas work, the art desperately called humanist in our barbarous age, the Chapmans denounce the publics conviction of their own core moral instincts as the principle obstacle to the lucid analysis of the state and the military juggernaut. Ethics henceforth would have to undertake an extensive analysis of the aims of nation-states and of the internal dialectics of military technology. The media had itself suppressed the Abu Ghraib torture photographs for two weeks after they received them; now every news hour projected them again and againthe media and the public could not have enough of them. These photographs do not depict the victorious United States War President as absorbing into his destiny the glorious deeds of his troops. What dominates in the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib and the recent FBI report of practices at Guantnamo was the bizarre sexual degradation of the captives. The photographs feature men forced into homosexual acts and piled up naked penis upon buttocks in a grotesque forced homosexual orgy before the gleeful smirks of young American women. In these photographs there is no sign of the proclaimed cause of the warthe liberation and democratization of Iraq, and, although the picture of the hooded captive with arms outstretched invokes the Spanish Inquisition, there is here no evidence of a transcendent God guiding the

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hands of the torturers. His place is taken by the viewer. Viewers outside of the United States judged the acts depicted: they took them to exhibit the cause of liberation and democratization as lies, following upon the lies that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying Great Britain within 45 minutes. But viewers in the United States felt repugnance and disgust, felt rising from their depths their own core moral instincts, an immanent sphere of the good. The insistent projection of the photographs to the American public were contrived to provoke intense feelings of revulsion. President Bush gave the watchword: Americans view these images with disgust and repugnance. The intensity of disgust and repugnance across the land functioned as evidence, in each viewer, of his or her own core decency, his or her instinctual moral integrity. The aroused feeling of their own core moral integrity convinced them that, apart from these few perverts, the 150,000 National Guardsmen and enlisted servicemen and women there are brave, generous, idealistic liberatorsSenator Lieberman even insisted: kind. The now approved media broadcast of the photographs would serve the American invasion. In his first public statement after the release of the photographs, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared: Now the world will see American Justice. The army itself was charged with the investigation and with punishing these few of its troops for violation of its own code of conduct. The public was reassured of the irreproachable integrity of the army, whose procedures would now be installed in the interim Iraq government, for the public trial of Saddam Hussein, immediately arraigned. The photographs had functioned to convince the American public of their intrinsic righteousness, and the intrinsic righteousness of a collective action taken in their name by citizens like themselves. Immediately after the attack of 9/11 on the control centers of American military and economic power, the American War President had identified the attackers as irrationally motivated by pure evil, and, by contrast, the American population as good. But launching, from Florida, long-range high-altitude bombers to reduce Afghanistan to rubble was too obviously a massive outburst of revenge to convince the Americans of their intrinsic goodness. It was the photographs, the disgust and revulsion they aroused, that made their intrinsic goodness evident to them. They returned President Bush to office by a majority, seeing in him one like themselves.