°Scars
This, from Michael O’Donnell’s review of Darius Rejali’s Torture and Democracy:
Rejali’s provocative thesis is that most clean tortures were actually born in democracies, especially imperial Britain and France. He persuasively argues that the rise of clean torture was a reaction to transparency and monitoring in democratic states: Torturers could carry on despite public scrutiny as long as they left no scars. Although Rejali does not discuss it, this thesis plays out daily in the American legal system. Immigration courts, for instance, handle thousands of asylum applications every year, and judges usually demand that alleged torture victims produce evidence of scarring or hospitalization. No scars means no torture, and the applicant is sent home.
Why would it be surprising if democracies developed forms of coercion that are designed not to arouse public outrage? Isn’t that a straightforward consequence of the fact that people have a minimal amount of power over the governemnt, so can’t just be, you know, wiped out in a PR disaster?
That’s one point. Another, which I guess reinforces my first impression, would be that actually, democracies aren’t exactly renouned for their wonderful clean forms of torture - france’s colonies are renouned hellholes, with some of the worst forms of torture imaginable. Some of the most grotesque, hideous, demeaning forms of torture ever conceived were developed in the US - but for application in Latin America and SE Asia. Lots of Nazi stuff was in fact recycled through that, and ‘improved on’. The point being that the torture was used in areas where the population was not in a position to exert power over the US. And when the stuff they were doing in El Salvador and Guatemala started to surface in the 80s, it put a lot of pressure on the government.
My guess is that the incredible collapse for support for US intervention after Vietnam, and even more so after the 1980s solidarity movements with LatAm, it was going to be hard for them to start cutting people’s tongues out at guantanamo. But much of the stuff that they do now is absolutely grotesque.
TCO [February 3, 2008 @ 6:26 am]
I’ve not read the book, only this review. So can’t say whether or not Rejali explores those nuances and shift. I’d imagine that he may well do.
But what sparked my interest was not the question of outrage, but that of the plane of visibility - both in relation to the history and geopolitics of torture as well as (and linked to) that of scarring as a means of verifying conditions of refugee determination.
s0metim3s [February 3, 2008 @ 1:30 pm]