sotto.org

I wrote this draft post when the news about Abu Ghraib came out, but I never finished it. I resurrected it today because of the release of the Fay Report sans my thoughts about torture being being Western Democracy’s dirty little secret. Instead, I’ll let the original article I linked to speak eloquently for itself.

Is torture ever justified?

That is the dirty question left out of the universal protestations of disgust, revulsion and shame that greeted the release of photos showing British soldiers and American military police tormenting helpless prisoners in Iraq.

It is a question most unforgettably put forward more than 130 years ago by Feodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. In that novel, the saintly Alyosha Karamazov is confronted by his brother, Ivan, with an unbearable choice. Let us suppose, Ivan says, that in order to bring men eternal happiness, it was essential and inevitable to torture to death one tiny creature, only one small child.

Would you consent? Ivan has preceded his question with stories about suffering children – a seven-year-old girl beaten senseless by her parents, enclosed in a freezing wooden outhouse and made to eat her own excrement; an eight-year-old serf boy torn to pieces by hounds in front of his mother for the edification of a landowner. True cases plucked from newspapers by Dostoevsky that merely hint at the almost unimaginable cruelty that awaited humanity. How would Ivan react to the ways in which the 20th century ended up refining pain, industrialising pain, producing pain on a massive, rational, technological scale, a century that would produce manuals on pain and how to inflict it.

Training courses on how to increase it, and catalogues that explained where to acquire the instruments that ensured the pain would be unlimited, a century that handed out medals for those who had written the manuals and commended those who designed the courses and rewarded and enriched those who had produced the instruments in those catalogues of death?

Ivan Karamazov’s question – would you consent? – is just as dreadfully relevant now, in a world where 132 countries routinely practise that sort of humiliation and damage on detainees, because it takes us into the impossible heart of the matter regarding torture, it demands we confront the real and inexorable dilemma that the existence and persistence of torture poses, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Ivan Karamazov’s words remind us torture is rationalised by those who apply and perform it: this is the price, it is implied, that needs to be paid by the suffering few in order to guarantee happiness for the rest of society, the enormous majority given security and wellbeing by those horrors inflicted in some dark cellar, some faraway pit, some abominable police station.

Make no mistake: every regime that tortures does so in the name of salvation, some superior goal, some promise of paradise. Call it communism, call it the free market, call it the free world, call it the national interest, call it fascism, call it the leader, call it civilisation, call it the service of God, call it the need for information, call it what you will.

The cost of paradise, the promise of some sort of paradise, Ivan Karamazov continues to whisper to us, will always be hell for at least one person somewhere, sometime.