The House of David

Saturday, May 01, 2004

Excuse corner

I posted the analysis below because I wanted to understand why the Americans (and Brits, now) committed these barbarities. I may be wrong; I may be ignorant; I may be suffering from the hallucinogenic 'shrooms someone no doubt slipped onto the chicken I had for lunch. The point is that I want to keep this sort of thing from happening again. Right? Everyone on the same page, here?

That is not the impression I am getting from this site. If I am reading this right, it is arguing that we don't do this sort of thing as a point of policy; that we haven't been at it for long; and that we're still doing better than Saddam did. At the end, he says he'd really rather not deal anymore with this nettlesome little subject: "End of comparison."

This set the tone for the man's wonderful commenters:

IT'S ALL A DREAM: "I have my doubts on the credibility of these photos"
MENTAL ABUSE DOESN'T COUNT: "There is a huge difference between strapping fake electrodes to someone and having him think they are real and actually strapping live electrodes to someone and electrocuting him"
IT'S NOT AS BIG A DEAL AS YOU THINK: "Shit happens all the time, it's just when it's being documented that it's blown out of the proportion."
DON'T PERSECUTE ME: "None of this matters. What's important is that America is imperfect, and therefore the greatest evil ever known!"

Now, these statements are not necessarily "wrong". But that is because they are not even dealing with the problem. Instead they aim to dull the outrage, that the world's civilised people ought to be feeling over this.

In dealing in such pathetic excuses, the people who make them are performing no service for the rest of us. What if this sort of thing hits home? One of the perpetrators in Abu Ghrayb was a Virginia prison guard as a civilian. If he hadn't been caught, then he'd have been right back at home in a few months, practicing his new tricks on his charges. Another thing to think about is that the captives in Abu Ghrayb were not yet convicted of any crime. Think it'll be funny when you're pulled over in a "routine" stop and put in a jail cell for the evening - before being convicted of anything - and then tortured in the fashion we just saw?

Oh yeah, it'll be a big barrel o' laughs. Make sure to post some pictures when it happens.

posted by Zimri on 19:58 | link |

The Baghdad Overlook

I don't believe in ghosts. But one has to wonder, what possessed those soldiers in the Abu Ghrayb prison, to torture their prisoners in so Sadistic a fashion...

In the 1970's, the brilliant director Stanley Kubrick directed an interpretation of Stephen King's famous novel, The Shining. Stephen King had set this tale in a haunted hotel deep inside the Rocky Mountain range. This hotel, the Overlook, was not only haunted but evil. A small family, led by an ex-alcoholic (thus weak) Jack Torrence, came to the Overlook to maintain the place through the winter. The Overlook influenced Torrence to such an extent that he went mad and attacked his own family. Such was the King version.

The Kubrick version is a little different.

King had intended to write about "the shining"; a gift whereby certain people could see into the spirit world. Kubrick carried the name, but his version wasn't about "the shining". He was more interested in the hotel, and in why it exerted the influence it did.

Under Kubrick's direction, the camera slid around in straight geometric lines, if it moved at all. The hotel itself was internally vast, and Kubrick shot a number of scenes in the largest rooms: the ballroom and the lobby. Kubrick also understood that he wasn't very good at directing humans, and used it as a strength here, forcing the characters to utter tin-eared dialogue. The effect was to make the humans into fish in a bowl... a bowl wakening to equal life as its fish.

Kubrick's main actor, then, was the Overlook Hotel; not Jack or Wendy or Holloran or that weird little kid. The Overlook is the source of that controversy about the hidden meanings in the Shining: namely, that Kubrick redacted King in such a way that the movie became a parable about the West's conquest of Native America. You can go click that link if you are so inclined. I will just say that I agree with it but think it incomplete...

The movie's not about the Indians. The Indians are there as a backdrop and an illustration on the movie's set, and that is therefore how the Indians must be understood in the movie's subtext. The earliest conversation the Torrances have among themselves concerns the Donner Party, which got lost in the snows in 1846 and "had to resort to cannibalism to survive". There weren't any Indians involved in that event. The reason the movie brought up the Donner Party, was to propose that the West had an inherent brutality that caused the foreign "white man" to turn upon himself, even when there weren't any Indians around. The white man turning upon his own kind is the point of the movie. That is what Kubrick brought forth in his movie.

Kubrick was trying to illustrate that there are places in this world stained with deep evil, and that the evil can have its root in an evil event - the Indian wars, in the case of The Shining. The event may be forgotten, or recalled only vaguely. But it's there: in the way people avoid that part of the woods where a black village once stood; the strange way the flowers bloom in that mountain meadow. Bones, bullets, and childrens' clothes keep turning up under the plough. The local elders refuse to answer your questions. The rusty marks won't come off the wall in Prison Ward Six; or else they leave a discoloured, raw patch when they do.

Kubrick also illustrated that those who spend too long in such a place will "catch" the place's evil, like a farmer catching anthrax from spores in his field, that a dead cow had planted there thirty years ago. That is why we keep hearing about tyrant polygamists of Colorado City, so very close to the aforementioned Mountain Meadow. That is why there has been such a culture of violence and racism in the deep hinterlands of the American South - and, unfortunately, not far enough away from Houston: Jasper, Vidor, northern Louisiana.

And that is - finally - how we must understand Abu Ghrayb. Saddam had designed the place to be the Qur'an's Jahannam on Earth. An Iraqi who enters there (voi ch'entrate) must fear Hellfire (lasciate ogni speranza) whether he is guilty or not. The very architecture is dehumanising. If one is put in charge there, he must be strong, very strong, to avoid the temptation to treat his charges like the Damned.

The ill-trained troops whom our leaders sent into that place succumbed to its evil - as surely as would have Jack Torrence.

But understand this: to understand why men do a thing is not to excuse what they do.

If the prison was evil - which it was - then we should not have used it. It should have been torn down, or turned into a memorial of Saddam Hussein's regime. We could have built other camps to process captives, until we had designed a new prison to replace it. Given that we did use it, we should have trained the prison guards stringently, and let them know that the place was now a jail and not a dungeon - and so its captives were not yet proven guilty, and must be treated with respect.

So now Abu Ghrayb is a memorial of our regime. Abu Ghrayb is a monument to the US military's incompetence, its soldiers' brutality, and its leaders' negligence.

The ghosts linger.

posted by Zimri on 17:37 | link |

Saturday, May 01, 2004

Excuse corner

The Baghdad Overlook

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