Phil Weiss: When he was young, my friend Mohammad of Vancouver, an art curator and graduate student, served in the Iranian army during the Iran-Iraq war. I asked him whether he'd observed or experienced torture, and how he feels about the debate over the U.S. doing torture. His response:
My encounters with torture are both personal and intellectual.
As
an Iranian kid growing up in the 1970's, it was impossible to escape
the tall tales of torture under the Shah's famous security forces
called SAVAK. In the family, we were brought up under the assumption
that mentioning anything about what grandpa and his friends said in
the house in front of people at the school would result in his
imprisonment and torture. When my cousin visited us from USA in 1972,
my second question from him was "do they torture people in the jail
back in USA?" (My first question was, why do you guys elect your
head of state but ours will never change?)
He was so terrified
by my question that I ended up being verbally tortured by my dad for
speaking about the stuff that my grandfather was interested in at that
time. I was told by him that this attitude of mine, in particular my
tendency to speak my mind will sooner or later land me or my
relatives in jail and under torture.
For my family after the
revolution, the exercise of Islamic law by the government was nothing
short of state-sanctioned torture. I was once arrested after the
revolution with 4 liters (1 Gallon) of vodka in the trunk of my dad's car. My family had to work so hard to make
sure me and my friends who were all taken to a revolutionary committee
would not get lashed for carrying a large sum of alcohol with us. I
received a very hard punch to my face in the interrogations about the
alcohol in the trunk, and even though I was only 16, I still feel the
realignment it caused in my jaw once in a while when I laugh or yawn
very hard. The experience was terrifying because we were all
blindfolded and I didn't know where the punch came from and wasn't sure
if he will continue punching me. The experience left me both fragile
and defiant at the same time. Certainly telling your high school,
friends that you were tortured by the Islamic police elevated my status
as a more masculine fellow at the high school.
As to my historical/intellectual views, I am a bit of a structuralist in the tradition of Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher when it comes to torture.
Whether
we like it or not, torture has been a sinister but necessary
instrument of maintaining social rule since it was outlawed by the
modern democratic state after the triumph of the French revolution. The
function I am speaking of here is not a direct, but an indirect one. The
role of torture in modern states is similar to an oath of secrecy. It
seals the boundaries of possible and impossible and implicates all
those who are at the helm. Torture, along with a few other violent
instruments like military initiation and hazing, rape of the female and
gay military personnel, illegal police brutality
on blacks and immigrants and so on and so forth, works as the exception
from which the civil 'Law' receives its legitimacy. Torture and those other instruments of secret state violence legitimize the system by
defining what is left out of the law; to define something, one needs to
create the negative space that surrounds and defines it.
Torture
functions best when everyone knows it could be happening, but no one
can really puts their finger on it and government inquiries, if ever, can
only point to its instances as aberrations that need to be highly
reprimanded, and exceptions that in no way can represent the system.
The
very fact of torture not being on the book gives the rest of the law
and order apparatuses their coherence and public identity. Torture is
like the darkness whose edges define where the light begins. This
function of torture is mostly symbolic and even then and on an
unconscious level, functions as something that everybody knows but
never talks about.
For torture to function as such, it has to
be used secretly and scarcely, and kept under the rug completely. The
system has to fully pretend to strive for the rule of law and the
exclusion of violence, if it wants to use torture–and other forms of
state underbelly violence–to hold together the structure of law and
order. States must minimize the use of torture and make sure that it
never enters the arena as part of the publicly acknowledged law and
order routine. At least that's how torture has been functioning in the
modern states.
Today, torture has been incorporated in the US
law enforcement process during George Bush's presidency to an extent
that it has lost its classic function. Meanwhile, the government tries
hard to find a new function for it within the system. Unfortunately the
precedent for the use of torture has been set already for USA, and
other western democracies, by their spoiled child Israel. To understand the new function of torture in USA, one must first see how torture works in Israel.
In
Israel, the torture of Palestinians works as a
different separating mechanism, this time dividing the normal citizenry
from the outsider/savages. This way, torture functions as a legal
instrument of apartheid and racial/religious hierarchy . The
acknowledgement of "anti terror" torture within Israeli law implies
that measures like this are not for Jewish citizens of Israel and
rather for those Arabs who are resisting colonialism. In other words,
constitutionally endorsed torturing of Arabs grants the Israeli public
their right as civil citizens of a rather Banana Republic.
On
a different level, acknowledgement of torture as an instrument of law
and order sends another message to the people: that the government is
willing to do anything to protect the civil life from violence and
insecurity brought upon it by the 'outsiders'. Again, torture becomes
the instrument of defining civil law and order
by excluding those who are its enemies. It reassures the public that
even though using torture is an aberration from morality, it is an
excess that is essential to the separation of law and order from chaos
and terror. Compared to the classic modern state, The Israeli
state does not instrumentalize torture through refraining from
admitting it, but contrary, by practicing it while acknowledging that
it is immoral.
This is the beginning of the end for
the modern state, because the limited use of torture in the classic
modern state is minimal and its function is merely symbolic. But once
you acknowledge torture as an instrument of law and order, how can there be an end to its growing use? Israel may start by torturing some
violent resistant fighters, but sooner or later torture will be applied
to any Arab that was arrested on security charges–and there are suggestions of this practice in reports from Israeli jails.
The classic use
of torture is a means of maintaining the structure of law and order by minimizing its role and utilizing it
symbolically. This has been the case for three centuries. Yet the new function of torture is a publicly
acknowledged utility that once legalized will understand no limit. It
puts the government on a slippery slope through which the state and the
population will become slowly emptied out of the main symbolic function
of the humanistic form of the state, for its otherwise and often inhuman content.
