Snapshots of sadistic insanity

The Arab world is outraged. Commentators maintain there is little the Americans can do to repair the damage caused by this latest instance of US aggression. And it is not just the Arabs but people all over the world, including in the US, that have been appalled by the pictures.

It could, though it has not been, argued that Saddam Hussein was known to have perpetrated far more terrible forms of punishment against the Kurds: Torture cells reportedly contained evidence of ear lobes being pinned to walls and hooks on ceilings. It is also known that much worse takes place routinely in jails all over the world and certainly in India. Yet the pictures are said to spell the ultimate disaster for America. What is it that makes these pictures so very powerful?

In the first place it is perhaps the fact that they exist at all. Torture, when it takes place, usually occurs behind closed doors. To have actual visual evidence is not a common phenomenon and it leaves little scope for ambiguity or refutation. But there is much imagery in the pictures also that lends itself to symbolic interpretation.

The most striking feature is of course the enforced nakedness of the prisoners. Nobody aiming to diffuse the image of the Iraqi as a dangerous terrorist could have come up with anything more effective. There is an almost feminine beauty in their awkwardness. Sightless, unclothed, at gunpoint, the helpless vulnerability of the prisoners rather than humiliating them evokes shame and anger in the viewer.

In direct contrast is the picture of a female American soldier with a cigarette in her mouth cocking an imaginary gun at a prisoner’s private parts. Nobody aiming to demolish the aura of a free society could have come up with anything more effective. In a free society, the picture seems to say, the women have all become cruel men.

Then there is the much publicised picture of a prisoner in a sackcloth like garment with a hood over his head balancing on a box with wires in his hands. It is as if the soldiers had deliberately set out to revive memories of the Ku Klux Klan and remind those who had forgotten, of the terrible cruelty some sections of their great nation had perpetrated on their compatriots not so long ago.

But it is before the exposure of the American soldier, yes the same clean-cut, patriotic hunk of Hollywood movies that all of Saddam Hussein’s purported acts pale into insignificance. It is not as one might think, an exposure of morality. Much is being written about the cover been blown off the myth of American superiority. That people who behave so despicably have no right to preach to others.

In truth, that cover was blown off a long time ago. America’s persistent double standards and self serving foreign policy has not impressed the world regardless of the high tone adopted, most notably by Bush in recent times. No the pictures do something far, far more subversive.

Psychologists have long maintained that people who perpetrate acts of cruelty have internal terrors they cannot confront. Brian Keenan who was held hostage in Lebanon for five years puts it well: “Cruelty and fear are man made and men who perpetrate them are ruled by them. They live out their unresolved lives by attempting to destroy anything that challenges the void in themselves. A chill holds a blanket over its face in fear. A fear-filled man transposes his inadequacy onto another.”

Now the world knows that the most powerful nation actually feels powerless. And it is a disturbing thought.