The Abu Ghraib Photos: A Mirror for the Age We Live in

By Farish A. Noor

Looking at the festering imbroglio that is steadily worsening in Iraq, one is forced to think out of the box and find some means to make sense of it all. We look for books and theories that can perhaps explain this mess that has confounded even the most jaded American critic among us. One book that immediately comes to mind is Darius Rejali’s landmark study of the complex psychological and political relations that are at work in the practice of modern state-sanctioned torture and abuse, ‘Torture and Modernity In Iran’.

Rejali’s work looks at the historical process of the normalization of torture in Iran, from the early Qajar period right up to the Pehlavi regime and the post-revolutionary regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. Contrary to what the title may suggest, this is no Iran-bashing tome. Rejali employs the methodology and praxis of Foucauldian historical-archaeology to unearth the dynamics of power, torture and abuse and he shows how torture has become a routinized and normalized practice in the modern era, as ordinary as tax collection and politicians spinning tales for the media.

Torture, during the pre-modern era, Rejali argues, was very much a public affair.

From the drawing and quartering of pirates to the beheading of dissenters in London and Paris, the torture and mutilation of prisoners and enemies of the state was something that the feudal monarchs did in the open, as a vivid and public attestation to their power and ability to exercise it. In many other parts of the non-Occidental world similar means of abuse were utilized by the ruling elite to keep the masses in check and at bay: from slicing traitors to a thousand pieces in China to having one’s enemies disemboweled and broken on the wheel or ripped in two by racing camels or horses, the gory display of broken bodies was a form of public catharsis that reminded the masses of Asia that they were bound by the laws of their feudal rulers and despots.

Modernity changed all of that, making torture an increasingly private affair. By the time of the industrial revolution the exploitation and daily abuse of the masses (otherwise known as labor) was routinized and normalized through the exploitative labor system. Even in the colonies of Africa and Asia, slavery gave way to forced labor and eventually to paid labor – though none of this really disguised the exploitative aspect of work and the uneven power differentials between the rich colonizers and their exploited colonial subjects.

Along with this came the public effacement of torture as the site of torture and murder was shifted from public squares and open fields to prisons and detention centers. During the modern era, predicated as it was on modern notions of individual identity and private agency and reason, torture and punishment was no longer mainly a public spectacle to demonstrate state power at work. Its intended target/victim/recipient was now the individual dissenter who had to be corrected, just in the same way that early psychiatry sought to ‘correct’ individual discrepancies by emphasizing the norms that had been established on the wider social level. The prison and its regime of discipline and punishment therefore served as an appendage to the modern state, and along with the public school, educational system, missionary activities and state-controlled media, became yet another means to create loyal and obedient citizens.

By the time of the late industrial/late modern era of the 20th century, torture and abuse had been elevated to the level of correctional therapy and social engineering. In Darius Rejali’s book he looks at how the post-revolutionary regime of the Iranian mullahs sought to ‘educate’ and ‘correct’ the enemies of the state – ostensibly for their own good and the general good of society. (Precisely the same argument used by the Stalinists, Fascists and Nazis, the errant offspring of modernity themselves.) Thus it came to pass that the secret police of the Shah of Iran gave way to the moral police of the Mullahs, who sought not only to control the external behavior of Iranian citizens, but also their private mental, emotional and sexual lives as well.

The developments that have taken place at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad can and should perhaps be seen in this context. Pro-American apologists have leapt at America’s defense by claiming that these instances of torture and abuse were the errant actions of a handful of miscreants who have somehow deviated from the norms of military practice. But what is the army if not a band of people given weapons and ordered to take the life of others for reasons that they may not understand themselves? The dehumanization of individuals that is part and parcel of the military training process is intended to produce exactly these sort of inhuman, sadistic and potentially murderous brutes in the first place. And to claim that armies and soldiers do not engage in torture is about as naïve and facile as the childish claim that soldiers do not rob, rape and terrorize too. An army that does not torture, kill, abuse, rape and terrorize is, in some respect, an army that is useless – after all the army is not a pacifist institution made up and run by hairdressers.

The documentation of torture and abuse of prisoners is also a norm in all armies. One simply has to look at the frescos and statues in Athens to see that the celebration of blood and guts and downright murder and mayhem goes back to antiquity. One does not go off to war to pick flowers, after all. And soldiers have always recorded their acts of wanton violence for posterity, as one of the bonding rituals that binds fellow-murderers and abusers closer together, almost like a band of common criminals bound by the same common guilt. (Here one could draw a comparison between the photos taken by the American troops to those pictures of naked children taken and shared among pedophiles, a secret underworld whose membership is open only to those who are already implicated in the crime.)

The irony is that living as we do in the late modern/industrial age, modern technology has caught up with us. The thrust of modernity was to render private and intimate the slow and calculated destruction of the human being so that the very thought of torture would strike us with fear. The graphic images of abuse and torture were never meant to be made public – Rather they belong to that subculture of genuine violence that is shared and enjoyed only by true sadists, in the same way that videos of Bosnian women being gang-raped were secretly sold and traded among mercenaries, hardcore criminals and genuine sadists in Europe and beyond.

Thanks to the internet and the rapid dispersion of the pictures (we are told that there are even videos of Arab women being raped by gangs of soldiers and prison guards) the sensible line between the private and public has been crossed and a global furor has erupted. The word on Arab street is that the Arab peoples now feel a collective sense of shame and humiliation at the hands of the Occidental invaders, but this begs the obvious question: How can the photo of the American female soldier leading a naked Iraqi prisoner by a leash add anything new to the already-pathetic state of the Arab nations as a whole, who are already bound to the interests of America and Western multinationals and being led like animals and kept as docile pets? Does Arab anger stem from the individual act of humiliation of one naked prisoner, or does this anger stem from an unstated realization that the Arabs today are enslaved, leaderless and defeated?

The photos taken at Abu Ghraib prison have forced us to take a closer, painful and embarrassing look at ourselves. The images of Americans abusing, torturing and humiliating Arabs is a stark reminder of the reality of the age we live in. The danger is that the controversy over the Abu Ghraib pictures focuses our attention on one particular incident or location only, rendering specific and particular what is actually far more universal and normalized.

The reality is that such abuse and torture is taking place all over the Arab and Muslim world, and the developing world by extension. Much of this routinized torture and abuse is being done by the governments of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Arab countries against their own people, more often than not with the collusion of the USA and its Western allies. It is for this reason that this writer believes that the photograph of the female US soldier and her Iraqi prisoner-slave-dog is the most fitting testimony for the injustice and cruelties of the Modern age. This singular image has captured the shameful dilemma of the Third World as it is swallowed up by the globalization process, a polite euphemism for the most modern, developed, rationalized and systematic form of imperialism the human race has ever seen.

Dr. Farish A Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist.