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CounterPunch
March 19,
2003
The Bush Security
State
Torture, Moral
Clarity and Democracy
By BEN FEINBERG
The Bush administration, clearly confident in
its actions in the face of overwhelming popular opposition throughout
the world, takes its righteous superiority from something it
and its supporters on the extreme right wing of American discourse
and your radio dial-from Dr. Laura to Dick Bennett-call "moral
clarity." Conservative pundits loved belittling Clinton's
supposed moral foibles. For example, they made great hay with
his self-serving quibbling about what "is" was, as
he tried to maneuver his way out of a scandal that involved an
act of pleasure between two consenting adults. This supposedly
immoral act became the great story of 1998, along with Mark McGwire's
home run chase and the rising stock market.
The new president also has a word that
his handlers like to dance around and redefine. This word has
nothing to do with those hideous acts of sexual pleasure that
so shockingly failed to scandalize the French, Russians, and
other barbarian immoral nations. This word is "torture."
Acts of torture, which not a long time ago were considered the
absolute evil against which any conception of morality and "civilization"
could be measured, are now openly bandied about on CNN and Fox.
Smug, well-dressed men in suits and uniforms smile and laugh
with pretty blond anchorwomen as they speculate about how long
it will take some captive or other to break. The United States
does not "torture," they say, with a nod and a wink,
as, far away, a man's flesh screams. But we do apply "appropriate
pressure." This means keeping captives "uncomfortable,"
chained naked in the cold, kept awake for days and days on end
with limited food and water, and, if necessary, shipped to a
friendly ally that does not share our "superior moral qualms"
(a line always delivered with maximum smirking smugness) about
certain kinds of interrogation.
Unfortunately, torture is torture, and
anyone who has been kept up for days in a row by barking dogs
or partying neighbors can imagine what it might be like to be
kept, chained, in a brightly lit room while you are barraged
by unpleasant sounds, endless rounds of fresh questioners, and
forced to urinate and defecate on yourself. By any legitimate
definition, the admitted practices constitute torture and violate
international law, and the claim that shuttling captives to "friendly"
sadists in different uniforms somehow ameliorates responsibility
is of course absurd. The United States administration sees bans
on torture as a minor bureaucratic hoop to jump through, and
Bush and his cronies are creating a world of suffering in their
own image. Amnesty International reports a dramatic rise in
torture around the world over the last three years, as regimes
follow the lead of the most powerful nation on earth, a nation
that has used its influence to wink (at best) or actively encourage
(more likely) the profound philosophical idea that "moral
clarity" equals "might makes right" and the threat
of "terrorists" (anyone the government in question
doesn't like) justifies the inscription of state power on thousands
of bodies through exquisite refinements in the ancient apparatus
of pain.
Of course, those of us who have looked
closely realize that the smirking claim that the worst dirty
work is left to our allies among the depraved races-as our upstanding
American soldiers find this dirty work necessary but somehow
beneath their elevated sensibilities-is of course bullshit.
The American military has been training its Latin American comrades
in torture techniques ranging from electric shock to genital
skinning for decades at the School of the Americas, and many
former captives in torture centers in Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere
have reported the presence of Americans during their sessions.
In the same interviews where military spokesmen detail the limited
nature of their "appropriate interrogation," they (nod
nod wink wink) admit that, in the hidden dungeons of Guantanamo,
for example, "the gloves came off" after 9/11.
The Orwellian word play with "torture"
has created significantly less public outrage than Clinton's
difficulty equating fellatio with sex. Perhaps this is because
the American public has plenty of training in the strange semiotic
universe in which torture represents moral superiority, as we
devour movies and television cop shows that normalize and applaud
police torture of suspects from Dirty Harry to Sipowitz. These
characters embody the notion that the impulse to torture is the
appropriate, natural response of the dedicated, sensitive "real
man" who is opposed and held back by effeminate superiors
removed from the "street"-bureaucrats who enable crime
through their devotion to abstract regulations. The fact that
some details about torture are openly admitted to the press shows
that, in this country at least, torturing suspects probably tested
well in focus groups and political polling.
At the same time that Bush proclaims
morality by creating a world in which thousands of human beings
are whisked out of their homes at night, subjected to calculated
brutality, and then either held alone in secrecy for unlimited
terms or else simply "disappeared," he proclaims that
his war against the people of Iraq will bring about something
called "democracy" for the struggling peoples of the
Middle East. Lets ignore, for a second, the fact that the United
States is not itself a democratic nation in anything except the
most literal sense (people vote). In truly democratic nations,
that portion of the populace that does not support one of two
official parties is not effectively disenfranchised, since their
vote does not directly help the candidate on the opposite end
of the ideological spectrum. In truly democratic nations, presidents
do not come to office through blatant fraud and cronyism.
Ignoring Americans' bogus claims to the
superiority of our profoundly undemocratic form of democracy,
lets take a quick look at how war plans in the Middle East directly
undermine democracy throughout the world. First of all, we see
the tremendous pressure that American leaders are placing, through
bribery and threat, on governments-Turkey, Spain, Italy, Portugal,
even Mexico-to ignore the wishes of the overwhelming majority
of their citizens. This turns their democracies into jokes and
deprives governments of any legitimacy they may enjoy at home,
which creates frustration, which finally comes out in resistance
outside the electoral system. Apparently, for this administration,
the spread of democracy means the creation of a world of illegitimate
states that take orders from Washington and not their own people,
and are supported by American military power.
Will the war bring democracy to Iraq
and other Middle Eastern nations? The answer given by the Bushies
is an offshoot of the racist "clash of civilizations"
hypothesis; it assumes that Americans have an innately democratic
substance (a bodily fluid developed by those marvelous imaginary
organs "culture" and "tradition") that does
not need to be related to any actual democratic practice. We
simply are democratic. The presence of Americans-even
if these are generals ruling through military force-oozes "democracy"
onto the natives, whose naturally undemocratic "culture"
will be improved through contact, just as colonialists believed
that Christianity would civilize subject peoples, and some eugenics
advocates argued that the gradual absorption of superior white
genes by darker peoples was a necessary prerequisite of a democratic
culture. Unfortunately, "Democracy" is not an innate
attribute of Americans-it emerges through the practices of self-determination
and organization by subject peoples as they seek a more just
world for themselves and their children. The bombs that rip
apart Iraqi households do not bring the civilizing "democratic
values of the West" any more than slave ships brought the
"civilizing benefits of Christianity" to Africa. They
bring death, humiliation, and profit.
Bush would like, other things being equal,
to see formal democracy in the Middle East--that is, a
world where people vote--but not any democratic substance. Since
the United States, along with international agencies like the
IMF, seeks to impose an economic system that has created unprecedented
disparities in wealth on the rest of the world, real, participatory
democracy will inevitably bring to power governments that are
hostile to the United States and its policies. These governments
will then be defined as "undemocratic" or "not
free"-listen to the administration's definition of "freedom"
and you'll see why-and they will become targets of the American
military and intelligence apparatus. This is happening now in
South America, where popular movements have successfully challenged
neoliberal hacks in Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela.
Henry Hyde, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Relations
committee, has called Venezuela and Brazil (along with Cuba)
a "Latin American axis of evil" and called for covert
actions against these freely elected governments. This is the
future of the Middle East-perhaps phony democracies, perhaps
good old fashioned autocracies; in either case, these governments
will continue to lack legitimacy and depend upon support from
United States military and security services to defend them from
the wrath of their inhabitants. This works to the United States'
advantage. More enemies means more justification for more military
bases throughout the region and the world. More desperate attacks
by disenfranchised nativists means more wars to bring "democracy"
to yet another corner of the world, and more support for crackdowns,
using "appropriate physical pressure," on all sorts
of dissent at home and abroad.
So as the terms "morality" and "democracy"
fall away to reveal an expanding military empire based on torture
and intimidation, we need new words to describe the Bush plan.
There is a term for a regime in which the chief concerns of
government are the military and the internal security apparatus.
This term is "national security state." Most Middle
Eastern nations are national security states, and most Latin
American nations were national security states in the sixties
and seventies. This term seems appropriate for the new United
States of Homeland Security, a land where thousands of people
are whisked away and detained without charges, subject to brutal
"appropriate pressure," denied all contact with the
outside world on remote bases and isolated islands. But there
is a more historically resonant term that anti-war protestors
should keep in mind as we confront a regime that celebrates torture
and systematically creates more fearful threats (vote for the
leading danger on cnn.com! Is it Saddam Hussein, Kim Jung Il,
or Osama Bin Laden? Sorry, no write-ins allowed) in order to
increase the pool of candidates for this technique and distract
the public from massive wealth transfers. When we confront the
war on Iraq, we are not just exercising our freedom of speech
to challenge the misguided policies of honest, but mistaken elected
officials. We are confronting fascism. Let them dance around
that word.
Ben Feinberg
is a Professor of Anthropology at Warren Wilson College in Asheville
NC. He can be reached at: feinberg@warren-wilson.edu
Yesterday's
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