The *Other* Torture Report: What the USA looks like to the World

Rebecca Gordon comments on The *Other* Torture Report: What the USA looks like to the World.

Why should an international body focused specifically on torture care about an apparently broader issue like police behavior? In fact, torture and race- or identity-based police brutality are intimately linked by the reality that lies at the foundation of institutionalized state torture.

Every nation that uses torture must first identify one or more groups of people who are torture’s “legitimate” targets. They are legitimate targets, because in the minds of the torturers and of the society that gives torture a home, these people are not entirely human. (In fact, the Chilean secret police called the people they tortured “humanoids.”) Instead, groups singled out for torture are a uniquely degraded and dangerous threat to the body politic, and therefore anything “we” must do to protect ourselves becomes licit. In the United States, with lots of encouragement from the news and entertainment media, many white people believe that African American men represent this kind of unique threat. The logic that allows police to kill unarmed Black men with impunity is not all that different from the logic that produces pogroms or underlies drone assassination programs in far-off places, or that makes it impossible to prosecute our own torturers.

Emphasis Mine

Torture is a reaction to an existental threat. It is used again the other who threatens the existence of society: be they Jew, Communist, Trade-Unionist, Catholic, Prostestant, Muslim, Non-White, Chinese, Indian, Sihk, Arab, etc.

Torture destroys what it seeks to protect: the superior civilization. For what is superior has no need of coercion, but only of reason. Torture is an admission that reason has failed.

Rather than confront why reason has failed, the torturers and their supporters seek to shore up their world through force. To question why reason has failed is question the superiority of their civilization. And questioning that is treason—an admission of failure. And superior civilizations never fail.

Torture destroys the humanity of both the tortured and the torturer through the destruction of their shared humanity. When the torturer fails to see in the pain and agony of the tortured their own suffering, they lose the empathy that is essential for humanity. When the tortured only sees the hatred and deafness to pleas of mercy of the torturers, they lose hope in a shared humanity.

Hearts of stone result from torture for the torturer and the tortured for this is the only way to survive the process. Humanity cannot be built out of hearts of stone, only buried within them.