Re: [Marxism] Torture "fundamentally un-American" ?

[DLVinvest@xxxxxx]

In a message dated 5/10/04 9:17:20 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
illonph@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> it is clear that living with
> indelible shame is as bad as death for people in some cultures and the Arab
> culture might well be considered one of them.

Brutality of this sort is routine, endemic in US prisons and jails as a means
of control, but not unique to them, and not necessarily systematic as this
appears to be. I suspect that further revelations about the torture in US
prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo and Afghanistan will show that reservist "grunts"
recruited as MPs from US prison-guards (and many of them displaced workers who
couldn't find work elsewhere) were allowed to indulge their sado-masochistic and
racist tendencies as part of a deliberate technique of humiliating captives
to "soften them up" for interrogation by "intelligence" operatives., especially
where sexual attitudes and body-image could be exploited to degrade the
detainees' self-conception of "manhood."

Some anthropologists have tried to distinguish between "shame-based" cultures
as distinct from those in which "guilt" is an emotional response that
motivates a very different behavior. Shame has a collective attribute becase it
derives from a relationship with family and clan in which others are dishonored 
by
one's actions (or inactions).  This is especially true in cultures where
pre-capitalist extended family-clan relationships have survived the 
"articulation
of modes of production" under conditions of imperialist domination, as in
Arabia. In the Americas, Christian missionaries subverted the indigenous clan 
and
tribal mores with religious indoctrination that replaced "shame" with "guilt"
while the structures of kin relationships were disrupted by massive dislocation
of the population to supply labor to the mines and plantations for export,
enslavement and genocide.

There is a long history of imperial research on how best to dominate a
conquered people: For example, near the end of World War II, the US Army
commissioned social-scientists to study Germany and Japan for guidance on the 
occupation.
One result was The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the anthopologist Ruth
Benedict's classic study of Japanese cultural attitudes and mores; she argued 
that
the occupation had better take the distinction between shame and guilt into
account in dealing with a conquered people.

Guilt is more individual and internalized. Shame often demands retribution by
the aggrieved person's family and clan. The US has fueled the resistance like
an arsonist spreading accelerant, and there will be hell to pay.

Douglas L. Vaughan, Jr.
Investigations
for Print, Film & Electronic Media
3140 W. 32nd Ave.
Denver CO 80211
303-455-9429
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