July
2006
American Torture and the Mark of Cain
One of the saddest things about living in what Gore Vidal aptly calls the United States of Amnesia is that we cannot seem to recall the point of issues we struggled to resolve 30 years ago, let alone 100 or 200 years ago.
I was reminded of this after reading Sean Wilentz’s monumental history, The Rise of American Democracy, over the July 4 weekend. Wilentz emphasizes how anti-slavery forces in this country, building on the British anti-slavery agitation led by evangelicals like Wilberforce, were able to persuade a critical mass of Americans with the argument that slavery should be abolished not only because of the awful suffering of the slaves themselves but also because control by violence over the bodies of others degrades the characters and endangers the souls of those who exercise such control.
The anti-slavery movement made good propaganda use of the image of a kneeling, heavily-shackled African crying out with the words, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” This appealed to a religious sensibility that ran deeper the random Bible verses cited by pro-slavery preachers; it reminded people of Genesis 4, in which God says to the murderous Cain, “Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
Preoccupied by the threat from without, the drafters of the Bush Administration’s various torture memos seem never to have considered the threat from within—the threat to the souls of those who would be expected to torture in our name. David Addington, John Yoo, and the others never seem to have considered what allowing U.S. personnel to abuse, torment, and even kill other human beings in the name of freedom would do to the characters of the abusers, and by extension, to the character of the nation. For we cannot pretend that we who permit or condone such acts to be done in our behalf are exempt from their corrosive effects.
Now, belatedly, we are beginning to get some sense of the incalculable damage that has been done, and not just at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Baghram Air Base but in the streets and alleyways of Ramadi, Haditha, and now Mahmudiya, where U.S. soldiers are alleged to have raped a 15 year old, shot her several times, killed her parents and her 7-year-old sister, and then tried to set the rape victim’s body on fire. There will be many more such incidents uncovered, and many more that are not uncovered but that will haunt the dreams and torment the spirits of the perpetrators, who may return from Operation Defend Iraqi Freedom but who will never fully return to civil society.
The lesson the Abolitionists and their successors tried to teach us was simple: we cannot brutalize others without brutalizing ourselves. Because we seem to have forgotten it, we can boast all we wish about our vaunted freedom and democracy, but in the eyes of the civilized world we wear the mark of Cain. We who were victims in September 2001 have forfeited all of the moral high ground by becoming conscienceless brute victimizers.
This is where the mindless—and bipartisan—“war on terrorism” has taken us. Unless we can recover our moral center, and soon, we, like Cain, will be left to wander in the wilderness, seeking but not finding a space of grace.