Seminar Three
Warfare, genocide and ethnic conflict
Torture

Concerning Man… He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.

Mark Twain

. . . the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Aleksandr Solzhenistyn

Torture may be worse now in Iraq than under Saddam Hussein… torture is at appalling levels in Iraq. Everyone, it seems, from the Iraqi forces to the militias to the anti-US insurgents, now routinely use torture on the people they kill.

Manfred Nowak

How can humans torture and kill fellow humans? Ingrid Betancourt, the Columbian-French activist who was rescued in 2008 after six years of captivity, said: ”I think we have that animal inside of us, all of us… We can be so horrible to the others. For me it was like understanding what I couldn't understand before, how, for example, the Nazis, how this could happen.“

In the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicles over four decades of Soviet arrest and torture of over ten million people. Ordinary citizens were arrested, often in the middle of the night, and deported to one of over 475 forced labor camps. There they were repeatedly interrogated and tortured, and were permitted no contact with their families. They were executed if their interrogation had an unsatisfactory outcome.

The unprecedented scale of human torture in the Russian gulags forces a brute confrontation of human nature. What would you think of another planetary intelligence that perpetrated these cruelties on their own kind? How do we explain this to children?

Following is a partial list of the truly horrific torture methods used in the Soviet Gulags:

• Sleep deprivation with glaring 200-watt lights
• Confinement in upright coffin-sized cell
• Packing in tiny cell with other prisoners so that few prisoners’ feet touched the floor
• Starvation
• Humiliation
• Living cloak of blood-feeding bedbugs, in coffin-sized cell
• Standing on testicles with booted foot
• Worst of all: threats to prisoner's family

Humans have justified torture in a variety of ways:

• Claiming moral authority (dehumanization) —They are degenerates, infidels, cockroaches.
• Displacing responsibility—We are just carrying out orders.
• Diffusing responsibility—Everybody does it.
• Blaming the victims—They deserved it; they asked for it; they had it coming
• Renaming torture—We use aggressive interrogation. (Does this sound familiar?)

Physicians participated to an extraordinary extent in the Nazi exterminations of the 1930s and 1940s. Some 50% of German physicians collaborated in the sterilizing of Jews, infants born with deformities, gays, and patients at mental institutions, all of whom were compared to infectious disease organisms seen through the microscope. Over 100,000 prisoners lost their lives in medical experiments performed on them, such as freezing with attempts to revive them with warming, hyperbaric compression, wound creation, infectious disease experiments with malaria and typhus, and poisonous chemical warfare experiments. How do you explain the approval and collaboration of physicians, who used their skills to torture, kill, and perform inhumane experiments on the prisoners?

I can find no evidence of similar physician participation in the atrocities of the Gulag, perhaps because the Gulag was intended to exterminate political enemies, in contrast to the Nazi exterminations of “inferior” humans.