Thanks. It’s about individual psychology or a government mindset or ?
Hi, I’m sorry this took so long, I thought the thread went down for the count & I hadn’t checked it for a bit.
It’s about both how policy can be set which engenders horrors and how the individual can become desensitized in such a system.
There’s also the more recent book HItler’s Willing Executioners, which is more a look at the mentality of the German people as a whole during the Holocaust.
Starting around 1992, the Algerian government declared war against the moderate Islamist parties who were poised to win the elections. (Check out the CIA factbook on their website; sorry I don’t have the URL handy at the minute.)
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were “disappeared” into Algerian military prisons and tortured. In some cases these events took place at police stations devoted to “special security.”
Not all of the police officers delegated to stand guard over, or worse, to participate in, the torture were able to stomach it. They fled the country. Some of them wound up in Great Britain, seeking political asylum–which was often denied because they had confessed to participating in violations of human rights. If you have access to NEXIS (the news database of Lexis-Nexis), you can read interviews with them in The Guardian.
These “retired” torturers described feelings of extreme depression, sleeplessness, a sense that they would never again feel themselves to be clean…but they also described the persons who had remained behind to continue the torture in ways that seem eerily familiar. Remember the schoolyard bullies who used to head up little gangs and pick on the smaller kids? Ever had a boss who delighted in public humiliation and intimidation of employees?
When society authorizes torture (say, by writing legal memos to its chief execuitve suggesting that he need not comply with international standards and treaties signed by prior governments), these sociopaths come out of the woodwork, happy to move from minor crimes to truly major ones. And they wind up in charge of places like the Kremlin’s underground interrogation rooms, those “special security” police stations in Algiers, the military prison in Petit Goave (Haiti), or Guantanamo. Or Abu Ghraib.
It is correct that part of the mindset of the torturers is that the persons being tortured are not fully human. But in a larger sense, some psychologists think that torturers have a bigger problem: the political ideology, whatever it is, is simply a cover for a psyche that doesn’t think ANYONE else is actually human. These sociopaths have learned that they get along better in society by faking the ordinary human reactions, but underneath they simply cannot imagine or empathize with other people. Fundamentally, other people, like the rest of the universe, are dangerous. They must be controlled. Torture controls them.
There are other explanations which may be equally valid. You might like to read the book Trauma and Recovery (sorry, my copy is at work—I can’t think of the name of the author—maybe Judtih Hermann?) to understand some of the psychological interplay between torturers and their victims, and how victims are eventually able to recover.