COMPLICITY IN TORTURE
McCarthy, Abigail
COMPLICITY IN TORTURE Abigail McCarthy "I'm really very sick of these publications," said the young woman of my acquaintance tossing aside a new magazine, "they're all the same-an article on...
...But the Iroquois practiced their unspeakable' cruelty only in a single situation, and even then did not justify it by affecting to hate the victim or think of him as a criminal...
...Church authorities have spoken out, accusing the government-not only the brave and widely renowned Dom Helder Camara, but other members of the hierarchy, too, like the Archbishop of Sao Paolo...
...She was kept in ignorance of what was happening to her, and was shot by an arrow through the heart at the same time she was clubbed from behind so that death was instantaneous...
...But their report on torture published last year insists that torture as an accepted means of control is spreading to an increasing number of nations...
...And, until very recently, Americans and American business did not contribute to the security of the oppressors in Russia...
...The enormity of the number of the suffering has been growing all our lifetime...
...He cut the girl free, ran off with her, and returned her to her tribe...
...In the end a young Pawnee of high reputation rebelled against the rite...
...There were no psychologists around then to study the people...
...When he returned, he was not punished, but admired for his courage...
...At first it revolts men, then they get used to it, then they begin to crave it...
...Members are encouraged to adopt a particular prisoner, communicate with him or her, seek to help his or her family, and to keep up a steady barrage of appeals and protests to ambassadors and officials of the responsible government...
...They had had an annual custom, surrounded by much ritual, of sacrificing a captured maiden just as the morning star rose...
...In other words, the practice spread: "Again we have to wonder how so dreadful a custom could start and how it could continue...
...We ourselves have learned from the accounts of the Nazis and the little we have been able to learn of Russia that cruelty is something of a drug...
...Obviously, over the years the sacrifice had been little by little cleansed of its aspect of torture...
...COMPLICITY IN TORTURE Abigail McCarthy "I'm really very sick of these publications," said the young woman of my acquaintance tossing aside a new magazine, "they're all the same-an article on torture in Chile next to one about the peril of aerosol underarm deodorants...
...her heart was cut out and eaten...
...But La Farge also tells of a curious (Continued on page 221) Abigail McCarthy (Cont...
...Nearly a hundred and fifty years have gone since that day,"-she was writing about the savage flogging of the nine-year-old Sojourner Truth by her master, a New York state farmer-"and cruelty has lost the bumbling, inefficient, personal touch...
...In the national agony over Vietnam we intended to project the responsibility for the horrors onto others-the bad Americans-deny them altogether, or justify them by citing comparable practices by Hanoi and the Viet Cong...
...It is a curious riddle...
...The growth of the terrible inhumanity of torture, now widespread, excused, and aided by technology, is not inevitable...
...After she was dead all the warriors of the tribe took turns shooting arrows into her body...
...incident among the Pawnees which gives us some hope about human nature...
...Practical men will tell you that there is no difference between detente with Russia, which has the ostensible purpose of forestalling the final nuclear war, and the favored nation status Secretary Kissinger has just offered Brazil...
...Oliver La Farge points out in his history of the American Indian that not all Indian tribes practiced torture but that the tribes of the Southeast did, the practice probably having spread north from Mexico with the tribes-and that, of course, the Iro-quois did so with such horrifying cruelty that other tribes followed suit in order to revenge themselves on the Iroquois...
...Amnesty International, the international organization to succor political prisoners, has sought to attack the problem by personalizing both responsibility and help...
...They have been successful in securing many releases...
...Guilt is either a silly complex, or something large and impersonal, like the corporation...
...The reports of torture which reach us from Brazil are documented and authenticated by refugees and couriers who risk their lives to get the story out...
...We cannot say the same thing about Brazil...
...All put out by affluent people who refuse to face how much they're involved in torture and pollution and how obscene that kind of discussion is...
...The reaction here has been almost nothing...
...It does not do to blame the government, the CIA, the multi-national corporation-and turn the page.and turn the page...
...What does it take to arouse world opinion against this continuing cruelty...
...Many of those tortured have been priests and nuns...
...It seemed to me that she had put her finger on the really crucial point in our relationship to the institutionalized bestiality and brutality so commonplace in our world...
...We have done much more to marshal world opinion against the degradation of man within the borders of the Soviet Union than we have done to protest the enormities in Brazil...
...But-arguments' about detente aside-is there not...
...We have documented subhuman conditions in our own prisons, although nothing as terrible as the dictatorships promote...
...Helen Beal Woodward wrote in 1953 about the indignation and guilt we had finally been able to muster about cruelty to slaves...
...But we can only do it by accepting personal responsibility...
...We can reverse the trend...
...The people seem to have been relieved to drop a cruel practice, and it ended there...
...A civilizing process must start somewhere...
...We have seen the skulls of Dachau and Buchenwald stacked like grapefruit at the supermarket, we have antiseptically exterminated eighty thousand Japanese in one tidy operation...
...Undoubtedly the torture pattern, the feasting of the victim, (even on some occasions providing him with a bride for the night before his death), and cannibalism-not out of love of human flesh, but as a way of absorbing some of the fine man's bravery-came up from the South and originally from Mexico...
...instead they loved and admired him...
...Perhaps it would give us some perspective to look at the practice of torture and cruelty in terms of another culture...
...We have written about brutalities against helpless prisoners in both communist and fascist countries," he wrote last year...
...Columnist Jack Anderson, a specialist in rousing indignation, confesses frustration...
...It is not just that we are at once fascinated by it, and seemingly helpless to bring it to an end, but that only the most strenuous efforts at purification can free us from being party to it...
Vol. 103 • March 1976 • No. 7
