Torture

Those few who naively thought that the Western presence in Iraq would bring with it certain universal values, received a hard blow when it was discovered, and amply supported with hard evidence, that occupation troops had been behaving like animals. But there is much room for reflection in these images of torture even for those of us who take it for granted that war necessarily involves brutality, torture and the liberties which power brings, and that it is for this very reason that wars should not take place.

Not because they show Western men and women smiling at the scenes of torture, but for the perverse spin on the use of this material in the media. Instead of sending round the world the scoop of photos showing American soldiers raping young Iraqi girls, something which has no doubt happened and is probably still happening (as it does in every war), this time, in order to arouse entirely legitimate indignation, the photographs chosen are of abuse against male prisoners, with a noticeable insistence on the one which shows a female soldier dragging a prisoner along the ground with a lead around his neck.

There is, therefore, no physical violence between the torturer and victim, which is instead enacted directly amongst the enemy, with prisoners being forced to simulate and carry out sexual acts on each other. Considered culturally different, inferior by the dominant culture and by the dichotomy which the West promotes, the body of the enemy is feminized and made passive in order to deny its virility, in the classic mechanism of gender. And the message is perfectly inteligible, both to us and to them.

Once again a colonial culture and a symbolic and political colonial power/dominion is made to seem like enslavement and passive resistance of "the other's" body.

And the sexual violence against women, which was such an important point in the objective of nationalist division during the wars in Yugoslavia, is now being kept hidden because the aim today is not the nationalist one of dominating the land (symbolically linked to the feminine gender in all nationalist metaphors), but the neo-colonialist one of dominating the enemy who must be made passive, a slave.

Later, this tamed enemy will look after putting his house in order and carrying out intestine "ethnic" and nationalist violence throughout the territory, a typical after-effect of colonialism.

(M.A/L.D)

from Alternativa Libertaria May 2004
News-sheet of the Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici