Fear is the foundation of most governments.
-John Adams
Monday, March 27, 2006
120 DAYS
LIFE CENTER FOR ART IMITATION
"If, though full of respect for social conventions and never overstepping the bounds they draw round us, if, nonetheless, it should come to pass that we meet with nothing but brambles and briars, while the wicked tread upon flowers, will it not be reckoned - save by those in whom a fund of incoercible virtues renders deaf to these remarks-, will it not be decided that it is preferable to abandon oneself to the tide rather than to resist it? Will it not be felt that Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found too feeble to contend with Vice, and that, in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along after the others?" -Marquis de Sade, Justine
The most notorious book written by the Marquis de Sade, out of a lifetime's worth of notorious books, was penned on toilet paper while de Sade was locked up in the Bastille. He never completed the work.
That book is known as The 120 Days of Sodom. It is almost universally reviled, and for good reason.
The story follows four of society's elites, a banker, a judge, a bishop and an aristocrat. These four conspire to perform the most outrageous perversions imaginable in a secret castle, increasing their violence and intensity with each passing day, graduating to horrific murders.
Some might consider de Sade's libertinism and assume the work is an expression of his own twisted desires.
Those familiar with de Sade's works and philosophy might see a different interpretation.
The four main characters are the authority figures of society. They practice their predations on whomever they want, fully complicit and accepting of their companions' crimes. Their prisoners are reduced to mere objects, things to be acted upon, no rights and no feelings. Those familiar with rape know such an action is about power, not sex.
And it is with the psychologist's careful process that de Sade catalogues the assertion of power over human beings, beginning with the lightest of abuse all the way to horrific homicide.
Come and seehow a free society debases itself. The Marquis must be laughing in his grave at an entire country complicit in such depravities. Funded by money given freely by free persons, encouraged by a government that praises its own goodness and morality constantly in public.
Look at the simple way in which their tortures became both more complex and more painful.
Such things are not done to people. Only when those hooded figures become things, become meat to be manipulated, then the torture can increase. And what's more, it becomes a game.
Laugh. Barking dogs. Thumbs-up. Blood. Get your picture taken like you're showing off a prize catch.
There was powerful death magic in Abu Ghraib - blood and shit and menses. The hoods, the underwear strapped to heads, the erasing of the face - an old voodoo revenge. The bindings, cuffs, zip ties, shackled to bedframes - crucified gods in different positions.
The newfound power, the stench of fear, of being in complete control, led to newer manipulations. Sexual violation was used to increase the pain. Degrading positions while fully nude. Sodomy with foreign objects.
Intelligence could not possibly be a goal at this stage to any but the most ignorant agent. By now a prisoner's mental state will be such that they are not likely to give accurate information. They are more likely to give false information just to please their torturers.
Still, not enough.
The pain was increased. The pressure was increased. Cuts and bruises. Dogs. Lacerations. Constant abuse.
And eventually, inevitably, murder.
---
These were not accidental torturers. They didn't fall into their practices.
They followed their authority, the CIA. Their authority followed the authority above them, Rumsfeld or Cheney or whoever.
All sanctioned by a government of free persons. Now well-known. Well-documented. Debated. Normalized. The common narrative is now, "Should we torture?" not, "We will not torture." Aided and abetted by the aristocrats. By the bishops. By the bankers. By the judges.
De Sade must be laughing at how easily it is for even a free society to go along with the tide.
And surely even he might be shocked to know that Abu Ghraib was not, and is not, the only place for the US to practice its bloodthirsty appetite.
---
"The extensive wars wherewith Louis XIV was burdened during his reign, while draining the State's treasury and exhausting the substance of the people, none the less contained the secret that led to the prosperity of a swarm of those bloodsuckers who are always on the watch for public calamities, which, instead of appeasing, they promote or invent so as, precisely, to be able to profit from them the more advantageously." -Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom
There is little difference between torture in dark rooms on those suspected of wrongdoing and letting a bomb fall indiscriminately into a neighborhood. Power and dehumanization, the twin pillars of authoritarian political movements. The motivation and strategy, respectively, necessary to wage war.
We are in a terrible place.
Perhaps we would be better off like de Sade during the Revolution -- tucked safely away in a mental asylum.
It would be saner than being outside.
-THE MANAGEMENT
"There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him . . . These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame. Under torture Bentivenga may have told the most absurd lies, because it was no longer himself speaking, but his lust, the devils of his soul."
"Lust?"
"Yes, there is a lust for pain as there is a lust for adoration, and even a lust for humility. If it took so little to make the rebellious angels direct their ardor away from worship and humility toward pride and revolt, what can we expect of a human being? There, now you know: this was the thought that struck me in the course of my inquisitions. And this is why I gave up that activity. I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly." -Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
