Regardless of their takes on
the divisive topic of torture, there seems to be rare agreement among an array
of experts, activists, proponents and critics about one of the most reliable
ways it has been successfully defended in recent decades. The so-called ticking
time bomb scenario has done the trick so often and so well—for leaders of
countries, militaries, small armies of Hollywood producers—that it has taken on
the enticing shine of a particularly hot political commodity: the foregone
conclusion disguised as a given.
The scenario lays out the
premise that if a man-made catastrophe were about to take place and the
criminal mastermind behind it had been captured, torture would suddenly become
not only a prudent option but a moral obligation. The naïve and precious
idealism of deluded liberal elites would give way to tough-guy pragmatism,
considering how countless lives could be spared by what would be, in less
extreme circumstances, the highly abhorrent and unethical treatment of an
isolated person or group. As anyone who has seen “24,” any of Liam Neeson’s
alpha-dad-on-a-rampage movies, or this
2001 Dick Cheney interview knows, ours is a mean world, and sometimes you
need to cross over to the dark side to protect the ones you love.
There are just a few problems
with this argument, to say the least. Author and scholar Alex Adams confidently
takes a jackhammer to a series of key premises on which it rests in his new
book, “How to Justify Torture: Inside the Ticking Bomb Scenario,” beginning
with the one that claims torture works, like it or not. For a quick refresher,
here’s a clip of former Vice President Cheney, still insisting on its efficacy
in this 2014 episode of “Meet the Press,” although he also insists on using the
term “enhanced interrogation” instead of torture when it comes to the United
States’ post-9/11 tactics:
Those visiting the Washington,
D.C., area can now pop by the International
Spy Museum to weigh in on what they think torture is and to see
artifacts from the Bush-Cheney era, such as this waterboarding kit:
(Jacquelyn Martin / AP)
Adams is clear on these
distinctions, and he also has a firm grip on how the ticking time bomb scenario
has had a good amount of help in the justification department from Hollywood.
From “Dirty Harry” to “Batman Begins,” “24”‘s Jack Ryan to French cinema, Adams’
book tracks the pop-cultural narratives around torture that have functioned,
intentionally or no, to make the practice acceptable in the eyes of the global
public.
Here it should be noted that
there reportedly was also a torture scene in the recent children’s feature
“Pokémon: Detective Pikachu.” (We thought we knew you, Pikachu.)
As Adams pointed out in a
recent interview with Truthdig Executive Editor Kasia Anderson, the pleasure we
take in consuming entertainment is important in the normalization process.
Torture lurks in the realm of the taboo, which is always good for a thrill.
Hollywood producers like thrills, as do audiences. It’s no mystery how and why
the theme continues to play out on screens of all sizes.
Not too long ago, talking
about the ongoing merger between politics and entertainment used to be harder
to do, especially before the election of a certain reality TV star to the
world’s most powerful office. Now, though some pointed sniffs may still echo
through the vaunted halls of The Academy when the notion is raised of taking
entertainment seriously as a site of political study, the overlap seems more
obvious, the stakes far more drastic than even subscribers to that idea had
imagined. Adams knows, as he elaborates in the interview below, that though
it’s not so simple as to say “Dirty Harry” made a Dick Cheney or a Donald Trump
possible, there are connections that we ignore at our own peril.
KASIA ANDERSON: What, in
your estimation, is the relationship between torture on the part of a state
against its enemies and how the government of that state treats its citizens?
ALEX ADAMS: This is a
complex and interesting question. One of the ways that the U.S., for instance,
has justified its torture regime in Guantanamo and the network of CIA black
sites is the reclassification of the people it incarcerates at these sites as
“detainees” and “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners. These categories are
radical legal innovations, created solely in order to strip these prisoners of
their availability to the protections of international law. Prisoners are
subject to the Geneva Conventions, and the U.S. argues that detainees and enemy
combatants are not. To be blunt, through these redefinitions the U.S.
administration has created a class of “torturable” inmates. Now, to consider
citizens: Citizens of a state are insulated against torture in part because
citizenship itself is a body of protections that ensures the safety of the
person holding that citizenship, those documents and that status; citizenship
and noncombatant status protect us from the violence of war. However, once we
are classified as a threat, or as a criminal, or, rather, as someone who it is
in some way legitimate for the state to go after, then there is the potential
for us to forfeit these protections and be subject to gross infringements of
human rights. I’m sure your readers can join the dots here: Think about the
state of incarceration in the U.S., which is characterized by slave labor and
hideous conditions of confinement, or police brutality, and state surveillance
of minority groups in the U.S. and Europe. That is, to sum up: We are all
potentially torturable, and because of racism ingrained at all social and
institutional levels, some of us are more torturable than others.
Wars, in particular colonial
wars, are often laboratories of social control. In the U.S., for instance,
there have been calls for white nationalist terrorists to be treated the same
way as Muslim terrorists. What this would trigger, however, would be the use,
on U.S. soil and against U.S. citizens, of counterterrorist practices that have
been denounced across the globe as war crimes. So there’s always the potential
for the war to come home.
KA: Why—or maybe the
question is how—do you think that there has been such a pronounced uptick in
the post-9/11 era of instances of torture being depicted in entertainment and
popular cultural products? It’s not like there was a master memo that
circulated through Hollywood.
AA: You’re right that we
can’t attribute the rise in the prominence of torture representations to a
centralized or deliberate plan. But looking back, we can make patterns from the
chaos. There was a general climate of outrage and revanchism, and one of the
ways that this manifested was in the torture program, and in more general calls
for torture, which were part of this general atmosphere. After 9/11, there was
a lot of grief, a lot of rage, there were calls for invasion, calls for the use
of nuclear weapons, calls for peace; one strand of this was the call for and
the practice of torture. There have been an extraordinary amount of cultural
explorations of the war on terror, of colonial violence and so on,
characterized in a huge multitude of ways. What I’ve done in the book is
isolate one element of this and charted its extraordinary development. It’s
also worth noting that there were—and are still—a lot of representations
critiquing torture, exposing it and condemning it. The ticking bomb scenario is
part of a wide and varied debate about torture, which is still taking place
today. Amazon is releasing “The Report” soon, for instance, which I’m
really looking forward to seeing.
I like your remark about the
lack of a master memo, and, of course, you’re right. But on the other hand, if
we look at the controversy surrounding a movie like ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’
for instance, we can see that the military [does] attempt to influence
Hollywood storytelling for nakedly ideological purposes. It’s difficult to
articulate this point without sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but there
are documented cases in which torture narratives have been literally
ghostwritten by the CIA.
KA: I know this may not
happen currently as much as it may have when you began your work, but what
do you tell people who may discount the importance of entertainment and popular
culture as “mere fluff,” or somehow separate from real life?
AA: You’re right to note
that the connection between popular culture and political discourse is easier
to discuss these days, but there was a time when people would feel entitled to
summarily dismiss concerns about the political nature of literature, film and
popular culture. People in general are more amenable to the idea now, but it
still needs to be stressed: The fact that something may be enjoyable or
recreational in no way diminishes the extent to which politics are embedded
into it. At the most fundamental level, stories are socializing tools which
morally and philosophically educate or stimulate us; we accept this about
children’s fiction or about polemic art forms like caricature, so why shouldn’t
we accept it about fiction or literature or culture more generally?
There are some important
caveats to this, of course. Sometimes people object to this position because it
can sometimes be articulated in a patronizing manner; that is, that you mean
that people are passively or stupidly brainwashed or indoctrinated by cultural
discourse. Of course, that isn’t accurate: Audiences don’t have to accept
anything they see uncritically, and I’m not just talking about people who have
arts degrees. Any ordinary audience will be able to watch or read something
critically; in general, most audiences today have a very sophisticated level of
visual and cultural literacy. Something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe
couldn’t exist without the presumption that most ordinary consumers of visual
media are able to handle huge amounts of aesthetic and affective and political
material competently, adaptably and intelligently.
The other caveat here is the
censorship angle: Sometimes people think that by objecting to something in a
movie or a novel you are calling for it to be banned, or that you’re saying
that it is literally dangerous or toxic in a contaminating way. You see this in
free speech debates, but also in the way that people sometimes blame movies and
video games for sex murders or gun crime. Now, I think that the popular culture
I critique in the book does circulate unsavory ideas that should be resisted,
but I’m not calling for censorship or literally blaming the CIA torture program
on “24.” The claim that culture is political is, for me, quite a simple
claim: Parliaments, philosophy seminars and talk shows aren’t the only places
where we have public debates about moral, ethical and political debates.
Sometimes we have them in the cinema or on Netflix.
KA: Following on that
last question, how would you characterize the unique qualities of popular
culture and entertainment (I don’t use these interchangeably, by the way, but
am putting them together for the sake of brevity here) as ideological conduits?
For example, it seems like popular culture and entertainment are effective
sites for strengthening an argument, whether about torture or another topic, in
part because they are not always consumed the same way more overtly
political or “serious” texts are.
AA: Yes, I agree. One of
the major reasons that popular culture is politically effective is that it is
pleasurable, recreational. We are happy when the family is reunited, we enjoy
seeing the villains come to a sticky end, we are inhabited by a sense of
justice or outrage or horror (when the cultural objects are doing their job
properly). The ways in which these pleasures are associated with particular
narratives or events or characterizations does a great deal of
work—strengthening or undermining stereotypes, for instance, or developing and
renegotiating ideas of justice. I’ve written elsewhere about humor as a form of
political communication, and I think it’s a really strong example of what we’re
discussing here: When we laugh, we understand and we agree. This is a really
effective, because personal, way of generating agreement, because seriousness
is so often dry or boring or otherwise off-putting. So yes, I think that the
pleasurable character of these forms of cultural discourse is central to why
they’re effective.
KA: What is the promotion
and/or common sense-ification of torture about at this moment? Does it have a
function now that differs from, say, how—and perhaps why—it was supported right
after 9/11?
AA: You’re right to draw
this distinction. There was an extent to which the earliest post-9/11 torture
narratives could be understood as a reaction to a particular moment, but now,
18 years on, there is something about the repetitive and normalized nature of
these scenarios that suggests something else. The idea that torture is simply
effective and righteous because it can save the day is embedded into multiple
forms of cultural production—it’s not just thrillers or action movies; torture
is everywhere. I haven’t seen it yet, but apparently there’s a torture
scene in “Pokémon Detective Pikachu.” So today I would say that the
problem is more that we have a normalization, a banalization of torture. It’s
common sense—“If it was my daughter, of course I would torture
someone to save her.” I remember when people were warning that torture would
become normalized. They were right.
KA: How would you read
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s recent praise of Colonel Carlos
Alberto Ustra, as well as Donald Trump’s campaign promises regarding bringing
waterboarding back (and then some)?
AA: I would say that one
of the distinguishing characteristics of fascists is their enthusiasm for
appearing tough, their utter lack of understanding of what is at stake in
torture, and their moronic cruelty.
I think, regarding Trump in
particular. one of the interesting things about the way he would frame his
remarks about torture is by positioning torture as “anti-PC.” That says a lot
about the way that he uses the language of the far right. Further, even though
he’s incoherent, it’s dangerous to assume that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
One of the major tactics of his fascism is to make everyone who is reasonable
rush to provide coherent rebuttals to his ludicrous statements; while he’s
doing that, he’s busily prosecuting his horrendous agenda. Sartre said it
in “Anti-Semite and Jew”: The fascist knows he is not talking in good
faith, but he laughs while he forces us to rebut ever more absurd allegations.
Likewise, Bolsonaro will make some flippant remark, and while we’re screaming
about it he’ll burn down the Amazon.
But at the same time, I think
they mean it when they say things like that about torture. When a fascist tells
you who he is, believe him the first time.
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