I’ve had a (strongly critical) interest in punishment theory for some years now. Many months ago I rashly agreed to write an article on mass incarcerations and political control for a friend of mine, who graciously reminded me a couple of weeks ago that the deadline was either highly imminent or actually overdue… That’s part of the reason I’ve been reading Caroline Elkins’ detailed study of the exact and complex dynamics of the mass punishment of Mau Mau suspects in British-controlled Kenya.
Today, I read this excellent article by the (subcontinent) Indian-American anthropologist Amitav Ghosh, who draws a direct line between British carcereal practices in colonial India and the practices of the US GI’s in Abu Ghraib. (The piece was written to mark, roughly, the anniversary of the Abu Ghraib revelations.)
Here are some of the similarities he identified:
- some of the Abu Ghraib images are eerily reminiscent of photographs taken by British prison officials in Asia in the late nineteenth century. In these too, the prisoners are naked, men and women, and they stand with an arm outstretched and their genitals facing the camera; although their clothes have been removed, many wear fetters and chains. The difference is that these pictures were taken for officially sanctioned projects of documentation, and the jailors were absent from the frames…
Another continuity lies in the marriage of incarceration and cultural theory. The methods employed in Abu Ghraib and Guant
Helena – I like the Quaker saying. You could generalize by saying, “There is no end – only means.”
Naomi Klein had a great piece on “The True Purpose of Torture” in the Guardian back in May that makes some similar points to Gosh’s article. Here’s the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1483893,00.html
It’s easy to understand why the powerful use these methods to control the weak. It’s a little harder to understand why their many “enablers” (abusive prison guards, etc.) participate in their crimes for so little reward. Arlie Hochschild wrote a great piece for TomDispatch on that subject, which she called “The Chauffeur’s Dilemma:”
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=76&ItemID=8153
“Addressing the question of human betterment was never the problem: The problem began with the privileging of ends over means. It is because of this that the liberal interventionists have been so neatly tied into a knot by the neoconservatives: Having failed to address the question of the appropriate means, they have been unable to contest the appropriation of their ends.”
My issue w/ the above is the author’s felt necessity to ascribe noble ends to the neocons in the first place.
“[T]he question of human betterment was never the problem” is correct because it was never aim. “Human betterment,” “spreading democracy,” etc. etc. is the kind of rhetoric all imperialist invading powers use to justify their actions. There is nothing singular or exceptional about the USA’s actions in Iraq.
The more interesting question is why did the USA incarcerate vast numbers of people in Iraq who were never charged w/ a crime, never even suspected of terrorism? My hunch is they wanted to subject various Iraqis to those horrors because they counted on them returning to their communities and spreading the word about their mistreatment. Torture & subsequent reports of torture as a means coercing widespread compliance is what I suspect. An interesting study would be the distribution of the locations of those detained at Abu Ghraib before their detention.
I love your blog.