Written by:
Victoria A. Brownworth
» Order
this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 14#6
The election draws nearer, and voters of all genders must consider what is important to them as they go to the polls come November. There are many concerns. Civil rights for queers, which the Bush administration opposes. The economy, which the Bush administration has eviscerated, creating more poor and working-poor Americans, two-thirds of them women. There are manifold other domestic issues, from the environment to reproductive rights, all of which have been endangered by this administration. And then there is the war on Iraq.
For many, Iraq isn’t the central issue of the Bush presidency. But the war — a war perpetrated on Iraq by President Bush in the name of the American citizenry with no provocation — has, for me, endangered what I hold very dear: my pride in being American. Before the word was co-opted by conservatives for political manipulation, I called this patriotism.
The war on Iraq damaged my patriotic pride. But it was the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other facilities administered by the U.S. military under the aegis of the president and the Pentagon that made me truly ashamed. The knowledge that acts of outright murder, despicable violence, sexual coercion and personal humiliation were being carried out in my name (and in yours) by Americans against men and women (the photographs of what was done to the women prisoners were not released to the public — the outrage in the Arab world would have been too great) has been very difficult to live with. The knowledge that this nation has embraced the use of torture by inflicting it in other countries against people it has deemed nonpersons, such as the prisoners being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sickens me further. Among the most disturbing elements of the series of revelations about the torture is that women were involved.
In May, when the scandal reached a political fever pitch, feminist commentator Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a column about the incidents at Abu Ghraib. I often like what Ehrenreich has to say; her book Nickel and Dimed, about the working poor in America, should be read by everyone who isn’t among the underemployed. Yet on Abu Ghraib, Ehrenreich disappointed me. She saw the torture exposé simply as a defeat of the feminist perspective that women are the superior gender, that women are not complicit in acts of violence, particularly sexual violence, against other human beings.
Ehrenreich’s feminist take on the haunting pictures of a leering Pvt. Lynndie England, cigarette dangling from her mouth, pointing her finger like a faux gun at the genitalia of naked, hooded Iraqi male soldiers like in some grotesque S/M parody, was simple. It was also simplistic: If women can do this, they are no longer victims. They are perpetrators. They aren’t superior; they are as capable of evil as are men.
The issue of torture has plagued humanity for centuries. Torture hit its zenith at various times: the hideous scope of the Spanish Inquisition; the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis and Stalin; various genocidal tortures wrought by Pol Pot, Idi Amin and the Hutus (the latter against the Tutsis in Rwanda). Those were big moments in torture history, but according to Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross (which investigated Abu Ghraib and reported the abuses months before they came to light
in the United States), torture occurs every day in the majority of the nations of the world.
And the primary victims of torture are women and children.
Torture in China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Congo is among the most horrific. Rape, sodomy, sexual mutilation and humiliation are common forms of torture of women and girls throughout the world, particularly in Africa and Asia.
In the United States, the torture — not abuse, but torture as classified by both Amnesty International and the Red Cross — at Abu Ghraib was simply minimized by conservatives as no more than a “fraternity hazing” (also illegal), or excused as “necessary” to obtain information from prisoners of war. (White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez advised President Bush to treat terrorism suspects at Guantánamo as outside the rules of the Geneva Convention, which the United States signed in 1948, and the president has done just that.) That women members of the military were engaged in these actions, particularly women who, like England, were also sexually intimate with the men who were perpetrating the majority of the torture‚ is not surprising. Nor does it mean that women have somehow, as Ehrenreich suggests, lost their moral high ground.
Women have been perpetrators of torture under the aegis of their male instructors and lovers before. One need only remember women guards and even fellow prisoners at concentration camps during the Holocaust. But torture worldwide is almost universally perpetrated by men against women and other men, not, as three photos starring England out of thousands of photos from Abu Ghraib suggest, the obverse.
What disturbs us so about the photos of England and other women is that the women are complicit in the violence. We want them, instead, to be outraged. We don’t care that they are trying to get along in a male world. The way to become one of the boys isn’t to objectify others, and it isn’t to participate in creating an otherness among an entire group of people, just as women have been made the other for millennia.
Ehrenreich sees Abu Ghraib as a referendum on feminism and its precepts. She sees those grotesque pictures of England as something that taints all women — including those who suffer under torture. I see the torture at Abu Ghraib for what it is: a referendum on this administration and its precepts. It isn’t that I have an investment in designating women as victims; it’s simply the fact of what we are, in most instances, in most of the world today. England, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski and the two other female privates involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal are exactly what the administration has claimed the entire incident is: a few exceptions. The problem of torture, in Iraq and the world, is one that men have created, and it’s men who must cease to consider torture viable before it can be eradicated.
A female colleague of mine noted back in June, “You can’t take torture off the table.” I take Dostoevsky’s view from The Brothers Karamazov. Torture is always wrong, and so are those who perpetrate it. The degradation of humanity is the worst atrocity that we can perpetrate on other humans.
And that is why the events of Abu Ghraib must be viewed not as a referendum on women or feminism, but on men, war and torture. Right now, as you read this, a woman is being tortured. If we allow our nation to be complicit in torture, then we become complicit, and that is tantamount to being torturers ourselves. If we accept this administration’s policy of designating other human beings as less than human, then we have no moral challenge to those in Saudi Arabia or China or Congo who torture women under the very same rubric.
The torture at Abu Ghraib and its revolting pictorial were done in your name. England did what her boyfriend told her to do. She made a choice — a terrible one. Our choice, come November, is singular. We must refuse to countenance such actions in our name. Otherwise our own humanity is at risk.
|
