Ashes to Ashes

"…the Tableau is one of only two witch treatises that addressed the issue of witches as women. There were two aspects of their feminity which de Lancre emphasized in his discussion of witches: their sexuality…and women's 'natural inclination' for sorcery (de Lancre Tableau p. 89). This natural inclination was not rooted in women's physically weaker state. In fact, jurists such as Bodin had previously commented on having witnessed 'that women suffer torture more continuously than men' (de Lancre Tableau p. 89). Women's affinity for sorcery was based on women's extreme nature—her pursuit of her appetites, her desire for revenge, and her need for novelty, all distinguished her from the more balanced male."
Lorraine Berry, "Destabilizing Categories: Jews, Witches, and the Christian Male," Aestel 4 (1996)

Are we aware what lies at the end of the road opened up by the normalization of torture? A significant detail of Mr. Mohammed’s confession gives a hint. It was reported that the interrogators submitted to waterboarding and were able to endure it for less than 15 seconds on average before being ready to confess anything and everything. Mr. Mohammed, however, gained their grudging admiration by enduring it for two and a half minutes. "Knight of the Living Dead" By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Are we aware that we are nearly there now? It won't be much longer before the so-called war on terror will have stripped of us, not only of any moral authority we may have once possessed in the world, but I think we've already passed into the realm of the inhuman. We have become the zombies that stalk the earth, devouring human flesh. We call it interrogation; we call it seeking the truth, but really, we are cannibals, and the only thing that will slake our desire for the thirst for revenge is the flesh of those we consider less-than-human.

Fear is a terrible thing. It causes people to do things they would never, ever consider if they continued in a world of blue sky and flowers and plenty of food. But place people in an arena where they fear that someone is out to hurt them, and watch how we all become lions willing to eat the huddled near-dead before us.

It's not even that those we face are weak. We portray them as weak: they are slave to their rituals, their calls to prayer, their denigration of women, their rules about what they may or may not eat. Their rituals are so bizarre to us it's almost as if they are secret. And if those rituals are secret, they must be using them to hurt us. And really? They're woman-like. Woman with all of her secret rituals that she uses to trap and ensnare us, until one day we find ourselves domesticated and enslaved supporting a family. She frightens us in so many ways; no wonder we spend so much of our time coming up with new and better ways to make sure she knows her place.

But when we get them alone, when we strip them of their clothes and torture them, the really bad ones, the ones we secretly fear because we think he intends to kill us all, well those ones are able to endure our tortures for longer than it should be possible. Does he have supernatural help? 500 years ago, we would have assumed that it was the devil who held their tongues, gave them the strength to endure our good, Christian discipline, our search for the cleansing truth that would set free their souls. Maybe Allah is the devil. Or maybe, these people, who we have a long history of associating with decadence and the body and way-too-much sex, well maybe their bodies, the inferior half of the human miracle—for we all know that the soul and the mind are the body's masters—perhaps their inhabitation of the body gives them just a few more minutes of strength when we apply our rational, modern, intellectually justified and legally memo'ed methods of extracting truth.

And really, the deviousness of the weak is well known. They tell us lies. They tell us what we want to hear; part of us knows that, and yet, we don't stop because we want to hear those words. We want to feel the power of forcing them to say the unthinkable. We want the sadistic, sexual thrill of reducing another human being to cowering lump of bloody flesh.

SINCE the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent of his crimes has been mixed with doubts. Can his claims be trusted? What if he confessed to more than he really did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop the water boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”?

But we are a gentle people. We are so humane, so modern, that we protect the little animals that we eat.

There is a valid Federal Government interest in preventing or reducing the infliction of pain on sentient creatures. Examples of this are laws governing the use of laboratory animals and requiring pain -free methods of slaughtering livestock

Of course, we inflict pain on fetuses, but we shall soon fix that. Woman needs to be reminded of her place. They all need to be reminded of their place. Everyone who does not recognize our authority, our intellectual, spiritual superiority, will have to be reminded that when all is said and done, they are merely creatures of the flesh. And we, we in search of our noble truths, our exalted sense of ourselves as God's true representatives on earth, it is our mission to remind those who are lesser than us that they are flesh and weak.

Some don’t find this troubling. The realistic counterargument goes: The war on terrorism is dirty, one is put in situations where the lives of thousands may depend on information we can get from our prisoners, and one must take extreme steps. As Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School puts it: “I’m not in favor of torture, but if you’re going to have it, it should damn well have court approval.” Well, if this is “honesty,” I think I’ll stick with hypocrisy.

We are almost there. Once we have legalized what we do in the name of our safety, once we have rationalized and explained how it is that we can reduce humans to their physical parts, then it won't be much longer. After a while, after we've become accustomed to their screams being the price we pay for the truths they must tell us, then it will become easier to round them up, to gather them into concentrated camps, and then, after that, we'll have no choice but to fire up the crematoria, and release their not-quite-human ashes into the sky.

Photos from Without Sanctuary

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