[Backstage-list] Fwd: NYTimes.com Article: Tourists and Torturers

[jn2115 at columbia.edu]

Liebe Backstage Liste,

fuer alle 'Dark Tourism' Interessierten anbei ein Beitrag von Luc 
Sante,
mit besten Gruessen,
Johannes Novy

Johannes Novy
PhD Candidate in Urban Planning
Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Columbia University New York
fon:(001)9174702341
212 Avenue B, Apt.2
New York City, NY, 10009
--



Tourists and Torturers

NYTimes, May 11, 2004
 By LUC SANTE





So now we think we know who took some of the photographs at
Abu Ghraib. The works attributed to Specialist Jeremy
Sivits are fated to remain among the indelible images of
our time. They will have changed the course of history;
just how much we do not yet know. It is arguable that
without them, news of what happened within the walls of
that prison would never have emerged from the fog of
classified internal memos. We owe their circulation and
perhaps their existence to the popular technology of our
day, to digital cameras and JPEG files and e-mail.
Photographs can now be disseminated as quickly and widely
as rumors. It's possible that even if Specialist Joseph M.
Darby hadn't gone to his superiors in January and "60
Minutes II" hadn't broken the story last month, some of
those pictures would sooner or later have found their way
onto the Web and so into the public record.

Leaving aside the question of how anyone could have
perpetrated the horrors depicted in those pictures, you
can't help but wonder why American soldiers would
incriminate themselves by posing next to their handiwork.
Americans don't seem to have a long tradition of that sort
of thing. I can't offhand recall having seen comparable
images from any recent wars, although before the digital
era amateur photographs were harder to spread. There have
been many atrocity photographs over the years, of course -
the worst I've ever seen were taken in Algeria in 1961, and
once when I was a child another kid found and showed off
his father's cache of pictures from the Pacific Theater in
World War II, which shook me so badly that I can't remember
with any certainty what they depicted. I'm pretty sure,
though, that they did not show anyone grinning and making
self-congratulatory gestures.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib are trophy shots. The American
soldiers included in them look exactly as if they were
standing next to a gutted buck or a 10-foot marlin. That
incongruity is not the least striking aspect of the
pictures. The first shot I saw, of Specialist Charles A.
Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England flashing thumbs up
behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that
for a few seconds I took it for a montage. When I
registered what I was seeing, I was reminded of something.
There was something familiar about that jaunty insouciance,
that unabashed triumph at having inflicted misery upon
other humans. And then I remembered: the last time I had
seen that conjunction of elements was in photographs of
lynchings.

In photographs that were taken and often printed as
postcards in the American heartland in the first four
decades of the 20th century, black men are shown hanging
from trees or light fixtures or maybe being burned alive,
while below them white people are laughing and pointing for
the benefit of the camera. There are some pictures of
whites being lynched, too, but these tend not to feature
the holiday crowd. Often the spectators at lynchings of
African-Americans are so effusive in their mugging that
they all seem to be vying for credit. Before seeing such
pictures you might expect the faces in them to express some
kind of collective rage; instead the mood is giddy, often
verging on hysterical, with a distinct sexual undercurrent.


Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt
free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were
psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably
never crossed their minds. In both cases a contagious
collective frenzy perhaps overruled the scruples of some
people otherwise known for their gentleness and sympathy -
but isn't the abandonment of such scruples possible only if
the victims are considered less than human? After all, it
is one thing for a boxer to lift his hands over his head in
triumph beside the fallen body of his rival, quite another
to strike a comparable pose next to the bodies of strangers
you have arranged in quasi-pornographic tableaus. The
Americans in the photographs are not enacting hatred;
hatred can coexist with respect, however strained. What
they display, instead, is contempt: their victims are
merely objects.

It is conceivable that such events might have occurred in a
war in which the enemy looked like us —certainly, there are
Americans to whom all foreigners are irredeemably Other.
Still, it is striking how, in wartime, a fundamental lack
of respect for the enemy's body becomes an issue only when
the enemy is perceived as being of another race. You might
have heard about the strings of human ears collected by
some soldiers in Vietnam, or read the story, reported in
Life during World War II, about the G.I. who blithely
mailed his girlfriend in Brooklyn a Japanese skull as a
Christmas present. And the concept of the human trophy is
not restricted to warfare, but permeates the history of
colonialism, from the Congo to Australia, Mexico to India.
Treating those we deem our equals as game animals, however,
has been out of fashion for quite a few centuries.

Of course the violence at Abu Ghraib was primarily
psychological - hey, only a few people were killed - and
the trophies were pictorial, like the results of a photo
safari. Some commentators have made a point of noting this
very relative nonviolence, contrasting it with the lynching
of the four American military contractors in Falluja last
month. This line of argument is notable for what it leaves
out: there is a difference between the rage of a people who
feel themselves invaded and the contempt of a victorious
nation for a civilian population whom it has ostensibly
liberated.

That prison guards would pose captives - primarily
noncombatants, low-level riffraff - in re-enactments of
cable TV smut for the benefit of their friends back home
emerges from the mode of thinking that has prevented an
accounting of civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning
of the war. If civilian deaths are not recorded, let alone
published, it must be because they do not matter, and if
they do not matter it must be because the Iraqis are
beneath notice. And that must mean that anything done to
them is permissible, as long as it does not create
publicity that would embarrass the Bush administration. The
possible consequences of the Abu Ghraib archive are
numerous, many of them horrifying. Perhaps, though, the
digital camera will haunt the future career of George W.
Bush the way the tape recorder sealed the fate of Richard
Nixon.

Luc Sante, who teaches creative writing and the history of
photography at Bard College, is the author of "Low Life,"
"Evidence" and "The Factory of Facts."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/opinion/11SANT.html?
ex=1085283785&ei=1&en=e58fef897a177111


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