The Torture Memo
By Judith Martin
Straw
I’ve stopped using the word
“torture”, as I’ve come to the realization that it does not
really apply to the things I’ve been using it to describe. Well, sitting
in that traffic on the 405 in the pouring rain, it was just…no, it
wasn’t really. It was kind of frustrating, that it took so long to get
from one place to another, but I’m in a comfortable car with a soothing
voice on the radio keeping me company. It wasn’t that bad. Not torture.
The visit to the dentist to get my teeth
cleaned, no, not my idea of fun, but these things need to be done. And then,
they discovered I’d cracked a tooth around a filling and needed more work.
The drilling, the noise, the pain after the novacaine wore off- not a load of
laughs, but it wasn’t torture.
My government uses torture. My
government thinks it is utterly justified in using the most horrifying,
degrading abuse imaginable to get information out of people who they think might
have some. This is so outrageous to me, I’m sickened whenever I think of
it. And I truly hate to think of it, in any way, at
all.
I am, admittedly, someone with a
really low tolerance for violence. It’s just amazing to me that so many of
us take it so much for granted, it does not arouse the smallest protest.
Consider the television shows that begin with a crime, or a corpse, as if a dead
body were just another empty grocery bag blowing down the street. As if it were
not someone whose life had a meaning, a person who had friends and a family, a
member of the human race who would be missed. Just another “call HQ, we
got a body here…” and then on to the next commercial for aspirin.
So, since we’re all supposed to be home watching our three or four hours
of fun suspenseful murder games every night, we’re not at all alarmed.
Violence? You’re soaking in it! It’s not a surprise that we
don’t take notice of the real live cruelties we inflict on our
“prisoners of war.” I am astounded that anyone can read the front
page of the paper and ingest breakfast at the same
time.
It does connect with the essence
of the problem when one begins the study of non-violence. We have to call this
concept “non-violence”. It doesn’t make sense to us to use a
word like peace or ahimsa or love. We must make it understandable by describing
what it isn’t. It’s not (the usual order of the day) violence. It
begins with language, and how we choose to use
it.
For myself, I’ve decided to
wash the war out of my mouth. I will not be attacking the dirty dishes in the
sink. If it were an attack, wouldn’t it make more sense to just smash them
all to bits rather than wash them and put them away? I’m choosing not to
describe my life in terms of battles. If I’m looking at my calendar for
the week and making up a battle plan, it seems I’ve already decided
it’s going to be a bloody, painful struggle, and someone will have to be
declared the loser for me to know that it’s
over.
I will not use the word torture
describe traffic or dental work. I will use it in my letters to the editor, to
congress, to my senators, and to the executive branch. I will use it to declaim
that my government’s actions and duplicitous policies are just as wrong as
wrong gets. I think it’s the only reason we aren’t all screaming
about this horror as loudly as possible; we just hate to think about it,
we’re just shocked into disbelief and silence. But in so many ways,
silence is complicity, and if we are frightened into silence, the real
terrorists have won.
If you are going
to use the word, torture, make it a practice of non-silence. Speak it in the
poetry of peace.
I have such an aversion to
torture that even reading a description of a particular practice is
Enough to turn my stomach. Then, it stays
with me. Just as an example, the novel “The Assault” by Muelisch, is
a story that starts at the end of WW2 in the Netherlands, and in it’s
description of the appalling practices of a despised collaborator contains a
torture that was so disgusting, so painful and humiliating, I’ve never
been able to forget it. I wish I remembered the peace rally in the last section
of the book with equal clarity.
Posted: Mon - May 1, 2006 at 11:57 AM