Grizzly @ Adams

Senior Seminar. The concluding chapter of We gives us a chilling description of the interrogation of I-330 and other suspected members of the Mephi. Here’s the key passage:

In the evening of that day I sat at one table with Him, with the Benefactor (for the first time) in the famous Gas Room. They brought in that woman. In my presence she was supposed to give her testimony. This woman stubbornly said nothing and was smiling. I noticed that she had sharp and very white teeth and that this was beautiful.

Then they led her under the Bell Jar. Her face became very white and since her eyes were dark and big, this was very beautiful. When they started to pump air out from under the Bell Jar, she threw back her head, half-closed her eyes, and squeezed her lips — this reminded me of something. She was looking at me, strongly gripping the armrests of the chair and looking, until her eyes closed completely. Then they dragged her out, quickly brought her back to her senses with the help of electrodes, and then put her back under the Bell Jar. They repeated this three times and she still didn’t say a word. Others, who had been brought in together with this woman, turned out to be more honorable: many of them started to talk after the first time.

This description is not particularly graphic. What makes it so powerful? I would argue that its horror is deepened by the matter-of-fact tone in which it is described, which is to say, by the failure of the recently lobotomized narrator to recognize it for the torture that it is and to be revolted by it.

OK. You all know what an America-hating knee-jerk liberal I am, and you probably recognize the photo above as one taken at Abu Ghraib prison, so you can probably guess where I’m going with this. What horrifies and disgusts me most about my own country’s barbaric treatment of “enemy combatants” is not so much that it happened in the first place. It’s the ongoing strenuous refusal of so many influential Americans to acknowledge torture as torture — and beyond that the lack of outrage among Americans generally.

That waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in fact constitute torture has been acknowledged by everyone from the International Red Cross to Republican Senator John McCain (see here), yet any number of influential talking heads still refuse to acknowledge that truth (see here). But so far only a few low-ranking soldiers (like Charles Graner and Lynddie England) have been prosecuted for torture. The high-ranking officials who authorized torture in the first place are still at large. One of the most important of these people, John Yoo, is now a law professor. Another, Jay Bybee, is a federal judge. As for Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — I’m not holding my breath. As Bob Dylan once reminded us, “All the criminals in their coats and their ties / are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.”

Here let me quote the key concept from the work of David and Nanelle Barash, who define dystopia as the denial of a biologically-based human nature:

In justifying this nightmare society [of 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien...is wrong.

Well, is there “something called human nature” which is intrinsically outraged by what we do? Or has that something been hammered out of us? Is O’Brien right or wrong?

If we think of “the soul” in We as a kind of shorthand for all that makes us uniquely human — imagination, love — then is Zamyatin suggesting in the passage above that part of being human is the ability to recognize and be revolted by torture? If so, should we say that America has lost its soul?

I’ll give you my answer to this question after you’ve all replied.

P.S. For a recent essay likening torture at Guantanamo Bay to that in Nineteen Eighty Four, take a look at Scott Horton’s “Revealing the Secrets in Room 101.”