There is this girl I hate. I like fantasizing about how I would kidnap her, sew her pussy shut, beat her, dress her up like a bride, and rip her vagina open with my dick from behind, while choking her face with a wedding cake during improvised wedding ceremony. If that's not enough, I think of sewing our marriage rings to her clit and rip them off when it's time to exchange rings. Other times I fantasize how I'd rape her for months, use pain-inducing drugs and all kinds of physycal and mental torture like ripping her hand nails off or surprise-fisting her (virgin!) anus, or leaving her for days of loud white noise in cold dark chamber without food, and every day or two - slowly cut off parts of her while my penis stuck in her ass - one part at a time, until she has no arms, no legs, no eyes and ears, no teeth and tongue, so that she would ethernaly stay in the dark, not able to communicate in any way. And then I would return that meat bag back into society for rehab, so that she always think about me and fear/feel the pain, and shit in her bed until she went insane, while laying in some hospital in complete safety and comfort. I also would invent a tactile sign - a pinch maybe, which I would always use while torturing her, while she is still able to see me and what I'm doing to her, so that later I could come to hospital when she's convinced that everything is over and remind her that I'm still free and more importantly - close by. Among other things, when she hasn't yet been severely tortured, I'd make her do things to other people - raping and assraping a teen girl with a beer bottle (with a cap on), cutting off slices of her face skin and rubbing salt into wounds, assraping a small boy with a hand cut from a girl while chewing his dick and showing him a video of how this girl was tortured, boiling his leg in oil and eating it in front of him while he's dying from hunger, and many other disturbing stuff. And then I would torture her while blaming for selfishness - that she would prefer other people suffering rather than suffer herself, and that if she had properly refused I would have just let innocent people go. This is how I hate this girl. Most of all I hate her for making me think all these things and enjoy torturing her.
Orwell does endow Winston Smith with some standard techniques used today. If these techniques fail for Winston Smith, this has less to do with torture technology and more to do with the fact that Smith lives in a particular kind of state which progressively undermines characteristic sources of value outside the torture chamber. Here again, Orwell conflates the historical reality of his times, torture as he saw it in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, with an account of the reality of torture as such. He reads back into the past his present, and out of that he constructs an unchanging vision of what torture "really" is. Orwell here suffers from a narrowness of vision, and this narrowness bears the marks of the Cold War period in which the novel was written.
FULL A Chinese Torture Chamber Story 1994
Betrayal is not a mode of resistance, it is sheer and utter surrender. Suspended on a hook, Amery writes, "I had to give up rather quickly. And now there was a crackling and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten until this hour." (Amery: 32) In torture, he writes, "the transformation of the person into flesh becomes complete. Frail in the face of violence, yelling out in pain, awaiting no help, capable of no resistance, the tortured person is only a body, and nothing else besides that." (Amery: 33) When asked, Amery replied truthfully. He was lucky he did not know very much himself, but this, he recognizes was not due to his virtuousness: To come right out with it: I had nothing but luck, because especially in regard to the extorting of information, our group was rather well organized. What they wanted to hear from me in Breendonk, I simply did not know myself. If instead of aliases I had been able to name the real names, perhaps, or probably, a calamity would have occurred, and I would be standing here now as the weakling most likely am, and as the traitor I potentially already was. Yet it was not at all that I opposed them with the heroically maintained silence that befits a real man in such a situation and about which one may read (almost always, incidentally , in reports by people who were not there themselves). I talked. I accused myself of invented absurd political crimes and even now I don't know at all how they could have occurred to me, dangling bundle that I was. Apparently, I had the hope that, after such incriminating disclosures, a well-aimed blow to the head would put an end to my misery and quickly bring on my death, or at least unconsciousness. (Amery 36)
Torture then gathers to itself accomplices, and these accomplices are not just other human beings, but ordinary things for which bodies reach and are familiar. They are the large kitchen rice paddles used to beat one in Sri Lanka (Lawrence, 1999: 6) , the kindergarten chairs to which Palestinians are tied for the Shabeh torture in Israel (Ginbar, 1998: 16; Allen, 1999:5-6) . They also include the things forensic pathologists working at grave sites refer to as the "Associated Objects", the clothing, crosses, toys and shoes that somehow found their way into the grave. Again it is often said that torture destroys communities, families, and identities, but less frequently that torture also destroys many other forms of relatedness, things like cooking, dancing, writing, or simply moving. These too constitute ordinary betrayals that follow from modern torture. For this reason, Amery concludes: Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one's fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules.(Amery: 40)
Modes of compassion emphasize alertness and awareness. Gyatso is well aware of the "tricks" of interrogators and he has mastered many different strategies including omission, deception, and silence. He is skilled at hiding things. (Gyatso: 76, 116, 119, 144, 180, 182) He is fully focused on the Dalai Lama (Gyatso: 231), and he has, like Djilas, no fear of death (Gyatso: 135). But as a monk he venerates life. Indeed, Gyatso is remarkable in his willingness to think compassionately of all living creatures and reach out to them. He affirms all these fragile relationships. He takes on pupils teaching them to read, only to see them tortured. He makes friends only to have them commit suicide or have them publicly denounce him. He reveals to his captors who his family is and where they can be found. He speaks with prisoners and enjoys their company only to see them executed.
But Gyatso's strategy is different. He expands himself to include the torturers as part of humanity. In the modes of alertness and governance, the torturer stands apart as an enemy. When humanity is invoked, it is invoked either as part of the strategy of the torturer or the victim to gain a hold on each other. That is not the case here with Gyatso. The center of Gyatso's approach is that even in the absence of hope, one opens oneself up fully to the world, and it is this openness, that allows one to remain whole in the end. Although in a place of death, Gyatso dreams of escape not through death but by affirming life.
Both modes of forgetfulness and modes of laughter flirt with madness, and this is of course their weakness. Laughter can become hysteria, and forgetfulness can become delusion and fantasy. In the film "Brazil," as the torture victim escapes into fantasy, the torturers say regretfully "we have lost him." What Timmerman says though then serves as a caution. Hysteria and delusion are indeed dangers, but they may not come, and besides there's no point in worrying about it. One just proceeds.
One may object to all this that I have analyzed resistance outside of the context of Oceania. In Oceania, the Party seems to undercut the possibility of resistance to torture by shaping a particular kind of state and society and by developing excruciatingly painful torture technology. One brings to torture the totality of one's life experiences, and Smith had so few opportunities to develop his character that he was handicapped. Perhaps, but this credits Smith too little. Smith does practice modes of alertness (by outwitting the Party for so long), governance (by joining the "resistance"), and compassion. But in the end the Party had anticipated these. In Oceania, modes of alertness, governance, laughter and compassion are not available -- though interestingly modes of forgetfulness do persist for it is possible that the cells of Oceania are full of Smiths who escape into forgetfulness and fantasy as the hero in the movie "Brazil."
There are two facets to this observation, technological and political. Let me deal first with the technological objection. How inventive are torturers? Will they invent the perfect torture machine? The answer to that is no. Orwell is right to say that modern torture is scientific and modern, but it is important not to conflate this with attributing some kind of technological genius to torturers. Sociological studies of torture technology show that torturers are not innovators but adapters of previously existing technology invented for other reasons. (Rejali, 1994: 135-136; Rejali, 1999; Wright, 1996). They simply have better things to do that to tinker. Djilas is absolutely on target when he states: Torturers are seldom possessed of a particularly inventive imagination in devising their terrors. Most frequently, they find it easiest to follow long trodden paths and make use of those tried and true methods handed down from the past. They rely on ready-made instruments- whips, truncheons, sandbags, needles, castor oil, electric currents, and the like. It is common, of course, especially where torture is not standard procedure, for the police to use, particularly in hanger and haste, whatever instruments may be at hand--pencils (for jabbing between fingers), drawers (for crushing hands), chairs (for jamming bodies against the walls), and most frequently to be sure, the most direct, handiest instrument of all, their fists.(Djilas: 7)
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