HELIOLITH

I visited the International Center of Photography last week, on 6th and 43rd. In a small room downstairs, there are photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison. They are photographs that most everyone has seen already. They are unframed, printed on regular printer paper, downloaded from the internet. They are tacked on the black walls at eye level, forming a ring of torture evidence all around the viewer, broken only by the entry and the facing text, notes from the curator.

The exhibition’s purpose is to call into question “the relationship between war and photography,” about visuals of war, both the ones that we get by accident, like these, that celebrate the sport of violence and the pornographic nature of degredation, and the ones we see because they were chosen to manipulate and tailor our perceptions of war.

After looking at the pictures in the museum, which I had seen before in the news, I wandered out into the larger downstairs rooms. The black room full of Abu Ghraib prison pictures was tucked away amidst the Life Magazine exhibit. In this collection, there are photographs from all different decades; certain ones, however, jumped out at me. I saw Martin Luther King Jr. lying bleeding, assassinated. I saw Kennedy, head cradled by a boy, in the same position. I saw people in Montgomery struggling against the force of a firehose. I saw images from Vietnam–soldiers at My Lai, children running, bodies burning with napalm, who were accidentally hit.

My mind wandered from these evocative events to Iraq and back. The pictures from the internet were pretty equally half and half, showing female and male US soldiers performing the abuses. I kept thinking about their mothers, especially for the woman. She was about 20 years old. What would her mother think when she saw those pictures of her daughter?

Ultimately, after digesting the disgust and horror with our soldiers’ behavior, my reaction filtered back through the sixties to the issues of obedience. If the Holocaust didn’t prove for all the world that anyone can be a Nazi, that we all contain within ourselves the capacity to commit atrocities, to abuse and to mistreat, to degrade and destroy, Stanley Milgram’s experiments in obedience at Yale University in the early sixties confirmed those ideas. See his biographer’s link above for a brief summary of the most famous experiment, and this link for a more detailed description.

I am first of all furious and indignant that our leaders would without hesitation and with few if any compunctions send our country’s young to slaughter those of another nation. On top of this, I find it despicable that our military trains and encourages those same soldiers to cultivate that part of themselves, the Nazi within, the unthinking obedience to authority, the element that willingly and happily participates in the sickest forms of violence. These are our agents of democracy. Not only do the actions of our soldiers in Iraq and also in Guantanamo present a despicable image of US foreign policy. (The Sunday Times yesterday placed prominently on the front page an article divulging to some extent the tortures that the Bush administration sanctioned in Cuba.) But also they represent our establishment’s willingness to sculpt cruelty and graft violence onto the people who serve us. Not only is the administration willing to torture other people, but it is also glad to subject our very own people to the revolting self-reflection that inevitably follows.

The real results of the Milgram experiments were not simply that we are all willing to engage in abuse if told to do so by a figure of authority. The true destruction came afterwards. The participants in Milgram’s experiments were debriefed; they were told that it was just an experiment, that they hadn’t actually hurt anyone, yet they were still rocked by the knowledge of what they had been willing to do. Their psychological devastation laid the basis on which such an experiment would never pass an ethics board in present day. Our soldiers in Iraq will forever have to live with the knowledge that they exercised acts of cruelty. They will be haunted with images of themselves siccing dogs on terrified men and women, images of themselves grinning and giving the thumbs-up sign over an injured person, or worse, a corpse. The same is true for many soldiers who were sent to Vietnam, and for prison guards not just in Guantanamo but in domestic prisons as well. There are plenty of people who have no recourse to the law, no power with which to defend themselves, people who are seen as targets, who will not be missed, who can be easily disappeared. Of course the first and most devastating loss in these cases of abuse is the dignity and honor of the victims, whether we are talking about Cuba, Iraq, Vietnam, or less systematic and more widespread violence. Secondarily, however, our leaders must consider the price of corrupting the integrity of those who commit these abuses. It seems the lesson is to acknowledge the fragility of our honor–it can be so easily corrupted–and to devise a way to prevent people from degrading others, and themselves in the process.