The Psychological Origins of Institutionalized Torture

Mika Haritos-Fatouros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415282765
• eBook ISBN: 9781135646714
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Original research, including interviews with former Greek torturers, is supplemented by discussion of former studies, military records and other sources, to provide disturbing but valuable insights into the psychology of torture. The book describes parallel situations such as the rites of passage in pre-industrial societies and cults, elite Corps military training and college hazing, eventually concluding that the torturer is not born, but made. Of essential interest to academics and students interested in social psychology and related disciplines, this book will also be extremely valuable to policy-makers, professionals working in government, and all those interested in securing and promoting human rights.

1  Introduction

August 17, 1972, Thursday.

He tells me, “Now you are going to die, you communist bastard.”

And he starts beating me with his fists, punching my stomach with his knee on my groin, stepping hard with his heels on my toes. Hitting me with his club on my elbows and fingers. Slapping my face with all his might…

This man, called Demos, is tall, over 1.90 meters, and his hands are like bricks. He beats me without stopping; I scream, I moan, I fall down. He hits me even harder to get me upright again. I get up; my head is bleeding, I don't know where the blood is coming from. Finally, the two hours have gone, Demos’ shift is over. He is replaced by a boxer named Hercules. The name fits his size. I've never seen this one before.

Hercules asks me, “Are you going to write?”

I answer, “I have nothing to write.”

And he starts to beat me with a club on the feet, the thighs, the stomach. He threatens to pull out my nails and teeth. On top of the pain from the beatings, I'm feeling very sick, I have diarrhea. Hercules takes me to the toilet, I empty my bowels very badly, I am sick again. He takes me back to my cell, to the green circle. I ask for a doctor. Hercules says, “You are going to die, faggot.” And he continues pummeling me.

His shift ends. Another man enters, whom I also see for the first time.

He squints; he asks me, “Have you anything to write?”

“Nothing,” I say, “I have nothing to write.”

He immediately starts slapping my face, then starts punching my stomach and ribs with his fists, and then with the club. The pain is absolutely unbearable. I can hardly breathe, I'm suffocating, my body drips with sweat, I become dizzy; I see the same pictures on the walls that I saw the other times, and the man beats me and curses at me without stopping. I am always standing inside the green circle, at attention. I now believe that I shall not be able to endure this new ordeal. I have written myself off.

I want very much to die, to finish as quickly as possible.…I am staring at the wall. Without thinking about it, I charge forward with all the strength I have left and crash my head into the wall. My face begins to bleed heavily, I'm suddenly dizzy, I fall down. Beating me even harder, he pulls me up and makes me stand inside the circle. It gets dark, night falls, and the guards take their turns beating me continuously.

(Wing Commander A. Minis, 111 Days in ESA, 1975: 51–52)

The question

Who are the official torturers of the world? What kind of people could spend their days and nights inflicting pain, suffering, and cruelty on their fellow human beings? How are they different from ourselves, we ask; how is it possible to do deeds that you and I cannot now conceive of doing?

Torturers represent the puzzle of a human without humane values. We generally assume that unusual human behavior is exemplified by unusual people. But examining torturers puts a very different perspective on how to make sense of the bizarre deeds of torturers, executioners, aggressors, enemies of the people. These are an extension of “torturer” that would need elaboration. Instead, we pose the questions: “How can we begin to understand how evil deeds flow from individuals who have neither evil motives nor a personality that predisposes them to do evil? Under what circumstances and under what kind of system can good people be led to engage in evil acts?” Reframe these questions, and they become even more profoundly disturbing: “What situations and forces might compel someone to comply with the suggestions, requests, or demands of an authority to make others suffer excruciating, psychological, physical, and spiritual pain regularly and for extended periods of time, without scruples or remorse, and even with pride and pleasure?”

In this book, we examine the psychological processes of the torturer: how does a person become capable of inflicting such excruciating pain on another human being? Our basic focus in this book is to describe the remarkable process by which torturers are created and sustained. Only through understanding can we offer solutions for its prevention. The story of humans’ transformation into torturers and how they justify themselves allows us to gaze down paths that any of us, even the best and the brightest, might follow under similar circumstances – the paths of the young men that appear in the following pages. When we consider torture and the processes that lead to it, it quickly becomes apparent that the question of torture is in many ways a fundamental question for us all.

How the question is usually answered

There are several common reactions to the question of what makes a torturer:

1  Avoidance, or distancing of the question altogether. Perhaps the most common reaction is avoidance. Torture seems too horrible to think about, an awful reminder of human evil, like nuclear war. This kind of violence is too depressing and painful to dwell on, because one feels powerless to do anything about it. Alternatively, “It is something that happens to other people in other places” is a comfortable rationalization.

2  The torturer is a horrifying person. The core of this reaction is the belief that the horror of torture must be matched by the horribleness of the torturer himself: the torturer is an abnormal person, “not like me”; he tortures because he is sick, insane. At best, he is simply a sadist. This was the original hypothesis for this study.

3  The torturer is only following orders. This argument is that the torturer is a tool in the hands of authority, and therefore torture is an act of obedience. This has been used repeatedly by torturers in their own defense; it was used by the German SS officers, the French parachutists in Algeria (Vittori, 1980) and the Greek Military Policemen under the military junta (Amnesty International, 1977a, 1977b, 1980). The man who pushed the button over Hiroshima could make this argument. It is the “banality of evil” defense (Arendt, 1963): in placing accountability on an institution or system, it regards the torturer as merely a conformist to an agent of group beliefs, group pressure, and loyalty to efficiency, power and hierarchical order. For example, this view led a majority of Americans to disapprove of the prosecution of those who carried out the My Lai massacre in Vietnam (Kelman and Lawrence, 1972).

4  The torturer is a fanatical believer in a “higher cause.” Closely related to (3) above, it is the idea that the torturer is following a “worthy purpose” that justifies his actions. The torturer is driven by ideological demands greater than the individual under interrogation. For the Inquisitors of Spain and France the enemy was heresy; for the Nazis it was the genetic and political threat to the Aryan race; for the Greek Junta it was “Communism.” The issue is processed and confused through the love–hate principle – i.e., love for my “cause” leads me to hate, and hate is necessary in order to torture (Timmerman, 1981; Taussig, 1984).

Thus, torture is permissible on utilitarian grounds, by calculating its cost-benefit ratio. When information that can “only” be obtained through torture is beneficial (if lives will be saved, for example), then torture is permissible. Nowadays, this argument is usually applied to torture of “terrorists.” It is implied by government officials, police officers and security personnel when talking about how to prevent acts of violence and destruction by groups opposed to the state; the British authorities in Northern Ireland often employed this argument (Ackroyd et al., 1977; Coogan, 1980). Using torture as a legitimate means to an end is seldom proposed explicitly, but it is frequently tolerated by so-called law-abiding citizens. These citizens are even more convinced of its necessity if they are assured by someone who “knows” that the particular torture applied has “humane” qualities; e.g., by being told that the pain inflicted does not “really hurt” or does not scar or otherwise permanently damage the victim physically. For the public, this argument may diminish the brutality of the torturer's acts.

Thus a torturer does the necessary dirty work for the benefit of society. If torture is a means justified by its ends, somebody has to do it. No matter how repugnant the work, someone must be in place to carry it out when necessary. In this view, therefore, the appointed person is only doing his job. He is a technocrat, forced by ultimate institutional ends to torture.

The significance of the question

Although it might seem only of relevance to those interested in psychology or human rights, torture is not rare. Torture is practiced in the majority of countries around the world. Torture is almost always used in states under a military or quasi-military dictatorship (such as Algeria, Nigeria, Burma). In 1974, some eleven states throughout the world were under military dictatorship (Finer, 1975), and in many more countries the army alone guaranteed the existence of the particular political regime. These regimes by themselves must have produced tens of thousands of torture victims every year. But torture has been a widespread practice for governments throughout the political spectrum, from totalitarian states (such as China, Iraq) to electorally democratic states (for example, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, Israel). The number of such states has even increased in the last decade. According to Amnesty International Report (Amnesty International, 1998), 117 out of 157 governments in the United Nations torture their prisoners, and one-half of the world's governments imprison their citizens for their beliefs, their nationality, their gender, or their religion. Torture is even practiced on children (see for instance Brazil and Haiti, as reported by Eric Sottas (1992)).

An understanding of how a person comes to be a torturer and of what arrangements keep the person torturing should be used to assist the prevention of torture. The fact that torture is usually done in secret and is often denied by governments and by the torturers themselves is all the more reason to raise awareness about the practice. The more information we have, the better we will be able to combat this brutal and unjust situation.

Some fear that publishing such research will serve to make oppressive regimes wiser and better able to cover up their crimes, or even constitutes an instruction manual on “how to train a torturer.” These fears are misplaced. This book only reconstructs and describes what torturers and their trainers already know. The training procedures for torturers all over the world are now so systematized and similar that a manual could easily exist already (although not for general publication). The aim of this book, therefore, is to expose, analyze, and prevent torture.

The study of the torturer is also relevant to the study of the self and of social processes. Torture is usually considered beyond the pale of “normal” society; torture is considered anomalous, somehow removed from everyday experience. As we shall see, this is not so. A close analysis of torture indicates that the psychological and social means by which a torturer is produced are everyday processes. The final outcome may be beyond ordinary experience, but it is interwoven with everyday life.

Our picture of ourselves and our social world is largely shaped by normative processes – as experienced within the family, in school, the church, our workplace, public arenas, etc. But some of the most profound shifts in self-image and world-view come from extreme events: the death of a loved one, illness, war – events which bring up the deepest emotions. Social scientists sometimes reach a more profound understanding of the problems of everyday life by studying their extremes. Freud is perhaps the most famous of such scientists, having based his theories on the study of his own troubled patients, although he has been criticized for theorizing far beyond the point justified by the data he collected from these patients.

In analyzing how a person could come to torture systematically and repeatedly, we enter an arena in which the most profound discoveries can be made about ourselves and the human world around us. Indeed, as we shall see, much of contemporary social psychology points to the view that we are all far more capable of torture than we would like to believe. This study will show that a torturer does not have to have a certain kind of personality, only exposure to certain kinds of psychological, social and political conditions. What then does this mean for our image of ourselves as “masters of our fate and captains of our souls”? Is our picture of the power of individual choice merely an illusion we create for ourselves? If so, could any of us be torturers?

Victims of torture have already asked, in their own way, some vital questions of themselves, of the world they re-enter, and of their torturers:

I have experienced the fate of a victim. I have seen the torturer's face at close quarters, and it was in worse condition than my own bleeding, battered face. The torturer's face was distorted by a kind of twitching that had nothing human about it. He was in such a state of tension that he had an expression very similar to the exaggerated features of a Chinese mask; this is not an overstatement. It is not an easy thing to torture people, it requires inner participation.

In this situation, I turned out to be the lucky one: I was humiliated. I did not humiliate others. I was simply a piece of profoundly unhappy humanity, my heart beating in my aching entrails. But the men who humiliate you must first humiliate the notion of humanity within themselves.

Never mind if they strut around in their uniforms, swollen with the knowledge that they can control the suffering, sleeplessness, hunger, and despair of their prisoner, intoxicated with the power in their hands. Their intoxication is nothing other than the degradation of humanity, the ultimate degradation.

They have had to pay dearly for my torments. I wasn't the one in the worst position; I was simply a man who moaned because he was in great pain. I prefer that. At this moment I am deprived of the joy of seeing children going to school or playing in the park, whereas they have to look their own children in the face.

(G. Mangakis, “Letter to Europeans,” in Amnesty International, 1975)

The torturers, nevertheless, try to create a more sophisticated image of the torture sites, as if thereby endowing their activity with a more elevated status. Their military leaders encourage this fantasy; and the notion of important sites, exclusive methods, original techniques, novel equipment allows them to present a touch of distinction and legitimacy to the world.

This conversion of dirty, dark, gloomy places into a universe of spontaneous innovation and institutional “beauty” is one of the most arousing pleasures for torturers. It is as if they felt themselves to be masters of the force required to alter reality. And it places them again in the world of omnipotence. This omnipotence in turn they feel assures them of impunity – a sense of immunity to pain, guilt, emotional imbalance.

(Timmerman, 1981)

2 Approach and methodology

But not so with the father of faith, Abraham! Obedience consists precisely in obeying promptly in the unconditional, the crucial moment. When one has come so far as to say A, one is humanly speaking very prone to say B and to act.

(S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling)

How to answer the question

The theoretical framework with which this study commenced is largely behavioral. It leaned heavily on learning principles, particularly those related to social learning. It looked at the behavior of the torturer in terms of normal behavior patterns, modified primarily by situational factors. The study emphasized the following three processes, which were found to be central to the creation and use of torturers: (a) neutralization of resistance and inhibitions; (b) alteration of personal beliefs and attitudes to accord with the culture of terror; and (c) desensitization to the act of torture.

The book concludes that the act of torture is largely the result of obedience to what can be called “the authority of violence.” This term describes punitive actions taken by authorities, not on...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Approach and methodology
• 3 The Greek situation
• 4 Transforming ordinary men into torturers
• 5 Case study of a chief torturer
• 6 Dispositional factors in Greek torturers: a sufficient explanation?
• 7 Psychological theories on the origins of torture
• 8 Reconstruction processes in the formation of torturers
• 9 Parallels to comparisons
• 10 Epilogue
• Appendix The historical context
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index