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Prisoners of Conscience
Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency
Gerard A. Hauser, Thomas W. Benson
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Prisoners of Conscience
Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency
Gerard A. Hauser, Thomas W. Benson
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About This Book
Prisoners of Conscience continues the work begun by Gerard A. Hauser in Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, winner of the National Communication Association's Hochmuth Nichols Award. In his new book, Hauser examines the discourse of political prisoners, specifically the discourse of prisoners of conscience, as a form of rhetoric in which the vernacular is the main source of available appeals and the foundation for political agency.
Hauser explores how modes of resistance employed by these prisoners constitute what he deems a "thick moral vernacular" rhetoric of human rights. Hauser's work considers in part how these prisoners convert universal commitments to human dignity, agency, and voice into the moral vernacular of the society and culture to which their rhetoric is addressed.
Hauser grounds his study through a series of case studies, each centered on a different rhetorical mechanism brought to bear in the act of resistance. Through a transnational rhetorical analysis of resistance within political prisons, Hauser brings to bear his skills as a rhetorical theorist and critic to illuminate the rhetorical power of resistance as tied to core questions in contemporary humanistic scholarship and public concern.
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PART I. Theoretical Probes on a Moral Vernacular Rhetoric of Human Rights
1. Reclaiming Voice
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln invoked the president's war powers to authorize suspending the writ of habeas corpus when disturbances to abet the South's insurrection seemed to compromise the Union's military action. Lincoln's actions were both extravagantly blessed and hideously cursed. During the George W. Bush administration, U.S. policies of detention and interrogation of suspected members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda evoked similar responses. Their initiation in 2001 near the onset of the war in Afghanistan received benediction from such icons of the Left as Alan Dershowitz (San Francisco Chronicle, January 22, 2002) and Michael Ignatieff (2004), and was reinforced by congressional support for the Patriot Act, which suspended such basic rights as freedom of speech and privacy when the president deemed it necessary in the interest of national security. This was before the American public and the community of nations became aware of the extremes to which these policies led: warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus rights or legal representation, torture, and more. These stunning realities called into question the ethos of the United States as the planet's oldest continuous democracy and, as its lone superpower, democracy's moral leader.
Dangerous times, the administration argued, call for extreme measures, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the measures must conform to the Constitution. And the court of public opinion, confronted by the graphic evidence of troops-gone-wild photographs from Abu Ghraib, wondered what had become of American honor. The remaining years of the Bush administration, from May 2004 on, played like a Greek tragedy with an abundance of curses: the White House suffered repeated rebuffs from a conservative Supreme Court; the American people suffered the expansion of the state of exception that claimed limitless presidential powers under the unitary executive theory,1 thereby making the country an effectual dictatorship; allies became disenchanted with Bush's foreign policy doctrines of unilateralism and his intransigence in the face of mounting evidence that these policies put the United States on the wrong course; and the mounting costs in lives and treasure from the U.S. military misadventure in Iraq fractured citizen confidence in the administration's capacity to lead.
Years of Discontent
Retrospection makes it easy to decry the folly of policies so askew with a nation's history and traditions. At the time when fateful decisions were being made, however, Jeremiahs were scarce, and the chorus of dissidence from such isolated quarters as the American professoriate was easily dismissed as the shrill reaction of a notoriously liberal faction equally notorious for its naive detachment from reality (see Yoo 2006). Up close, ambivalence was the more widespread response. Dangerous times call for extreme measures, to be sure. Terrorists had attacked the United States and threatened more of the same. Intelligence on enemy activities was essential to disrupt further terrorist attempts on U.S. citizens and to capture terrorist leaders intent on causing harm.
At the start, up close, it wasn't clear where to draw the line on the treatment of enemy combatant detainees. It never is when confusion abounds. By the end of the Bush administration, seven years after 9/11, it appeared that the White House either had been unable to gain clarity on the stopping point or, if its war rhetoric was to be believed, was blessed with perfect Machiavellian clarity and no regrets: the only stopping point was the end of terrorist threats to the United States; the end justified the means. For the rest of the country, the strange new vocabulary of âextraordinary rendition,â âwaterboarding,â âCamp X-Ray,â and âenemy combatant,â not to mention suspension of habeas corpus and warrantless wiretapping, defined a world that the majority believed went too far.2
Abusing those who are imprisoned for acts that grow from political ideals has a long history. Rulers have seldom looked kindly on their opponents, and absolute rulers have been inclined to treat them as troublemakers and enemies of the state who required harsh treatment. Gladiators, for example, often were Rome's political prisoners. Their fate was emblematic of the suicidal consequences of political opposition. Today the consequences are no less severe. Through the first eight months of 2008, Amnesty International issued reports dealing with alleged human rights violations in at least thirty-two countries. The treatment by the U.S. government of detainees who were suspected to be members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was breathtaking only because of who administered itâa government that prided itself on abiding by the Geneva Conventionsâand those who were justifying and authorizing itâthe Justice Department, the Office of Legal Counsel,3 the Defense Department, and the Office of the Vice President.
The presence of political prisoners on every continent signals that dissent and opposition, which are a given in political relations, are suppressed in many parts of the world, often with violence. It may be a truism that one group's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, but it is no less significant for the essential contest each political prisoner represents. Their harsh treatment reflects the important stakes in human aspirations for freedom. Political prisoners are often their most eloquent, most passionate, and most imaginative representatives.
This is a book about political prisoners, or, more precisely, prisoners of conscience (POCs), and how their modes of resistance constitute a discourse of human rights. It is a discourse that exercises influence through the rhetorical power of their resistance. There is moral suasion in resisting the deceit of states that would manipulate human weaknesses with false hope for freedom at the expense of personal integrity, in unyielding combat with prison authorities in order to protect their lives, in ceaseless efforts to keep the resistance movement alive and to mount international pressure for their freedom and for national reform. These are rhetorical transformations of human rights into something other than soft or quasi-legal international agreements or philosophical commitments. Their advocacy gives human rights life as a kind of discourseâa moral vernacular discourseâabout what it means to be human and to live free in a human(e) world. It is a discourse of political agency.
Political Prisoners and Rhetorical Paradoxes
Political prisoners occupy a unique rhetorical space. Unlike convicted felons who break the law for personal gain or through criminal recklessness, blind passion, or folly, POCs are incarcerated for the threat of their ideas. Often the only law they have broken is the (unspoken) prohibition against disagreement with a hegemonic power. When their legal violations do involve acts of violence, they stem from embracing ideas at odds with the existing order. Their ability to display an alternative political vision can be so compelling, as recent history has demonstrated, that repressive regimes are willing to liquidate leading dissidents and even entire ethnic groups with genocidal fervor.
In the absence of material penalties, the efficacy of liquidation can become an overwhelming imperative for murderous policies. When, on March 4, 2009, the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir as a war criminal, his response was to inform the ICC it could âeatâ its warrant (Belfast Telegraph, March 4, 2009). Despite compelling evidence gathered over several years that al-Bashir had orchestrated the genocide in Darfur, he had little to fear as far as enforcement went. When world leaders confronted with evidence of human rights abuses, including genocide, more often than not find an excuse to look the other way, al-Bashir's response threw back the obvious question: who was going to arrest him?
Willingness to remove dissidents from society rests on a calculation that once they are off the public stage they will be forgotten, and, if their treatment is horrendous enough, quite possibly they will recant. Consequently, repressive regimes remain willing to take their chances of success at forcing the opposition to be silent. This is not a sure bet, however. The impulse toward a pogrom can be checked in cases where the opposition has made effective use of publicity and its enemy status is defined less on group identity than ideological differences. There prudence dictates that mere incarceration may suffice. Against the risk that the political prisoner will quicken public imagination as a symbol of the state's alien ethos, the regime calculates that removal from public view will toll the dissident's political death knell and possibly deliver a mortal blow to the ideas for which he or she stands. For those still on the streets, the regime banks on intimidation forcing dissidents to avoid the kinds of overt acts that will bring them to the same fate, as the former Soviet Union's practice of show trials grimly testifies. Without public displays of disaffection and alternative visions of the political order, the bet is that opposition politics will disintegrate or, at worst, go underground.
Underground resistance may breed disaffection, but disaffection without the remedy of leading dissident voices often succumbs to the toxicity of cynicism, itself a form of display, albeit unlikely to captivate public understanding or overpower the existing order's claim to legitimacy. By the same token, the political prisoner remains alive as a viable political being only through communication channels outside the official political public sphere. Political prisoners must find ways to be seen in order to have political force; they require at least a counterpublic sphere in which to conduct and sustain dissident discourse (see Asen and Brower 2001; Hauser 1999b, 111-60). Moreover, the prisoner must find ways to display political conscience and consciousness capable of inspiring resistance regardless of personal costs in the service of revolutionary change.
Without rhetorical champions, the aspirations alive in the discursive arenas of a counterpublic sphere are unlikely to captivate public understanding and overpower the existing order's claim to legitimacy. By the same token, the POC remains alive as a viable political being only through the channels of the political counterpublic sphere. POCs address their fellow citizens to sustain resistance against the existing government. Within the enclaved sphere of the prison, their performances of resistance are both acts of political conscience and calls to solidarity among their fellow political prisoners in the prison's ongoing contest over its own terms of engagement. They lodge official protests with the prison authorities and the state in order to establish a record of illegal treatment. And they strive to make their cause known to the international community to invoke not only surrogates who will engage in the thin moral vernacular of human rights discourse but also to bring pressure to bear against the existing regime by marshaling international opinion.4
The POC with clandestine means to communicate not only survives but also leads. The POC may be exiled from public life, but this exile contains a political paradox. Imprisonment removes the activist's voice from the epicenter of evolving events. At the same time, it bestows a perverse imprimatur, since removal from society offers tacit state recognition of the prisoner's importance. Prisoners speaking from prison acquire an aura of authority to direct thought and action against the existing order, as Martin Luther King Jr.'s âLetter from Birmingham Jailâ eloquently testifies (see Baker 1995, 18-19).
Coping with Terror
The realities of prison are different for POCs than for convicted felons. A dissident poet, say Vaclav Havel detained during the 1980s, or a religious leader, say Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski detained during the 1950s, becomes a source of rhetorical invention. Their incarceration enters public imagination as a metonym for the body politic, a representation of the morbidity caused by political ills. Partisan appeals memorialize them as models of political principle. Dissident rhetoric transforms the confrontation with authorities into the body politic's struggle for survival. When the state is unable to force such celebrated opponents of repressive regimes as Nelson Mandela or Aung San Suu Kyi to cave, it signals tacit acknowledgment of their cause's superiority. Without rhetoric capable of commanding its citizens' minds and hearts, the state is reduced to using force.
Here we should note that not all political prisoners are POCs. A political prisoner becomes a POC by choosing to remain a dissident in prison. It is a choice that bears resemblance to phronĂȘsis. Donald Verene's (2010, 212) helpful discussion of conscience points out that it has its conceptual origins in practical reason through the Greek concept of synderesis. Synderesis was the intuition of moral primitives on which practical reasoning depended. It provided the first principles of behavior to be applied in specific circumstances. Conscience guided their application and was capable of error. Although the first principles themselves were true, and therefore, not only general guides for action (âdo goodâ), they also provided a basis for moral content about specific behaviors.
Hegel pushes the epistemic feature of the ancient Greek conception into the realm of moral self-consciousness. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, he describes conscience in developmental terms. Conscience is the state of consciousness in which the self ceases to oscillate between self and world and achieves certainty of its own being: âAs conscience, it [moral self-consciousness] is no longer this continual alternation of existence being placed in the Self, and vice versa; it knows that its existence as such is this pure certainty of itselfâ (1977, 481). Apropos to this study, Hegel points to the realization of conscience as present in the human self as a key step in the self-knowledge that results most immediately in duty (1977, 383, 392). In using the term in this way, as a state of moral self-consciousness that results in duty to act, I deviate from the narrower understanding employed by such nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as Amnesty International, which limits it to those imprisoned and/or persecuted for the nonviolent expression of consciously held beliefs.5 Those discussed here include dissidents who have resorted to violence in service of political resistance. My emphasis rests on the choices made in prison out of conscience to continue their resistance in prison and through vernacular expressions of resistance and identity that carry moral force within their national community.
In the case of leading dissidentsâwhose treatment gets high-profile attention from foreign states, NGOs, and the news mediaârefusal to accept the authorities' Faustian bargain of their name for their freedom often gets publicity and even enters history. Such diverse figures as Socrates, Sir Thomas More, Galileo, Peter Zenger, Susan Anthony, Margaret Sanger, and Mahatma Gandhi remind us that recrimination against those who have advocated beliefs or engaged in practices that challenged the existing authority has been a historical constant. For most who lack celebrity, their resistance enacted in daily micropractices that refuse submission to an authority they regard as illegitimate or whose dictates they consider untenable goes unnoticed by the outside world. Regardless of their status, their deep disgust at the dealâthings will go easier if you sign a loyalty oath, recant your prior criticism, accept an offer of emigration, inform on your confederatesâmakes fidelity to the commitments of their advocacy preferable to personal liberty. The prison's disciplinary regime has as its raison d'ĂȘtre to strip them of their political commitments. For political prisoners who survive as POCs, their conscious commitments not only keep them in prison but also individuate them as prisoners of their conscious commitments.
Most political prisoners do not lead lives of the sort that demand to be retold in a book. Nevertheless, refusing the state's offer is heroic; it accepts the terror of prison as the personal price for maintaining an authentic voice.6 As Jonathan Swift demonstrated in the savage comedy of Gulliver's Travels, âhumanityâ is but a matter of scale. The magnitude of an authoritarian state that can't subdue a lone POC's insistence on the indelible mark of oppositional identity gets diminished in stature. And the smallness of the single resister who accepts terror as the price for maintaining one's commitments gets magnified in a narrative of humanity that transcends his or her constructed identity by the penal code. By choosing not to submit to an interrogator's intimidation, the POC turns the tables and reframes his or her incarceration from the official narrative of the sentence to an interrogation of the state's legitimacy.
Within prison, these dueling interrogations often migrate to the prisoner's body. Publicizing a confession of guilt, recantation, or renunciation of the dissident movement itself can reap the dissident's political demise. Torture is often the state's means to this end. Accounts of prison life such as Elaine Scarry's (1985) meditation on pain; Havel's (1989) detailed letters to his spouse, Olga; or Irina Ratushinskaya's (1989) account of confrontations with her warders chronicle how the prisoner's body comes under assault. And, as Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (1981) graphically portrays, these cruelties come not only from beatings and torture but also from insulting treatment, isolation, physically exhausting and degrading conditions of internment, and psychological abuse. Not least among these is the interrogator's insistence that one's pain and degradation are self-imposed. The prisoner need only recant to gain release from this nightmare. However, to choose one's physical life by such means is also to choose political suicide.
Commitments of conscience make the choice clear, even if not easy. The more salient problem is how to confront terror within prevailing constraints. Physical force is not an option; more likely are tactics that can engage other prisoners, the prison itself, and the outside publics of the nation and world community. Collaboration on where to draw the line for cooperation with the authorities, mitigating institutionalized terror by invoking the structures of law the prison is supposed to follow, smuggling letters to the outside, and inventive means of confrontation testify to the value of resistance and keep the call to identity alive. These are rhetorical practices, modes of appeal speaking an alternative language, advancing an alternative political aspiration to the existing power, and indicting the state's alien status in the eyes of those it governs.
The Problem of Voice
The existential condition of the political prisoner is captured by what Giorgio Agamben (2005) calls the âstate of exceptionââa condition that lies between the legal and the political. The ambiguity between the political and the legal makes the state of exception both difficult to define and strikingly descriptive of state power. Agamben, drawing on Francois Saint-Bernard and Allesandro Fontana, writes: âIndeed, according to a widely held opinion, the state of exception constitutes a âpoint of imbalance between public law and political factâ that is situatedâlike civil war, insurrection and resistanceâin an âambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the politicalââ (2005, 1). Conditions of civil war are a decidedly ambiguous region in which laws may be suspended in order to restore political order, and make citizen rights and even citizenship uncertain. He continues: âOne of the elements that make the state of exception so difficult to define is certainly its close relationship to civil war, insurrection, and resistance. Because civil war is the opposite of normal conditions, it lies in a zone of undecidability with respect to the state of exception, which is state power's immediate response to the most extreme internal conflicts. Thus, over the course of the twentieth century, we have been able to witness a paradoxical phenomenon that has been effectively defined as a âlegal civil warââ (2).
Agamben uses the case of Nazi Germany as the exemplar for suspension of constitutional rights to deny certain citizensâJews and gypsiesâtheir citizenship. However, the state of exception has become widespread. Denial or suspension of civil rights, as occurred under South Africa's policy of apartheid; Britain's Criminalization Act of 1976, which provided individuals arrested for terrorist activities, notably those of the Irish Republican Army, with summary trials without benefit of a jury of peers; the Soviet Union's frequent abrogation of the constitutional right to free speech and conviction for expressing views the Communist Party determined did not comply with the standards of socialist society; and the United States' Patriot Act, which suspended privacy rights, habeas corpus rights in certain circumstances, and adherence to the Geneva Conventions on torture, were each justified on grounds of national security and preservation of social order. Each illustrates the politics of biopower. Each denies voice not on the basis of class or citizenship or other more common distinctions on which power has been based. These regimes focus on voice as embodied and deny it to bodies controlled by the state.7
Homo sacer
Michel Foucault has argued that biopower initiates a new form of power. Speaking of the two forms of disciplines that studied the body from the Enlightenment forwardâthe anatomo-politics of the bod...