"Few of us ever know how far fear and violence can transform us into creatures at bay, ready with tooth and claw," Gray wrote. "If the war taught me anything at all, it convinced me that people are not what they seem or even think themselves to be."
I am teaching inmates at a supermax prison this summer. We are reading William Shakespeare's "King Lear." Every student in my classroom was charged with murder and, though the American judicial system imprisons its share of innocents, it is a safe bet that many if not most in my class have killed. At the same time, once you hear the stories of their lives, the terrifying domestic abuse, the crushing poverty, the cruelty of the streets, including police use of deadly force against unarmed people, the societal and parental abandonment, the frustration at not being able to live a life of dignity or find a job, the humiliation of being poorly educated -- some went into prison illiterate -- you begin to understand the power of the institutional racism and oppression that made them angry and finally dangerous.
Marguerite Duras in her book "The War" describes how she and other members of the French Resistance kidnapped and tortured a 50-year-old Frenchman they suspected of collaborating with the Germans. The group allows two of its members who were beaten in Montluc prison at Lyon to strip the alleged informer and repeatedly beat him as onlookers shout: "Bastard. Traitor. Scum." Blood and mucus soon run from his nose. His eye is damaged. He moans, "Ow, ow, oh, oh. ..." He crumples in a heap on the floor. Duras wrote that he had "become someone without anything in common with other men. And with every minute the difference grows bigger and more established." She goes on: "Every blow rings out in the silent room. They're hitting at all the traitors, at the women who left, at all those who didn't like what they saw from behind the shutters." She departs before finding out if he is executed. She and her small resistance band had become Nazis. They acted no differently than Hamas did when it executed more than 15 suspected collaborators last week in Gaza.
Our failure to understand the psychological mechanisms involved means that the brutality we inflict, and that is inflicted upon us, will continue in a deadly and self-defeating cycle in the Middle East as well as within poor urban areas of the United States.
To break this cycle we have to examine ourselves and halt the indiscriminant violence that sustains our occupations. But examining ourselves instead of choosing the easy route of nationalist self-exaltation is hard and painful. These killings will stop only when we accept that the killers who should terrify us most are ourselves.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
12
12
11
