Cover Story: Oscar Grant & Remorse from Bureaucrats of Torture?

El Hajj El Shabazz (Malcolm X) from a speech delivered at the London School of Economics, Feb. 11, 1965, to a meeting sponsored by the school’s Africa Society

He did not murder Oscar Grant, but the young Black man lying face down on the BART station platform is dead.

“My son was murdered,” Grant’s mother Wanda Johnson proclaimed. “The law has not held the officer accountable.”

The U.S. does not consider itself under the spell of fascism. The history books tell us that the U.S. and its allies crushed fascism in 1945. The Christian nation, Anglo with “minorities” is a global influence for good contrary to Chalmers Johnson’s characterization of the U.S. as a “successful” imperialist state and as such requires its domestic republic or domestic democracy to “change into a domestic tyranny” (Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project). In the history books, the U.S. is a succeeding experiment in democracy.

The U.S., the rhetoric will tell us, has come a long way. The president and the attorney general are members of the African American community, proof that Grant protestors calling for “accountability,” “rioters,” the Chalmers Johnsons for that matter, are disgruntled, angry, dissident, naysayers—war criminals.

It is no accident that while the jury deliberated the fate of the BART police officer, the State’s corporate media apparatus disseminated information on how the State, harnessing law enforcement personnel, high-tech weaponry, and armor, would protect property against an angry population hell bent on violence.

In the meantime, the officer expressed about as much remorse for his crime as the Christian, Anglo, and imperialist society from which he materializes, poised with gun in hand ready to exterminate the unwanted populations.

The madness has its logic or why else would it be repeated again and again. In one night, the U.S. and its allies incinerated 100,000 people in the city of Tokyo. Former strategist for the Air Force under Gen. Curtis Le May, former Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy, former World Bank president, a revisionist historian, Robert S. McNamara revealed to documentary filmmaker Errol Morris and the world in Morris’ Fog of War that Le May, during WWII, worried that the generals and troops, the U.S. government and its allies would be charged with war crimes if victory escapes them. The U.S. must win this war! Fat Man dropped in Nagasaki and Little Boy dropped in Hiroshima consumed homes, buildings, and, above all, war criminals.

Lyndon Johnson’s war on “tyranny and aggression” normalized the use of napalm over Vietnam. Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan use of the CIA machinery to overthrow democratically-elected foreign heads of state, established the right of the U.S. to install military dictators to further enrich the coffers of the World Bank and the IMF. Bush I and II and the current administration have renamed the pogrom to eliminate tyranny, aggression, and war criminals from the world. Even now, as I write this essay, the Orwellian report for today announced that Marine Gen. James Mattis has been nominated by the current administration to head the U.S. Central Command. The man who bragged that he loves to “shoot some people” will in all likelyhood charm the folks on Capitol Hill because he has all the right qualifications to pursue war criminals and achieve victory for the U.S.

It is all a “hoot,” just as Gen. Mattis notes. All very logical.

Looking for remorse, you will not find it here!

Read the policies and laws carefully. While Gen. Mattis scourers the globe in search of war criminals, here at home, prosecutors and any law enforcement agency will tell you that it is not hard to spot this subhuman and powerfully evil force of war criminals. Well trained and driven officers of the law will know you will not find them among large gatherings of white drunken or stoned college students on a Saturday night unless these students join the fray of protesters and dissenters. They will not be found working on Wall Street unless some “disgruntled” employee becomes a whistleblower. Civic and race leaders, as any good police state knows, will accept payments, guarantees of safety for family members and close associates, and even token positions as spokespersons for the war criminals. Looking for remorse, you will not find it here! As accomplices, they further divert the people’s attention from loads of chained citizens boarding buses baring the insignia of the U.S. Sheriff’s Department. Elsewhere, trucks with the insignia U.S. Army or insignia U.S. Border Patrol or ICE or Homeland Security deport aliens or terrorists—war criminals all—to Gitmo or to Bagram or to another friendly nation where the state police are in control…

Oh, it has all been studied and analyzed while the American public went to sleep…

“It was a matter of fliers,” Jean Amery writes. The “leather coats” spotted the Belgian resistance fighter passing out fliers that read: “Death to the SS bandits and Gestapo hangman.” It is 1943.

At his first interrogation, he notices how the “leather coats” had faces, “not ‘Gestapo faces’ with twisted noses, hypertrophied chins, pockmarks, and knife scars…but faces like anyone else’s. Plain, ordinary faces.” In difference to Hannah Arendt, Amery argues that “when an event places the most extreme demands on us, one ought not speak of banality.” This event, this encounter with reality, he writes, need not be an encounter with torture per se. “Arrest is enough and, if need be, the first blow one receives.”

At first, you may think it, this event, some kind of nightmare from which you will awake, you have to awake, Amery explains in At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, because this other seems to have made a mistake in selecting you to violate.

With the first blow, the prisoner recognizes he or she is “helpless” and begins to sense rescue is not forthcoming. It is not the loss of something called “human dignity” that brings about this sense of helplessness but the loss of trust, Amery explains. With the first blow, the prisoner losses “trust” in the world. The interrogators have rigged the game: a resistance fighter outside the event is now isolated in his or her misery and focused on the survival of his or her own body.

This reality is relentless.

Torture, writes Amery, is the essence of Nazism. Through its practice of torture, “the Third Reich materialized in all the density of its being.” Communism, he argues, whether you agree with it or not, nonetheless symbolizes “an idea” of humankind. On the other hand, “Hitler Fascism was not an idea at all, but depravity.” Hitler’s National Socialism “not only practiced the rule of the antiman but had expressly established it as a principle”—to exterminate and to enslave. Thus, the Nazis “tortured with the good conscience of depravity,” Amery writes. Placing torture in their service, they become its servants.

What is the nature of this depravity? Put aside the sadism, the “usual psychology handbook” definition, Amery suggests, and consider sadism, as George Bataille defines it—a “radical negation of the other” and “the denial of the social principle as well as the reality principle.” In a sane world, he explains, torture, destruction, and death cannot triumph, but the “sadist does not care about the contrived existence of the world.” Instead, “he wants to nullify this world, and by negating his fellow man, who also in an entirely specific sense is ‘hell’ for him, he wants to realize his own total “sovereignty.” Amery continues: “Torture becomes the total inversion of the social world, in which we can live only if we grant our fellow man life, ease his suffering, bridle the desire of our ego to expand. But in the world of torture man exists only by ruining the other person who stands before him. Bureaucrats! “Bureaucrats of torture,” these antiman, who, with all their heart and soul “went about their business, and the name of it was power, dominion over spirit and flesh, orgy of unchecked self-expansion.”

You can be lulled back to sleep, slip into something akin to “wretched admiration,” Amery writes, for this sovereignty of power.

But it is a power not to be trusted, he warns. The “sacral sovereignty” of a king or a chieftain, while stirring fear is, at the same time, the object of the people’s trust. The power granted the bureaucrats of torture permit them to plunge the prisoner from the world “into agony and death.” For the logic of this madness is death—of even the antiman, the torturer!

The prisoner who survives his or her event is no longer at home with the world, Amery writes. “That one’s fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror.” This encounter with the event blocks a view of the hope principle. In place of hope, fear reigns. Resentment reigns.

But resentment, as Amery concludes, results in the prisoner/survivor serving as an accomplice to torture. “I do not want to become the accomplice of my torturers,” writes Amery.

It is said that we are ‘warped’…[but this] sets me the task of defining anew our warped state, namely a form of human condition that morally as well as historically is of a higher order than that of healthy straightness.

Amery argues that he must “delimit” resentment from Nietzsche “who morally condemned resentment” and from that of “modern psychology, which is able to picture it only as a disturbing conflict.”

Resentment further dislodges the prisoner/survivor from the world where the discourse advocates abandoning the prisoner/survivor so to abort the atrocity of the crime. No, Amery writes, for already, he argues, the child speaks of what is “already past.” Done! Over! Memorials commemorate: