Notes Toward an Essay on Torture: Double Signal

Here is some evidence in support of my belief that, in our society, the messages we receive that tell us torture is wrong carry with them a secondary, hidden message conveying approval of or desire to torture. In the jargon of process-oriented psychology, this is known as a "double signal."

On Make Them Accountable, David Podvin has posted an article, "Savagery" [link NSFW], that is a, well, savage denunciation of the Bush administration and its apologists over the torture issue. At the head of the article is a JPEG image, a drawing showing three nude hooded men standing on buckets, with electrodes attached to hands and feet. In the foreground a uniformed man is shouting and brandishing a stick with prongs or electrodes. In the middle ground, a woman in uniform (who seems to be a grotesque caricature of Lynndie England) holds the gathered wires from the electrodes in her hands. In the background, a uniformed man wearing dark glasses is guiding a handcuffed, blindfolded woman into the room. The torture victims standing on the buckets are facing the viewer. All three are well-muscled, and the genitals of two of the three are in full view. The only color in the otherwise black-and-white drawing is the red-white-and-blue American flag shoulder patch on the soldier in the foreground.

The drawing has none of the sad, sordid, passive misery we see in so many of the actual torture photos from Abu Ghurayb. Instead, it is active and dynamic. The shouting soldier in the foreground is ready to strike. The muscular torsos of his victims are erect and poised. The drawing looks pornographic, like an idealized, eroticized substitute for the real thing. The drawing style in fact resembles that of Tom of Finland [NSFW].

Podvin dehumanizes his foes, describing Ann Coulter as "eighty pounds of toxic sewage wrapped in six feet of reptile skin," and uses rhetoric of civil war (Republicans are "Confederates ... striving to make Andersonville a global phenomenon"). What would David Neiwert make of him, I wonder?

Here we have a diatribe against torture that is couched in violent, dehumanizing llanguage and illustrated with BDSM porn. That's a double signal, if ever I saw one.

(via The Sideshow)