John Conroy’s Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People
considering torture from a variety of perspectives, presents an account of the
dynamics of torture in three democracies. 
Conroy inquires into how the victims experience and deal with torture,
with the torturers themselves and with the judiciary response to torture in
democratic countries.

The specific cases that Conroy addresses are: the
torture of fourteen Northern Irish men by the British army in 1971, the beating
of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli soldiers in 1988, and the torture of
Andrew Wilson by Chicago’s Area 2 police force. Choosing these particular occurrences, Conroy de-exoticizes
torture and forces his reader to recognize it as something that happens closer
to home than we might imagine.

Conroy inquires into the effects of torture. Through interviews with the victims of
torture, Conroy demonstrates the long lasting effects of being tortured. Torture is not something that just happens
and then ends. Rather, like sexual
abuse or war trauma, it incites post-traumatic-stress-disorders and remains
with its victims for life.

In examining the judiciary response of democratic
countries, exposing the difficulties of bring torturers to justice, Conroy’s
account testifies to our reluctance to let torture be recognized as
familiar. We need to think that torture
is something that happens in other places and we are reluctant, to the point of
nearly compromising truth and justice, to admit the possibility that torture
happen close to home.

Conroy’s strategy of presenting torture in familiar
contexts is furthered by the manner in which he deals with the subjects of his
inquiry. Conroy in his investigation
into the dynamics of torture presents a powerful account of the torturers
themselves. The power of this account
lies in Conroy’s refusal to demonize the torturer. Rather than present an unphathomable monster, Conroy examines
the social and psychological circumstances that subtend torture. This line of questioning allows Conroy to
present a rich, complex, meaningful and importance account of how and why
torture can happen.

Conroy considers the Milgram experiment: In this
experiment the subject is instructed to give electric shocks to another
person. This other person, however, is
an actor and the electric shocks are in fact, fake. Thus the subject of the experiment thinks that he or she is
really hurting the victim, however the victim’s response to the shocks is
merely a performance. The results of
this experiment demonstrated that very ordinary everyday people when instructed
by an authority figure, here the scientist, to do harm to another, most often
comply. Invoking this experiment,
Conroy emphasizes the familiarity of torture: it is not something alien, a
characteristic only of monsters, but rather it has psychological foundations in
most people.

Conroy’s argument is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s
famous report on the Eichmann trials, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil". Here Arendt
told the story of Adolf Eichmann the Nazi officer in charge of the
"solution of the Jewish question" and responsible for the death of
millions. The gist of Arendt’s account
is that evil, despite our desire or need to see it as something monstrous, is
in fact very everyday. Eichmann was a
small man, a weak man, and an insecure man. 
Eichmann’s atrocious crimes against humanity were less the machinations
of a supremely evil being and more the ignorant weak errors of a very ordinary
person. Conroy’s account of torture
makes the same point: the torturer is not beyond us or beyond his/her
circumstances.

This position, of Arendt and Conroy, has important
ethical and political implications. If
the atrocious crimes of Eichmann and torturers can be related back to
psychological and social circumstances then the necessity for healthy and just
social structures must be understood as being of extreme importance. Conroy’s account of torture is a
responsible, well informed, engaging and an important expose. In addition, the account, questioning how
people experience torture, how democratic judiciary systems react to torture in
their own country and why people become torturers, prompts larger questions
about humanity and social justice.

© 2002 Kathryn Walker
 

Kathryn Walker is a doctoral student in
York University’s Social and Political Thought program. Her work is focused on
the relationship between moods, rationality and politics. Kathryn is also part
of the j_spot editorial collective.

Categories: Ethics, General