Justin on Abu Ghraib nine days ago:
- The Abu Ghraib photo gallery of S&M imagery, far from being a prank, is art. Monstrously perverted, even vile, yet the sheer horror of it, calculated to elicit an emotional reaction, qualifies it as such, at least technically, as much as the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. What we are talking about, in this case, is the art of propaganda, or, at least, the nexus where pornography and propaganda meet.
The two forms have much in common. Both are inherently crude, and share a certain hectoring, relentless style calculated to bypass the brain and go directly to the lower cortex with their messages, respectively:
All women are whores (heterosexual),
All men are whores (gay male),
All Arabs are whores (U.S. Department of Defense).
The will to domination permeates the propaganda of the flesh, including the rather specialized variety exemplified by the Abu Ghraib photo-montage of Arabic degradation. Cruelty and role-playing, creating and reinforcing stereotypes of dominance and submission, are key elements of what can only be called pornoganda.
According to this theory of the meaning of Abu Ghraib, the whole point of the S&M show is to underscore the utter powerlessness of the Arab world before American military might. There is no other meaning we can ascribe to images of Arab men who wear women’s clothes and glory in their unmanly abasement, and Iraqi women who lift their skirts and squeal as they’re raped by their invincible American conquerors.
Of course, Justin wrote that without the benefit of R. Emmett “Bob” Tyrrell’s moral expertise. Here’s what Bob had to say last Thursday:
- I do wish, however, that they would stop lecturing us on the sanctity of the Arab male body. I have no doubt that among the Iraqi male population there are many goody-two shoes and possibly many middle-aged virgins. However, at Abu Ghraib it seems you have men more expert at roadside ambush, murder, and perhaps rape than at chastity and good works. It was probably a mistake for our military to send the horny boys and girls of the fabled 372nd Military Police Company to that Iraqi hoosegow. They appear to be lifetime subscribers to Hustler magazine. The reports that the 372nd’s Sabrina, Lynndie, and Megan collaborated with their four he-man associates to coerce the Iraqi prisoners to simulate intercourse and to masturbate are repulsive. Yet I dissent from the widely held notion that this sort of lasciviousness is all that alien to the Arab male, especially the Arab male with a hankering for violence.
- May I refer fellow skeptics to a first-person report on the folkways and mores of Arab prisoners at Guantanamo written by Matt Labash in early 2002? Writing in the Weekly Standard he reported asking Marine jailers “if they’ve seen anything weird.” The Marines, continues Labash, “laugh sheepishly, looking at each other. Finally, Sgt. Josh Westbrook, who sports a forearm tattoo of flaming baby heads, steps up. ‘They know they’re being watched,’ he explains, ‘so they’ll stare at you, and while they stare at you, they’ll, uh, masturbate.'”
The Marines believed that their Islamic fundamentalist masturbators were particularly avid “to embarrass the female Army guards.”
“The weirdness doesn’t end there,” reports Labash. “They’ve also eaten their toiletries and urinated on equipment. ‘The other day,’ says Westbrook, ‘one of the guys tried to do a naked cartwheel.’ In the most bizarre twist,” writes Labash, “Lance Corporal Devin Klebaur says a few have also been known to ‘put toothpaste in their ass.'”
It sounds to me as though we sent the 372nd to the wrong prison.
A fellow less astute than Bob might wonder, in light of recent events, if the Marines at Guantanamo were having a little fun with a credulous warbot, or even describing things [i]they had done[/i] to inmates. I’ll let those less astute fellows wonder about such things. For now, I’ll just await my tongue-lashing from [i]American Spectator[/i] web editor Jeremy Lott. (Aren’t you the least bit embarrassed, Jeremy?)