The Religion & Culture Web Forum
January 2007
Featured Essay
From Artaxerxes to Abu Ghraib: On Religion and the Pornography of Imperial Violence
By Bruce Lincoln
Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the History of Religions
University of Chicago Divinity School
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I
In the wake of September 11, 2001, much has been written about religious groups commonly called “terrorist,” building on an older literature whose equally tendentious buzzwords were “cult” and “fundamentalism.1 In general, the conclusions advanced within such works tilt sometimes in the direction of alarm (“They’re dangerous and they’re everywhere!”), and sometimes in that of reassurance (“These are quite marginal phenomena, and they’re not really religions”). Particularly skilled, also particularly confused analysts (George Bush comes to mind) sometimes manage to have it both ways, which is rather a nifty trick.
Tempting though it is, I would rather not contribute to the enterprise of this growing cottage industry.2 This is not to say the topic doesn’t have its importance (surely it does), but the field is saturated. Besides, there is bigger, more interesting, and more important game. Simple utilitarian calculations suggest that the amount of academic attention devoted to a given threat ought reflect its seriousness, based on calculations of the likelihood that threat will be realized and the destruction it can unleash. By these standards, al Qaeda, Hamas, the Aryan Nations, Aum Shinrikyo, the Tamil Tigers, Gush Emunim, and all other non-state groups are relative pikers, whose capacity for violence is dwarfed by that of the larger states, who also use their formidable discursive capacities to normalize their own aggression, while stigmatizing that of all adversaries. State violence is, of course, held in check by numerous factors, including law, tradition, international institutions, political and economic costs, calculations of self-interest, also—not least in importance—considerations of morality and religion. Should any of these militate in other directions, however, the likelihood of violence increases accordingly. Among the most dangerous of situations is that in which an extremely powerful state bent on conquest finds and deploys religious arguments that encourage its aggressive tendencies and imperial ambitions.
Without great difficulty, one can identify a contemporary case of this type, but its very proximity threatens to distort one’s perception.3 Believing that it may be useful to consider data sufficiently removed from the present to afford some critical distance, I have devoted much of my research in recent years to the role played by religion in Achaemenid Persia (550–330 BCE), the largest, wealthiest, most powerful empire of antiquity before the emergence of Rome.4 As a convenient summary of that research, I propose to discuss two Achaemenian data, each of which can assume emblematic status. Only after that exercise will I return to contemporary materials and issues.
II
Wherever the Achaemenian empire spread, servants of the Great King built walled gardens, inside which they made every effort to create an atmosphere of perfect tranquility and well-being.5 Toward that end, they built irrigation canals to carry cool water that kept the environment moist and made all life flourish. They planted dense collections of shade trees to moderate temperatures and provide relief from the scorching sun. They arranged plantings in complex geometric patterns to create a sense of perfect order and exquisite beauty. They gathered plants “of every species”—as they never tired of repeating—from every province of the empire, transplanted them, cultivated them and, on occasion, launched military campaigns to obtain exotic species unavailable inside their borders.6 They did the same with animals, including the most exotic species. Some of these served as game for royal hunts, while others were left to wander.7
At their leisure, the king and his nobles frequented such sites, which they understood as exquisitely pleasant spaces for repose and recreation, microcosmic models of the empire at large, and a prefiguration or foretaste of the ideal state they wished to establish wherever they spread their power. To these symbolically charged grounds they gave the name “paradise” (Old Persian pari.daida; cf. Median *pari.daiza, Avestan pairi.daēza), which most literally denotes a walled enclosure.8 Carrying much wider nuances, resonances, fantasies, desires, and connotations, this word spread widely from Persia. Particularly influential in this process of near-global diffusion was the Alexandrian translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, where the loanword paradeisos—and not the native Greek terminology—was used to describe the extraordinary features of Eden at Genesis 2.8–15, for which the Hebrew uses a much simpler term for “garden” (gan, usually translated by Greek kēpos).9
This translator’s choice is significant, for Eden is not in any sense a royal garden, nor a playground for weary nobles. Rather, in the first instance, it is a space of perfection, created by God at the beginning of time; second, a space to which humans had access in a corresponding time of perfection, but from which they became estranged as the result of a primordial drama; third, a space—and a quality of being—that humans hope to recover in some eschatological future.
In Genesis chapter 3, the Biblical text shifts its attention from the garden as an image of primordial perfection to narrate the Fall, detailing how perfection was lost. The Achaemenian myth of creation—which was given first place in twenty-three of the surviving royal inscriptions, and was repeated by every king from Darius the Great (r. 522–486) through Artaxerxes III (359–38)—is more concise than the Genesis account, and treats the loss of primordial bliss only in allusive fashion.10 Still, there are some important similarities between the two cosmogonies. The Achaemenian text reads as follows:
A great god is the Wise Lord, who created this earth, who created that sky, who created mankind, who created happiness for mankind, who made Darius king: one king over many, one commander over many.11
Five separate acts of creation are mentioned in this brief passage. All are understood as unambiguously good, being products of a benevolent (but not omnipotent) Creator. The five creations are not equal in their age and status, however, since one is subtly set apart from the others. Thus, while the first four creations came into being at some unspecified moment in primordial time, the Wise Lord made Darius king at a precise historic moment: 29 September 522, to be exact.12
The text further distinguishes between the four original creations and the fifth through a detail of vocabulary. Thus, for the Wise Lord’s initial creative acts, it uses the verb 2dā-, ‘to establish, set in place for the first time’, a solemn verb that never admits any grammatical subject save the Wise Lord. When it turns to the moment this deity ‘made Darius king’, however, it employs a much less elevated verb: kar-, which takes both humans and gods as its subject, and can denote any act of doing, making, or shaping, including the most menial.13
The point is clear. The Wise Lord’s first four acts form a set that includes inanimate and animate, natural and cultural components: heaven and earth on the one hand, mankind, and everything necessary for mankind’s happiness on the other. Of these, the culminating item is the most interesting and elusive. Detailed studies of the term used to denote ‘happiness’ (Old Persian šiyāti; cf. Avestan šyāti, Latin quiēs) show it is a state of blissful tranquility that involves—and depends on—the presence of Truth, peace, and abundant foods (especially those derived from fresh water, healthful plants, and beneficent animals).14
Once the original four-part creation was complete, there followed an interval of indeterminate length, about which the text is silent. During this period, the world was perfect and no further action needed. But something happened that roused the deity to one more effort as a response to some danger. Darius’s first and longest inscription helps resolve the question of what produced this situation.
Written shortly after the events it describes, the trilingual inscription at Bisitun describes how Darius seized the throne in September 522, suppressed nine rebellions, then embarked on a program of new conquests.15 The early passages hold particular interest, where Darius represented his (otherwise dubious) accession as the result of divine election. These are the same events he later construed as the Wise Lord’s fifth act of creation. Mythic and historic discourses thus complement each other, providing different pieces of the same story. Bisitun omits the original creation—the prime focus of later inscriptions—but dwells on the crisis of 525–2 that brought happiness to an end, and all texts conclude when the Wise Lord responded to that crisis by making Darius king. The crucial passage at Bisitun reads as follows:
A man of our family named Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, was formerly king. His brother was named Bardiya and Cambyses slew him, but it did not become known that Bardiya was slain. Then Cambyses went off to conquer Egypt. While he was in Egypt, the people became vulnerable to deception and the Lie became great throughout the land. Afterwards, there was a Magus named Gaumata. He rose up in rebellion on March 11, 522. He lied to the people, saying: “I am Bardiya, son of Cyrus and brother of Cambyses.” Then the people became rebellious. Persia and Media and other lands went over to Gaumata. On July 1, 522 he seized the kingship, and then Cambyses died. The kingship Gaumata took from Cambyses belonged to our family since long ago. No one was able to take the kingship back from Gaumata. The people feared him mightily. He killed many people who knew Bardiya, for fear they might recognize him. No one dared say anything about Gaumata, until I rose up. I prayed to the Wise Lord for assistance. The Wise Lord bore me aid. Along with a few men, on September 29, 522 I slew Gaumata the Magus and his foremost followers. I took the kingship from him. By the Wise Lord’s will, I became king.16
Darius goes on to explain that once established on the throne, he set about rectifying all the wrongs Gaumata had committed. Toward that end, he restored the institution of kingship, temples and cults, also pastures, livestock, and the bases of the economy.17 Other sources suggest he raised taxes and enforced demands for military conscription that Gaumata had alleviated.18 Such steps were unpopular, and serious doubts also existed regarding Darius’s legitimacy. As a result, many revolts broke out, especially in provinces that wished to extricate themselves from Persian imperial domination. In general, these nationalist insurrections were led by men claiming to be rightful heirs of the old royal families the Achaemenians overthrew. Darius’s response to them was consistent, for he insisted they were not who they claimed to be. Not kings, but liars, imposters, and would-be usurpers. Not national heroes, but instruments of “the Lie.”
All of this is consistent with the central principles of Achaemenian religion, which posits a historic struggle between the virtue of Truth, on which the order of the cosmos depends, and its antithetical adversary: “the Lie.”19 The original creation, as we have seen, was characterized by perfect happiness, in which state the Lie was absent. Primordial perfection ended and history proper thus began, with three events of 525–2 recounted in the text just quoted. (1) The king—normally understood as the embodiment of Truth and protector of happiness—killed his brother and concealed this fact, said concealment being an act of deception, not quite a lie, but hardly the truth: a misrepresentation designed to mask reality and delude the people. (2) As a result of this half-truth, the people became “vulnerable to deception”: not yet liars and villains themselves, but confused, anxious, malleable creatures who could trust neither their king, nor their own senses and reason, from which reality had been successfully occluded. (3) These were the preconditions for the manifestation of evil proper, in all its force. And so, in Darius’s words, “the Lie became great throughout the land,” after which there followed rebellion, war, scarcity; disorder, death, hunger; suffering, fear, doubt. In a word, unhappiness on a massive scale: the end of the perfect era.
Darius and his successors claimed they were chosen by God himself to set things right: that is, to restore creation to its pristine state by vanquishing the Lie in all its forms and all who were corrupted by it. That done, happiness could endure forever. Constituting themselves—and their armies—as champions of Truth and virtue, they offered other peoples the option of voluntarily becoming Achaemenian subjects, which obliged them to pay tribute, contribute soldiers, maintain roads, obey Persian laws, and accept moral leadership from the monarch who defined himself as “King of lands and peoples of all races, King over this great, far-reaching earth.” All of these steps were intended, not simply to enrich the Persian center, but to help advance its imperial expansion, which it construed as a divinely ordained, supremely benevolent project of world salvation. Those who rejected such diplomatic overtures were construed as misguided creatures whose judgment was warped by the Lie. Their conquest represented advance of the Truth by Persian arms, assisted by the Wise Lord. So did the suppression of rebels.20
Military expansion was thus construed as a religious and moral project, designed to establish righteousness, peace, prosperity, abundance, harmony, the flourishing of life and all its pleasures. In a word, “happiness for mankind.” As a sign of what they intended—a sign directed both to themselves and others—the Achaemenians used a portion of their revenues to build the sumptuous gardens I described earlier, filled with exotic species of plants and animals imported from every corner of the globe, and designed to provide a foretaste of the absolute happiness waiting at history’s end under a Pax Persiana. Those gardens were among the most idealized models of empire that ever existed: a story the Achaemenians told themselves about themselves, through which they justifi ed and motivated violent wars of aggression, internal suppression of dissent, ongoing processes of extraction, and ambitions of global domination. To these gardens, they gave the general name of “paradise,” but we also know the name given one of these gardens, which confirms our interpretation, for this paradise-garden was known as “All-happiness.”21
III
The charming image of the paradise-garden stands in sharp contrast with another, the torture administered to a soldier named Mithridates by Artaxerxes II shortly after the battle of Cunaxa (3 September 401). Here, the king quashed a rebellion led by his brother, Cyrus the Younger and, as reported by Ctesias Artaxerxes’s court physician),22 it was Mithridates who first wounded Cyrus and was responsible for his death. For this, the king rewarded him handsomely, but in a way that obscured his contribution, since Artaxerxes wanted personal credit for having killed his brother. When a drunk and decidedly indiscreet Mithridates let the facts slip regarding his role in Cyrus’s death, Artaxerxes ordered him put to death in the following fashion:
Taking two troughs that were made to fit closely together, they laid the man being punished on his back inside one of them. Then they fit the other on top so the man’s head, hands, and feet stuck out, while it covered the rest of his body. They gave him food, pricking his eyes to force him when he resisted. They also poured milk mixed with honey into his mouth, and they poured it over his face. Then they turned his eyes constantly toward the sun and a multitude of flies settled down, covering his face. Meanwhile, inside, the man did what it is necessary for people to do when they have drunk and eaten. Worms and maggots boiled up from the decay and putrefaction of his excrement, and these ate away his body, boring into his interior. When he was dead and the top was removed, people saw his flesh all eaten away and swarms of such animals surrounded his vitals, eating them and leeching at them. Thus Mithridates was gradually destroyed over seventeen days, until he finally died.23
Ctesias, as cited by Plutarch, offered no interpretation for these procedures. Rather, both authors let the episode speak for itself as an example of Oriental despotism at its most sadistic and vile. Similarly, Achaemenian texts offer little that would help us make sense of the punishment, save perhaps Darius’s injunction to future kings: “You who may be king hereafter, protect yourself boldly from the Lie! The man who is a liar, punish him so that he is well-punished if you would think thus: ‘Let my land and people be secure’.”24
This, of course, raises the question what it would mean to be “well punished” (u-fraštam), and here Zoroastrian doctrines offer some help. This follows whether or not one accepts that the later Achaemenians had adopted Zoroastrianism, as most now believe.25 Even those who remain skeptical on this point will readily acknowledge that close comparison of the Achaemenian inscriptions and Zoroastrian texts reveals similarities so numerous and so strong that the two must be regarded as heirs to a common pan-Iranian linguistic, religious, and cultural tradition that each one developed in its own fashion.26
Virtually every detail of Ctesias’s account finds clarifying analogues in Zoroastrian scriptures: the milk and honey; the flies, maggots, and worms; the excrement and its horrific stench, which the text tactfully leaves to one’s imagination. Even the enclosure formed by the two troughs reminds us of another enclosure described in a passage of the Videvdat (an Avestan text concerned with issues of law, purity and pollution) that bears the same name as the Achaemenian “paradise” (Avestan pairi.daēza; cf. Old Persian pari.daida).27 Whereas the latter is an ideal space of happiness, abundance, and the flourishing of life, that of the Videvdat is a space of death and bodily corruption. Inside its walls is the driest, most desolate terrain, devoid of plant, animal, and human life. There, corpse-bearers—i.e. those unfortunates most soiled by the filth of dead bodies—are imprisoned for the duration of their mortal existence so their threat of contaminating pollution may be safely contained.28
With the exception of the Videvdat, which is concerned with issues of purity, the older Zoroastrian scriptures (i.e., those written in Avestan) are mostly liturgical in nature. It is thus the younger, Pahlavi scriptures that provide the fullest testimony. Many of these contain lists of mortal sins (marg-arzān), i.e. actions so grievously wrong that those who commit them ought be put to death. While these lists vary somewhat, they always prominently feature the crime of which Mithridates was convicted: Untruth. In a multitude of forms—perjury, heresy, slander, breach of contract, et al.—untruth is always a capital offense.29 Those guilty of it can also expect postmortem torment, as is described in the Dadestan i Denig:
From all the demons, there comes to him heavy pain, trouble, devouring and many things, like stench and biting, tearing, cutting in pieces, all harm and misfortune. His own choice created these things for him in hell, and there will be evils for him until the cosmic renovation.30
The first point to observe is how closely these otherworldly afflictions resemble the death-torments inflicted on Mithridates, complete with biting, tearing, devouring, cutting in pieces and, of course, the stench. Two other details also merit attention. First the evildoer is made fully responsible for his suffering, it being asserted that his own choice (wurrōyišn)—i.e., the wrong moral decisions he made—created these woes for him.31 Second, those who inflict the pain on the victim’s body are hellish demons. This prompts us to observe that Mithridates’s sufferings came most directly from the attack of lowly creatures, while the humans who managed his torture did almost nothing violent. Indeed, the affair was organized such that they could—and no doubt did—construe their actions as beneficent, since they chiefly consisted of providing food and drink. Nor was this just any food and drink, for milk and honey were understood as the purest forms of nourishment, associated with goodness, light, innocence, and peace, since milk is the food of newborn babes, while these two foods—and no other, save water—are procured without harm to the life of any plant or animal.32
Mithridates’s execution thus organized feeders and fed in a set of interlocking binary oppositions. The feeders were vertical, above, and free to move as they liked; the victim horizontal, below, deprived of mobility. They gave abundantly; he took, with reluctance. That which they gave served as a mark of their (putative) goodness and innocence, while that which he made of their gifts—the dark, foul, death-dealing excrement his body produced, the crawling vermin it spawned and the flying vermin his body attracted—revealed and punished his (putative) guilt. It is as if his body, or some interior, hidden quality thereof, transformed the stuff of life into the terrible instruments of death.
Throughout ancient Iran, maggots, worms, and insects were regarded as monstrous beings, and Herodotus describes Achaemenid priests as having waged ceaseless war against them.33 For its part, Zoroastrianism has quite an extensive theology of vermin, which draws on cosmological, demonological, and physiological discourses. All of these are grounded in a myth of creation that resembles the Achaemenian cosmogony. Like the latter, the Pahlavi texts describe the Wise Lord as having produced an original creation whose perfection was disrupted by the Assault (ēbgat) of an independent, utterly malignant force: ‘the Evil Spirit’ (Ahriman), also known as ‘the Adversary’ (hamēstār, petyārag) and closely identified with ‘the Lie’ (druz). Working in the infinite darkness that is his own, this spirit fashioned two kinds of being as an antithesis to the good creation: demons (dēwān) and vermin (xrafstarān). The latter category includes insects, reptiles, snakes, worms, and those creatures that swarm, crawl, and bite.34
With these as his troops, the Evil Spirit attacked the Wise Lord’s creatures with a will-to-annihilation. His power being inadequate to that task, however, he could only damage and corrupt, but never destroy them. Accordingly, his Assault yielded a synthesis of good and evil, light and darkness, being and non-being, which the Pahlavi texts call ‘the mixed state’ (gumēzišn), in which all the originally pure creations—heaven, earth, water, plants, animals, humans, and fire—now contain flaws, ambiguities, and destructive potential as a consequence of the Assault.
With regard to the human body, for instance, original perfection was compromised to admit mortality, pain, disease, and sexual reproduction (which offers species-immortality in place of individual). Three further points hold particular interest in the present context. First, the body comes to have two material components that are radically different in nature: bone, which endures, and flesh, which is subject to putrefaction.35 Second, if left to decompose, dead flesh spawns vermin that reveal its innate corruption.36 Decaying bodies also produce a terrible stink, as do living bodies that have fallen into a state of moral and physical corruption.37 Third, the fleshly body must sustain its life by eating, itself a morally ambiguous practice. Some texts maintain that eating good foods in moderation produces health and well-being, while gluttony—characterized as the demonic form of eating—produces disease and stench.38 Others focus on the process of digestion, which, according to their analysis, converts the pure components of food into everything that supports life (breath, blood, thought, energy, etc.), while transforming its impure components into excrement, the chief form of filth, pollution, darkness, and stench that is present in every living body.39
If pollution is a part of all life in the mixed state, it is not equally present in every life and body. As an important passage from the Denkart observes, “Filth is entirely demonic; it all comes from demons. The more one’s body is inhabited by demons, the more filth there is.”40 The text goes on to discuss what happens at death:
When the body is dead, the death-making demon, the author of powerlessness, the defeater of the soul, comes to it triumphantly. He seizes it and he brings his brothers to the body, to inhabit its every place of life. These are the stench-makers, creators of foulness, and other demons who make the body useless and who drive off the opponents antithetical to themselves, like sweet fragrance, purity, good conduct, beauty and others that are necessary. Residing in the body, they increase, so there are more of them all together in the body, so that they breathe corpse pollution and all illnesses. One can say, without dispute, that the residence of demons is in that filth.41
This passage from the Denkart treats death as the moment when the body, bereft of its vitality and of the soul that gives it moral guidance, can no longer defend itself against demonic assault. In life, the choices that the soul makes affect the body’s nature and welfare, rendering the flesh—its most vulnerable member —either more, or less able to resist the destructive forces ever-present in the mixed state. And here, it is relevant that things modern discourse treats as impersonal abstractions—things like appetite (Āz), anger (Xēšm), and falsehood (Druz, “the Lie”)—Zoroastrianism personified as demons.42 These are the forces against which moral people must defend themselves, and these are the forces that tear them apart when their defenses are weak. People who permit their bodies to harbor appetite, anger, falsehood, and the like find themselves corrupted by these demons, who turn their flesh foul and useless to good causes. Ultimately, they bring death, after which they make the stinking corpses that remain into an object lesson about the nature and power of evil.
The exquisite torture inflicted on Mithridates seems to have been a similar, if somewhat more pointed, object lesson designed to reveal the man’s guilt by making spectacular display of his state of corruption. “Who and what caused his death?” we are meant to ask. Surely not the king, a voice whispers in response, nor the men who fed him milk and honey. No, Mithridates was killed by the vermin who devoured his flesh. “And where did they come from?” Clearly, from the stinking filth of his body. “And that filth, what caused that?” His demons, my dear, the terrible demons who permeated his being as a result of his moral failings. “What sorts of demons, and what sorts of failings?” Probably the Lie. Probably the Lie, the very worst of them all.
IV
From Artaxerxes’s perspective, the physical horror of Mithridates’s death was thus justified and mitigated by its discursive significance, since the victim’s mortal agonies effectively proclaimed his guilt, while confirming that the king was precisely what royal ideology asserted and demanded: the champion of truth and guardian of the moral order.43 For his part, Ctesias inverted the signs of this story, thereby turning it bitterly ironic. In his version—designed to confirm the harshest Greek stereotypes of things Asiatic—the king is a coward and a liar, who tortured the brave Mithridates for having dared tell the truth.44
Having been raised to consider ourselves heirs of the Greeks, and having Ctesias’s text still available in all its persuasive power, we are probably inclined to accept his version of the events. But were we exposed to the spectacle of Mithridates’s execution at first hand, and were we sufficiently steeped in Persian culture to appreciate its nuances and values, we might well reach different conclusions. As it is, there is no way to know who really killed Cyrus the Younger and, as a result, we can make no secure judgments about the truth or falsity of the story, the guilt or innocence of the accused. Which is fine, since these are not the issues that ought concern us.
Of infinitely greater importance than adjudicating any of the particulars is to observe what happens when a powerful state develops the capacity to persuade itself, its citizens or subjects, and perhaps also others, that the world is divided between the forces of good and evil; further, that its leaders have been divinely ordained to lead the good in battle. As an occasional fantasy, this is bad enough. As a core belief, sustained in and by a well-wrought body of discourse, broadcast widely through all available media and genres, it becomes infinitely more dangerous. This is so, whether it is done cynically or if the propagators are themselves fervent believers. An important part of this process is the state’s ability (and its proclivity) to stage impressive spectacles that confirm—to its own satisfaction and benefit—its own delusions of grandeur.
Achaemenian religion involved three constructs that I have come to understand as ideally conducive to the aggressive pursuit of imperial ambition. These are: (1) A starkly dualistic ethics, in which the opposition good/evil is aligned with self/other; (2) A royal theology that grounds the ruler’s legitimacy in divine right, charisma, and election; (3) A sense of soteriological mission that recodes aggression as salvation (or liberation) and one’s victims as one’s beneficiaries. Moreover, the Achaemenids were past masters in the art of staging spectacles that reproduced, and seemingly validated these convictions. Their architecture and art, their banquets and festivals, their gardens and their tortures, all demonstrated to themselves—and to anyone who would listen—that they were good, their enemies evil, and that their king was committed to vanquishing the Lie, restoring human happiness, and rescuing all of creation.45 Some of the spectacles they staged were extraordinarily lovely in their aesthetics, as in the case of the paradise-gardens. Others were equally horrific. This notwithstanding, they all served the same ends by reconstituting (what passes for) reality to advance the project of imperial conquest.
The Persians, of course, were not alone in this enterprise, and successful empires almost inevitably engage in something similar. One might mention any number of recently staged spectacles like the April 9, 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square (a name derived from Persian “paradise,” Figure 1) or President Bush’s “Top Gun” landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln just three weeks later to proclaim that he and the American military had accomplished their divinely ordained mission to liberate Iraq and to bring God’s gift of freedom to that nation’s benighted people (Figures 2 and 3).
Also relevant are the infamous photos taken by members of the 372nd Military Police Company shortly after they assumed control of Tier 1A at the Abu Ghraib prison on October 15, 2003. Over the next month, members of this unit staged and photographed various scenes that construed Iraqi captives as bestial and lowly (Figure 4), dark and demonic (Figure 5), sexually repressed, but secretly lascivious and perverse (Figure 6), filthy (Figure 7), weak and easily scared (Figure 8). In most instances, the Iraqis were naked and cowering; in all, they were—or were made to seem—humiliated, demoralized, craven, and thoroughly dominated by the superior power of America, as represented by its tall, strong, happy soldiers.46
Unlike the earlier photos, those made at Abu Ghraib were not produced by professionals in the art of public relations, nor were they intended for general consumption. Rather, these are the low-budget, aesthetically degraded—indeed, the obscene version of the story: the prurient record of titillating events that took place discreetly offstage. Here, bored soldiers made use of the bodies and means at their disposal to make some of the same points, employing some of the same codes as did their colleagues higher up in the chain of command.
Few explanations have been offered for these photographs, save Pfc. Lynndie England’s sworn testimony “it was just for fun,”47 and an Army investigator’s retort that the soldiers did these things “simply because they could.”48 Beneath these banalities, the photos show low-level GIs deploying the same binary oppositions that organized the other data we have considered: High/Low, Us/Them, Mobile/Immobile, Lordly/Bestial, Clean and pure/Filthy and polluted, Powerful/Powerless, God’s chosen/God’s forsaken, Champions of Truth and Freedom/Dupes and Slaves of “the Lie.” Read from the perspective of those who staged them, these vignettes did not degrade otherwise fully human subjects, any more than did the torture and execution of Mithridates. Rather, the impromptu minidramas at Abu Ghraib revealed that as “terrorist,” “fanatics,” “diehard ex-Baathists,” and so forth, the Iraqi prisoners were always already degraded, and therefore deserved the treatment they received.
Only when Seymour Hersh, our modern Ctesias, secured publication of these photos were the signs of hero and villain inverted, so that a broad audience could read the story as one of moral depravity. While I share that reaction at a visceral level, for analytical purposes I find it important to combine the initial intent of the photos with their subsequent reinscription to make a more complex point, with which I will conclude this essay. What we see here is the way moral depravity and moral confidence (or the simulacrum thereof) are dialectically related: how they produce and reproduce each other through a variety of discourses (spectacular, obscene, aestheticizing, parodic, solemn, carnivalesque, official, improvised, etc.), all of which help relieve the leaders and foot soldiers of empire from those inconvenient reservations and qualms that might otherwise inhibit their effective, relatively guilt-free exercise of the brutish and brutalizing power necessary for the conquest and maintenance of empire.
This essay is adapted from Tore Ahlbäck, ed., Exercising Power: The Role of Religions in Concord and Conflict (Åbo, Finland: Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History, 2006), 213-241.
The Religion and Culture Web Forum comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Persons seeking to copy or use this material must obtain permission from the Divinity School. 1025 East 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. (773) 702-8230.
Read the invited commentary from Amy Kaplan
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