A loss

Every time I read or hear about this whole waterboarding fiasco, and now about these hundreds (!) of pictures of Americans mistreating prisoners that apparently aren't going to be released, I think back to when I was in high school and read The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn. I didn't read the whole thing, actually. It was very heavy stuff, and I was busy, and I read maybe a third of it. But it strongly affected me. It's terrifying to read actual accounts of unrestricted government abuse of its people. Reading through the Wikipedia entry, it looks like the entire book tracks political prisoners from arrest, through interrogation, imprisonment, and possible release. I never made it past the interrogation part, and even that was upsetting. From what I remember, I wouldn't say the prisoners were tortured. They were mostly subject to really awful conditions, like standing in freezing cold water for long periods of time, stress positions, bright lights for long periods of time, and sleep deprivation. They had virtually no rights or recourse. It felt dark, and scary, and that there was no escape. And unlike 1984 or other dark future books I read around the same time, these things actually happened to real people, in real places. I clearly remember the relief I felt that I lived in a country where I would never be subject to those terrible injustices. I lived in a country where even if I were wrongly accused I would have access to a lawyer, and I would be treated humanely. I would be up against the rule of law, not an unknowable, dark force. It felt bright and pure and right. It was obvious that I lived in a just country, with moral weight. We didn't do things like that because we didn't need to in order to uphold our way of living.

I don't have a strong opinion as to whether waterboarding or bashing someone's head against a wall with some sort of protective collar qualifies as torture or not. Obviously we could think of much more horrifying things to do to people. And whatever happened in our prisons pales in comparison to the horror and injustice of the whole Soviet Gulag. But I do know, absolutely, that something is lost. When my children read that book one day, there will no longer be a bright line, or the certainty that those sorts of things don't happen in our country. Whether our country technically engaged in torture or not, there is no question of the corrosive effect that engaging in such dehumanizing acts has on our own self concept as a nation. It is a loss that I feel profoundly.