My stomach contracts and I feel a deep chill in every pore of my Brown skin when I see the prisoner abuse photos. I know that this is about racism. So why are so many publicly reluctant to say so?
News Source: In House
Or is it that we can't get our words into print? Only a few people have noted that the photos remind them of prison abuse and police brutality of Black and Brown men in North America, and of American military and covert operations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Vietnam and elsewhere. Most of these writers are non-Western with the notable exception of Washington Post staff writer Phillip Kennicott. Not mincing words, Kennicott maintains that "these pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished." Using the words of Aime Cesaire, Kennicott actually names the abuse "race hatred." The Egyptian writer Ahdaf Souief declares that the abuse reflects the "deep racism underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the third world generally." John Pilger calls it "modern imperial racism. " Recalling Vietnam, and the way that the My Lai massacre is remembered only as a rare incident of exceptional violence, Pilger predicts that prisoner abuse in Iraq will come to be seen the same way, as exceptional and unconnected to the national project of dominating racially inferior peoples. Two weeks into the scandal, the exceptional violence argument rules the day and the word racism is not even uttered as a possible contributing factor.
While racism is not being explicitly named, outrage and condemnation are not lacking. Although CNN recently asked its viewers if they had had enough of the pictures, the Western world continues to be rocked by the images of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. When the photos show a young American woman leading an Iraqi man on a leash, and both male and female soldiers grinning for the camera as they display a pyramid of naked Iraqi men forced to simulate sodomy, the conclusion that humiliation and torture of the most terrible kind had taken place is inescapable. Few try to defend the abuse although there is the occasional columnist, such as Andrew Coyne for the National Post, who insists (on the CBC's program Counterspin) that the abuse is isolated and that 400 photos do not constitute proof otherwise. The National Post notwithstanding, even CNN has begun to use the word "systemic" as more photos and videotapes emerge.
Full Review: The 'Anyone Can Torture' Arguments
