Robert Jay Lifton on torture in the gulag

Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton has done considerable work on the psychology of people in warfare and in captivity.  One of his best-known studies is one on American prisoners in the Korean War who were subjected to Chinese "brainwashing" attempts.  His work is drawn upon heavily by others like the late Margaret Thaler Singer who study "coercive persuasion" techniques used by cult groups.

Lifton has also written on the psychological conditions that facilitate the conduct we now know has been occurring at Abu Ghuraib and other parts of the Pentagon's gulag: Conditions of Atrocity, The Nation 05/31/04 issue (posted 05/13/04).

What ultimately drives the dynamic is an ideological vision that equates Iraqi fighters with "terrorists" and seeks to further justify the invasion. All this is part of the amorphous, even apocalyptic, "war on terrorism," as is the practice of denying the human rights of detainees labeled as terrorists, a further stimulus for abuse. Grotesque improvisations can occur at different levels--whether in the form of interrogators' ideas about inflicting sexual humiliation or in foot soldiers' methods of carrying out those instructions or responding to more indirect messages from above.

Recognizing that atrocity is a group activity, one must ask how individual soldiers can so readily join in. I believe they undergo a type of dissociation I call "doubling"--the formation of a second self. Nazi doctors could continue to be ordinary husbands and fathers when on leave from their murderous work in Auschwitz. Similarly, Tony Soprano is a likable fellow who cares about his children but is in the business of maiming and killing. The individual psyche can adapt to an atrocity-producing environment by means of a subself that behaves as if autonomous and thereby joins in activities that would otherwise seem repugnant.  ...

Lifton is being conservative in assumptions about specific guilt higher up in the chains of command.  His analysis explains how crimes like those in Abu Ghuraib can occur even without specific directions or authorization from senior levels of command.  He does make it clear that he is not trying to either exonerate the indiduals who directly committed torture or to let seniorofficials off the hook.  On the contrary:

To attribute the scandal at Abu Ghraib to "a few bad apples" or to "individual failures" is poor psychology and self-serving pseudomorality. To be sure, individual soldiers and civilians who participated in it are accountable for their behavior, even under such pressured conditions. But the greater responsibility lies with those who planned and executed the war on Iraq and the "war on terrorism" of which it is a part, and who created, in policy and attitude, the accompanying denial of rights of captives and suspects.

Lifton's focus is on the psychology of the perpetrators, not their ethical or legal guilt as such.  The accumulating evidence that the use of torture was widespread and implicitly - or even explicitly - directed from senior levels in the Administration does not invalidate what he writes about the mind-set that justifies it.

In studies of Nazi war crimes during the Second World War, we often encounter discriptions of Schreibtischtäter, conventionally translated as "desk murderers".  It refers to those who facilitated various parts of crimes like the Holocaust in bureacratic tasks like scheduling transports or authorizing transfers of prisoners to death camps without directly getting their hands dirty in the process.

I suspect we'll find out more and more about the role of Schreibtischtäter in the gulag torture story.  Lifton's article is also useful in understanding their mentality.