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Written by Frederica Mathewes-Green
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For the Summer 2007 issue of the Review of Faith
and International Affairs, Frederica Mathewes-Green was invited to contribute
an article on the Orthodox perspective on torture. This deeply moving piece is
reproduced here with her blessing. For more information, visit her site online .
"It was during this part that the majority of us tried to kill ourselves."
They buried my spiritual father last November. I have never seen a body in a
casket look so not-there; the indistinct pale husk he left behind looked like
something a breeze could lift up and carry away. It was the contrast, I
suppose. Few people in life are as radiant and vigorous as Fr. George Calciu,
or as full of joy.
He
was a few days short of his 81st birthday, still full-time pastor of
a church in the Washington,
D.C. suburbs, still traveling
world-wide to those who sought him as a teacher and spiritual father, still
diligently reaching out to the poor and unchurched around him.
Fr. George's radiance was a lasting rebuke to the darkest intentions of
torturers. In his native Romania
he was imprisoned twice by the Communist authorities, for a total of 21 years.
He was a survivor, in particular, of the brief but appalling "Pitesti
Experiment"-the most intensive program of brainwashing to take place behind the
Iron Curtain.
The plan at the prison in the Romanian city of Pitesti was to take promising young men, 18
to 25 years old, and utterly break them down-then rebuild them into the ideal
"Communist man." In the book Christ is Calling You! (St. Herman Press,
1997) Fr. George explained to an interviewer that the Pitesti experiment involved several distinct steps.
Incoming prisoners would be handed over to a team of guards and experienced
prisoners, who would beat them and kill one or two, whoever appeared to be a
leader. Then the "unmaskings" began, in which prisoners were required under
torture to renounce everything they believed. Fr. George recalled being
compelled to say, for example, "I lied when I said ‘I believe in God.' I lied
when I said, ‘I love my mother and my father.'" This was extremely painful, as
it was designed to be. The intention was to undermine the prisoner's memory and
personality, to infiltrate his consciousness with lies until he came to believe
them.
A few months ago I was able to talk with another survivor of Pitesti,
Fr. Roman Braga, when I visited the Michigan
convent where he now is in residence. The Communists had arrested Fr. Roman on
an inventive charge: he was accused of trying to overthrow the government by
discussing the writings of St. Basil the Great, St. John Climacus, and St.
Gregory of Nyssa. He spent his first year in solitary confinement, and in the
dark, narrow cell could not tell one season from another, nor could he look out
the small, high window and see a horizon. "You had to go somewhere; you had to
find an inner perspective," he said, "because otherwise you would truly go
crazy."
Fr. Roman told me that religious beliefs were particularly mocked. Tormenters
would set obscene lyrics to the tunes of familiar hymns, and celebrate parody
liturgies designed to break believers' hearts. His sole clue that Christmas or
Pascha (Easter) might be near would be the appearance of their themes in the
torturers' arsenal.
One way guards particularly taunted Christians was by telling them that Christ
and Mary Magdalene had had a sexual relationship. Fr. Roman noted, laughing, that
in Romania this constituted
torture, but in America
people line up to pay for it in movies and books ("Here in the land of
so-called freedom-I am not so sure you are free.")
Neither man would describe what they'd endured. "It is secret, intimate," Fr.
Roman said, "I saw saints fall, and I saw the simple rise and become saints."
Fr. George admitted that he gave way under torture. When a victim is out of his
mind with pain, he doesn't know what he is saying. Fr. George told his
interviewer, "It was a spiritual fight, between good spirits and evil spirits.
And we failed on the field of battle; we failed, many of us, because it was
beyond our ability to resist ... The limit of the human soul's resistance was
tried there by the devil."
This emotional and spiritual damage was even worse than the physical pain. Fr.
George went on, "When you were tortured, after one or two hours of suffering,
the pain would not be so strong. But after denying God and knowing yourself to
be a blasphemer-that was the pain that lasted ... We forgive the
torturers. But it is very difficult to forgive ourselves." At night a wash of
tears would come, and with it, returning prayer. "You knew very well that the
next day you would again say something against God. But a few moments in the
night, when you started to cry and to pray to God to forgive you and help you,
was very good."
Fr. George once attempted to write a memoir of his Pitesti experience, but found it impossible:
"Sometimes I was hammering at one word, timidly, then persistently, then
intensely, to madness. The word became nothing other than a sequence of letters
or sounds. It had no meaning. It didn't tell me anything. I would say:
‘beating' or ‘pain' or ‘prayer' or ‘curse' ... and I would substitute one for
another without any change; none told me anything! I would say ‘cell' and the
word would not speak. I could say instead ‘lelc' or ‘clel' or ‘ellc' with the
same result. Everything was mute and absurd.
"And suddenly a curse from that time would resound in my mind, or a song
somebody sang during the unmaskings, and the whole atmosphere would install
itself with a painfully striking character and with a reality more real than it
was then. Affective memory! Proust was a genius in his intuitions, a part of
the literature he wrote."
Yet the worst was still to come. In order to demonstrate that they had truly
become "the Communist man," in order to fully embody the persona demanded of
them, these mentally and physically battered prisoners were required to become
torturers. They were compelled to assist in the "re-education" of new
prisoners, and any reluctance or leniency was cruelly punished.
"This was the most difficult part," Fr. George said, "for under terror and
torture one can say, ‘yes, yes, yes.' But now, to have to act? It was very
difficult. It was during this part that the majority of us tried to kill
ourselves." In his case, "I was on a big staircase, three stories high. The
moment I tried to climb over it to throw myself down, a friend of mine caught
me and saved me."
It may sound surprising that being a torturer was so much more painful and
soul-destroying than being a victim. Yet the pattern holds in other realms. In
her book, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (Praeger, 2002), Rachel
MacNair examines a number of situations in which a person may be more
distraught over harming someone-even if it's socially sanctioned or in
self-defense-than by being harmed personally. This sounds reasonable enough in
the case of a policeman who kills someone in the line of duty, or of the person
whose sad role it is to carry out a death sentence.
Yet even soldiers, who have been trained to kill and may well be themselves in
mortal danger, can feel great distress about the violence they do to others. In
"The Price of Valor" (New Yorker, July 12 & 19, 2004), Dan Baum
examines this puzzle. He spent a week with amputees at the Walter Reed Army Medical
Center, in Washington, D.C.,
and "was struck by how easily they could tell the stories of the horrible
things that had happened to them. They could talk about having their arms or
legs blown off in vivid detail, and even joke about it, but, as soon as the
subject changed to the killing they'd done, a pall would settle over them."
When he asked a Vietnam
vet how often he experienced flashbacks of killing villagers, he first said,
"Every ten minutes," but then corrected himself: "Really, it's more like I'm
always looking at a double image."
The Army's textbook for the medical corps, "War Psychiatry," notes that
"casualties the soldier inflicted himself on enemy soldiers were usually
described as the most stressful events" and quotes a company commander that it
is easier for a soldier to accept the death of a friend than to cope with the
fact of having shot someone.
MacNair considers evidence for Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress among a
number of groups-soldiers, executioners, police, criminals, and abortion
providers-and presents some unusual information about the Nazi
"Einsatzgruppen." These were the soldiers who were charged with shooting Jews
lined up at the edge of a pit-an act of unspeakable callousness. But, from the
perspective of Nazi efficiency standards, the soldiers weren't able to be
callous enough. Because they shot their victims in the back they were spared
the memory of the victims' faces, yet found their nightmares haunted by those
vulnerable, individual necks. Adolf Eichmann wrote that many of them, "unable
to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed suicide. Some had even
gone mad. Most of the members of these Kommandos had to rely on alcohol."
When Heinrich Himmler observed a shooting squad in action, it disturbed him so
much that he ordered a "more humane" approach be found; the result was the gas
chambers, which allowed the killer to avoid seeing his victims die. An officer
in charge of the Einsatzgruppen, von dem Bach-Zelewski (who would himself later
succumb to hallucinations), insisted to Himmler, "Look at the eyes of the men
in this Kommando, how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the
rest of their lives."
The torture he endured did not "finish" Fr. George; it made him courageous
enough to defy the authorities, and even accept a second term of imprisonment
as the price of preaching the gospel. Fr. Roman says that, in fact, his time in
prison brought him an unexpected blessing, because it was there that he first
discovered the depths of prayer. "I was forced to find myself in prison," he
writes in his book, Exploring the Inner Universe (HDM Press, 1996).
"Only then was I able to discover how beautiful the interior life of man is ...
We will never reach the same spiritual level of life as in Communist
imprisonment."
I asked Fr. Roman whether he was able to forgive his torturers. "Those who
suffer much, forgive," he said. "Those who do not forgive become victims. I
embraced my torturers, once I saw that they were controlled by the devil. The
devil is real, not a bedtime story." That would be one piece of the puzzle
which Orthodox Christians would bring to a discussion of torture. We still
believe in a real devil. Not a pitchfork-and-tail cartoon, but a vicious
malevolence who gorges on human suffering. The person who feels an inner
compulsion to acts of sadism is not being driven by human nature.
As Fr. Roman concluded, "Man is a sacrament; he is a mystery, too. We do not
know what we are."
******************
The idea that most humans are deeply troubled at hurting other humans seems to
me a very touching and hopeful thing. An unexpected proof for the existence of
God, I think.
Of course there are times people feel a "blood lust" or
become "bloodthirsty," or get exhilarated
by vengeance, and may later have mixed feelings or regret or even feel
frightened at what they've done. And there are some who are "bent"
and actually enjoy causing pain. There was a fascinating article in the New
Yorker not long ago, about the TV show "24" and a
meeting of military and intelligence experts with the show's writers.
The experts were trying to convince the writers that the show is unrealistic,
that it presents torture as far more effective than it actually is. They
said torture has limited usefulness, it is more likely to to strengthen
resolve, and they gave the writers a list of non-violent means that are
more successful in getting information (eg, one so simple it's
ingenious, simply giving prisoners postcards to send to their friends;
they write the names and addresses right down.) They also said another problem
with a show like "24" is that it makes torture look so useful and acceptable
that captors employ it even on people who really don't have any valuable
information, such as at Abu Ghraib. Torture gets used just because it looks
like it's the usual thing to do.
One guy in the article affirmed this finding that torture is very, very hard on
the people who inflict it, so much so its not worth using. He added that there
is about 2% of the population who enjoy inflicting pain, and that such people
have have extreme personality problems and "you don't want them in
your organization."
I covered the case of a person who enjoys hurting others in a longer
ending, but the editor and I agreed that the tighter, shorter form worked
better. I'll paste in the long ending below, in case you're interested.
*****
That would be one piece of the puzzle which Orthodox Christians would bring to
a discussion of torture. We still believe in a real devil. Not a
pitchfork-and-tail cartoon, but a vicious malevolence who gorges on human
suffering. The person who feels an inner compulsion to acts of sadism is not being
driven by human nature. As even the Army's "War Psychiatry" says, mammals have
"an aversion...to killing" their own species.
Yet it can't be denied that some people feel a rush of pleasure at such
moments. The fury of hate, the thrill of power, may impel a person to hideous
deeds; later he may come to himself and be horrified and disgusted with his
actions. Ordinary, garden-variety sins follow a similar pattern: a person feels
temptation come over him like a cloud, he feels an urgent need to act on it quickly
(as if hearing the whisper, "Do it now, before you have second thoughts"), but
afterwards may well feel self-loathing or despair. All these phases suit the
devil's single goal, which is to alienate us from God. Lurid stories about
exorcism give us the false impression that, if chairs aren't flying through the
air, the devil isn't around. Yet as Jesus' own Temptation shows, the usual
method is simply to offer suggestions, fantasies, thoughts. To draw us toward
sin, the devil assures us that God is lenient and will forgive; afterwards, he
tells us that repentance is now useless, and God has abandoned us.
What all such thoughts have in common is that they are lies. They come from the
evil one, the "father of lies" (John 8:44). A central feature of Orthodox
spirituality is the practice of identifying and resisting lying thoughts, and
in this it has some surprising parallels to Cognitive Therapy.
The person who regularly struggles against such thoughts grows stronger, but if
the temptations never meet with a fight, they get the upper hand. Gradually the
will is weakened and enslaved. There's an Irish proverb: "First the man
takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man."
Pleasure diminishes, and the reward for indulging desire decreases; desire
itself even fades, and is replaced by miserable compulsion.
I thought of this when I read an analysis of the writings of an author
noted for his bloodthirsty fantasies. As I read sample passages, what struck me
was how cold and joyless it seemed. If there had once been a flame of pleasure
from such thoughts, it had long been extinguished. All that remained was a
compulsion to think, think, think, ceaselessly, miserable, to ever be dreaming
up more complicated ways to wound and torment. It dawns on the reader that
these are not records of events but only empty fantasies, in many cases
impossible to perform. It reminded me of a the passage in the eyewitness
account of the martyrdoms at Lyons in 177 AD, in which the Christians protested
that the crimes they'd been charged with were so horrible that, not only would
they not do them, not only would they not *think* of them, they didn't even
think it was possible that anyone *could* do them.
That is the final condition of a person who habitually indulges a temptation to
fantasize about torture. At the end there is nothing but the feverish
churning mind, which is whipped to continue manufacturing fantasies though the
whole inner person is exhausted. What began as an occasional pleasure gradually
overtakes the mind and personality, and the end product is, as the evil one
desired, a hollow man, a slave. "Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin,"
Jesus said (John 8:34).
But for someone who turns back, recovery of health is possible. Christian faith
teaches that God pities and loves all sinners, even the torturer. Even the
torturer can receive forgiveness, and at his repentance more angels will
rejoice than they do over ninety-nine righteous who never need repentance (Luke
15:7). We are not alone in this fight. Christ's victory on the Cross was aimed
at the devil; it defeated him and set us free. "The reason the Son of God
appeared was to destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). We are freed, not
just from the debt of sin, but from sin itself. In Christ, we can begin to grow
into our true nature: "the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ"
(Ephesians 4:13).
Fr. Roman concluded, "Man is a sacrament; he is a mystery, too. We do not know
what we are."
Frederica Mathewes-Green is a popular speaker,
award-winning author, columnist for Beliefnet.com, and the Khouria (spiritual
mother) of Holy Cross Orthodox Church near Baltimore, MD.
Her books include The Lost Gospel of Mary, Facing East, First Fruits of Prayer, and The Illumined
Heart.
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