It's scary how beauty can be so indifferent to suffering
We went to this beautiful park the other day. It used to be a torture and detention center, Villa Grimaldi its called. They’ve planted trees and flowers in peace and remembrance of the people who were killed and the lives that were destroyed there. But what’s so haunting about it is that even when the park was a torture center, it was still just as beautiful. The military leaders would even bring there wives and families there on the weekends to enjoy the gardens and the pool. The prisoners who survived talked about how they could smell roses and hear children playing when they were blindfolded, led out of there cells, taken to another place for interrogation. lying down on a bench and staring up the trees reminded me of the view I spent so many hours taking in lying on my childhood trampoline thinking about who to invite to my 10th birthday party, how many innings i might get to catch at that weekends softball tournament, or what Wittgenstein really meant by P as the sun shined and the leaves blew in the buffalo breeze. It looked just like this. Except this view was interjected by a red tower. A tower where hundreds of people faced torture and for many it was the point from which they were disappeared. It’s scary how beauty can be so indifferent to suffering.
Ive been struck in my travels at how good we humans are at taking beautiful places and making them horrific. Turning a holy sea that reflects a painfully beautiful sunset every single night into a boundary between families, a lookout point from which to long for an unreachable home. Turning the vast mountains of Afghanistan into strategic points and the green of the Korengal valley red with blood and suffering, or the seemingly serene Mediterranean into a crowded and growing underwater graveyard. Taking spiritual water of indigenous holy lands that vitalized ancient ancestors and comodifying it, making it into a weapon and turning it’s safeguarders into terrorists…
Villa Grimaldi is natural beauty juxtaposed against human atrocity. It’s choosing faith in an ideological belief over personal safety. It’s arbitrary torture without even the dignity of plotting it against conviction. It’s kids playing in the pool and climbing trees un phased by abhorrations of human nature unfolding beside them. It’s propaganda and the creation of truth and memory and the destruction of denial with the resurrection of railroads from the depths of the sea. What is truth? Where does it come from? What purpose can/should it serve? Why does it matter? It’s passing Guantanamo off as relative. It’s the exceptions that lead to exceptionalism. It’s women turned into flowers and 6-8 people stuffed into a 1-2 meter box. It’s how the fuck does this happen. How can parents possibly accept such inhumane complacency so totally that they are willing to pass it on to their children? And it’s even scarier that it can work. I almost can’t imagine a more poignant image of how terribly human nature can be distorted.
Take such a disgusting scene as hanging someone from a tree and beating them to death with a chain and place it in the midst of beauty makes it almost destitute. Because in the movies thats only something that happens in dungeons. In the movies its only the crazies that torture, or crazies that are tortured. So in the movies its something that cant happen to us, or to our fellow us’s, to normal civilized folks. But, then, villa Grimaldi isn’t a movie. And in real life, without a the watchful eye of a directors metaphoric license, the sun shines just as brightly on the kids laughing and playing in the tree as on the dead body hanging from the branches above. Im philosophically inclined to argue that nature, human nature, carries in it the ability and the ultimate desire to be driven by empathy toward a goal of peace. But places like Villa Grimaldi challenge me to the edge of that conviction.
We’ve seen a lot of things on this trip. But perhaps my personal and academic focus, interest, passion in political philosophy makes the issue of torture stand out in my mind as nearly unreconcilible. I can see the steps leading up to why someone sitting in an office somewhere would sign away papers that raise rent and evict hundreds in NYC from their homes… I can see how politicians would be disconnectedly motivated to run as hard on Sukumbasi (the squatter settlement by the Baghmati river) in Kathmandu. It’s wrong, all of it. And it comes from the manipulation of a system. But what terrifies me is that a system can manipulate you so much that you are willing to torture a child in front of their parent. for any reason. But obviously, very obviously, it can. And what scares me more is that we can’t even get together as a global or even local societies enough to say that forever and always that is wrong. Just simply say it. All of us. As individuals. In this group even. It’s almost to the point where even if it does come down to a choice between the person in the room with the knowledge of the ticking nuke, I’d rather take the chance of going down in the flames of dignity rather than agree to a perpetual state of society in which torture is condoned. Especially In the name of some conception of greater security.
The strength of norms is massive. Because all of that is pretty radical to say now. but i could easily conceive of a society in which it wouldn’t be. a society where torture has been successfully eliminated. people sufficiently educated, or indoctrinated if thats your flavor, to believe that being human means transcending this kind of horrendous abuse of one person to another. And then taking kids from that culture and putting them in a room to have the same discussion we did the other day in class. It would sound quite different. But not irrational. and then putting them in the room with the nuke guy. They might well agree with me.
So then to change a norm, sacrifice is what it comes down to. A revolution of values if you will. And that’s where it gets tangly.
M