Call it morbid curiosity. This morning I got stuck on an article by Zev Chavets, a columnist for the New York Daily News, titled “Captured al-Qaeda commander will sing like a bird.” Referring, of course, to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
I’m not sure how Chavets knows that this rascal will break under torture but he gives a litany of reasons why he thinks so. Mohammed can be kept awake by hitting him with ice water, or blasting loud sounds in his ear, or putting him in a room designed so he can’t sit, stand or lie down, cute tricks like that.
But as even Chavet opines, a prisoner will say anything you want him to say under enough torture, so what’s the point? The point is to get the truth, and sometimes you can’t get that with even the worst kinds of physical torture.
As I read this article it brought back to mind how O’Brien broke Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984, a classic novel of totalitarian barbarism.
Smith and Julie were two people who had not yet fallen under the tyrannical spell of Big Brother. They realized the awful thing that was happening to other people, and they vowed to love each other, and remain sane, in spite of the world that was going mad around them.
When the black-booted Thought Police caught them, Winston and Julie were separated and taken to separate cells in the “Ministry of Love.”. There, O’Brien began the systematic torturing of Winston; not to make him confess anything, but to break down his resistance to the New Order, and make him “love” Big Brother.
When, after weeks of grinding physical torture, during which Winston confessed even to things he would never think of doing, he began to realize that O’Brien wanted something from him he could not acknowledge, even to himself, and so his conversion was impossible. Until O’Brien took the final step.
Room 101.
“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you know the answer already. Everybody knows. The thing in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world. It varies from individual to individual.
“In your case,” O’Brien said, “the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.”
Winston was locked into chair at a table. At the edge of the table was a cage. In the cage was huge gray monster of a rat. Winston went berserk.
He pleaded with O’Brien. “What do you want from me? How can I do it? I don’t know what it is?”
“Sometimes pain is not always enough,” O’Brien said. “but for everyone there is something unendurable. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height, it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is an instinct which cannot be disobeyed. It is the same with rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wish to. You will do what is a required of you.”
O’Brien moved the cage next to Winston’s face, the giant rat let out a hideous squeal, the cage door began to open.
At that moment, Winston understood that in the whole world there was only one person he could transfer the horror to; one body that he could get between him and the rat.
“Do it to Julie!” Winston screamed. “Not me, Julie! I don’t care what you do to her. Strip her to the bone. Tear her face off! Not me! Julie? Not me!” In that instant, it was over. Affection for another human being had been killed. It was what O’Brien had been waiting for. Total submission of mind to Big Brother.
The message is clear.
What is buried deep in each of our hearts and souls is a love for other human beings, a desire for affection, a spiritual quality of individuality and freedom, all of which must be burned out of us if tyranny is to succeed—or clung to with passion, persistence, and determination if we wish to see tyranny fail.
Wouldn’t it be a godsend, I wondered, if we could avoid the time and terror of physically torturing another human being, by simply finding out what his worst fear is, then using it to get inside his head? And, as O’Brien says, he will do what is required of him His unconscious hang-up leaves him no conscience choice.
In a broader sense, Orwell is warning us of what happens when individuality is stifled, love is driven out, every action is suspect, and even our most intimate thoughts become the target of the thought police. Stop right there.
If I now ask you if you can see this deadly scenario gradually unfolding in America today, and you answer “no”, then I challenge you to think long and hard about 1984, and answer the same question again.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”