Book Reviews

Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture

Knopf, 304 pp., $26

Possibly the most assiduously depressing book of the spring, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People is journalist John Conroy's analysis of how and why human beings inflict, undergo, and countenance torture -- defined in pertinent part by the United Nations in 1975 as "any act by which severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally initiated by or at the instigation of a public official*"

Conroy, best known for his vigilant coverage of the Chicago Police Department for the alternative weekly The Chicago Reader, uses as his evidentiary quarry three case studies in which the facts are fairly well-established through various legal proceedings. Police officers brutalize a suspected cop-killer with painful electric shocks from a mysterious "black box." Israeli soldiers round up young Palestinian males and subject them to a premeditated round of literal bone breaking. And British military men force an apparently random group of Northern Irish Catholics to undergo a hair-raisingly clinical demonstration of the "five techniques" of bureaucratic violence.

The lessons of Unspeakable Acts are unsurprising but worth repeating. There is no particular psychopathology present in the minds of those who engage in torture. Unlike the case of freelance sadists (serial rapists, murderers), we can't reliably look for preadolescent warning signs: pyromania, cruelty to animals, bedwetting, etc. Rather, torture in the sanctioned sense tends to be inflicted by lackluster individuals with no obvious grotesqueries of character. Their only real distinction seems to be in the training such people receive: extreme physical hardship, combined with a simultaneous course of indoctrination in an "us vs. them" ethic that dehumanizes whatever enemy happens to be on the horizon.

Conroy is an able expositor who writes with precision and a wonderfully sober clarity. But his choice of fact patterns to discuss -- including not only the three situations above but also the actions of legbreakers of various right-wing factions in Greece, Uruguay, and the former Rhodesia -- indicate an ideological predilection that ought at least to be discussed. Reactionaries aren't the sole perpetrators of torture. Conroy could have discussed at equal length the suffering inflicted on American POWs in Vietnam or the interrogation methods used by officials of the People's Republic of China against that nation's own citizens.

Unspeakable Acts offers little consolation. What we're left with is confirmation of some simple facts: People will hurt each other, repeatedly and with no particular remorse, when conditioned and/or allowed to do so. Most of the rest of us will look on in consternation and a certain amount of self-serving disbelief. And turn the page.