The ghost of Jeffrey Benzien lives

One of the most chilling moments during the South African Truth and Reconciliation process was when Jeffrey Benzien, an apartheid era torturer, was asked by one of his victims to re-enact, without doing harm, the torture he had administered. The image of Benzien clutching a bag over the volunteer’s face while sitting on his back will stick in my mind forever.

Benzien, who eventually received amnesty, was the infamous master of the ‘wet bag’ torture technique. This form of torture involves placing a wet bag over a victim’s head, which results in suffocation and the sensation of drowning. Benzien claimed he could break most prisoners in 30 minutes.

Disturbingly, variations of this technique, euphemistically called ‘waterboarding’, have been used in Iraq and in Guantanamo Bay by the US military. It was, at least in part, the condemnation of the practice of waterboarding that led me to take part in my first protest on US soil.

In August, while at the American Psychological Association (APA) conference, in Boston, I joined fellow psychologists to protest against the APA’s current refusal to ban its members from participating in or observing interrogations in any capacity whatsoever.

So how does this relate to waterboarding?

To cut a long story short, two years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross raised the alarm about the involvement of health professionals in US interrogations. The APA set up a committee to investigate this. The committee endorsed the use of psychologists “in consultative roles” in interrogation processes “for national security-related purposes”. It transpired that six of the nine members of the committee were military psychologists.

This caused an outcry. In late 2007, the APA issued a statement condemning the role of psychologists in torture and said it was unethical to participate in 19 coercive procedures, including waterboarding. However, the APA did not forbid psychologists from being involved in interrogations; rather it felt their presence could ensure ethical interrogations took place, safeguarding the welfare of detainees.

But is it possible to be an ethical observer in an interrogation? Why are ‘safety officers’ needed, in the first place? Clearly, there is a systematic problem in the US military if they are worried about potential torture.

Apathy clearly runs rife. At the APA protest, there were only 200 people out of the possible 14 000 delegates attending the conference. Most psychologists do not seem bothered that their profession is being associated with torture, or that individuals may be harmed.

This links to a second point: why and how certain sectors been vested with so much power? And why, when the mantra of national security or a threat against the country is touted, whether in the US or any country, for that matter, it seems that most of us just sit back and let governments do the thinking for us? Or we end up debating technicalities rather than taking action.

For example, in the APA case, is the bigger issue not the condemnation of centres such as Guantanamo Bay, not to mention the disciplining of psychologists who have participated in torture so far?

The sad truth is that torture and abuse are happening around us all the time, and should never be tolerated.

Every day, across Europe and Africa, immigrants are abused and robbed of rights, often detained in asylum centres, prisons or worse. Torture of criminal suspects still happens routinely in South Africa. So-called terrorists continue to be kept in hidden ‘black sites’ across the world by the US with the tacit agreement of other governments.

We all seem to have explanations for such abuses. After all, asylum seekers need to be properly vetted. Criminals and terrorists will ultimately reap what they sow. Or a psychologist being present during an interrogation is ethical. But these are fantasies, and each time we think such thoughts, another part of our humanity dies and with that another Jeffrey Benzien is born.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 5 September 2008 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

The Passing of Dan Bar-On

It is with great sadness that I heard today about the passing of Dan Bar-On. Dan was an inspiration. Dan embodied the importance of dialogue and contact between people in times of conflict without romanticising what this entails. He will be missed. He touched many people’s lives with his compassion and sharp intellect.

Dan Bar-On was born in 1938 in Haifa to parents of German descent. He was a member of Kibbutz Revivim for 25 years where he served as a farmer, educator and Secretary of the Kibbutz. After completing his M.A. in psychology in 1975, he worked in the Kibbutz Clinic, specializing in therapy and research with families of Holocaust survivors. In 1981 he received his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1985 he launched a pioneering field research in Germany, studying the psychological and moral after-effects of the Holocaust on the children of the perpetrators. His book Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich was published in 1989 by Harvard University Press and has since been translated and published in French, German, Japanese and Hebrew. Since then, Bar-On has brought together descendants of survivors and perpetrators for five intensive encounters (the TRT group, shown by the BBC on TimeWatch, October, 1993), as well as students from the third generation of both sides. His book Fear and Hope: Three Generations of Holocaust Survivors' Families was published in Hebrew, English, German and Chinese .His last book The Indescribable and the Undiscussable was published in 1999 by Central European University Press. In 1998 and in 2002-3, Bar-On was the Ida E. King Chair for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton College of New Jersey. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben-Gurion University, where he served as Chair of the Department in 1993-1995 and again in 2003-5. He is the co-director of PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East) near Beit Jala, PNA, together with Professor Sami Adwan of Bethlehem University. He is married, and has four children and four grandchildren.

Let’s face it, holidays are strange

Photo by Vicko Mozara on Unsplash

Currently, I am on a northern hemisphere summer break, although I should say an alleged summer break. There are two reasons for this. 

Firstly, in Ireland and England, there is no summer. Summer is something you know everyone else is having while you sit in the rain, trying to remember what sunshine feels like. The easiest way to deal with this lack of summer is to travel abroad, but this is costly in these credit crunch days. So I find myself sitting at a British family resort trying to learn the difference between light showers, squally showers, rain and heavy rain. Secondly, I must admit, I also struggle with the whole concept of a holiday.

It is not that I am one of those grumpy people who do not like holidays. I love them – it is the idea I find weird.

People not only work to pay bills, but also so that they can have a break from work. Apparently, to enjoy your break, you cannot simply have a break – we are all so conditioned that we must do something with it. This something is called a holiday. Holidays cost money. So, in other words, you work to get money to pay others for the pleasure of not working. This strikes me as logical as banging your head against a wall because it feels good when you stop.

Of course, one option is to choose not to work at all and then go on holiday, which then means you are paying others to add something to your otherwise empty schedule. But being unemployed is not a comfortable state of affairs and makes buying time at a holiday resort rather difficult. The result of this is that it makes those of us who are employed happy enough to continue to pay not to work.

There are further problems. If you choose to stay at home on your break, now dubbed the ‘staycation’, it feels as if you are not on holiday. And if you choose not to stay at home, and if you are not lucky enough to have a second home at the beach or in the mountains, your choices are limited. Either you have to book a holiday home in some remote spot, or you have to sell your soul to a hotel group.

In exchange for money, hotels are happy to provide you with all the structure you need in your day to prevent you from feeling too far from work. They also promise endless entertainment from belly-dancing classes to parasailing and, unlike an isolated holiday cottage, guarantee your children can get to interact with others in play parks and swimming pools. This, in turn, helps your child learn valuable social skills.

For example, this holiday, my two-and-a-half-year-old son learned that one should never trust anyone, especially someone who wants the same toy as you. This valuable lesson was brought to him by a covetous toddler who attached himself to my son’s cheek with his teeth in an unprovoked playground attack. This left us wishing we had opted for the isolated holiday cottage.

For me, this sums up the core dilemma of holidays. Either you have to share purpose-built spaces and activities with others who might turn out to be little Mike Tysons, more interested in biting off ears than cooperative play, or you have to seclude yourself from the world, losing the advantage of having someone else laying all the entertainment you need at your doorstep.

So there is no perfect holiday, only moments of bliss and disaster. Every holiday has its price, whether it is inclement weather, a nasty souvenir bite, a little bit too much isolation, or too many structured activities that leave you exhausted and in need of another vacation. I long to find the balance, but I just don’t have enough free time to find it.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 22 August 2008 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Zimbabwe - not a crisis, but a little mix-up

Lately, words have been distressing me and increasingly alienating me from the world. This is because our world is now filled with words whose meaning is distorted unrecognisably. We live in the age of euphemisms.

Cars are no longer second-hand but preowned. The world economy is not in free fall but is correcting itself, with staff being rationalised, not being fired. No one sells products anymore but rather solutions. The American justice system does not poison people to death but administers a lethal injection. Civilians are not murdered by armies but are subjected to collateral damage. And who can forget Janet Jackson revealing parts of her upper body to the audience a few years ago and the act being referred to as a wardrobe malfunction?

A euphemism, according to the Webster Online Dictionary, is the substitution of an agreeable or less offensive expression in place of one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant to the listener.

But why have we become so hooked on the euphemism? Euphemisms serve multiple functions. They can shelter us from the truth, especially when it might be difficult to deal with or make us feel psychologically uncomfortable.

I recall my nephew asking, when he was about four years old, what we were eating for dinner. His mom replied, saying we were going to have lamb. He asked, "like lambs in the field?" She truthfully said yes, but he simply laughed in reply, saying, "No way." In other words, he did not believe that it was possible that lovely fluffy lambs had been recycled as dinner with mint sauce on the side. He instinctually protected himself from an uncomfortable reality.

What is remarkable about our ability to distance ourselves from reality is that this continues unabated into adulthood. Cow flesh gets converted into beef, pig meat into bacon and the poor become disadvantaged, not destitute or starving to death. This helps us cope.

Euphemisms, however, have a more cynical use that extends beyond psychologically protecting oneself from horrid realities. Politics is infused with euphemism.

George Orwell, in his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, talks about 'B vocabulary', that is, language "deliberately constructed for political purposes – words . . . which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them".

Grace Mugabe with Robert Mugabe 2013

Credit: Dandjk Roberts / CC BY-SA

Robert Mugabe has been using B vocabulary of a sort for years now. In the mid-1980s, he deployed the Fifth Brigade, euphemistically known as Gukurahundi, meaning 'the wind that sweeps away the chaff before the rain'. The Fifth Brigade killed thousands of Zimbabwe's minority Ndebele speakers.

Today, in Zimbabwe, the doublespeak (incidentally, a term attributed to Orwell but which, in fact, he did not use) continues. President Thabo Mbeki is still apparently engaging in 'quiet diplomacy' and Mugabe continues to use his 'war veterans' (henchmen) to terrorise the population into submission.

On the wider international stage, condemnation of the Mugabe regime has become stronger recently, but sanitising language prevails.

Following the election of Mugabe as President for a sixth term, in June, after the opposition pulled out of the running because of intimidation, a spokesperson for United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon had this to say: "The secretary-general has said repeatedly that conditions were not in place for a free and fair election, and observers have confirmed this from the deeply flawed process. The outcome did not reflect the true and genuine will of the Zimbabwean people, or produce a legitimate result".

This was a welcome development, but, I think, it warrants a more honest translation. What Ban Ki-moon meant to say is: "The secretary-general is sick and tired of saying that Mugabe's thuggery has turned the elections into a sham. Observers have seen people being forced to vote for Mugabe against their will and brutal violence has been used repeatedly. The election process is damaged irreparably. The people want Mugabe out and the election outcome is corrupt and criminal in the extreme."

Need I say more?

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 18 July 2008 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Raytheon 9 Acquitted

I have been following this story closely as it concerns arm manufacturing in Derry. A very active group of protestors have been running a campaign against Raytheon for some time now. This resulted in prosecutions after the group occupied the Raytheon offices. But on 11 June 2008, 6 people, who had occupied the offices of Raytheon in Derry and destroyed computers, were acquitted of criminal damage by a Belfast jury, writes Danny Morrison.  He continues: "Raytheon is a huge US arms manufacturer, with sales of $20 billion in 2006 and over 70,000 employees worldwide.  It makes Patriot, Tomahawk, Cruise and Sidewinder missiles, and much more besides". You can read the full story here.

Viva the orange revolution

According to the publication Grocer, the number of oranges being sold in the UK is falling. Orange sales are dropping by about 2% a year, whereas the sale of easy-to-peel fruit, such as tangerines and satsumas, or naartjies, to South Africans is rising. Writing in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, Aislinn Simpson reported the sales of satsumas and tangerines rose 35% and 60% respectively.

Oranges are going out of fashion
because they take too long to eat?

Some have postulated that sales have decreased because it is difficult to carry a large bag of oranges about when shopping, compared with a neat little sack of naartjies. Others have commented that oranges are going out of fashion because they take too long to eat and people simply don’t have the time.

Stefanie Marsh, writing in the UK Times, feels it all boils down to the fact that Britons are too lazy or thick to eat oranges. She quotes a survey noting that 7% of children between the ages of 9 and 13 have no idea how to eat an orange. Consequently, Marsh laments the inability of so-called busy parents to pass on the “craft of orange peeling to the next generation”. To help, she provides a useful step-by-step guide on how to peel an orange, worth googling, if you feel your skills are on the wane.

However, I am not surprised to read these stories. I have long thought there is a correlation between oranges and the state of human civilisation and its discontents.

For example, it was the humble orange that facilitated the spread of colonisation with its miraculous ability to prevent diseases like scurvy. It was the orange that allowed explorers to circumnavigate the world, leaving oppression in their wake. However, it was, as is widely known, also the orange that finally overthrew apartheid when foreigners decided to stop eating Outspan oranges as part of the sanctions campaign.

I have also always found it telling that there is no word in the English language that rhymes with orange, suggesting its unique place in human evolution.

Thus, it is only fitting that the orange and its declining sales are the first marker, at least in the West, of the next major social upheaval: the lethargy revolution.

Seemingly, we have enough time to Facebook with friends, order pizza online, text until our thumbs go numb or spend hours playing computer games but not enough time to get to grips with the complexity of peeling an orange. What have we come to?

The orange is being squashed out of the market by the fast-food and consumer culture, which is, in turn, changing our understanding of what food should be. Do you know that, despite all that is said on cereal boxes about their enhanced fibre content, it would take seven cups of cornflakes to give you the same amount of fibre as one orange? Many of the vitamins cereals contain, such as vitamin C, have been sprayed on and are not naturally present.

Sadly, most citrus-related traditions seem to be on the decline. As a boy, I revelled in the ancient long-dead South African tradition of throwing oranges and naartjies at the opposition and players during rugby matches. My transition to manhood was also marked by the imparting of the secret of the abundance of citrus fruit at rugby matches. Oranges injected with alcohol made the perfect undetectable vessel for transporting vodka and had the added benefit of being delicious to eat, making you drunk and providing a good but harmless projectile once the alcohol had been sucked out.

So it is with great sadness that I read of the decline of the orange. I believe the time has come to start a campaign to save the orange. Let us break this cycle of lethargy and start peeling. Oh, unless the oranges are from Burma, China, Israel, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Florida or Iran.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 20 June 2008 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.