Rex Bloomstein
Torturers, Part 1
Rex Bloomstein - Torturers, Part 1
- Well, good evening everyone. Sorry I can’t see you, but you can hopefully see me. And thank you to Emily who’s helping me out this evening. T.S. Elliot, in his poem, “The Hollow Men” wrote, “Between the idea And the reality, Between Falls the Shadow.” Well, the shadow I’m dealing with this evening is torture and the torturer. So thank you for joining me for this talk and presentation, which as you can imagine and I should warn, is a highly disturbing subject and which will reveal disturbing facts and footage. Some of you may have seen the first programme in my three part series, “The Roots of Evil,” first broadcast here in the UK, on Channel four in 1997. We did this over two nights last year. The essence of that opening programme was to question the belief that evil is only committed by those we describe as monsters, but rather how ordinary people can become caught up and implicated in evil acts. So tonight and Thursday night, I’m presenting the second programme in the series which concentrated on torture and the torturer. This is how our programme began. Thank you, Emily.
They started their torturing. They took off my clothes, they handcuffed me from back, from my back. Then they put a hook inside the chain between the two handcuffs, they took me to the ceiling. I was swinging and there were two men torturing me. One from this side, one from the other side.
We the torturers, we, in that time at that time, you’re 20 years old, you’re new, you’re terrified. We are more afraid than the victims because it’s one of the, I think it’s the only reason why we torture in the beginning; because we are more afraid.
Torture is something that states deny. Torturer is something that happens in secret. It’s a crime. It’s forgotten, but it’s a crime. It’s a crime committed by law enforcement officials, the people who are supposed to be upholding the law.
Torture is indeed a crime, and outlawed internationally under Article five of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says, “No one should be subject to torture or inhumane or degrading treatment.” So where does this capacity for deliberate cruelty come from? Is the ability to torture embedded in the human psyche and given the circumstances, are we all capable of torturing another human being? Can you train someone to do this? And if so, how do you do that? How do you make someone overcome their normal human feelings enough to isolate a person, restrain him, terrify her, then methodically subject a prisoner to all manner of cruelties, beatings, electric shocks, sexual violations, all in the name of the regime, all in the pursuit of information or terror. These and other questions prompted my wanting to explore the subject of torture, both in the historical and contemporary sense in my “Roots of Evil” series; to look specifically at this particular evil and what it says about cruelty and the human condition. Our opening sequence, which you’ve just seen, sets out in stark terms the reality of torture in the modern world and its illegality, which of course wasn’t always the case historically. In fact, torture has been part of the apparatus of social control in countries for centuries, as we shall discuss in a little more detail later. But despite its prohibition, it was literally only a few years ago that it was reported that allegations of torture had occurred in over 141 countries worldwide. Staggering statistic, that. We followed that opening sequence in the film with an examination of what social science could tell us about human aggression. I previously discussed Stanley Milgram’s 1963 study of obedience to authority, arguably still the most famous psychological experiment ever carried out.
Milgram recorded the startling fact that over 60% of the ordinary people who took part in the experiment administered electric shocks up and beyond lethal level when ordered to do so by a white-coated authority figure. Of course, they weren’t real electric shocks and unbeknownst to them it was a simulation. It was Professor Philip Zimbardo, based at Stanford University a few years later in 1972, who devised probably the second most famous, the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo and his fellow authority experimenter Milgrim were schoolmates, both studied psychology, both were drawn to explore the human capacity for evil; as particularly shown in the willing corporation of thousands of Germans in the systematic destruction of the Jewish population and others in Hitler’s Germany. Zimbardo had been studying prison conditions and in particular the dynamic between guards and prisoners. Were the meanest prison guards evil people, or were they good people who are corrupted by the power inherent in their role? What happens if you take good people and put them in an evil situation?
Does humanity win, or does evil triumph? Zimbardo was fascinated when one of his students at Stanford suggested an experiment in which subjects role played prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Zimbardo then persuaded the university that he create a mock prison in the basement of the psychology department. Students were selected, after careful diagnostic testing, of a large group of volunteer male college students who were then randomly assigned to play either prisoners or guards. Their aim was to assess the power of social forces in this situation. As we shall see, the experiment got underway and was intended to last two weeks. It was abandoned after six days, when the abuse perpetrated by the guards on the prisoners reached intolerable levels. I’d heard of the experiment and contacted Zimbardo, who agreed to appear in my “Roots of Evil” series. He’d also recorded the experiment and subsequently edited a film, which was certainly dramatic and compelling, and appeared to endorse his conclusions that given the right circumstances, ordinary students could become serious abusers if given the power to do so. So here is the sequence featuring Professor Zimbardo and excerpts from the Stanford Prison Experiment.
[Narrator] On a quiet Sunday morning in August, the Palo Alto police swept through the dorms and student housing areas of Stanford University. The police were told to duplicate every detail of an actual arrest. Much to the surprise of neighbours and onlookers, each student was formally charged with a serious crime and treated as a dangerous criminal.
[Rex Bloomstein] This young man is taking part in a unique experiment to explore our potential for evil, the potential in all of us to become torturers.
[Narrator] They were led to a simulated prison block consisting of three small cells, a narrow hallway and a closet designed for solitary confinement.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is a psychological version of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. Instead of a chemical transformation of human nature where a good man becomes an evil monster, what I did was create an experiment in which a social situation transformed good, young men, some of them into sadistic, evil guards.
Put your hands against the wall, get your legs back and spread ‘em.
[Rex Bloomstein] The students who were the subjects of this experiment were well educated and middle class, with no history of crime or drugs. With the flip of a coin, they were divided into prisoners and guards.
[Prisoner Students] Six, five, four, three, two, one.
[Student] Oh, that’s bad.
[Guard Student] Hey, I don’t want anybody laughing.
[Rex Bloomstein] The prisoners were given numbers and minimal prison clothing. The guards given uniforms and told three main rules: maintain law and order, do not let the prisoners escape and no physical violence. Otherwise, they were in charge. Almost immediately the guards began to invent many new rules that were petty and vindictive.
[Guard Student] Well you get out here and do five pushups, 'cause I don’t think that was singing, come on, let’s go.
Can I do more, sir?
When they had their uniform on, when they had their billy club, when they had the symbols of power a God-like mentality took over and they began to issue these rules. And these are rules we found aren’t typically in most institutions. And these rules then enable them to become coercive, controlling, dominating guards. And then each day, whatever level of hostility, degradation, and humiliation that they imposed became the base on which they built new levels of humiliation.
Come on, get in that closet, there.
[Narrator] That’s prisoner 416 on the floor as he was forced into solitary. You’ve got a nice friend, going to see to it that you don’t get blankets tonight. Thank you, 416.
Over there,
Do you want me to say it to him?
Oh yes, you do it just the same way to him.
Thank you, 416.
Okay, that’s enough.
Now you might think that these boys who are guards were simply playing a role that they thought I wanted them to do in a stereotypical way. But in fact, I was astonished to discover that the worst abuses that the guards heaped on the prisoners occurred when I was asleep, or they thought I was asleep, in the middle of the night. Or when a guard was taking a prisoner to the toilet, when there was no one around, where there was no camera, there was no experimenters. And they tripped them, pushed them down the stairs, pushed them into a urinal, which we only discovered afterwards when we read the diaries that the prisoners kept. So that, the experiment was created by me, but it was taken over by the guards.
Now, if 416 does not want to eat his sausages, then you can give me the blankets and sleep on the bare mattress. Or you can keep your blankets and 416 will stay in another day. Now what will it be?
[Prisoner Student 1] I’ll keep my blankets.
What will it be over here?
[Prisoner Student 2] I’ll keep my blankets.
How about 546?
[546] I’ll keep my blankets, Mr Correctional Officer.
Even I was sucked in to the power of that situation, because it began to be “Dr. Zimbardo’s Circus,” because I began to lose my compassion. I mean, I was against violence, but I allowed the dehumanisation to go on.
[Guard Student] do pushups.
We know they didn’t go in evil and we know they were not sadistic to begin, but the situation created in them evil impulses, sadistic impulses; to harm, degrade, dehumanise, control other human beings to make them powerless, essentially to make them crazy.
[Rex Bloomstein] Designed to last two weeks, the Stanford Prison experiment was ended in six days. The simulation of evil became evil itself.
You put a uniform on and are given a role, I mean, a job, saying your job is to keep these people in line, then you’re not certainly not the same person as if you were in street clothes and in a different role. You really become that person once you put on that khaki uniform, you put on the glasses, you take the night stick and you know, you act the part.
I began to feel that I was losing my identity. That the person that I call Clay, the person who who put me in this place, the person who volunteered to go into this prison, 'cause it was a prison to me, it still is a prison to me. I don’t look on it as an experiment or a simulation. It was just a prison that was run by psychologists instead of run by the state. I had really thought that I was incapable of this kind of behaviour. I was surprised, No, I was dismayed to find out that I could really be a, that I could act in a manner so, so absolutely unaccustomed to anything I would even really dream of doing. And while I was doing it, I didn’t feel any regret. I didn’t feel any guilt. It was only afterwards when I began to reflect on what I had done, that this began to, this behaviour began to dawn on me. And I realised that this was, this was a part of me I hadn’t really noticed before.
This is unbelievable! You took our clothes,
[Guard Student] Hands off the door.
[Rex Bloomstein] What had been revealed was that intelligent, caring young men could be so easily transformed. How some possessed a chilling capacity for evil. And this was just an experiment.
Simulation!
[Man] Violation of rules!
[Prisoner Student] Simulation! It’s a simulated experiment, its not a prison! They don’t take your bed and your clothes in prison!
[Man] They do.
Well, since returning to the subject all these years later, I wanted to check how the experiment is regarded today. It’s certainly still famous, indeed, a feature film has been made about it and I understand it’s still used academically. But as I also discovered, has been subjected to intense scrutiny in these intervening years from fellow psychologists, sociologists, journalists, and others who have not only questioned its integrity, but have derided it as social science and even described it as fraudulent and unethical. Furthermore, it appears Zimbardo used a former prisoner as his advisor. And it was he who suggested the bags over the prisoner’s heads, the chains on their ankles, buckets instead of toilets. And is quoted as saying, “Those kids didn’t turn evil, it was theatre. They were just doing what they were instructed to do by the adults, including me. How can Zimbardo express horror at the behaviour of the guards, when they were doing what Zimbardo and others, myself included, encouraged them to do, or frankly established as the ground rules?” Other critics go on to say, Zimbardo created a complicit audience in the media, people like me, policy makers and the general public. It wasn’t the guards who wrote their own scripts on the blank canvas of the Stanford Prison experiment, but Zimbardo, who created the script of terror.
Another of Zimbardo’s critics wrote, “The evidence that ordinary people can obey even the most extreme of instructions, doesn’t mean that people cannot help but obey destructive authorities. Resistance is every bit as natural as tyranny.” And another, “I believe Zimbardo acted in good faith. Zimbardo designed his experiment from the outset as a demonstration of the toxicity of prison, making us aware of the prison reforms needed at a psychological level in order that men who commit crimes are not made into dehumanised objects by their prison experience. Zimbardo wanted to prove that prisons are bad for prisoners.” To me, the appeal of the Stanford Prison Experiment seems to go deeper than its scientific validity, which as you’ve heard, has been profoundly questioned. Perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves, that we desperately want to believe that we as individuals cannot really be held accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. Zimbardo warns us, and I quote from him, “All prisons are social experiments. It’s clear that abuse lurks in our institutions. That is because it lurks in our souls and because we fail to notice or organise against it. Institutions we create transform people. But whether they do this in a damaging or humane way is up to us. We should never underestimate their power to do harm, nor should we ever create flows of power without accountability. Occasionally individuals become heroes and assert their moral autonomy, but more usually they become corrupted. Creative evil is the result.” End of his quote. I’ll leave those thoughts with you, but I want to begin our next sequence with the testimonies of people who suffered at the hand of the torturer. They’re from different countries and their testimonies are a reflection that no region of the world is free of torture. We then placed the practise of torture in a historical context.
It was a house, just in a residential area next to a school. And the next day, in the morning, they started to torture us. And I could hear the children were playing, just I could hear their voices and they could hear my screaming.
And they beat me with the hammer. You know, the hammer, beat me up, and they didn’t kill me though, 'cause I was 14, 15 years old. They released me. But I never forget that. I didn’t commit a crime. I just want to survive as a human being.
You know, when I came out, really, I’m surprised, yeah, I was very surprised I was still alive, actually. You came out of this place which smelled of blood and you hear people screaming and gasping their last breath and this guy telling you he’s God and he’s in charge of the place, so.
[Rex Bloomstein] The screams of the tortured have echoed across the centuries, for torture is older than recorded history. Torture became known as “The Queen of Torments.” It was used either to punish or to extort confession. Church and state have exercised the power of torture to reach into the life of any man, woman, or child deemed witch or heretic, rival or revolutionary.
In most ancient mediaeval and early modern societies, torture was legally and morally acceptable. I’ve read there is archaeological evidence of torture in early neolithic Europe, about 7,000 years ago. That historically, torture was seen as a reliable way to elicit the truth; a suitable punishment and deterrence against future offences. When torture was legally regulated, there were restrictions on what tortures were most allowable. Common methods in Europe included the rack and the strappado, which was a form of torture in which the victim’s hands are tied behind his back, then suspended by a rope attached to the wrists, typically resulting in dislocated shoulders and if lasting more than an hour would likely result in death. Mediaeval ecclesial courts in the inquisition used torture under the same procedural rules as secular courts. During the 17th century, torture remained legal in Europe, but its practise declined. Torture was already of marginal importance to European criminal justice systems by its formal abolition in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Theories for why torture was abolished included the rise of enlightenment ideas about the value of the human person, the lowering of the standard of proof in criminal cases, popular views that no longer saw pain as morally redemptive and the expansion of imprisonment as an alternative to executions or painful punishments. In China, judicial torture, which had been practised for more than two millennia, was banned in 1905 along with flogging and dismemberment as a means of execution. Torture was widely used by colonial powers to subdue resistance and reached a peak during the anti-colonial wars in the 20th century. Independent states in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in turn, often used torture. An estimated 300,000 people were tortured during the Algerian War of Independence and the United Kingdom and Portugal also used torture in attempts to retain their respective empires.
Torture became more prevalent in Europe with the advent of the secret police, World War I and World War II, and the rise of communist and fascist states. Torture was used by both communist and anti-communist governments during the Cold War in Latin America, with an estimated 100 to 150,000 victims of torture by US-backed regimes. The only countries in which torture was rarer during the 20th century were the liberal democracies of the west, but torture was still used there, against ethnic minorities or criminal suspects from marginalised classes, and during overseas wars against foreign populations. More recently, after the September the 11th attacks, the US government itself embarked on an overseas torture programme as part of its war on terror. Enhanced interrogation techniques, or “enhanced interrogation,” as a euphemism for the programme of systematic torture of detainees by the CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, the DIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency, and various components of the US armed forces at remote sites around the world, including Baghdad, Guantanamo Bay. And as referred to earlier, Abu Ghraib, authorised by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods including beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink and medical care for wounds; as well as water boarding, sexual humiliation, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. To return to our film, I wanted to explore how you can literally train a person to become a torturer. Further research led particularly to South America. Just to give some context, it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The military dictatorships in Brazil and other South American countries created what was called “Operation Condor,” to persecute, torture and eliminate opponents.
They received support from North American military experts connected to the CIA, who taught new torture techniques to obtain information. A highly controversial training centre was created, called “The School of the Americas,” installed in the United States. It was identified by historians and witnesses as a centre for the dissemination of torture techniques. Among those attending were Brazilian police officers who were trained in torture to obtain information from arrested suspects. They began to apply them against common prisoners, suspects, or detainees, especially when they were black and poor; or in rural areas, indigenous people. I found evidence of this in footage taken in a Brazilian police station and another video that revealed brutality and humiliation as key components in conditioning young men to become torturers in the name of the state. I also asked Professor Ron Crelinsten, criminologist and historian of torture, to remind us of the use of torture in the 20th century, which had largely seen its official abolition and how he and another expert on torture, professor Martha Huggins, could further illustrate how torturers can be trained. So here is the next sequence of our film with its focus, particularly, on Brazil.
In the 20th century, torture became secret. It was actually almost banned universally in the late 19th century and early 20th. But it came back, and it came back after the nation state developed and as the notion of national security developed and with the rise of technology. And it went indoors into secret organisations and it also became professionalised, there were professional people who did it.
[Rex Bloomstein] How does the process of creating torturers begin? These Brazilian military police cadets, here secretly filmed in training, undergo hard physical exercise and intense discipline. Likely torturers are specially selected. They endure increasing levels of brutality. The aim is to enforce obedience by breaking the will. This violence breeds violence.
People who commit violence in many situations, for instance, mass murderers, sexual assault, people in jail for violent crimes all tend to have violence in their past. They have been victimised themselves. And that tells us something about violence as a kind of way of communicating, perhaps that’s the only thing they know. It’s the same with the torturer. And again, the mind behind the torturer is the person who recruits them, the person who develops the system. And they know brutalise this person, humiliate them, degrade them, make them go through hell and then when we set them loose against someone, they’ll be that much more ferocious.
[Rex Bloomstein] The cadets are now forced to crawl through this sewage mixed with blood and to beg for food laced with urine. An American sociologist who has studied the practise of torture among police and military units in Brazil is Martha Huggins.
One guy had an elaborate explanation for torture. He said, “Look, torture is normal in Brazil.” He said, “We’re a Catholic country.” He said, The Catholic church, the inquisition tortured people. He said, we have a history of torture. It’s just a part of the fabric of our society. So somebody like that isn’t going to define torture as evil.
But a torturer is human. And they have a history, they have a family, they have a background, they live, they eat and they have sex. And they do all these things that we do. And what happened to them we usually find is that the the training is designed to make them go through experiences and then they are given an ideology that tells 'em that there are some scum out there, some inhuman people and terrible menaces out there, that only they with their training can protect the society from. And then they’re let loose.
Three of the men who were torturers and who were in official positions that I interviewed in Brazil pointed out that there were several kinds of torturers, they said. One kind of torturer is sadistic. He enjoys torturing, he enjoys killing. And as the official said, if I don’t keep an eye on those people, they’re going to go too far and they’re going to make mistakes. Now this same official and others like him said, but there are other kinds of torturers who are normal. Quote, “They’re just as normal as you and me. But in the process of torturing,” he said, “This kind of work bestializes the policeman, it bestializes him and causes him to use violence that he wouldn’t use in 10 years of normal police violence.” Again, in Brazil, normal police violence is a very high level anyway, so he’s talking about an excessive level of violence.
But in any case, when you put police or an internal security system at war against something, as we all know, in a condition of war, normal rules are suspended.
Who better exemplifies our concept of evil than the torturer? We’re repelled by the thought of torture, of doing horrible things to people as we have seen that torturers do. And so of course we like to use the word evil for that type of person. But what I find with using that term is it immediately cuts us off from the torture. It makes an us-them mentality come in, we are okay, the torturer is bad, and we lose sight of the fact that a torturer is a human being. And that’s what’s so horrifying. Perhaps that’s why we use the word evil.
I think it’s interesting to point out the former President Bolsonaro of Brazil and members of his cabinet repeatedly praised the military dictatorship of 1964 to 85, which so marked by widespread torture and killings, the search for justice in Brazil goes on. Let us return for our final sequence this evening to a neighbouring country, Argentina. It was after a military junta led by General Jorge Videla, who seized power in Argentina on the 24th of March, 1976. Up to 30,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared during the “Dirty War,” as the campaign came to be known. Children from detained Anti-government activists, were also seized and given up for adoption. Many of them offered to families of military officials, with the aim of giving them a non-communist upbringing and their identity concealed. “The Dirty War,” the name used by the military dictatorship for the period of state terrorism in Argentina was part of “Operation Condor,” during which, military and security forces and right wing death squads, in the form of the Argentine anti-communist alliance hunted down political dissidents and anyone associated with socialism or leftist views. The primary target, like in many other South American countries participating in Operation Condor were communist guerrillas and sympathisers. But the net widened to include students, militants, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists, any citizens suspected of being left-wing activists, including By the 1980s, economic collapse, public discontent and the disastrous handling of the Falklands War, resulted in the end of the junta and the restoration of democracy in Argentina, effectively ending the Dirty War. Senior members of the junta were sent to prison for crimes against humanity and genocide. Here then is our last sequence concentrating on the military dictatorship in Argentina as an example of how torture was used as part of its campaign of repression.
A torturer, as you know, can be trained on behalf of a claim of his people. There is ideology behind torturing in most cases and torturers are recruited to be part of an ideological crusade against something that is stamped as evil or is wrong or is bad. So that the function as a torturer is given a higher purpose and it’s given a certain almost dignity or at least standing within a despotic regime.
[Rex Bloomstein] This was true of Argentina under the generals in the 1970s and eighties. The country became entirely corrupted by the evil of torture used in a crusade against communism and other foreign ideologies. Today in Buenos Aires, the torturers still walk free.
I recently interviewed a death camp survivor who was walking down the street downtown and he ran into one of his former torturers. This was about a year ago. It was an uncomfortable meeting and it ended on the following note where the torturer who is still a navy captain in active service said, “When we have foreign military officers who come visit Argentina, I’m often called upon and invited to talk to them about the methods we used in the war against .” And the Navy captain said, “But I always turn these invitations down 'cause what is there to say? We kidnapped people, we tortured them to obtain information, and then we use that information to kidnap their friends and torture them to kidnap and set up this little chain of kidnappings.”
[Rex Bloomstein] The struggle between the military government and the armed opposition became known as the “Dirty War.” There were terrible atrocities. Hundreds of secret detention centres were set up all over the country in which people, most of them innocent, were tortured and murdered.
[Rex Bloomstein] During the Dirty War, interrogators were working in this building in the heart of Buenos Aires. It is known as ESMA, the chief training centre for the Navy. It was then the main concentration camp in Argentina, a place of unimaginable evil. Some 5,000 people died here. People were tortured in the basement and housed in the attic. The officers lived on the floors between. Every week, dozens of prisoners were driven to a remote part of the city’s commercial airport, flown out and dumped into the sea.
Before throwing the bodies into the water, would cut their stomachs open. These people were still alive so that when they fell into the water, the sharks would come and eat their bodies and that would be another kind of security that the bodies would not wash up on shore.
A prisoner who survived the horrors of the ESMA concentration camp was a professional photographer, who was forced to take pictures of the torturers for their undercover work. Secretly he compiled a unique record of the bureaucracy of evil.
Many of these former torturers and repressors and murderers are still on active duty; many of them in the Police Force, in the Navy, in the Army, in the Air Force. And we have reached the incredible situation where some of these people are called upon as TV commentators, as is the case of Hector Vergez, who’s an army officer who’s one of actually, he’s actually masterminded some of the way the Dirty War was implemented, he’s just not a torturer. He actually drew up the plans on which the Dirty War was based, the idea that it had to be done with disappearances, the kind of torture that would be used. So he is a very evil person.
This is the story of a nation that has turned a blind eye on its past, on the very terrible things that happened during its past. By doing so, the only way to do that, of course, is by keeping your eyes closed in the present. Many people will often say, “I didn’t know what was going on back then.” “I couldn’t do anything about it 'cause I didn’t know.” And the obvious reply to that is, “Well, now you know, and what are you doing about it?” What Argentina has done about it is that Congress has passed two amnesty laws and the torturers are walking free. Now a nation where the torturers walk free is a nation where the whole country becomes a concentration camp.
[Rex Bloomstein] To this day, the whereabouts of thousands of disappeared people are unknown. Why did the dictatorship torture and destroy so many who were innocent? Why did it institutionalise evil on such a scale?
When one of the torturers asked me a question, I looked at him and said, “I can’t understand you.” So he repeated the question. And what did I say then? That, no, I understand. I can understand your words, what you are saying. The the thing that I can’t understand is why you are doing this.
Argentina’s Supreme Court and federal judges in the early two thousands stopped the pardons and the amnesty laws that shielded the officials implicated in the dictatorship’s crimes in the Dirty War. I’ve read recently, and for this lecture as of September, 2022, the Attorney General’s Office reported over 3,600 people were charged, over a thousand convicted, 165 acquitted of crimes against humanity; 130 people taken illegally from their parents as children during the dictatorship have been identified and many reunited with their families according to the human rights group, “Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo.” As in other Latin American countries, the fight for justice in Argentina remains. Well, thank you for watching that, it’s some pretty tough material. And I would like to, perhaps you will join me on Thursday when I shall continue with the second part of torturers. Thank you very much. And if there any questions or comments, I’m happy to answer them. Thank you, Emily.
[Emily] Thank you, Rex. Would you like me to read the questions to you?
Please do, please yeah.
Q&A and Comments:
[Emily] Well first we have a comment from Rita. “I recall being in a psychology class many years ago where the Zimbardo experiment was being discussed. One student suggested that this explained behaviour during the Holocaust. The professor didn’t object to this. I, a first year student, felt I had to object to what I felt was a simplistic explanation that ignored history. Thank you for showing the interview with Zimbardo and the video. I had not seen some of this before.”
Good. Well, the experiment is of course a very, it’s a remarkable one. And as I said in my talk, it’s fascinating the antipathy toward it. And, you know, he has been derided for essentially a theatrical exercise. I think there’s much more to it than that. As I said, I can’t dismiss Zimbardo in the experiment, though of course, I was unaware when I used that sequence. For me, it was a paradigm, a very compelling example. And having filmed in prisons as I had, of what can happen when someone is, puts on a uniform, has power over another human being. And I felt Zimbardo reflected a truth about that. But the actual experiment, the way he conducted it, what he did to tell the students, I think he was very concerned about getting people to understand that the prison itself could be such a terrifying place, a reflection of human cruelty. But nevertheless, for me, he was a very compelling and fascinating and interesting, to see what he did, what he achieved. But of course, it’s enormously controversial and people really do feel strongly that it’s something that we can’t take seriously now. Very interesting. Next question, if there is one?
Q - [Emily] Sure. “Did making these programmes, 'The Roots of Evil,’ have any negative effect on you personally, having to repeatedly see and think about the horrors people are subjected to? I think I would become so deeply cynical and disturbed that my personality would be permanently adversely affected,” says Ron.
A - Oh dear, Ron. Well, I’ve made my work falls into three main areas over 50 years. The Holocaust, human rights and crime and punishment. And interspersed with lighter subjects. For me, it’s a privilege to be able to explore this darker side of humanity, to ask questions about why, and the, perhaps forlorn hope that some of my work can make people think a bit more deeply about why such things happen. And there are many experts out there with remarkable work on human psychology, on human behaviour and so on. And I suppose my role that has kept me going through looking at this material is that I can bring some enlightenment, bring some of that work, so those thoughts, those ideas, and also, make myself ask fundamental questions about why. I mean, when I’ve interviewed many prisoners in helped open up the English prison system here in this country in the UK. And my mantra is to many prisoners that I’ve interviewed, what can we learn from your experiences? And I suppose my approach is a non-judgmental one. Society has already judged, for instance, prisoners. So how am I kept going? I think with humour and with a sense of privilege that I can bring some enlightenment and perhaps even change things. And I think on a few occasions, perhaps I change prison conditions for the better. But I hear you. And for all of us who are Jewish, the Holocaust hangs over us. It’s a shadow like so many other things and we have to come to terms of it, but we must be honest about what we are capable of. And I suppose that’s kept me going, to explore these themes and to be able to show them to people and perhaps change things for the better. Thanks for the question.
Q - [Emily] What do you think about the “ticking bomb” justification of torture?
A - Yes, well, it’s, I should be discussing that. It’s a very interesting question. I should be discussing that in part two on Thursday because it’s used as a justification by regimes that there’s a tremendous need to get information and there’s a greater need because people will be injured or damaged or murdered or killed if we don’t get this information. But it doesn’t wash as an argument. You imagine being tortured, can you imagine the pain involved? You will say anything. So the value of what is being said, I think is limited, but it is an excuse and I’m afraid it’s an excuse that no longer washes and it’s illegal, it’s banned by international law. But I will examine this in more detail in part two.
[Emily] We will see you on Thursday for part two.
Thank you very much and thank you all for watching.