Anatomy of the Satanic: Reflections on the release of HRW's torture report

Last week, Human Rights Watch released its report "Getting Away With Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees."

Here is the report: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2011/07/12/getting-away-torture-0


Many, if not most of the culprits mentioned in HRW's Getting Away With Torture The Bush Administration and the Mistreatment of Detainees, are devout Christians. Bush's faith is well documented. John Ashcroft, Bush's attorney general, was a devout 7th Day Adventist. The attorney general who proceeded him was a devout Catholic. Virtually everyone in his circle advertised their beliefs.

Aside from believing in the God of the Poor, together they believed that through warfare, they could politically reconstitute the Middle East along democratic lines while reaping the economic fruits.

Satanism is variously defined and represented in history, practice, myth and literature. Generally, as least in relationship to its most well-known set of narratives, symbols, and legends, it constitutes an inversion of Christian beliefs, a rebellious corruption of New Testament injunctions toward love, personal sacrifice, non-violence which are also contained within other world religions, Islam, Taoism, Communism, Richard Dawkins, etc.

While satanists represented historically include those having 'made contracts with the devil,' having, like Goethe's Dr. Faustus, 'sold their souls,' on an abstract, narratival level, the satanic is a corruption, a subtle inversion which goes unrecognized until it is suddenly exposed a lie, a fatal flaw: Bernie Madoff's blind spot.

Accordingly Lucifer himself (The Prince of Darkness, i.e., prince of nothingness, negation, absence), is represented in myth as a contradiction. He is at once a creature of light and darkness. A creature of Godly aims: yet his aims are paradoxical, self-negating, corrupted.

But observe, this inversion is produced subtly: created within a moment of shift in which we realize a creature of light, the angelic 'morning star' is really foundering in darkness. Hence perhaps all the iconography: the inverted pentagrams, crosses, etc.

And then there is mega-church pastor Benny Hinn.




Similar dualities, double entendres and inversions lie at the heart of the Bush torture scandal. Firstly, on the most obvious level, the goals of torture itself as set forth by Bush administration, constitute an inversion of their own literal aim. It is exhaustively documented how torture is not a reliable method of interrogation, nor does it do much to ensure for international peace and safety.

Bush's justifications of torture constitute an inversion of reason, relying on establishing something as one thing up until a point at which its own purported identity is suddenly inverted, suddenly shifting into a state of being the thing which diametrically apposes the thing that came before.

Therefore, despite remonstrance by such figures as Secretary of State Colin Powell (who was a moderate Christian rather than a fundamentalist), Bush relied on a legal team to accomplish this Luciferian switch, beginning with assessing practices of interrogation and ending in justifying the full scale rendition.

Iconic around this period is the image of the Abu Ghraib prisoner standing on a box, hands attached to electric nodes, head hooded. It's hard not to associate this with another symbol of suffering. It is a deeply ironic image granted that many of his captors were likely Christian fundamentalists. The exact, almost pre-packaged quality of this irony almost feels supernatural, like a religious epiphany.