Torture, Inquisition, Medievalism, Reality, TV

Abstract

The interest of the American and British public in the practice of torture, in the wake of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the still somewhat secret prison camps in Europe and Asia, is part of a long-standing fascination with the Middle Ages, or rather with a popular image of the period, epitomized in Ving Rhames’s indelible line in Pulp Fiction, “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass.”¹ The fascination has grown in this decade under the influence of world events, or rather of widespread American impressions of world events. After the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, American commentators often wrote of the Taliban regime, or of the country as a whole, as “medieval,”² and network TV correspondents often spoke of the feeling that they had stepped back in time.³ The 2003 invasion of Iraq brought similar comments about the “medieval mindset” of the global enemy and the “medieval barbarity” of Saddam Hussein’s rule.⁴ Reports of “medieval torture devices” were common in print and broadcast media and on the Internet,⁵ and Hussein’s use of torture on his subjects at Abu Ghraib prison was one reason given for the invasion, along with the weapons of mass destruction, aluminum centrifuge tubes, and yellowcake uranium from Niger. After the revelation in 2004 of the ongoing U.S. practice of torture at the same prison, liberals decried Bush’s medieval methods, and conservatives defended them as the necessary response to a barbarous enemy. (They forced us to get medieval on their asses.) Both sides agreed that the methods were medieval, and both sides shared an understanding of the term.

The main thing is to make the prisoner feel that he does not belong to the same species.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, Introduction to The Question by Henri Alleg

We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this.

—Lt. Gen. William Boykin

Torture is only cruel and unusual if we don’t do it all that often.

—Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

This essay examines the history and practice of torture from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to contemporary times, in order to trace some of the lines separating “judicial torture” from “punitive torment” (or “village games” sadism), and to also show how the U.S. government’s current use of torture is indeed “medieval,” but in a more complex and troublesome way than popular understanding of the term comprehends