History Of Torture Research Articles

Survivors of torture and organized violence: Demography and diagnosis

AbstractSixty patients, with a history of torture or other repressive state violence, newly referred to two psychiatrists, were assessed using a standard instrument. Thirty one met the diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (FTSD) and 21 met the criteria for MOD. Relationships between these diagnoses and history of trauma, loss of health, and social losses were investigated. Sexual torture is associated with an avoidance reaction.

Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (review)

Book Reviews 157 This volume addresses a belated truth-seeking by the German post-war generation before their elders pass from the scene. The effort parallels the attempt by the children of Holocaust victims to integrate the tortured history of their parents. With minor exceptions, the German therapists do not explore those pre-existing conditions which spawned an extermination ethos in a civilized people. The enthusiasm with which the whole spectrum ofGermans embraced the notions of racial purity and social Darwinism did not arise in a vacuum. Historical, socioeconomic, religiOUS, and cultural forces which promote terror have not been extinguished by Auschwitz. Revisionism and racial cleansing remain everpresent answers to sociopolitical and economic crises. Werner Israel Halpern, M.D. Rochester, New York Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, by Deborah Lipstadt. New York: Free Press, 1993. 271 pp. $22.95. The recent stir of negative opinion and the theft of ca.mpus newspapers at Brandeis University because of the placement of a Holocaust denial advertisement by Bradley Smith suggests the heights that Holocaust deniers have achieved. Deborah Lipstadt has provided in this work an understanding of how Holocaust denial has prospered in recent years, particularly through misguided arguments of freedom of speech. This is an important work, as the debate about how to deal with Holocaust denial is one that does not engage merely students, but faculty members as well. While Holocaust deniers may be dismissed as group of antisemites, it is not enough, in the eyes of the author and a growing segment of American academia, to simply permit such people to run a free course, particularly in a university environment. Holocaust denial is not a question of opinion, but an issue which focuses on denial of facts in the interest of delegitimizing the event and its consequences, particularly the existence of Israel. Denial prospers because of the new generation of history illiterates, even in good universities, and the belief that debate of the facts is somehow freedom of expression. Lipstadt's history of Holocaust denial begins with the prewar antecedents and gives ample coverage to the well-known evolution of postwar literature of Bardeche, Rassinier, Barnes, Hoggan, App, Harwood, Butz, and Faurisson. Lipstadt not only summarizes their works but also develops substantial evidence of the methodology of Holocaust denial. A 158 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No.1 good deal of this "methodology" involves falsely or incompletely quoting official reports, deniers quoting each other, rearrangement of chronological events, and making conclusions based on the absence of factual evidence. This is all the stuff of bad historical writing made significant because of the subject itself and the secondary issues. Lipstadt's chapter on "The Battle for the Campus" is particularly enlightening in light of antisemitic attacks on Jews and Zionism by the Nation ofIslam, nco-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and others. Lipstadt focuses, quite correctly, on the problems associated with political correctness and relativism of issues on campus (i.e., Stalin was worse than Hitler and there have been many "holocausts") and how those positions play into the hands of deniers. Bradley Smith, for example, has successfully utilized the idea that a "politically correct" official line on the Holocaust exists, which is not subject to debate. That" line" is actually the factual history of the event. Facts arc not debated, except for deniers. Another area where Lipstadt excels is in her analysis of the free-speech debate. The author makes very clear how First Amendment arguments to allow debate on the Holocaust are misused, even in high academic circles: "The First Amendment docs not guarantee access to a private publication. It is designed to serve as a shield to protect individuals and institutions from government interference in their affairs. It is not a sword by which every person who makes an outlandish statement or notorious claim can invoke a Constitutional right to be published." The frightening aspect of the campus "debate," Lipstadt admits in a pessimistic tone, is that students come away believing there arc two sides in this "debate." If this conclusion can be reached by educated students, then Holocaust deniers have already won a victory. For anyone associated with a charged campus environment where...

Factors Related to Long-term Traumatic Stress Responses in Survivors of Torture in Turkey

To examine factors related to long-term psychological functioning in political ex-prisoners who had been subjected to systematic torture. The psychological status of 55 tortured political activists, 55 nontortured political activists, and 55 subjects with no history of torture or political activism was assessed using Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III for psychiatric assessment, Semi-structured Interview for Survivors of Torture, and other self-rated and assessor-rated measures of anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Correlational and multiple regression analyses were used to assess the independent effects of precaptivity, captivity, and postcaptivity variables as predictors of long-term psychological status among the torture survivors. Istanbul, Turkey. Number of lifetime and current PTSD symptoms, and scores on the Beck Depression Inventory, Hamilton Depression Rating, Hamilton Anxiety Scale, and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Effect of captivity experience on various life areas (eg, family and social, economic, and employment status) and other postcaptivity psychosocial stressors were associated with PTSD symptoms, anxiety, and depression. Perceived severity of torture was related to PTSD symptoms but not to anxiety or depression. Lack of social support predicted anxiety and depression but not PTSD. Family history of psychiatric illness correlated with higher scores on most measures. Impact of captivity experience on family was the strongest predictor of PTSD symptoms. These findings point to three types of stressors related to different aspects of psychopathology in survivors of torture: perceived severity of torture, secondary effects of captivity experience on various life areas, and general psychosocial stressors following captivity. Different interventions may be needed for three components of survivors' traumatic experience: cognitive and behavioral strategies for treatment of PTSD symptoms, marital or family strategies for minimizing the impact of the trauma on the family, and strategies for enhancing social support to minimize postcaptivity depression and anxiety.

Acute renal failure following physical torture.

Ten cases of acute renal failure (ARF) were seen in the period from July 1990 to August 1991 in the Nephrology Department of the SIMS Hospital, Srinagar. All were males in the age group of 18-28 years and in apparent good health when apprehended by the police. There was alleged history of physical torture of different types. All had been beaten on the buttocks, back and limbs; in addition, 2 cases had been given repeated electric shocks and 1 case put to 'sit-and-stand' exercise for about 3 h. The interval between the first day of torture till they came to our observation varied from 4 to 11 days. The main clinical features at the time of presentation were generalized aches and weakness (10), oligoanuria (9), vomiting (8), hypertension (6), acidosis (10), facial puffiness and pedal edema (6), fever and shivering (3), pulmonary edema (2), stupor (4), and hyperkalemia (5). All the cases had an established ARF (serum creatinine 668-1,997 mumol/l and serum urea 21.8-71.8 mmol/l) when first seen. Muscle enzymes, creatine phosphokinase, lactic dehydrogenase and serum glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase were all significantly raised indicating rhabdomyolysis. All showed evidence of myoglobin casts in urine. Nine had oliguric and 1 had nonoliguric ARF. All except the 1 case with nonoliguric ARF were managed with peritoneal dialysis and/or hemodialysis. All recovered. Early recognition of ARF is important since the main attention in such cases is directed towards the surgical aspect.

The Information Age

As A WRITING INSTRUMENT, THE computer is not so much a better pencil as a better eraser. Although it serves well enough to put words on the page, where it really excels is in wiping them out again. Writing with a computer affords you the luxury of changing your mind, again and again, without penalty. The excised word leaves no scar; the page never becomes gray or tattered from rub­ bing; the margins do not fill up with af­ terthoughts; there is no tangle of arrows showing how sentences are to be re­ arranged. When you write on the glass screen, the world need never know how you labored to achieve that easygoing prose style. Indeed, this very paragraph conceals the tortured history of its own composition: you the reader cannot see in the space betvveen the lines how I have re­ vised it, a dozen times or more, until hard­ ly a word of the first draft survives. When I got my first chance to write with a computer, it was an exhilarating experience. I would insert a word into the middle ofa paragraph and marvel as all the following words automatically rearranged themselves to make room, cascading from line to line in a kind of domino effect. Or I would hold down the delete key and suck up whole sentences like spaghetti. Suddenly prose became a kind of clay that never hardens, a medium that one can al­ ways reshape yet again. But if the plasticity of electronic text is a great liberation for the author, it can al­ so license the forger, the plagiarist, the swindler, the impostor; and it is not an un­ mixed blessing for the scholar, the histori­ an or even the ordinary reader. Words stored in electronic fonn are in certain ways less secure and less pennanent than words on paper. When writing is in­ scribed in the magnetic domains ofa spin­ ning disk, can one trust its integrity? Fifty years from now, will anyone even be able to read it? As more of the world's docu­ ments migrate from memO pads and filing cabinets and bookshelves into computer memories, those questions are going to take on considerable importance.

Anticommunism and Anticolonialism

T hat there is an inevitable relationship between a nation's foreign policy and its domestic politics, everyone knows. In that sense, therefore, the title of this paper cannot be said to suggest any major intellectual breakthroughs in our thinking about international relations. However, when we closely examine the nature of U.S.-Indian relations from the time India achieved its independence in 1947 until the present, one must look long and hard to find a more striking example of how divergent historical experience can combine with contemporary domestic political constraints to produce a painful disparity between positive expectations and real outcomes. For this is a case involving two nations, whose political systems were compatible and whose people genuinely liked each other from the beginning. They commenced their association in an atmosphere of high idealism and then saw it gradually sink into a pattern of mutual frustration, exasperation, and pique largely because neither side could evolve a foreign policy that accommodated the other's vision of how security and social justice in the postwar world must be achieved and maintained. I do not propose to deal with the entire spectrum of this tortured history of unfulfilled expectations that often reads like a marriage perpetually in danger of going on the rocks, but only with what I think was probably the most crucial early stage in this tearful saga-viz., the years immediately following the end of World War II when Harry S. Truman became president of the United States by default and Jawaharlal Nehru became prime minister of India by acclamation.

SICBM Yes, HML No

AXlthough this essay will focus on an evaluation of the small ICBM (SICBM) and its possible basing modes, I will begin with a brief review of the tortured history of America's effort to modernize its land-based ICBM force, in order to place this newest missile in context. For two decades, the theoretical of silo-based missiles has occupied center stage in the ongoing debate over the proper structure of the U.S. nuclear retaliatory force. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird brought the issue to the forefront in 1969 as the Soviets began deployment of their first crude MIRV-the SS-9 Mod4. The SS-9 Mod4 turned out to be not much of a threat to the Minuteman. But the ability to attack Minuteman appeared to be the motive behind the Mod4's design, convincing most American policymakers that the Soviets intended to develop the capability to destroy America's land-based ICBMs. By 1976, Paul Nitze had sounded the Klaxon even louder. The Soviets had begun deployment of true MIRVs, the SS-17, SS-18, and SS-19, and both the SS-18 and the SS-19 appeared to have substantial counterforce capability against fixed silos. In two impassioned articles, Nitze argued that the Soviets could deter our deterrent by launching a preemptive attack against U.S. land-based missile forces.1 The window of vulnerability was declared to be open wide. The Ford Administration, and later the Carter Administration, responded by moving to deploy the MX missile in a multiple protective shelter (MPS) basing mode. The MX itself had been conceived in the mid-1960s as the WS120A system identified in the STRAT-X study undertaken during Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's tenure. But accurate MIRVs had rendered deployment in silos problematic from the standpoint of survivability, even if the silos were super-hard. The mobility and deception inherent in the MPS basing mode seemed the only answer to concerns about surviva-

Special report. Health-policy issues and the predicament in Poland.

When I visited Poland in May and June of 1981, I was struck by the contrast between two strong forces that fed into the stream of Poland's daily existence: one, the great tide of enthusiasm over Solidarity's independent sweep into so many corners of Polish life, including health care; the other, the almost palpable air of apprehension and resignation born of the nation's tortured history, its legacy of wars and oppression, and the present-day realities.Even then, six months before the government declared martial law on December 13, many Poles whom I met were troubled with uncertainty and despair. Physicians . . .

Obscenity and speech

In this paper I will advance a simple argument against anti-obscenity legislation. This argument has both moral and legal force, as it appeals to the moral basis underlying the First Amendment protection of speech. In addition to defending this argument, I am concerned to show how it (1) renders moot a number of considerations commonly urged in favor of antiobscenity legislation, and (2) is more fundamental than most arguments typically invoked against anti-obscenity laws. It is appropriate to begin a critical discussion of anti-obscenity legislation with an examination of Miller v. California and its companions. 1 These cases continue to represent the latest major effort of the Supreme Court to deal with what it has called the "intractable obscenity problem. ''2 An analysis of Miller requires a critique of the reasoning of the Court in cases upon which Miller expressly relies. In Miller, it was announced that "since the Court now undertakes to formulate standards more concrete than those in the past, it is useful for us to focus on two of the landmark cases in the somewhat tortured history of the Court's obscenity decisions." 3 The first of these cases is Roth v. U.S. 4 The holding in Roth, explicitly reaffirmed in Miller, is that obscene materials are not speech protected by the First Amendment. In reaching this conclusion, the Court relied heavily upon the following language from Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 5 quoted with approval in Miller:

MONUMENT AND MYTH∗

ABSTRACT The Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, which strategically and symbolically dominates the northern skyline of Paris, has a strange and tortured history. Conceived of in the course of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, its construction was seen by many as an act of penitence for the moral decadence of the Second Empire of Napoleon III as well as for the supposed excesses of the Paris Commune of 1871. The cult of the Sacred Heart and the movement to build a Basilica for its glorification drew much of its support from ultraconservative Catholics as well as from those espousing the cause of monarchist restoration. Legislation pushed through at the height of the political reaction which followed the Commune turned the construction of the Basilica into a national project. This legislation permitted those in command of the project to select the heights of Montmartre as a site for its construction. The Basilica was thus built upon the very spot where some of the most significant opening and closing events of the Paris Commune occurred. In the years that followed the laying of the foundation stone in 1875, the predominantly republican population of Paris sought to stop what they perceived as a manifestation of reactionary monarchism from being erected in their midst. They all but succeeded, in 1882, in emasculating the whole project. The Basilica, finally completed and consecrated in 1919, was for many years seen as a provocation to civil war and to this day is still interpreted as a political symbol.

King Leopold II, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, and the Strange Beginnings of American Economic Penetration of the Congo

From its birth at the Congress of Berlin in 1885 as King Leopold's personal fiefdom to its present status as a fledgling nation struggling to survive mercenary plots and regional uprisings, the Congo has been an area of American interest and concern. And perhaps at no other period in its tortured history, not even excepting the recent past, has the Congo figured so prominently in American eyes as during the first decade of the twentieth century. Then, in response to the crusade launched in England by E. D. Morel and Roger Casement to arouse the conscience of the world to the terrible plight of the Congolese people under King Leopold's rule, an eloquent collection of Protestant ministers and missionaries, authors and college professors, politicians and businessmen, both singly and in association, carried on in lecture, newspaper, and pamphlet a full-throated campaign aimed at compelling Theodore Roosevelt to place his administration behind the cause of Congo reform. So strenuously did they pursue this goal, that, long after the affair had receded into history, Elihu Root, Roosevelt's Secretary of State, still had vivid and bitter memories of how the administration was forced ultimately to reformulate its cautious Congo policy along lines acceptable to the reformers. The case of the .... Congo, Root asserted in 1930, is a very conspicuous illustration of the difficulties which are created for . . . the men handling foreign affairs in a democratic country, regarding matters of sentiment.