Chapter 75 savage

The basic psychological approach to torture is to divide the world into "us" and "them."Scapegoating and belittling others are important means to this end.Torturers must believe that their world is just to be insanely violent against their victims.One consequence of this belief is that interrogators see victims as asking for it, who actually deserved their punishment.From the perspective of the torturer, the more painful the victim is, the more reason he has to be sentenced.This way of thinking is not uncommon, and generally does not evoke cruelty in people.Yet this state of mind is a prerequisite for abusing others, and thus it becomes a dehumanizing psychological condition for those who perceive victims as threats to social order or as contributing to racial impurity.

Most torturers are made, not born.They are gradually pushed into this perverted mental state.Amnesty International's report said that the transformation from guard to torturer often begins with being a guard outside the interrogation room and hearing the sound of beatings coming from inside.After they were transferred to the holding cell, they witnessed how the victim was humiliated.Finally, if they were competent, they would "suddenly become actively involved" in beating the prisoners themselves. Just as the torturer "loses his humanity," they make the victim feel that he has lost his spiritual strength, that he is losing his physical integrity.Dai Li used two types of punishments for this purpose: "tiger stool" and "stepping on the pole", both of which crippled the victim.The interrogators of the military command specialize in this way to deal with suspected Communist Party members and maim them for life. "In order to force the revolutionaries to confess new clues, the agents always try their best to torture the revolutionaries' bodies. They not only have the desire to trample and destroy the human body, but also pursue scientific efficiency. Teaching "action techniques" to novices like intoxication The secret police in Beijing were always keen to develop more effective punishments; within a day or two of new instruments of torture being invented, they were testing them on prisoners in Shanghai Station cells to perfect their techniques before introducing them to the military. Psychologically, this "professional" and seemingly "detached" interest in "being in the penal business" is part of what Robert Lifton calls "two-faced nature": these people "form a A set of feelings and habits" that both fit their villainous persona and enable them to return to their everyday selves after get off work. Duality is the key to being evil all day long, and it explains how people can fall into a situation where they don't like the rest of their lives. Go in the opposite direction.

But duality is not a completely mysterious process.As the forbidden areas of the torture room were broken one by one, the torturers became increasingly cruel and brutal.For example, military torturers also eat human flesh.Dai Li's agents would use the excuse that some people were "cowardly" to dig out the victims' hearts and livers and fry them up, saying: "Eating people's hearts can strengthen your courage." Under Dai Li's connivance, they often raped young people. Women, especially Communist Party suspects.Dai Li thought it was a reward or encouragement for the agents to work hard.

The range of types of torturers clearly goes beyond the usual sexual perversion or mania.However, representatives of Amnesty International, which attended the trial of the Greek ESA officials, commented: In short, in the eyes of a military official, the secret interrogation of female prisoners, especially the stubborn and radical young female students, was an opportunity to "vent animal desires" by inflicting pain and humiliation on the sexual organs. The military command agents used the most crazy and cruel behaviors on the female prisoners they guarded: piercing their nipples with needles, inserting bamboo sticks into their nails, and beating their vaginas with rattan canes.These tortures were ultimately sanctioned by Dai Li, who himself used the same brutal methods against Cui Zhengyao (her husband attempted to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek in November 1935, only to wound Wang Jingwei).