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  • The Psychological Origins of Institutionalized Torture
  • Nathan Stoltzfus
The Psychological Origins of Institutionalized Torture. By Mika Haritos-Fatouros (London and New York: Routledge, 2003. xxv plus 270 pp.).

The Holocaust illustrates the eclipse of the use of imagination to do good by its deployment for evil, as Ellie Wiesel has commented. Here the clinical psychologist Mika Haritos-Fatouros examines human creativity in optimizing evil through a study of the processes by which men became torturers during the Greek military dictatorship of 1967–1974. Relying on records of the trial in 1975 of these Greek perpetrators, she concludes that the torturer is a person who responds normally to abnormal conditions: within certain circumstances even the best of persons could become a torturer.

Upon seizing power in 1967 the Greek military dictatorship established a training camp for turning new military recruits into torturers. Their training emphasized both random cruelty and abject obedience and began with their own abuse, physically and psychologically. “We were like sheep in a pen,” one recalled. “They made us turn over a military car and cut off our moustaches. They ordered us to shout slogans like ‘Greece of Christian Greeks!’ … Someone asked me what soccer team I supported and when I told him he punched me and ordered me to support another team. Then he asked me again which team I supported and when I said the name of the team he’d told me before, he hit me even harder” (41). Recruits endured mock executions, or might be awakened abruptly, and made to dance until suddenly they were beaten. Some were ordered to measure a building with matchsticks or walk on their knees across the camp to the giant eagle symbolizing the regime. They might be required to pick up mail and cigarette butts from the floor by mouth, eat grass, or imitate sexual intercourse with a doll or lamppost. They went without food or water for long stretches while body functions were treated as a privilege resulting in humiliations.

Subjection to these irrational orders, torture, and humiliations caused the trainees to feel powerless. There soon developed competition as to who could endure the pain and humiliation best.

After three months the trainees were taught specific techniques, numbered according to severity and known under euphemisms such as “tea party” or “tea party with toast.” Prison wardens were trusted to torture the regime’s prisioners alone but others always tortured in the presence of others. Torturers had a range of motivations including the desire to follow orders and reap the rewards. A case study of one especially effective perpetrator had, since childhood, strongly wished to be a “good boy” and worked as the “right hand” of military authorities as he had for his father. Obedience and trying to please authority characterized his behavior before as well as during torture (88–89). He was most violent of torturers and yet “seems to have had the most normal development of all” (113). Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the sixteen men trained as torturers the author interrogated were not raised in authoritarian conditions.

For Haritos-Fatouros “torture is generally not an aggressive act, although the torturer may occasionally lose his temper or act out of hatred“ (162). Rather she [End Page 1123] stresses the training and the social context of the torturer: with others looking on, new torturers tried to do it better than others. Propaganda encouraged torturers to believe they were serving a higher cause. Of course there was the fear of becoming the victim, while any thoughts of admiration for the victim were pushed away. Torturers received special status and favors One said the worst part about the end of his two years of service was that all privileges were lost. “For instance, as a persecutor, you could be some place with your girlfriend and you could call a junior to come and fetch you with a car” (53). The balance of these men’s motivations for torture, between carrot and stick, is betrayed by their answers to the question of whether they experienced relief when their military service and duties torturing ended: just two of the 16 said yes; most regretted having to leave Athens and...

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