Where does the “mentally/willpower broken by torture” trope even come from if it’s a myth? I don’t think every content creator who uses it WANTS to indirectly support torture but it’s a very widespread trope…

scripttorture:

Good question.

I am 100% sure that most
people who use this trope don’t want
to support torture in any way and are horrified by the idea that they might be.
The problem is that we learn from fiction. We see well written fictional
portrayals using tropes like these and we see how widespread the idea is and we
assume.

That’s natural. We all do it. Five years ago (when I’d done
significantly less reading on what torture does vs how it is done) I was
merrily assuming it was true as well.

I honestly don’t know where the
trope comes from. I’m pretty sure that finding out definitively would be at
least a PhDs worth of work.

I do have an educated guess
though.

One of the patterns that emerged from Rejali’s analysis of media
surrounding the Franco-Algerian war was just how much French torturers warped
the narrative.

The ticking bomb scenario beloved of torture apologists literally comes from a novel written by a
French torturer.

It’s a…interesting read. The main character is an ultra-macho,
ultra-violent stereotype whose willingness to brutalise Arabs somehow magically
results in enemies giving him information, men respecting him and women falling
in love with him.

I am reaching slightly here but I believe this is how the author saw
himself- it’s what he wished he was.

And what struck me about it while
I read Rejali’s summary was how similar it was to narratives coming out of the
New World during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The details change but a central theme was this insistence that the
violence was ‘necessary’. That without a level of violence which was quite
literally decimating the population society itself would collapse.

I don’t think the idea that brutality made people ‘passive’ came from
the slave trade. I think it’s probably significantly older than that.

But it is amazing just how
much slave owners clung to that idea when the New World was full of uprisings, violent attacks,
non-violent resistance and outright wars (for which see West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba by M Barcia- not the only source
but an excellent book, I also recommend the classic Black Jacobins by C L R James). 

So I think torturers have an
established history of arguing for torture, and chief among their arguments is
that torture is ‘necessary’. The exact reason varies with the times but making victims ‘passive’
has been one of the ‘reasons’ for a long long time.

Stepping back from specific periods in history I think you could also
argue that someone could come to this conclusion by fundamentally
misunderstanding how mental illness works.

I
know I always link to the symptoms but seriously let’s look at that list.

They want to die. Well obviously they’re ‘broken’.

They jump at every little thing. ‘Broken’.

They don’t talk or interact like other people. ‘Broken’.

Every single thing on that list of symptoms has been used to devalue
human beings before, regardless of what may or may not have caused the symptom.
The behaviours these words represent are things society has judged for
centuries.

And those same behaviours are why calling this ‘broken’ is nonsense.
None of these illnesses, these patterns of behaviours, make people ‘compliant’.
None of them encourage obedience and many of them (completely outside of the
context of torture) work in ways that make obedience more difficult.

It’s not a definite answer. I never had the chance to take Media Studies
and I don’t have much official schooling when it comes to history (which is probably lucky, I shudder to think how history is taught in most of my countries)- And I think
that makes me the wrong person to try and chase down a definitive answer.

But my instinct, based on what I do know, is that it comes from a potent
stew of stereotypes about mental health problems and allowing torturers, abusers and their supporters to tell us
what violence is ‘really’ like.

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