hmmmm

[undergroundpanther]

"Spiritual violence is most dangerous when it is most spiritual -- that is least emotional. Violence which acts in the depths of the will without any surface upheaval carries our whole being into captivity with no apparent struggle. Such is the violence of deliberate and unresisted sin which seems to be not violence but peace".
Thomas Merton

Something to ponder on..

[undergroundpanther]

1. Enroachment

The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside froce to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy.

Detention should be planned to enhance... feelings of being cut off from anything known and reassuring.

The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself

Pain that he feels he is inflicting on himself is more likely to sap resistance... After a while the subject is likely to exhaust his internal motivational strength.

These techniques, according to Dodd, build in part on an earlier CIA manual entitled KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation (1963) which notably highlights the value of non-coercion:

The effectiveness of most of the non-coercive techniques depends upon their unsettling effect. The interrogation situation is in itself disturbing to most people encountering it for the first time. The aim is to enhance this effect, to disrupt radically familiar emotional and psychological associations ... When this aim is achieved, resistance is seriously impaired. There is an interval ... of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. At this moment the source is far likelier to comply.

Spiritual violence: This is not a new phenomenon. It has taken an endless variety of forms and expressions throughout human history. From the condemnation and casting out of people who don't believe the prevailing religion to hanging witches and burning heretics, spiritual violence has been one of the most persistent and creative human activities ever manifested in social behavior . Its restriction to particular issues, of concern to particular religions or groups, is itself a form of spiritual violence characteristic of structural encroachment.

Again this form of violence may be seen as epitomized in particular "non-violent" approaches to interrogation. In the case of Muslims in Iraq (or Guantanamo Bay), for example, this involves a creative range of techniques designed specifically to humiliate and degrade men holding Islamic beliefs (nakedness, sexual acts, obligation to don women's underwear, exposure to sodomy, use of dogs, etc) and notably supervised by women. Not only may these practices be deemed sacrilegious, their polluting effects may also be believed to endanger the person's salvation (especially if, as is typical of fundamentalists, women are conceived as sinister and satanic, the embodiment of sin and seduction). The spiritual impact of this "non-violence" derives in part from its being undertaken under the leadership (and with the knowledge) of Judeo-Christians deeply committed to their own faiths and promoting values they label as "freedom" and "human rights".



http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs00s/encroacv.php