The CIA’s Heart of Darkness

Brando as Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness"

Brando as Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now”

Last week we saw the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report and it reveals the horrors we anticipated it would. One literary work above all comes to mind.

It is the novella that film director Francis Ford Coppola turned to when he set out to capture the nightmare that was the Vietnam War. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is only too applicable to what the CIA did following 9-11.

Jonathan Chait lists some of the tortures that the agency engaged in:

Men were shackled to walls or ceilings for days, in diapers, locked in coffins, rectally violated, subject to days of sleep deprivation, beaten, and (in one instance) murdered. Several intelligence staffers reported being traumatized by the experience.

Most issues admit of some degree of ambiguity but torture does not. As Kevin Drum of Mother Jones puts it,

Either you think that state-sanctioned torture of prisoners is beyond the pale for a civilized country or you don’t. No cavils. No resorts to textual parsing. And no exceptions for “we were scared.” This isn’t a gray area. You can choose to stand with history’s torturers or you can choose to stand with human decency. Pick a side.

Heart of Darkness, of course, is about a man of great promise who journeys to the Congo to make his fortune. He goes with high hopes and with plans to bring the light of Christ to the heathen. Instead, he is swallowed up by his inner darkness. As the narrator remarks upon seeing the human heads that Kurtz has posted around his stockade,

there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

Nietzsche famously describes what has happened in Beyond Good and Evil:

If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

This helps explain why the torture program spun out of control. Often, it seems, the CIA tortured simply because it could. Such things happen when the window into the abyss is opened. Here’s Kurtz’s assistant describing how Kurtz relished his power to play God:

He declared he would shoot me unless I gave him the ivory and then cleared out of the country, because he could do so, and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased.

When one abandons all humanity, one long longer has any vantage point from which to judge human action. Kurtz reaches this place and it was the road that America’s torture program was taking us down. Marlow describes how it works:

There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces.

Kurtz’s one saving grace is that, in his last moments, he at least struggles with what he has done. Marlow gives him credit for looking back at his life and recoiling in horror. Some of those responsible for our own torture program haven’t gotten to this point.

Chait describes the response of Dick Cheney, who pushed torture and is now vigorously defending it. Remorse isn’t on his radar screen:

Appearing later that night on Fox News, the former vice-president was no longer merely dismissing the report’s conclusions out of hand. Nor was he retreating to the slick evasions or complaints about George W. Bush’s feelings that so many of his fellow Republicans had relied upon.

The host, Bret Baier, asked Cheney about Bush’s reported discomfort when told of a detainee’s having been chained to a dungeon ceiling, clothed only in a diaper, and forced to urinate and defecate on himself. “What are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘Please, please, tell us what you know’?” Cheney said. “Of course not. We did exactly what needed to be done in order to catch those who were guilty on 9/11 and prevent a further attack, and we were successful on both parts.”

Just as Marlow does not want Kurtz’s Russian assistant to tell him everything Kurtz has done, so many on the right are choosing not to examine what occurred in our torture facilities. But not Cheney. Chait tells us what this means:

Here, finally, was the brutal moral logic of Cheneyism on bright display. The insistence by his fellow partisans on averting their eyes from the horrible truth at least grows out of a human reaction. Cheney does not even understand why somebody would look away. His soul is a cold, black void.

Or as Marlow describes Kurtz,

His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines. 

Pray to God that we can make our way back up to the light. Pray that we, and especially our policy makers, never descend into these depths again.

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