Chapter One
Memory of Interrogations
* * *
I have a confession to make: I was once considered a national security
threat. For months I was interrogated - not only about details of my
own life but also for incriminating information about other people suspected
of posing a threat to the state. No wonder, then, that the photos of
mistreated Abu Ghraib detainees in Iraq shocked me to the core. I still
remember where I was when I first saw the image of a person hooded
and hooked to electrical wires standing helplessly with arms stretched
out in what looked like a modern-day crucifixion. Terrible as these windows
into mistreatment were in their own right, they also flooded my
mind with scenes from my own - albeit less severe and humiliating - interrogations
of more than twenty years ago.
Charges and Threats
It was the year of our Lord 1984, though to me it seemed more like the
year of his archenemy. In the fall of 1983 I was summoned to compulsory
service in the military of then-communist Yugoslavia. There was no way
out of it. I had to leave behind my wife and a soon-to-be-born Ph.D. dissertation
to spend one year on a military base in the town of Mostar,
sharing a room with forty or so soldiers and eating stuff like cold goulash
with overcooked meat for breakfast at 5:00 a.m. But as I stepped onto the
base, I sensed that not just discomfort, but danger, awaited me.
My wife was an American citizen and therefore, in the eyes of my
commanders, a potential CIA spy. I had been trained in the West in a
"subversive" discipline that studies everything as it relates to God, who is
above all worldly gods - including those of totalitarian regimes. I was
writing a dissertation on Karl Marx, whose account of socialism and how
to achieve it could only serve to de-legitimize the kind of socialism the
Yugoslav military was defending. I was the son of a pastor whom the
communists had almost killed as an enemy of the people after World
War II and whom the secret police suspected of sedition and regularly
harassed. I was innocent, but Big Brother would be watching me. I knew
that. I just didn't know how very closely.
Unbeknownst to me, most of my unit was involved in spying on me.
One soldier would give me a politically sensitive book to read, another a
recent issue of Newsweek or Time, while a third would get his father, who
worked for the Croatian magazine Danas, to give me a subscription. All
this was designed to get me to talk about religion, ethnic belonging, politics,
the military - anything that would expose my likely seditious proclivities.
I had a Greek New Testament with me, and some soldiers pretended
to be interested in discussing its contents, a topic prohibited on
the base. I was named the administrative assistant to the captain, an
otherwise attractive job, but given to me so that I would spend most of
my time in a single room that was bugged. For a few months, almost every
word I said was noted or recorded and every step I took, both on and
off the base, was monitored.
My ordeal started not long after I stumbled onto a soldier translating
to the security officer a letter my wife had written to me. I was summoned
for a "conversation." "We know all about you," said Captain G., the security
officer. He was flanked by two other officers, their faces expressionless
and menacing at the same time. They had plenty of "proof" of my subversive
intentions and activities. A foot-thick file lay on the Captain's desk - transcripts
of conversations I'd had in my office, reports of what I'd said to
this or that soldier elsewhere, photos of me entering buildings in town,
sometimes taken from somewhere high above. Obviously, they knew a
great deal about me. And they didn't seem to like any of it.
Like the court in Franz Kafka's The Trial, my interrogators were going
to pull out "some profound guilt from somewhere where there was originally
none at all." I had engaged in religious propaganda on the base - I
must therefore be against socialism, which in Yugoslavia was linked officially
with atheism. I had praised a Nazarene conscientious objector for
acting according to his principles - I was therefore undermining the defense
of our country. I had said something unkind about Tito - I was
therefore an enemy of the people. I was married to an American and had
studied in the West - I was therefore a spy. The charges should have been
embarrassing for the interrogators. Restricting freedom of speech, not
engaging in it, should have been viewed as morally reprehensible. And
some of the charges were just plain silly Is every expatriot American a potential
spy? But the officers were utterly serious: I must be out to overthrow
the regime. The real issue, which they sensed rightly, was that the
seams holding Yugoslavia together were at their breaking point. An enemy
could be hiding under any rock, behind any bush.
Threats followed the charges against me. Eight years in prison for
the crimes I'd committed! I knew what such threats meant. Had I been a
civilian, I could have counted on the help of competent lawyers and public
opinion, both within the country and abroad. But I was in the military,
so there would be a closed military tribunal. I would have no independent
lawyer. To be accused was to be condemned, and to be condemned
was to be ruined . unless I confessed. And "confessed as quickly as possible
and as completely as possible." Unless I admitted everything they
assured me they already knew, I was doomed. And so it went, session after
session, week after week. I was force-fed large portions of terrifying
threats with an occasional dessert of false hope. Except for Captain G.,
who was always present, new interrogators kept coming, their ranks
reaching all the way up to that of general.
All this attention, to be sure, gave me a sense of importance - the
kind of importance felt by a fox being hunted by a king and his entourage,
with their fine horses, sleek hounds, and deadly weapons! But one
overwhelming emotion drowned almost all others: fear. Sometimes paralyzing
fear - fear that makes your body melt, not just your soul tremble.
Though I was never physically tortured, I was firmly held in my interrogators'
iron hand and completely dependent on their mercy. They
could do with me anything they wanted; and their eyes, as they pummeled
me with threats, told me they would relish seeing me suffer. I did
not fear so much the threatened imprisonment - I feared the seeming
omnipotence of these evildoers. It felt as though a ubiquitous evil eye
was watching me, as though an evil mind was twisting for its own purposes
what the evil eye saw, as though an evil will was bent on tormenting
me, as though a powerful, far-reaching hand lay at the disposal of
that will. I was trapped and helpless, with no ground of my own on which
to stand. Or from which to resist. Trembling before the false gods of
power, I was something, all right. But as a person, I was nothing.
Memory of Abuse
The "conversations" stopped as abruptly as they had begun - and without
an explanation. After my term in the military was up, security officers
made a lame attempt at enlisting me to work for them. "Considering
what you've done, we have treated you well," an officer told me. "You
know what you deserved. You can show your gratitude by working for
us." Gratitude? For months of my life stolen by interrogations just because
I am a Christian theologian and married to an American? For all
the mental torment? For fear, helplessness, and humiliation? For colonizing
my interior life even after I was discharged from the military? For
causing me month after month to view the world through the lens of
abuse and to mistrust everyone?
My interrogations might be categorized as a mid-level form of abuse
- greater than an insult or a blow, but mild compared to the torture and
suffering many others have undergone at the hands of tormentors,
especially those schooled in Red Army methods. No prolonged isolation, no
sleep deprivation, no starvation, no painful body positions, no physical
assault or sexual mistreatment. Yet, even afterward, my mind was enslaved
by the abuse I had suffered. It was as though Captain G. had
moved into the very household of my mind, ensconced himself right in
the middle of its living room, and I had to live with him.
I wanted him to get out of my mind on the spot and without a trace.
But there was no way to keep him away, no way to forget him. He stayed
in that living room and interrogated me again and again. I knew that it
would not be wise to forget anyway, even if I could. At least not right
away. Psychological as well as political reasons spoke against it. So gradually
I pushed the Captain a bit to the side and arranged to live my life
around him. When little else was going on, he would still catch my eye
and make me listen for a while to his charges and threats. But mostly I
had my back turned to him, and his voice was drowned in the bustle of
everyday activities. The arrangement worked rather well. It still does - in
fact, now he is confined to the far corner of my dark basement and reduced
to a dim shadow of his former self.
My success at sidelining the Captain, however, left the main worry
about my relationship to him almost untouched. That worry had surfaced
as soon as the interrogations started: I was being mistreated, so
how should I respond? The way I felt like responding was one thing. I
wanted to scream and curse and return in kind. In his novel The Shoes of
the Fisherman, Morris West reports the musings of the interrogator
Kamenev: "Once you have taken a man to pieces under questioning, once
you have laid out the bits on the table and put them together again, then a
strange thing happens. Either you love him or you hate him for the rest of
your life. He will either love you or hate you in return." I don't know what
my interrogator felt for me, but I felt absolutely no love for him. Only cold,
enduring anger that even vengeance, if it were possible, would not alter.
But I sensed - maybe more subconsciously than consciously - that if I
gave in to what I felt, I would not be responding as a free human being but
reacting as a wounded animal. And it did not matter whether that reaction
happened in the physical world (which was impossible) or in my
imagination. To act as a human being is to honor feelings, even the thirst
for revenge, but it is also to follow moral requirements stitched by God
into the fabric of our humanity. Fear-ridden and humiliated as I was, I was
determined not to lose what I believed was best in the human spirit - love
of one's neighbors, even if they prove to be enemies.
The more severe the wrongdoing, the more likely we are to react
rather than respond, to act toward wrongdoers the way we feel like acting
rather than the way we should act. Would I have clung to the principle
of loving one's enemies had I been as severely abused as the Abu
Ghraib detainees - or worse? I might not have. The force of the abuse
might have overwhelmed my capacity even to think of loving my abusers
- of wishing them well, of seeking to do good for them, of working to establish
a human bond with them. Would, however, my inability have canceled
the requirement to love my enemy? I think not. It would simply
have postponed its fulfillment until some power beyond my own had returned
me to myself. Then I would be able to do what deep down I knew I
should do. Then I would be able to echo in my own way the struggle and
the victory given voice in the sermon by nineteenth-century abolitionist
and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth titled "When I Found Jesus":
Praise, praise, praise to the Lord! An' I begun to feel such a love in
my soul as I never felt before - love of all creatures. An' then, all of
a sudden, it stopped, an' I said, Dar's de White folks dat have
abused you, an' beat you, an' abused your people - think o' them!
But then there came another rush of Love through my soul, an' I
cried out loud - "Lord, I can love even de White folks!"
Fortunately for me, it was only Captain G. that I had to love, not "de
White folks," not people who hack others to death, not monsters out to
exterminate entire ethnic groups.
To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory
happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil
is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did
not infuse it with new life. In my own situation, I could do nothing about
the first victory of evil, but I could prevent the second. Captain G. would
not mold me into his image. Instead of returning evil for evil, I would
heed the Apostle Paul and try to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21).
After all, I myself had been redeemed by the God who in Christ died for
the redemption of the ungodly And so once again, now in relation to
Captain G., I started walking - and stumbling - in the footsteps of the
enemy-loving God.
How, then, should I relate to Captain G. in my imagination now that
his wrongdoing was repeating itself only in my memory? How should Iremember him and what he had done to me? Like the people of God
throughout the ages, I had often prayed the words of the psalmist: "Do
not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to
your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness' sake, O Lord"
(25:7). What would it mean for me to remember Captain G. and his
wrongdoing in the way I prayed to God to remember me and my own
wrongdoing? How should the one who loves remember the wrongdoer
and the wrongdoing?
That is the issue I have set out to explore in this book. My topic is thememory of wrongdoing suffered by a person who desires neither to hate nor
to disregard but to love the wrongdoer. This may seem an unusual way of
casting the problem of memory of wrongs suffered. Yet, to embrace the
heart of the Christian faith is precisely to be pulled beyond the zone of
comfort into the risky territory marked by the commitment to love one's
enemies. There memory must be guided by the vow to be benevolent
and beneficent, even to the wrongdoer.
Many victims believe that they have no obligation whatsoever to
love the wrongdoer and are inclined to think that if they were in fact to
love the wrongdoer, they would betray rather than fulfill their humanity.
From this perspective, to the extent that perpetrators are truly guilty,
they should be treated as they deserve to be treated - with the strict enforcement
of retributive justice. I understand the force of that argument.
But if I were to share this view, I would have to give up on a stance toward
others that lies at the heart of the Christian faith - love of the enemy,
love that does not exclude the concern for justice but goes beyond it. In
this book, I do not make the argument for a love of the enemy that at the
same time affirms justice and goes beyond it; I simply assume it to be a
given of the Christian faith.
In looking at the kinds of questions that arise when a victim seeks to
remember in accordance with the commitment to love the wrongdoer, I
will refer throughout the book to my own interrogations, since in large
measure these have been the crucible for my exploration of this topic.
For me they have also been a window into the experiences of countless
others both today and in the past, especially the sufferings of people in
the last century, the bloodiest of them all. In Chapter Two, I will join the
larger ongoing conversation among psychologists, historians, and public
intellectuals about the importance of memory, a conversation that
started largely in response to the great catastrophes of the last century,
such as two world wars, Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, purges by
Stalin and Mao, and the Rwandan genocide. I will argue that it is important
not merely to remember, but also to remember rightly. And in the
rest of the book I will explore from a Christian standpoint what it means
to remember rightly. But here, in the second part of this current chapter,
I will register how the struggle to remember rightly looks from the inside,
in the experience of a person who was wronged but who strives to
love the wrongdoer. So now that I have sketched the memory of my interrogations,
I turn to examine critically - even interrogate - that very
memory.
(Continues.)
