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Who remembers Abu Ghraib? Why should we remember Abu Ghraib?
Abu Ghraib represents an era of imperial conquest, which began in Iraq in 2003 and followed by Afghanistan in 2001. Since its troops have now withdrawn from Afghanistan, the United States has no reason to remember Abu Ghraib. But this is true for the whimsical world at the mercy of this dysfunctional empire.
Abu Ghraib is a prison complex named after the city near Baghdad where it was built.
For many years, Saddam Hussein used it to illegally imprison, torture, mutilate and murder dissidents and political opponents. Then the United States took over and did more of the same thing.
For those who have been raped, their bones are broken, their souls are crushed there, and it makes no difference whether their suffering was ordered and approved by Saddam Hussein or George W. Bush.
But at least Saddam Hussein never pretended to be the duly elected president of a democracy. However, for George W. Bush and his like, the world has to endure endless denials and tiresome speeches about “American values.”
‘America does not torture’
In 2004, three years after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, many terrifying photos surfaced, showing that members of the U.S. military, security and intelligence forces not only physically, mentally and sexually tortured Iraq and other prisoners in Abu Ghraib , But also in Guantanamo Bay and other similar locations in Afghanistan.
These American torturers took pictures of themselves and their victims and sent them to their friends and family to brag about the terror they inflicted on Arabs and Muslims and soon became iconic-a symbol of centuries. The immoral depravity that does not completely exist-the old propaganda that the United States is “the glorious city on the mountain”.
Americans tortured, mutilated and murdered them, forcing them to engage in crazy sexual acts. This is ugly. How could these people do such a thing?
Soon, the global media began to spread these pictures, so much that it numbs our senses. The existing problem has arisen. The depth of the depravity of those who did these things to other people quickly escaped any meaningful record.
The names of experts Charles Granner, PFC Lindy England or Brigadier General Janis Karpinski became synonymous with the horror of Abu Ghraib’s torture chamber, but George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Ram Names like Sfield are still respected and respected in the “land of freedom” and the home of the brave.” Americans quickly forgot these names. Their amnesia game eventually led to the election of Donald Trump. Therefore, 9 /11 became the path to 1/6-the day the U.S. Capitol was invaded and looted by radical white supremacism worshiping Trump.
“The art of torture?”
Soon after it was published, some artists began to look at these terrible photos with different eyes, perhaps to let us see their horror better. But do we really need to look at these horrors better? Wouldn’t it be better to look at the brutality of the original evidence itself?
In one series, he called it Oh Boy! Oh Boy!, Swiss visual artist Daniele Buetti turned these photos into stained glass mosaics. They looked disturbingly familiar and incredibly beautiful. The people who watched them were placed in a strange position: peeping into the American torture chamber through a “cute mirror.” Should we be frightened by their beauty or fascinated by their horror?
This eagerness to turn aesthetics into torture is deeply disturbing. I remember my immediate reaction was too early, too early, these photos should be completely unrecognizable for a period of time. Artists are too in a hurry, perhaps out of the basic instinct of human instincts, to decipher them, read them, draw them, explain them, and integrate them into their own unique visual vocabulary.
Perhaps the most well-known artistic representation of the Abu Ghraib torture chamber is the work of the Colombian figurative artist and sculptor Fernando Botero, who made a series of eye-catching visual representations of these pictures to make them terrifying It looks like something people are willing to spend money to buy and hang in museums, art galleries, art festivals, crowded biennials. The terrible facts that happened in Abu Ghraib have been recorded in many crude snapshots sent to friends and family, as “souvenirs”, and are now widely aestheticized for consumption by festival curators, art galleries and their clients .
There are some nasty things in the whole scene. How about a lonely person screaming at the mercy of American torturers? What happened to the cry from the depths of human suffering? In what dark dungeon of underground history, that cry has disappeared?
Art historians like Helena Guzik began to study the themes of art and torture farther in history, and explored them in academic papers such as visual form, instinct: Understanding the Body, Pain and Torture in Renaissance Art (2014) The “Renaissance Influence” revolves around the philosophy of the human body in the context of pain, especially the physical pain endured during torture. “
The work of American artist Susan Crile is close to exploring these images without rendering them into faded and broken abstract spaces. But when her work was reviewed by The New York Times, the reviewer shyly said that she was “hesitant”[d] Use the word lyric”.
Lyric? Really-depicting torture?
There are still some very familiar things in the pictures of Iraqi prisoners taken by American torturers—they look like they were taken by white racist murderers when they lynched their victims and hung them from a tree. “Strange Fruits,” legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday (Billie Holiday) called them “kiwis” in an iconic song. The trees that bear these fruits were planted in Iraq. It was the same kind of racist atrocities that terrorized the South, and it has now spread to the East.
The art of resistance
Faced with the American invasion and destruction of their homes or the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, Iraqi artists certainly would not stand idly by. Their memories can be traced back to Saddam Hussein himself from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.
In 2004, Qasim Alsabti and 24 other Iraqi artists created “a series of sculptures, paintings and installations depicting the horror of Abu Ghraib” in the heart of Baghdad Hewar Art Gallery in Wazerieh District. “
Recently, in 2019, the works of a group of artists from the United States, Iraq and Kuwait were curated in a large exhibition at MoMA PS1 to review the horror experienced by their people at the time. As a commentary in the words of the New York Times, People are not interested in remembering. War zone: The Gulf War from 1991 to 2011 was barely noticed by the public, although the main media gave it some positive comments.
Today, you can hardly find any critical news about Abu Ghraib in the United States or Europe. They have no reason to do this. On the contrary, imperial culture thrives in their deliberate amnesia. History has no meaning to the empire, except for the delusional myth that they continue to feed themselves.
Therefore, there is a direct link between the eagerness to beautify and display the horror of Abu Ghraib and the sudden disappearance of disturbing memories that should have been illegible and disturbing for a longer period of time. But forgetfulness is the best way to survive this empire without memory, because it cares the least about the traces of terror and destruction it left when it launched the endless “war on terrorism”-now it is the highest ideology that rules the world. At that time there was almost nothing to control in the world.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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