Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence
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Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence
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Overview
Payne draws on interviews, unedited television film, newspaper archives, and books written by perpetrators to analyze confessions of state violence in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa. Each of these four countries addressed its past through a different institutional form—from blanket amnesty, to conditional amnesty based on confessions, to judicial trials. Payne considers perpetrators’ confessions as performance, examining what they say and what they communicate nonverbally; the timing, setting, and reception of their confessions; and the different ways that they portray their pasts, whether in terms of remorse, heroism, denial, or sadism, or through lies or betrayal.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822390435 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2008 |
| Series: | a John Hope Franklin Center Book |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Uncivil Movements: The Armed Right-Wing and Democracy in Latin America and a coeditor of The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule and Business and Democracy in Latin America.
Read an Excerpt
UNSETTLING ACCOUNTS
Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State ViolenceBy LEIGH A. PAYNE
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4061-4
Chapter One
CONFESSIONAL PERFORMANCE
If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul. -William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 5.3.189-90
THE VILLAINOUS CHARACTER Aaron's confession to committing evil deeds in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus represents a public confession by a perpetrator in a dramatic performance. This is not, however, the kind of performance real-life perpetrators make. Whereas Aaron admits to doing harm and smugly gloats about it, Murray Edelman notes, with an unintended insult to Shakespeare, "Only in bad novels and comic books do characters knowingly do evil and boast of it. In life, people rationalize their actions in moral terms."
Real-life rationalizations, however, are no less dramatic than fictional boasting. Perpetrators' confessions are more than mere political talk: they not only say something, they do something. They interpret the past. And through that interpretation they advance a political project for democracy. The political meaning behind the confession generates conflict as others-victims and survivors-challenge perpetrators' interpretations. The ensuing political drama transcends personal stakes in the past and shapes the meaning of the past for contemporary political life.
DYNAMICS OF THE CONFESSIONAL PERFORMANCE
The metaphor of performance is not new to the social sciences. Dramaturgical analyses often emphasize "what performance is taking place or what meaning is being portrayed to an audience and how the elements that make up the performance contribute to that meaning." They focus on "people and groups within the society who have access to resources and who use these resources to invoke and manipulate meaning." The specific characteristics of a performance-scene, act, agent, agency, and purpose-provide a set of categories for organizing observations. Such analyses, however, limit their approach to everyday occurrences by social actors largely unconscious of acting or playing on a political stage. In a confessional performance, by contrast, a social actor deliberately takes a public stage in a political drama that suspends "normal everyday role playing" and "interrupt [s] the flow of social life." Moreover, in addition to the actor and acting, script, and stage, certain theatrical elements-specifically, audiences and timing-produce meaning out of confessional performances.
Perpetrators as Actors; Acting as Perpetrators. Who are perpetrators and why are so many people fascinated by them? Because they are novel, mystifying, or deviant, they intrigue audiences. Audiences perhaps unconsciously believe that they can protect themselves if they know more about perpetrators. Or perhaps audiences find perpetrators' power alluring. Perpetrators, after all, "do" violence; victims are "done to." Observers of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission reflected on the media's emphasis on perpetrators: "The same kind of intensity of reporting is not afforded to victims/ survivors, unless they have high-profile images themselves," and even then the media considers newsworthy only the "sensational brutality" that victims have faced. The South African dramaturgist Jane Taylor further notes: "What makes the stories of the perpetrators so compelling is, in part, that they are agents: they act upon others. All of the psychological structures of desire, power, greed, fear, identification are invoked in these accounts. Milton's classic dilemma in Paradise Lost was that Satan became the hero of the narrative, because of the inherent interest in his character. A similar effect was evident in the coverage of the stories of [South African perpetrators] de Kock, Coetzee and Mamasela."
Perpetrators themselves rarely find the characterization appealing. They do not, like Shakespeare's Aaron, embrace the role of the evildoer. Even when they boast about their violent past, they do not accept the implied criminality behind the "perpetrator" label, which they resist for its indelible imprint. A former British Loyalist combatant, for example, preferred language that acknowledged the possibility of changing attitudes and behavior: "I used to be a peace-breaker," he stated. "Now I'm a peace-maker." A recent sociological study refers to Brazilian police torturers as "violence workers," which emphasizes the institutionalized creation of perpetrators, rather than innate and immutable individual characteristics. For those who have committed authoritarian state violence, the role of perpetrator is neither neutral nor alluring.
Public attention may result from fictional and news accounts that depict perpetrators as extraordinarily evil, sadistic, and psychopathic. By contrast, most academic studies consider perpetrators of authoritarian violence normal. The psychologist Dan Bar-On, for example, claims that only 5 percent of Nazi perpetrators could be labeled psychopaths. The remaining 95 percent were motivated to commit atrocities as a result of a particular type of training, socialization, ideology, and power structure. The obedience experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in 1961-1962 concluded that most individuals obey authority, even when ordered to inflict harm on individuals without reasonable cause. Philip Zimbardo's 1971 prison experiments and a 2002 study of Brazilian torturers conducted by Martha K. Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Zimbardo claim that environments that authorize and reward individuals for violent acts breed violent perpetrators. John L. Sullivan, James Piereson, and George E. Marcus found that under the right set of circumstances nearly everyone is susceptible to acting violently against individuals who belong to a group they hate. Nonetheless, the media seek explanations that differentiate perpetrators from "the rest of us": abusive or repressive homes or deep psychological afflictions.
Misguided assumptions about perpetrators' psyches run so deep that even those who know better are susceptible to such prejudices. The journalist Tina Rosenberg, for example, wrote, "I did not want to think that many of the violent are 'people like us': so civilized, so educated, so cultured." The journalist Jann Turner fashioned herself a "Jodie Foster staring down the restrained psychotic form of a South African Hannibal Lecter" when she interviewed an apartheid assassin. I recall vividly the way my own heart beat on the way to my first interview with a perpetrator, assuming that some slip up on my part would make me one more victim of his violence.
Perpetrators, therefore, use social fronts to overcome this image when they take the public stage. Erving Goffman defines personal front as "expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow the performer wherever he goes." He includes among its features insignia of office or rank, clothing, sex, age, racial characteristics, size, appearance, posture, speech patterns, facial expressions, manner, and body language. Perpetrators can thus engage in "the whole theatrical array of gestures, demeanors, costumes, props, and stage devices" to "impress or bamboozle an audience." They make and remake their image; their front is "constantly constructed, negotiated, reformed, fashioned, and organized ..., a pragmatic piecing-together of preexisting scraps of material recalling ... 'bricolage.'" These fronts are not cut from whole cloth, but derived from existing and socially acceptable roles. Sometimes perpetrators adopt a front unconsciously and sincerely, believing that it represents their "truer self," the self they would like to be or believe they are. Alternatively, they may deliberately and cynically construct an appropriate front, either alone or in consultation with their colleagues, family members, or lawyers. These cynical fronts provide a pragmatic "means to other ends," but a perpetrator may also derive "a kind of gleeful spiritual aggression from the fact that he can toy at will with something his audience must take seriously."
Perpetrators use other techniques, in addition to social fronts, to diminish negative images associated with their past. Through "doubling," for example, perpetrators present alternative selves and lives. Their social lives appear incompatible with common images of perpetrators, as they portray themselves to be morally upright and religious, good neighbors, and good citizens, doting parents, loving and faithful partners, generous and caring friends. Their work lives appear beyond reproach: they are dedicated, loyal, and efficient employees, willing to go the extra mile, and obedient to authority. In political life, they exhibit patriotism, duty to the nation, and a willingness to make personal sacrifices. Doubling diminishes the negative characteristics associated with perpetrators.
A "born again" narrative device presents a similar opportunity. In these cases, perpetrators admit to past wrongdoing, but consider themselves reformed and, as such, unassailable. Religious rebirth allows individuals to trade their sinful pasts for saintly presents. Recovering alcoholics and drug addicts among perpetrators use a similar trope. They explain their earlier acts as resulting from intoxication and as incompatible with their new, sober selves.
Primo Levi's notion of the "gray zone" points to how perpetrators reverse roles and identify themselves as victims. They recount or demonstrate the physical or psychological effects of their violence on their lives: drug or alcohol addiction, insomnia, anxiety, depression, or other scars of a tormented past. They suggest that they cannot be held responsible for the violent acts they committed when they were also victimized by those acts.
"To agree to perform is to agree to take a chance"; despite elaborate fronts and narrative devices, perpetrators do not always succeed in convincing their audiences of their "normality." They may lack effective acting or narrative skills. Too much contradiction or too many incompatibilities in their performance may render it incoherent to the audience. While they can alter certain personal characteristics (e.g., clothing or hairstyles), other attributes can indelibly mark them as perpetrators (e.g., background, build, movement and carriage, accent and word choice, facial expressions or emotions). Inappropriate performances, as Goffman notes, can derail perpetrators' objectives: "To be awkward or unkempt, to talk or move wrongly, is to be a dangerous giant, a destroyer of worlds. As every psychotic and comic ought to know, any accurately improper move can poke through the thin sleeve of immediate reality."
Contentious coexistence demands performances by political actors, but it understands that such performances shift across time, stages, and in response to audiences. Those shifts indicate political adjustments made through interaction with other elements in democratic society. Subtle changes in the performance may reveal an understanding and sensitivity to political events, institutions, or actors. Similarly, those parts of the performance replayed or remembered publicly demonstrate how political meaning changes over time and in conjunction with theatrical and political elements.
Confessional Scripts. Adapting Ndebele's elegant formulation, I argue that confessional scripts allow perpetrators to reinvent their past through narrative. Perpetrators do not recount their past as it occurred at the time, nor do they necessarily possess "a claim to truth or accuracy." The stories they tell may be made up, consciously or unconsciously, to fit a particular political moment or personal need. They may even contradict the common understanding of confession as an acknowledgment of guilt or wrongdoing. Perpetrators' accounts, or reinventions, of their past include remorse, heroism, denial, sadism, silence, fiction and lies, amnesia, and betrayal.
Audiences often perceive confessional reinventions as deliberate manipulations that minimize guilt, rather than acknowledge it. And sometimes they are. At other times, however, confessions simply reflect the creative process of trying to piece together the past with partial and selective memory. Memory is imperfect and unreliable, as is well known among psychologists, historians, legal professionals, and law-enforcement agents. Perpetrators and nonperpetrators alike tell "vital lies" about their past, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unconsciously creating stories that add meaning and coherence to their lives. In their confessions, perpetrators describe how they remember their past, or how they want it to be remembered, reconstructing their pasts through narrative.
Creating vital lies involves several processes. Perpetrators employ, for example, "salvage operations," the conscious or unconscious choice to retain certain parts of the remembered past and to jettison others that do not fit "present-day discourses and desires." The present political context acts as a filter, molding and modifying memory "to fit into the understanding and expectations of the society in which it is presented." Salvage operations filter and select facts, seeing only what is convenient to see and transforming memory fragments into a coherent and consistent story.
To fill in memory gaps, perpetrators use contrivance, adding details, sometimes out of sequence, or borrowed from other moments or others' memories, or even imagined, but believed to be true. These details give memory body and life, and accurately represent how perpetrators remember events (or want to remember them), even if they do not match the chronology or factual set of events.
Socialization also frames vital lies. Families, schools, churches, and military institutions shape how people experience events in the past and even teach a specific language for talking about those events, or to avoid talking about them. Over time, social norms or individual attitudes change values and influence the way in which individuals remember their past. Sometimes they may do so according to their new set of values and thus reinvent their past. At other times, they cannot escape the language of memory that they learned originally, and they remain trapped in a particular narrative about the past.
Perpetrators of authoritarian state violence do not speak about their acts of violence at the time those acts are committed. Elizabeth Jelin's ominous statement, "If there are no words ... there cannot be memories," may explain the absence of confession by perpetrators. Formal and informal gag rules pervade authoritarian periods. It is common for perpetrators to recount official sanctions and self-censorship that prevented them from talking about their violent acts, even to their colleagues, family and friends, and counselors. Gag rules persist into democratic periods, sometimes through violence, threats, and intimidation. Perpetrators may deliberately erase their violent acts more from consciousness, so they can learn to live with themselves without ghosts and haunting memories. Perpetrators' silence and amnesia not only reflect this learning process, but may also be used instrumentally to avoid reprisals.
When perpetrators do speak out, they often evoke the vocabulary they were taught by the authoritarian regime: denial, justification, excuses, and euphemisms that hide their acts from themselves and others. They may do so even when they feel remorse for their past, for they simply have no other language. The language of war, and particularly "unconventional war" (counterinsurgency), pervades their confessions, sanitizing atrocity. The vocabulary of "interrogating" or "eliminating" the enemy in a "war," for example, obscures the reality of kidnapping, torturing, executing, poisoning, raping, and disappearing prisoners held in covert detention centers. Perpetrators characterize the defenseless victims in those camps as ferocious enemies whose defeat requires military virtues of self-sacrifice, patriotism, heroism, and bravery. As soldiers, perpetrators contend, they have a duty to defend the nation from communism, terrorism, or barbarism. Asserting that the ends (defeating the threat to the nation) justify the (usually unarticulated) means, perpetrators portray themselves as forces of "good" against the forces of "evil."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from UNSETTLING ACCOUNTS by LEIGH A. PAYNE Copyright © 2008 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixAbbreviations xiii
Introduction: The Political Power of Confession 1
1. Confessional Performance 13
2. Remorse 41
3. Heroic Confessions 75
4. Sadism 107
5. Denial 141
6. Silence 173
7. Fiction and Lies 197
8. Amnesia 229
9. Betrayal 251
Conclusion: Contentious Coexistence 271
Notes 293
Bibliography 343
Index 353