The utility of torture

according to Horkheimer and Adorno has to do with the speeded up assimilation of people into collectives. This is of course, stated from the point of view of the collective and its initiation of torturers. This is why whistle blowers on torture are seen as violators' of an unwritten code that governs the complicity in criminal activity. To treat others like things is to be in solidarity with the total destruction of our capacity for experience.

But as Gabi Schwab mentioned in a recent paper, torture is also the secret that can't be kept -- it unleashes fantasies of omnipotence and perversion on a collective level. To condemn torture is not enough. We have to identify its effects and affects. All the head-shaking and hand-wringing in the world will not change what has happened -- that the distance between people has been radically destroyed, leading to a dangerous fantasy or feeling of absolute invinicibility on the part of US military and mercernaries alike.