POW-ness: Implications for Viet Nam, Argentina's Dirty War, and, to a lesser degree, the Neo-Cons'

[patrice]

War on Middle-Class Americans:

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

"Torture as 'Curing'

While the policies attempted to excise collectivism from the culture, inside the prisons torture tried to excise it from the mind and spirit. As an Argentine junta editorial noted in 1976, 'minds too must be cleansed, for that is where the error was born.'
...

In testimony from truth commission reports across the region, prisoners tell of a system designed to force them to betray the principle most integral to their sense of self. For most Latin American leftists, that most cherished principle was what Argentina's radical historian Osvaldo Bayer called 'the only transcendental theology; solidarity.' The torturers understoood the importance of solidarity well, and they set out to shock the impulse of social interconnectedness out of their priosoners. Of course all interrogation is purportedly about gaining valuable information and therefore forcing betrayal, but many priosoners report that their torturers were far less interested in the information, which they usually already possessed, than in achieving the act of betrayal itself. The point of the exercise was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else, that part of themselves that made them activists, replacing it with shame and humiliation.

Prisoners were goaded into being as individualistic as possible, constantly offered Faustian bargains, like choosing between more unbearable torture for themselves or more torture for a fellow prisoner.... These prisoners represented the ultimate triumph for their torturers; not only had the prisoners abandoned solidarity but in order to survive they had succumed to the cuttroat ethos at the heart of laissez-faire capitalism - 'looking out for No. 1,' in the words of (an) ITT executive."

In addition to a certain rather famous POW whom I don't need to name, think of other different kinds of prisoners, in different types and degrees of restrictive/coercive environments, and different degrees of torture some more covert than others. Seems to explain at least some of the heartlessness one encounters out there.