Male and female victims alike carried with them the marks, physical and psychic, the scars on body and soul, that resulted from what they had endured and from what they remained immersed in even years later. One peers into a heart of darkness, that shadow of nihilism, when one reflects on such matters. Yet there are questions here from which one must not flinch. Several contributors to this volume have taken the burden on themselves to deepen our understanding of torture as politics and of that sustained form of pervasive bodily effacement called slavery. They do so in a way that rescues these matters from the banality into which they threaten to sink when ideologues, to their own ends and purposes, cheapen the realities here evoked in the interest of promoting a political agenda.
Human history is a story of deportations, banishments, bodily wrenchings and torments of every kind.
In the great state building period in Western Europe, armies were instruments deployed to help create the idea, and reality, of a unified body politic. Young men were torn from their villages and regions and put in uniforms, for this, along with state schooling, was the most effective way to forge identity with a nation-state by contrast to loyalty to a particular local place, Brittany or Lombardy or Bavaria. Indeed, the great historian of war, John Keegan, argues that all civilizations owe their origins to warmaking. War is not aberrant but routine, he avers. There has never been a pure, sustained pacifist or pacific haven.