From 50 Years of Teaching and Training Torturers, Counterpunch, Nov. 3, 2004 an analysis of the Kubark Manual on torture techniques.
Some excerpts from the article:
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“It notes that psychological rather than physical debility will break a suspect sooner: “The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain.”
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“Caballero said the CIA taught that psychological coercion was more effective than physical torture.”
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“Fay’s Abu Ghraib report makes the same point about dehumanizing interrogations degenerating: “What started as nakedness and humiliation, stress and physical training, carried over into sexual and physical assaults.”
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This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort and humiliation
has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning and near asphyxiation.”Item
“The Fay report noted that nudity likely “contributed to an escalating ‘de-humanization’ of the detainees and set the stage for additional and more severe abuses to occur.”
Lila: Physical torture was actually seen by interrogators as less effective than psychological torture, but an inevitable development from it.
Note how psychological stressors were the means to break down the subject – isolation, dehumanization, humiliation, and sensory deprivation.
Dehumanization, isolation, and humiliation are all inextricable parts of cyberharassment.
All of these are considered torture in its most sophisticated form, according to the CIA itself.
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“Many psychologists consider the threat of inducing debility to be more effective than debility itself.”
“Bullying,” like “hazing” and “ragging” (in India), are part of the inculcation of the brutality that undergirds imperial culture.
They are practices specifically introduced into British public schools for developing the character required to man the empire. From that has developed the attitude of indifference to what is nothing more than training in psychological cruelty.
Being stripped publicly on the net is no different psychologically from being stripped physically.
The fact that it happened in the “good old days” doesn’t turn it into a good thing.