Without Sanctuary

'...an African American male' circa 1900, location unknown [Without Sanctuary]

The mob numbered into the thousands that wrenched five black men from the civil authorities of Salisbury, North Carolina on the night of August 3, 1906. They accused the men of murdering members of a local family, named Lyerly. The New York Times reported that the victims were tortured with knives before being hanged and then riddled with bullets. The authorities in North Carolina, alarmed at what was one of the largest multiple lynchings of the 20th century, took unusual steps to punish the leaders of the mob.

After the Governor ordered the National Guard to restore order, local officials arrested more than two-dozen suspected leaders. One of the killers, George Hall, was convicted and sentenced to 15 years at a hard labor in the state penitentiary. The New York Times predicted that, by taking these measures, North Carolina's Governor Glenn was not improving his political prospects. more...

Deliverance Comes to Iraq

Ms. England’s own least appealing traits appear to have thrived with stunning perversity on the lingering energies of Abu Ghraib prison, such that she and her friends succeeded in bringing American pornography’s abiding concern with a visual record of degradation, to a role reversal of what George W. Bush claims went on in Saddam Hussein’s prison "rape rooms." But in giving an American female face to the legacy of Saddam’s male torturers, she and her friends seem to have brought some "backwoods world" twists that would have done the mountain men in Deliverance proud.

According to the Telegraph’s Sharon Churcher, "the poor, barely-educated and almost all-white population" of Fort Ashby "talk openly about an active Ku Klux Klan presence." And indeed the iconography of the hooded prisoners recalls precisely — but again indulges through projection in reversal — the spooky anonymous hoods of the Klan. What’s more, though, another local woman, Colleen Kesner, explained to Churcher why Lynndie England is locally seen as a hero: "A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq. To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human. That's the way girls like Lynndie are raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you're hunting something. Over there, they're hunting Iraqis." more...

(See also Doug Ord's Comment for May and Seven Days in May [title page])

Note In What Have We Done?, published today, Susan Sontag examines the pornography of lynch-mob imagery (and the printed version of the site referenced above, Without Sanctuary), before ripping the hood from the face of George W. Bush's so-called War on Terror. The Guardian asks, "The horrific images from Abu Ghraib have come to define the ill-starred occupation of Iraq, but what do they really tell us about America? Are they simply the work of a few rogue soldiers, or the result of the new foreign and domestic policies of the Bush administration, which find ready approval in an increasingly brutalised society?" Like Doug Ord, Susan Sontag delivers.