For Adbusters, June 2005

Will showing Saddam Hussein in his underpants help our cause in the Middle East? Not among the Arabic peoples, who are, as it happens, the culture that invented chivalry, and who believe you must treat your enemy with honour. Not among the Red Cross, which thinks it a breach of the Geneva Convention. Not among European editorialists, to whom photos of naked people being tormented and killed, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, bring thoughts of the Holocaust. Not among those civil libertarians who value trial by jury, the right to a lawyer and a phone call, and release on bail before one's day in court. To all these it shows barbarism, a conquering army of ignorant rednecks out of control.

Imagine, for instance, a photo of the naked Colin Powell urinating on the floor. Would that help our enemies' cause? The Americans apparently think it would. Show your foe humiliated, abject, helpless, solied and foolish, and his followers, they think, will give up the struggle.

The followers of Jesus of Nazareth, curiously, did not abandon their cause after his whipping, buffeting, mocking, stripping and crucifixion. The followers of Che Guevara still revere him, and are currently storming the citadels of power in South America, despite the photos of his beating, shooting, slow agony and death. The supporters of John Tyndale did not cease to read his English Bible after his public burning at the stake. Where do Americans get their silly ideas?

From, I guess, their own culture, which is a culture of humiliation. In Little League Baseball, in Gridiron and the Spelling Bee, humiliation is the norm. In high school corridors and summer camp, in the secret societies of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, in the army, the navy and the air force (as in An Officer And A Gentleman) you shape up or go under. On American Idol, The Weakest Link, The Apprentice and How To Marry A Millionaire, on Gerry Springer and Jay Leno and Fox News and, yes, on Oscar Night, you are measured, apparently, by your ability to withstand humiliation, defeat and mockery. The Simpsons and South Park, Seinfeld, Married With Children and the films of Woody Allen record and celebrate this tendency. Films like Rocky and The Green Mile and Million Dollar Baby revel in it. The all-American concept of Winners and Losers (losers are the 98 percent who are not millionaires) reveres it.

It's what you'd expect, of course, from an immigrant culture. The same Manhattan streets that successively saw the Dutch, the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Puerto-Ricans, the Blacks, the Koreans and the Russians fighting for dominance, recognition, respect with fists and bricks and flick-knives made all-American these waves after waves of twitchy usurping humiliators.

So did Slavery, that ultimate imported humiliation. You see me take your woman, boy? Yes, massah. I am going to impregnate her, boy, and you are going to thank me for it. Yes massah, thank you massah. You, boy, are not thanking me sincerely enough. Thank you, massah, truly.

And so does its military culture which 40 percent of American males over forty have served in or grown up in. The parade-ground abuse, the forced marches, the dormitory bullying and faggot-bashing have shaped successive generations of ignorant white -- and black -- American males.

And so does its prison culture, in which Abu Ghraib-style humiliations are commonplace, a culture that thirty million Americans now living have had experience of. And so it is we have the pyramids of naked humans, the dogs attacking genitals, the menstrual pads rubbed on faces, the Korans hung where the toilet paper should be and, lately, Saddam in his underpants as the logical outcome of a culture that believes that this kind of treatment frightens the enemy into obedience: Wow, our leader has been humiliated, let's call off the suicide bombing.

What it does, of course, is increase a thousandfold the numbers of the enemy. Those numbers now include perhaps four billion people, some more passively, some more actively opposed to American policy and aghast at American brutishness on every continent and island of the world. The culture of humiliation, of bullying, of enslavement, of public mockery, is not thought very civilised by anyone, anywhere much. And yet we are aligned with it. How wrong we can be. And how friendless, very fast, every day, we are becoming.