Victoria Fontan

Victoria Fontan in Baghdad

The 16-31 March issue of Counterpunch features an article by Victoria Fontan, a scholar in “Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies,” a growing subfield of Peace Studies.  Fontan studies conditions under which people who have been humiliated are more likely than others to become terrorists.  She has interviewed members of several violent groups in Lebanon and Iraq.  In this article, Professor Fontan tells what happened when she taught at Colgate University in upstate New York and a group of right-wingers launched a smear campaign against her.  The smear mongers managed to hound her out of her job and to get her name on an official terrorism watchlist.  A French citizen, Professor Fontan did research in Iraq after leaving Colgate, and now teaches at The University for Peace in Costa Rica.  While Colgate’s campus rightists may consider Professor Fontan to be a stooge of America’s enemies and congratulate themselves on having performed a patriotic service by driving her off campus and out of the country, much of the US national security apparatus disagrees.  Her work is still assigned to cadets at West Point, and the FBI agents who interview her every time she flies into the USA (she’s on a terrorism watchlist, remember) have become her friends, recognizing in her research something indispensible to them as they try to figure out how to look for terrorists without making more terrorists. 

Fontan’s article reminds me of two things.  First, I’ve often thought that in the Aeneid Vergil represents warfare as primarily a matter of humiliation.  One of these days I might get around to developing that idea in a scholarly article about books 7 through 12 of the Aeneid, the “battle books.”  

Second, an idea popped into my head which I don’t believe is original with me, though I can’t seem to find where I may have picked it up.  It doesn’t seem to be Fontan’s idea.  The idea is that the road from “humiliated person” to “terrorist” may tend to run in three stages:  humiliation→ isolation→ radicalization. 

1. Humiliation: A person is humiliated.  The humiliator might be one person, a group of people, or a political entity such as a state or an army.  The humiliating event might take an obvious form, such as rape or some other form of physical torture, or a more subtle form, such as long-term unemployment.  The event might even be something that an outside observer would be tempted to dismiss as trivial, as for example in cases of “humiliation by proxy.”  What sets off the process is nothing inherent in the original humiliation, but the consequent desire of the person who has been humiliated to avoid humiliation.  Having suffered humiliation, a person’s strongest, most urgent wish might well be to avoid further humiliation.   

2. Isolation: The humiliated person may withdraw from others.  Of course, s/he may not; certainly we all know people who have responded to humiliation by building or rebuilding relationships that have enabled them to meet the world head on.  Others do withdraw, however. 

This withdrawal may be a process the humiliated person initiates him/herself, driven by the fear of further humiliation; or it may be initiated by others, who pull away from the person either because the person’s humiliation frightens them or because they side with his or her humiliator.  In either of these cases, the humiliated person has contact with fewer people than s/he was in contact with before being humiliated.  Much of the contact s/he still does have, moreover, may be shallower than it was before the humiliation, drained of the emotional richness that once was available. 

Many humiliated persons are  overwhelmed by the loneliness that comes from this loss of contact.  Some withdraw from all social contact.  Many, too many, turn their hostility inward and end by committing suicide. Others fall into terrorism.  Who are they?

Maybe they aren’t so different from those who don’t withdraw at all.  To whom can the humiliated person turn to relieve his or her new loneliness?  To others who have suffered similar humiliations.  Or, to those who are strong, invulnerable, able to protect him or her from future humiliations.  Certainly not to those who are indifferent to the humiliation, or to those who try to justify the humiliation, or to those who are likely to inflict more humiliation. 

So the humiliated person may form a little circle of fellow sufferers.  To stay in that circle, one will have to continually reassure the other members that one is not about to humiliate them or side with their humilators.  So the circle develops a great many rituals of reassurance.  Along with these rituals of reassurance come ritual displays of hostility toward the humiliators.  Anyone uninitiated in these rituals is suspect.  Anyone who challenges the rituals is an enemy.  As the circle’s rituals become more elaborate, they take up more of the members’ attention.  The members of the circle become less and less able to interact with those outside.  Eventually, the circle provides its members their only emotional support, their only social identity. 

3. Radicalization: In his novel Journey to the End of Night, the French novelist and “man of hate” Céline famously speculated that perhaps what we call madness is nothing more than “the ordinary ideas of mankind shut up tight.”   One can see how the members of the sort of circle described above might shut their ordinary ideas up tight. 

Once the circle becomes the members’ only reference group, its members begin to see people outside the circle as abstractions.   Then, the only concerns that are real to any member of the circle are the concerns that affect the circle.  These concerns are defined in terms of the rituals that dominate the circle’s interactions.  So no one outside the circle has any concerns that matter, or indeed a life that is to be valued.  If therefore the circle judges its ritual displays of hostility toward the humiliators no longer adequate and demands acts of violence against outsiders, the members of the circle cannot imagine any legitimate reason to refuse to commit those such acts.  At that point they believe that only cowards, traitors, agents of the oppressor will restrict themselves to peaceful resistance.  If they actually commit acts of violence, the victims who survive those acts will of course be humiliated by them.  Thus the process begins anew, with another set of humiliated and humiliators.   

This schema might apply equally well to a small group, like the terrorist cells Fontan has studied in Lebanon and Iraq; to lone individuals; and to political entities.  Recently I’ve read some reviews of memoirs by people who held senior posts in the G. W. Bush administration in the fall of 2001.  The reviewers have noted the sense of humiliation that pervaded that administration after 9/11.  In command of the mightiest arsenal the world has ever seen and sworn to protect the USA against attack, the Bushies let a ragtag band carry out a spectacular attack against the country.  Their humiliation was shared by Americans everywhere.  The strangely closed political discourse of the USA in the months after the attacks, with its “You are either for us or against us” tone, is what we would expect to hear among a group of freshly humiliated people who were determined to prevent a repeat of the experience.  The crackpot realism of the Washington elite that decided to invade and occupy Iraq in March 2003 could then be seen as the outcome of the same process that has given such a grisly character to so many of the Iraqi groups resisting that occupation.

Posted by acilius on April 16, 2009

https://losthunderlads.com/2009/04/16/victoria-fontan/