The Boger Swing

[endarkenment]

A metaphor for what we have become.


Was that something to do with the word altalena? I asked. “The Boger swing”? Yes, it was a meter-long iron bar suspended by chains hung from the ceiling. We could never have imagined what it was for until she described it, in a monotone spoken as by rote, its details recalled and rehearsed repeatedly during her months bearing witness in Frankfurt. A prisoner would be brought in for “questioning,” stripped naked and bent over the bar, wrists manacled to ankles. A guard at one side would shove him – or her — off across the chamber in a long, slow arc, while Boger would ask “questions,” at first quietly, then barking them out, and at the last bellowing. At each return, another guard armed with a crowbar would smash the victim across the buttocks. As the swinging went on and on, and the wailing victim fainted, was revived only to faint howling again, the blows continued —until only a mass of bleeding pulp hung before their eyes. Most perished from the ordeal; some sooner, some later; in the end a sack of of bones and flayed flesh and fat was swept along the shambles of that concrete floor to be dragged away.


From Frau Braun and The Tiger of Auschwitz
By Jascha Kessler
March 26th, 2007
http://calitreview.com/33

[Ilsa]

1. People wonder if there are demons in this world. We don't need them, not

with cruelty like this imagined and constructed by humans to be used against humans.

[derby378]

2. I don't think any American has been accused of using the Boger swing

We've used the waterboard, the strappado, and all sorts of psychological torture, but not this. Not that I'm aware of.

As your post hinted at, this technique was used in the infamous torture cells of Auschwitz, usually to "interview" Jewish prisoners in order to find out what they knew of the resistance movement.

Our species' capacity for unspeakable cruelty towards our own kind never ceases to astound me.

[endarkenment]

3. That is why it is a metaphor.

Yes of course we would never do anything like that. Except that we beat people to death in abu ghraib and bhagram, oh well never mind that, we are not nazis you know. Neither were they. They were good Germans following legal orders.

[derby378]

4. Hey, I'm pissed off over what's going on in DC, too

Rahm Emanuel has publicly declared that the White House isn't going to hold the Bush administration accountable for torture. How do you think that makes me feel?

[endarkenment]

5. You should feel ashamed. I do. nt.

[derby378]

6. What I am is angry, not ashamed

Had I tortured anyone, had I signed off on the torture techniques, or had I decided not to go after those who were involved in the torture techniques, then I would be ashamed. But the Obama administration couldn't be so clueless as to think that we wanted all these schmucks to simply walk away. Something very wrong is going on in DC.