A Torture Scene with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Last week I had a somewhat disturbing dream involving Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In the dream, Burton was being tortured by electroshocks. He was seated on a couch in which one cushion had been removed so that his body was on a metal plate. He was wearing a herringbone sport coat and semi-formal attire.  With limbs quivering, eyes ablaze with terror and fingers curled alongside his face, he looked like a terrified, helpless animal.  

On the far side of the room was a man in a lab coat fiddling with knobs like a studio engineer adjusting a soundboard.

Elizabeth Taylor, wearing an incongruous grin, was standing over her suffering prey looking triumphant. 

* * *

When I awoke, my first thought was about the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which featured a cruel, escalating  conflict between Taylor and Burton.

As I reflected further, a number of things came to mind, the first being: This was the not the purpose of bringing electricity into the world. One of electricity's benefits is light, electricity being a source of light in the world. It was not harnessed for the purpose of torturing people.

Looking into it further, I discovered that the Ancient Greeks noticed how rubbing amber produced static electricity. Ben Franklin linked electricity to lightning in 1752. Alessandro Volta created the first battery (1800), Michael Faraday later discovered electromagnetic induction (1831), enabling generation. Electricity exists in nature as electrons and charges; humans learned to harness it in the 18th–19th centuries.

What we see is that humans did not "create" electricity, they discovered it, and learned how to apply it.

In the late 19th century power lines began to appear. The first long-distance line was built to carry electricity between Williamette Falls and Portland, Oregon, a stretch of 13 miles. Within a matters of years high-voltage AC transmission enabled efficient delivery everywhere.

The advent of dedicated electric torture devices for interrogation appeared in the 1930s' The electric prod was purportedly first used by police in Argentina in 1932. Essentially it was a modified cattle prod that delivered high-voltage, low-amperage shocks to sensitive body areas for pain without killing its subjects.

Hand-cranked magneto/dynamo devices (from field telephones or car batteries) were used for shocks in various contexts by the 1940s, notably by French forces in colonial Algeria and Vietnam in the 1950s, and in other places. 

The use of electricity for torture spread widely in the mid-20th century because it often leaves minimal visible marks, suiting regimes wishing to avoid scrutiny. It has since been documented in dozens of countries with devices like cattle prods, stun guns, and electrodes.

One of the shocking revelations of the Iraq War was our own use of electricity for torture and psychological coercion at Abu Ghraib prison. We denounced it as odious when Saddam Hussein was doing it, It's a shame our own nation dropped its own ethical standards in this pointless activity. We've been told all our lives that the ends don't justify the means. We also know that any information extracted by torture is unreliable. 

Sorry to be so depressing. 

"Man's inhumanity to man

makes countless thousands mourn."

--Robert Burns

If you're interested in learning about the history of electricity as a torture technology, click here.

 

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