[Mb-civic] Primo Levi On Guantanamo - Richard Cohen - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Primo Levi On Guantanamo

By Richard Cohen
Thursday, July 28, 2005; Page A25

NEW YORK -- I need to be very careful here, to say precisely what I mean 
and leave nothing to chance. I have just seen the play "Primo," which is 
performed by a single actor, Antony Sher, with material taken from Primo 
Levi's incomparable "If This Is a Man," the book that made the obscure 
Italian chemist an international literary sensation. It is an account of 
his time spent in Auschwitz. I could not help but think of Abu Ghraib or 
Guantanamo.

I know, I know. One must never compare anything to the Holocaust. One 
must never invoke Nazism except in reference to the Nazis. One must 
isolate that era as a way of honoring the victims, keeping it pristine 
and removed from all other human experience because it was so uniquely 
awful. I know all this -- and I believe it, too.

What's more, I am not likening what happened at Auschwitz and the other 
camps to what's happening or happened at Guantanamo and other places 
where America's enemies -- real or supposed -- are kept. Our purpose is 
not to murder. We do not engage in slave labor. We are not evil, and our 
intent is to safeguard the innocent both here and abroad, not to kill 
them for whatever reason. I hope I have made myself clear.

<>Yet much of this remarkable play is not about genocide and the 
annihilation of many, but about shame and the annihilation of self. The 
famous number, 6 million, is never mentioned. When numbers are used, 
they are small and comprehensible -- squads, for instance. Levi, after 
all, was not killed right off, as most were, but was made a slave 
laborer, slated for death eventually but kept alive to do mostly 
meaningless work and so severely abused that it amounted to a 
minute-by-minute torture. The purpose of the torture, aside from it 
mostly having none at all, was to annihilate the prisoner's sense of 
self. For Levi and the others at Auschwitz, it meant the loss of his 
identity and the replacement of his name with a number, 174517. It was 
an inventory tag.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072800216.html?nav=hcmodule 

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