To the editors:
As a supplement to Omar McDoom’s review, readers might wish to consider variations within the macabresque. Such variations cluster around a tripartite taxonomy, stemming from the communist left, the fascist right, and the supremacist sectarian right. These ideological doctrines and political cultures predict for how human violations occur. They also point to explanations for how specific genocidal movements justify massive scales of human suffering to the ranks of perpetrators who engage in it. The macabresque theoretical framework demonstrates that victims suffer in three primary modes—torture, agony, and torment—and explains why.
Under the communist left, the political conditions and ideological commonalities include the following: primacy of the party vanguard or center as interpreters of political truth or ideological meaning, doctrinal or canonical fundamentalism, radical egalitarianism, class supremacism, and massive collectivization campaigns leveled at rural or peasant agriculture, villages, and urban centers. Ideological validity and adherence assume absolute existential validity; doctrinal deviance is the ultimate crime. Victims are deemed guilty for exhibiting incorrect ideology. Reeducation becomes the dramaturgical format for staging human violation; torture becomes its means, method, mechanism. The illogic of the perpetrators assumes that “reeducation” is connected with confession; victims must suffer torture in order to be made to confess to their sins of deviant thinking. Only then can they be disposed of. In this form of the macabresque, the application of torture is linked to the dramaturgies of confession.
Under fascist-right regimes, political conditions and ideological commonalities include racialization of segmented lineage and kinship communities based on supremacist notions of human physicality, geneticized ethnicity (Aryan or Hutu), and exclusivist nationalism. The guilt of victims is determined by their bodies, genetic composition, and physicality. Their crime is not in how or what they think; rather, it derives from their congenital being. The victims’ bodies thus become the vehicle of punishment. The macabresque modalities ensue from this logic; physical mutilation, dismemberment, evisceration, impalement, and disembowelment are the instruments of suffering, precisely because perpetrators consider the body to be the existential fault of victims. Victims are often cast in racist and derogatory terms associated with disease or lesser forms of life. Torture is not the preferred method of violation because perpetrators tend to be relatively indifferent, generally speaking, to how or what victims think. The macabresque executed at the behest of fascist movements, therefore, tend to operate in terms of suffering and agony as opposed to torture, because victims in this subset are not expected to confess.
The ideology common among political regimes and genocidal movements on the sectarian right include canonical supremacism that combines religious nationalism with sectarian extremism, often in ways that racialize ethnicity. This format of human violation invokes a sacral mandate to exhort followers, as well as cadres of militia or paramilitary troops, to act as agents of putative divine will. Often termed ethnic cleansing, it has a goal of purification. Purification involves modalities of suffering driven by repression and forced expulsion, typically from traditional lands. But the macabresque agenda is about more than territorial occupation; its modes of attack embrace kinds of violation devoted to denying a sense of intergenerational continuity among the members of the victimized groups. Victims are made to suffer, not on account of incorrect thinking or because of faults in bodily composition, but for what perpetrators ideologically construe as sins of wayward or deviant spiritualism. Extremist macabresque sectarianism falls especially hard on those who represent reproductive futurity: women in general, women as mothers, children, and families as a whole. Perpetrators aim to bring heaven to earth through macabresque methods of purification and salvific vindication, often through sexualized violation, rape, and the bludgeoning of infants. Ethnic purification and violation at the behest of sectarian extremism leads to a third kind of suffering: torment. Torment involves lingering emotional, psychological, and spiritual harms and guilts. It is also manifest in an unrelenting sense of shame, often experienced within families and in particular by women and girls who are left to live devastated by attacks not only on their bodies but on their deepest bonds and beliefs, their dearest loves, and cherished hopes.
My overall finding is that the logic of illogic in the dramaturgical and aestheticized formats of the macabresque materialize in the ways that suffering is inflicted. In each subset, perpetrators advance a particular form of illogic to justify the modes of suffering they exact on victims. A considerable portion of the historiographic evidence adduced in my book addresses how and why this tripartite set of outcome conditions were produced.
