Music: The Sound of Torture & War

Disco Inferno

And he was left in a room soldiers blithely called The Disco, a place where Western music rang out so loud that his interrogators were, in Qutaji’s words, forced to “talk to me via a loudspeaker that was placed next to my ears.”

I have an idea that everyone, regardless of location or nationality wants one thing more than any other in the world: to love and to be loved. I think there is a moment in everyone’s lives when they understand love, whether it is making love, holding a newborn infant, or having an honest and intimate conversation. The feeling is undeniable in these precious moments. Similarly, there is a breathtaking moment with a song that makes a positive difference in our lives.

Blending these two ideas together, I remember the first time I saw my wife; I knew she was the one. I can still recall our first kiss and how beautiful she was as she walked down the isle on our wedding day. Similarly, I remember sitting in my car as a depressed adolescent listening to “Fight the Good Fight” by Triumph. “There’s an answer in your heart,” Rick Emmett sang passionately.

Fight the Good Fight

Nothing is easy, nothing good is free

But I can tell you where to start

Take a look inside your heart

There’s an answer in your heart

That song and numerous others have made a difference in my life with and without words, and that makes me think about why that is. I remember something I forgot I did.

I wrote this one evening in a philosophical mood last year, I titled it “Relationship with the Music.”
 

Relationship with the Music

As a sixteen year old adolescent, I was extremely privileged to be hiking in the Cimarron Mountains as a Life Scout on the Philmont Scout Range. I was a lover of Ozzy Osbourne and of Ronnie James Dio. On the other hand, I was also privileged to be taking jazz lessons on my tenor saxophone from a man who strongly promoted my listening to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. I related to Bird the first time I spun his record on my turntable. I wouldn’t “get” Trane until much later, yet something in my soul wanted to understand him. I made it my personal goal not to reflect on metal during that trip, but to reflect in my aural memory during the fifteen nights the music of jazz I had been trying to “get.” I remembered a  Branford Marsalis song during the day and it seemed to get clearer and clearer in my aural memory (sax solo only, of course); then, I woke up one  morning recalling Kenny Drew’s  piano solo in “I’m Old Fashioned” on Coltrane’s “Blue Trane” in my aural memory. I had not heard any music for a week. It was the most beautiful thing I ever heard in my mind.

Conversely, when I felt really exhausted, I would “play” the music of Ronnie James Dio in my mind. It pumped me up and helped me keep going. Music had affected my body, my mind, and my emotions. My soul formulated  a deeper relationship with it. Pondering the butterfly effect with that musical experience without any recorded music (there was the music of Mother Earth) led me to a conclusion.
 

I am a microcosm and what affects one affects the whole macrocosm. Therefore, music affects (at least as organized vibrations) the collective body, the collective mind, the collective emotions, and the souls of everything when and if those four things have a relationship with the music.

I have an advanced degree in music, I’ve taught it one way or the other since 1993, and if I ever lost music; I think I’d die. In fact, I almost did once because I temporarily lost my ability to play music – or to be music (there’s a reason psychologists say artists and schizophrenics have things in common, but what can you do?). Hence, I’ve got something to say about music being used as a “technique” of torture.

ACLU pdf file

I looked inside the adjacent interview room. At that time I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing –

Music as torture / Music as weapon

One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war.

It is an outrage to take any human being and break them with music and anything else into an infantile and helpless state of mind, which will deprive them and their family of the love experience because of the immense trauma it creates. Torture just isn’t un-American and immoral; it’s anti-love.

The first site of a true love is replaced by being abducted, the first kiss is replaced by violence, and the lifetime commitment made is to a dark marriage of evil memories and severe psychological traumas. Concluding the analogy, the hope that music gives is stripped of hope and changed into a traumatic psychological trigger which will be pulled in the future. Whatever song was playing, whenever that person hears it, they will remember the torture that accompanied it
(having the “Israeli flag draped around him” and the strobe lights, for instance). Whether or not the prisoner is ever freed, the use of music in their torture makes it torture for their lifetime when a particular song(s) plays.

A valid criticism might be, “This author is no psychologist, he doesn’t know enough about what he’s saying to say it.” I would then answer, “Yes, but have you ever been around a war veteran when firecrackers went off around them unexpectantly?”

Odors and Sounds as Triggers for Medically Unexplained Symptoms: A Fixed-Occasion Diary Study of Gulf War Veterans

Conclusions: These results are consistent with an associative mechanism underlying symptom reporting in veterans. By contrast, the duration, but not the intensity, of sound was related to the severity of MUS reporting on the same day.

I would graciously concede my opinion to a trained and credible psychologist; however, I would not concede my opinion to any psychologist who uses their skills to help torture and “interrogate.”  Go to Valtin’s diary “(Round 2) Stop Torture Campaign — Netroots Can Play Special Role” and see what I mean and take some action to stop torture, please.

What’s the direct relevance? Only my guess that the psychologists who aid in torture “pick” the musical selections. I don’t know.

In addition to being exploited to torture human beings stripped of habeas corpus and their dignity at present, music has been used as propaganda in the past.

Music as War Propaganda Did Music Help Win The First World War?

In the 1930s and 1940s, the arts held a prominent place in the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism. In 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor, Schott published the Badonviller Marsch, Hitler’s “official entrance music” (similar in meaning to the American President’s Hail to the Chief ) and put together a group of “hearth and home” songs with the title German Homeland. In 1934, Hermann Blume’s Adolf Hitler Fanfare was published in a collection of marches. (Kowalke, 4-5) During the summer of 1942, Hitler suggested that propaganda broadcasts aimed at Britain and America should contain musical styles that appealed to those audiences, resulting in the use of popular music to deliver messages to other cultures.

And remember that “Gary Owen” was used by Custer before he slaughtered Black Kettle’s village.

The Death & Vision of Moxtaveto (Black Kettle)

The village slept as the first morning rays were darkened by grey clouds, then a 7th Calvary rifle broke the silence, echoing through the trees. Custer’s military band played “Gary Owen,” but the song sounded flat before the instruments froze, halting the song in the chilling air.

The notoriousness of that song has lasted for generations and still does to this day. So would “Hell’s Bells” by AC/DC (another old song I love) in the minds of torture victims, or for that matter – wedding bells.

Which of your favorite songs are being used to torture?

While you’re thinking about that, see if this takes you back; I think Twisted Sister has some good advice (I know this dates me a little, oh well).

“We’re Not Gonna Take It”


I think of the verbally abusive father as the Military Commissions Act

We’re Not Gonna Take It”

We’re not gonna take it

No we ain’t gonna take it

We’re not gonna take it anymore

We’ve got the right to choose

And there ain’t no way we’ll lose it

This is our life, this is our song

We’ll fight the powers that be just

don’t pick our destiny cause

You don’t know us, you don’t belong

Hmmm – I’m just saying:

BMI

As a performing right organization, BMI issues licenses to various users of music, including television and radio stations and networks; new media, including the Internet and mobile technologies such as ringtones and ringbacks; satellite audio services like XM and Sirius; nightclubs, discos, hotels, bars, restaurants and other venues; digital jukeboxes; and live concerts. It then tracks public performances of its members’ music, and collects and distributes licensing revenues for those performances as royalties to the more than 300,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers it represents, as well as the thousands of creators from around the world who have chosen BMI for representation in the U.S.

Bands have a right to know if their music is being used to torture – don’t you think?

I would be furious to even imagine music I wrote was being used to torture. I’d join the ACLU,

I’d want to support Sen. D. Feinstein D-Ca. Files Bill To Close Gitmo, I wouldn’t support any protorture candidates, and – I just might write some songs about it and organize concerts condemning torture. See what I’m saying?