Zizek writes about the United States military's support of torture and the following exposure in the Abu Ghraib scandal. He relates the practice of torture to acts of hazing in school and the military. "to be accepted into a closed community" is the goal of most hazing rituals. But the main difference is the acts were perpetrated as exclusionary rather than for acceptance. These acts were to initiate the prisoners into the darkest side of American culture, the "obscene underside of the public values of personal dignity, democracy, and freedom." He also comments on Rumsfeld's "known knowns" (the things we know that we know) and "known unknowns" (the things we know that we don't know) and suggests that Rumsfeld should have included the "unknown knowns" (the things we didn't know that know). These unknown knowns are "the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we enact but don’t allow ourselves to see, and which—via practices such as outsourcing—are becoming increasingly easy to ignore" I believe that the exposure of such unknown knowns has only made these acts more secretive and harder for further events to come to light rather than eliminating these practices altogether.
1. Does one blame the solider for committing these acts? or the military for creating the environment for these acts to be committed?
2. How can we better expose "unknown knowns" such as hazing rituals and torture
3. Are we as citizens partially responsible for these acts by living under and supporting a government that commits these crimes?
