America’s Never-Ending War With… Itself

Why the Brutal Death of an Innocent Man Should Matter to Us All

They warned how horrific it’d be. Memphis’ police chief said the video would show “acts that defy humanity.” The Director of the FBI called it “appalling.” And yet. If anything, they’d understated the case. The video of the death of Tyre Nichols? It is absolutely gut-wrenching, jaw-dropping, stomach-churning. I found myself crying out “My God,” over and over again, watching it.

I’d spent the day before — Holocaust Memorial Day — watching documentaries about that, modern history’s greatest crime. And on a visceral level? This video reminded me of that. It is bad on that level, and though some may object, I can’t help but — if not make an outright comparison, which I’m not doing — then at least find a resonance. In what way, though?

Let’s begin at the beginning. Many of you will think you’ve watched the video, and many haven’t. Many versions of the video I’ve seen floating around are sanitized or shortened or what have you. The best version I’ve seen, by far, is the one on the Washington Post’s website, where they sync up audio and video from multiple cameras. And when you see what happened unfold that way, well, it’s not just “the video” any longer. Now you feel as if you’re really witnessing the event.

That event I can scarcely do justice to in the confines we have here. Because the full documentation of it? It’s 38 minutes long. You could write a book about it, and hopefully many will. What it shows, briefly, is a sequence of events which go like this. A man is pulled over for a traffic stop. A routine traffic stop. And then the horror begins, almost instantaneously.

He’s stopped with what can only be described as absurd, incredible, outsized levels of rage and aggression. “Get the eff out of the car!!” “Get on the ground!!” Already, incredibly, the police are screaming at him in a kind of senseless rage.

Now. I’m going to pause already, though the story’s barely begun, to offer a simple enough thought. This would never happen in any other country — any other country — that I know of. In nearly every one of those, a routine traffic stop is…just that. It’s usually something like a polite interchange between a civil servant, a cop, and a citizen. OK, you did something wrong. Here’s your fine or ticket or what have you. Never — never in my life — have I seen these levels of rage and aggression, anywhere. Not even anything close to them.

It’s hard to make this point, because in America, such rage and aggression are normal, and that’s part of the problem, which I’m going to get to the heart of, but slowly, forgive me. In America? It’s totally OK for your boss to curse at you, scream at you, insult you, demean you. Authority figures of every kind in America have a kind of social power which doesn’t exist almost anywhere else: they can get away with aggression and rage that’d be considered literally off the charts in nearly every other society. So for example if, anywhere in Europe, or probably most of Canada, your boss screamed at you in rage, and called you all kinds of names…that’d be a serious issue. It violates basic norms. It’s an offense….by them. But if in America minor league authority figures like working superiors can abuse their power and belittle people…then is it any surprise that police can lash out in completely disproportionate levels of rage and aggression? Like, completely over the top ones?

Now. I’m far, far from a “defund the police” kind of guy. Sorry, I’ve lived in way, way too many lawless societies and failed states for that to make much sense to me. But something is clearly very wrong in America when abuses like this are commonplace. Police take this social norm of abusing power and authority to another level. And worse, they seem to think they’re fighting a war. They act like it. The only other times I’ve seen these levels of rage and aggression? In wars.

That is why what happens next happened.

What is that? American media puts it this way: “Video shows Tyre Nichols calling for his mother, beaten by officers now charged in his death.” That’s true, but it’s not accurate. It’s far more accurate, I think, to say this. A man was stopped at a routine traffic stop, and then…tortured to death.

What do we call it when people are…beaten to death? With clubs and batons? By, say, officers of some kind? When they’re not even resisting, and that’s still not enough to stop the blows? You see, on the video, the videos, from multiple angles, you can see no evidence, none, that Tyre Nichols was doing anything like resisting the police. How could he have? There were many of them, and one of him. What could he have possibly done to threaten them?

When someone is beaten to death, the appropriate term we should use is torture. Because, well, that’s what it is. Now, that brings to me my next point. Violence, extreme violence, is so normalized in America that Americans seem to have forgotten what forms of it, like torture, even are.

It’s just…in the air. It surrounds Americans, in mass shootings. But also in culture. It’s enculturated and socialized into Americans, extreme violence, from a young age, like nowhere else in the world. American culture isn’t just OK with it, it lionizes it. Just think of a show like the now infamous “Cops,” where the precursors to events like the above…are…totally acceptable…made out to be that…to mass audiences…and yet in most other countries…you can’t just curse and shout and rage at people…especially when you have power over them. Think of everything from video games to Marvel movies, and no, I’m not drawing some kind of simplistic linear relationship here. I’m just saying that extreme violence is normalized in American culture, because it’s long been a part of American society, and so Americans seem to have forgotten to even see events like this as…

A man being tortured to death. Think I go too far? Good. Excellent. Let’s review the actual literal dictionary definition of torture: “the action or practice of inflicting severe pain or suffering on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.”

Can you think of a single way in which this event doesn’t fit that definition? Probably not, even if it surprises you to learn that. This was the literal definition of torture — because, of course, Tyre Nichols could hardly have resisted doing anything, being met by several heavily armed cops. Hence, while they were beating him to death, he was crying out “Mama!!”

My God.

Let’s review for a moment what we’ve established so far. A man was tortured to death…at a routine traffic stop…for no reason. Do I need to say that again and italicize it? Hopefully you see that something is very, very wrong here, even over and above the obvious. None of this should be happening, and yet it happens over and over again. People are tortured to death for…nothing. Freddie Gray was selling…a cigarette. Tyre Nichols was driving a car. Ahmaud Arbery was…jogging. On and on this litany of violence goes. People are tortured to death…for nothing.

The question then becomes: what kind of society allows that to happen? What kind of society does that happen in? Because of course episodes like this aren’t just about the poor victims, or even the perpetrators. In a very real sense, they’re about a society. Where it is. What it’s becoming.

What kinds of society is it OK for those with power and authority to abuse it to the point of…toturing innocent people to death? Now. When I put it that way, some Americans will be offended, and think I’m being unkind. But this much, so far as I can see, is true. This is a literal definition of what happens, sadly, in America.

Let me make that point a little more challenging. You can think, too, of mass shootings, like the ones in California, as another form of torture. After all, they’re not just about killing. They’re about traumatizing. A whole community. Entire groups of people. Towns, cities, gay communities, schools, and so on. Mass shootings inflict extreme violence on a lot, lot more than just the people they kill and wound, and in a very real sense, that is their point, to terrorize, to make it so that things are never the same again, so that there is a lasting wound in the spirit of a community, which never heals. Like a broken bone, set wrong. Just like a torturer does to a body.

Extreme violence is so normalized in America that America’s forgot how to think about it. Speak about it. Call it what it is, and that way really understand it. So we must begin at the beginning, with the truth.

What kind of society allows authority figures to abuse their power to the point that they can torture innocent people to death? And why do authority figures — and their perverse inversions, outcasts, who become mass shooters, who see themselves as persecuted, powerless victims — think they’re fighting a war?

This is what an authoritarian society is.

The only kinds of societies in which authority figures abuse their power like this, over and over again, are ones which are authoritarian. That’s precisely why the term was invented. Authoritarian societies, too, eventually learn to shrug at extreme violence, the way America has, because it’s a norm that if you have authority, you can do anything with it, from berating and belittling your inferiors, normal at every American workplace, to surveilling them, Bezos style, to the persistent bullying that’s the hallmark of growing up in America, which, sadly, teachers and principals so often look the other way at, right down to, of course…

Let’s expand that context even more. There’s the GOP, elevating lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, both of whom have explicitly championed violence. There’s the MAGA right, who’s behind a relentless surge of hate. Holocaust survivors are out there talking about anti-semitism growing again. There’s are the billionaires who are openly behind them, encouraging them, goading them on, buying entire billion dollar corporations to give them playgrounds in which hate and bigotry and obscenity are given nutrients to grow.

All of this — all of it — is authoritarian. When Americans hear the word authoritarian, often, I think they don’t really grasp what it means. They think of, I don’t know, Stalin ordering millions of people into the gulags. It’s not always like that, but even if it is, have you seen America’s incarceration rate? Still, authoritarianism isn’t always about a Stalinesque dictator. It’s about having norms and values and systems and institutions which permit one to eventually rise. A Stalin was inevitable in the Soviet Union precisely because the values of conformity and terror and violence had already been established, because dissent was already cracked down, because secret polices had already begun to exist.

These cops? They were part of a thing called the SCORPION unit. Now, to Americans, that might sound like it has a noble goal — “saturating high crime neighborhoods with police.” But in fact, that’s a whole lot like a secret police. One with extraordinary powers — and military equipment. One whose entire job is to keeps track of people, limiting their basic freedoms, like expression, association, movement — which is how you get to innocent people being tortured to death at routine traffic stops.

This is genuinely becoming the stuff of “secret polices,” only in America, they’re not secret. We all know about them. Police departments make a big deal out of them. Creating forces with extraordinary powers and equipment whose job is to attack civil liberties. The trend keeps gathering momentum — by now, Ron DeSantis has his “election police force,” and that’s how this trend grows, policing just multiplies in scale and scope until, pretty soon, you, too, are living in an authoritarian society. Now, for a lot of Americans, particularly Black ones, those living in poorer nieghborhoods, life already feels like that, and has for a long time. The rest of America should see that as a warning sign. Not as something good and happy and worthwhile. It is emphatically not normal to build institutions with the powers of secret polices, because that is authoritarianism. It’s how you get to dictators and gulags and all the rest of it.

I said that the death of Tyre Nichols reminded me of the documentaries, I’d seen, the day before, on Holocaust Memorial Day. And I mean it. I can’t help but be haunted by it. In one of those documentaries, there was a scene — the kind many people turn away from in visceral disgust. How the Allies had found the conditions at the camps at the end of the war. People who barely looked like people anymore — just skeletons. The freshly dead, in trenches or what have you, mass graves, stacked up like cordwood, just skin on bones.

The kind of stuff that makes a heart break and a mind weep. How can people do this to each other? How can anyone do that to another human being? Starve, enslave, hate, beat them….to that degree? In that way? Right to the point of death, and then some? How can people do that to one another?

The answer, of course, as Hannah Arendt and George Orwell pointed out, is that such people don’t see the people they are abusing as people at all. And that is eminently true in the death of Tyre Nichols, too. You can see it from the very instant the video even begins. The police don’t see Tyre as anything remotely like a human being. They begin with rage and aggression that’s reserved for lesser things. They begin by screaming at him, cursing at him, ordering him to the ground. There’s not an inch of dignity, equality, or justice advanced towards him — the things we give other human beings. Nichols was dehumanized long before the encounter even began. At some point, along the way, the men who killed him had stopped thinking of the people they were policing as human beings, and more as lesser things. That is how this happened.

And yet you can not just see, but feel, that as an American value now. Everywhere. Where in America is anyone treated like a human being? Not when the hospital sends you a “bill” for a million dollars that’s full of “charges” that are literally fictional, someone having the job to literally pluck these numbers out of thin air to meet profit targets. Not at school, where if you’re different, you’re dead, you’re going to spend a decade or more or life being violently abused and demeaned and harassed, and most of the time, that’s totally OK with the adults in the room. Not at work, where you’re just a number, and they think you’re lucky to be that, because, hey, at least that way you get a little bit of money. Dehumanization has become the primary American value, which is precisely why…the MAGA right flourishes, still…why Americans get exploited so mercilessly yet relentlessly by the systems that are supposed to take care of them…hospitals…universities and schools…police.

Dehumanization is what paves the way for extreme violence. The Nazis knew that well. That is why they spent half a decade or more grooming Germans to believe, with all their hearts, that Jews and other minorities, but especially Jews, were the causes of their problems. Why, they weren’t even human at all. They didn’t have the qualities humans had. They were too greedy, base, vile, cunning, to be humans.

But isn’t that just what the officers thought about Tyre Nichols, too? After all, if it isn’t, why was he greeted with aggression and rage that’d be reserved for something inhuman…you’re fighting a war with…something that’s an existential threat to you and your kind…who are the real victims here…not a harmless guy just driving his car home.

Dehumanization is the road to extreme violence. And in America, all this has gone hand in hand for far too long. Do you know why the Nazis, famously, invented the gas chambers and the crematoria? Because they were concerned about the psychic health of their soldiers. You see, nobody, it turned out, could gun down a thousand people a day, just like that, and not end up traumatized themselves. Dehumanization isn’t just about the removal of personhood from the victim. It’s about the removal of personhood from the perpetator, too, filling their heads with the Big Lies that the intended victims are monsters, inhuman, beasts to be annihilated, controlled, repressed, subjugated — taking a blowtorch to their moral agency, their souls, their consciences.

In America, that’s gone on for centuries. Watch some good movies about slavery. Watch Will Smith’s “Emancipation.” I can hardly bear to anymore. I find myself unable to get through them. How could people do this to one another, I ask myself? Americans have learned slowly, that, yes, those are people too. Black people, Native Americans, the LGBT, even women. That part’s taken centuries. But the other healing process that needs to happen goes like this. The perpetators, too, must realize, what’s been taken away from them. That in the bitter quest to punish the subhumans, the not-really-people, they too have lost their own moral faculties, and been left numb.

The “twist” in this story of course is that the officers who tortured Tyre Nichols to death were also Black. “Also” Black, as if that should be mystifying. But it hardly is. The thread of dehumanization and extreme violence in America wraps around everyone. It leaves no life untouched. Nobody is above or below it. It shrouds everyone in the veil of ignorance, leaving them blind. Some are trying to outgrow it, and yes, there is slow, grinding progress, of a kind. And yet events like this go on and on.

Because in truth America’s had this tendency from the beginning. Authoritarianism. Expressed then in the forms of slavery, hate, genocides against the natives, property owning men of a certain kind the only citizens of the nascent democracy, then barely worthy of the word. From way back when, the rest weren’t people at all, and extreme violence was totally OK. Progress has come, but too slow, and too unsteady. America’s authoritarian tendencies persist, and grow, still, in new, disturbing ways, like not-so-secret secret police forces, a regressive right which champions them, a culture that’ll show you a movie about a superhero killing a million people before it ever tells you the story of climate change, the forgetting of the Holocaust, the casual embrace of extreme violence in every social milieu, from school shootings to workplace abuse to frat-hazing, that simply doesn’t really exist elsewhere.

I’ve offered you a complex and subtle set of thoughts there. Just thoughts. Not even opinions, certainly not prescriptions. Let me try and sum them up. America’s always been a country at a certain kind of war. Humans against subhumans. That is why the Nazis studied it so intently, as they came to power, seeking to understand how to repress and annihilate the Jews. That war, if America is to mature and grow now, must be replaced by a difficult, hard-won, but noble peace. Only in that soil can democracy persevere.

Moments like this can be transformational ones, for societies who choose to learn. But that takes hard, hard work. It means not just being too repulsed to see the violence. But bearing witness to it, and tracing its horror, back through time and history, to its genesis. “Culture wars” are ways for that never to happen. Mama, cried out Tyre Nichols.

He was crying out to all of us, in those moments. Because it’s our moral duty, each and every American there is, to bear witness to these horrors, and understand why they keep happening, so that we can change what is not good enough about us yet. So that one day, perhaps, we more fully become the beacon of light and goodness we have hoped, from the beginning, to be, for all the world, and all history.

Umair January 2023