Politics & Power Quote by Seymour Hersh

Hersh is describing a weaponized collision of taboos: sex, humiliation, and empire, packaged as a photograph. The line’s force comes from its blunt inventory of details - “Arab man naked,” “simulate homosexual activity,” “American GI woman” - not to titillate, but to show how precisely the abuse was calibrated. Each element presses on a different cultural pressure point: sexual shame, masculinity, the stigma attached to homosexuality, and the shock of a woman soldier positioned as both participant and overseer. It’s not just degradation; it’s degradation engineered for maximum symbolic damage.

The subtext is about asymmetry. The captors don’t merely control bodies; they control narratives. A photo turns a private violation into a permanent social sentence, something that can outlive the prison and travel back into families and neighborhoods. “End of society” is deliberately hyperbolic, but it captures how honor-based structures can make public sexual humiliation feel like a kind of social death. Hersh isn’t endorsing that value system; he’s translating its stakes for an American audience that might otherwise read the images as “only” torture, “only” sadism, “only” a few bad apples.

Context matters: this is the logic behind Abu Ghraib, where documentation wasn’t incidental but integral. The camera, in a culture of selfies and proof, became part of the apparatus. Hersh’s intent is accusatory: if you understand why the images were selected to break prisoners psychologically and communally, you can’t pretend the scandal was just about rogue cruelty. It was about power that knew exactly what it was doing.