Heiner Saw It Coming

Here's Heiner Mueller's 1977 Hamletmachine, that grim forecast of the decades of neoliberal barbarism to come. Ophelia is a symbol of the revolution which didn't happen, the rebellion which Hamlet betrayed:

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WILDSTRAINING / IN THE FEARSOME ARMAMENTS / MILLENIA

Deep sea. Ophelia in wheelchair. Fish wreckage corpses and body-parts stream past.

OPHELIA: While two men in doctor’s smocks wrap her from top to bottom in white bandages. "Here speaks Electra. In the Heart of Darkness. Under the Sun of Torture. To the Metropolises of the World. In the Names of the Victims."

That was fiction. Here's the neoliberal reality:

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn't get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move. Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn't stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. (Special report: Rendition ordeal that raises new questions about secret trials Ian Cobain, The Guardian, April 8, 2012)

(Bouchar was the wife of a Libyan exile fighting against the Qaddafi dictatorship. The British government handed Bouchar and her husband over to Qaddafi's thugs in exchange for access to Libyan oil.) It's amazing how even the smallest torture-cell of the total system replicates the doom of the total system: the packaging of human beings into products, as if they were commodities on an assembly-line. And note the special touch of the hood and earmuffs: this was not so much to terrorize their victim. This was the bad conscience of the torturers, who knew very well they were mistreating another human being. They simply could not bear to look into their victim's eyes.