Routine torture training escalates cruelty progressively through graded exposure

Evidence

Haritos-Fatouros (2003) provides a revealing account of the most sweeping transformative changes in which the Greek military junta of 1967 to 1974 trained ordinary youths to be ruthless torturers. … This abusive treatment served two purposes. It taught unquestioning obedience even to the most outrageous demands and modeled how to torture without any qualms. … For convenience, the methods of torture were numbered according to severity, with sanitized labels such as “tea party with toast.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 673

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the escalation-by-degrees logic familiar from foot-in-the-door compliance research and to Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment findings on role absorption. — connects to: Exploitation may be built into Method acting training itself. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 663; Cruelty escalates through harm-doing that changes actors, not just prior hatred. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 55
• SHARE: The sanitized euphemism ‘tea party with toast’ for a torture method is the kind of grotesque detail a friend studying atrocity framing would appreciate.