An essay on music as a torture weapon

Published under category: Writing Help Convenience | 2015-05-21 00:29:38 UTC

Context: Music as a Weapon

This is an example of a paper on music. Apart from assignments on hip hop, rock, classical music and others, which are studied as genres, there are research papers relating music to unusual applications. This is one of those essays. Music is a form of art that is intended to express emotions and ideas by employing several elements, which are harmony, rhythm and melody. This is intended to produce a pleasant feeling when listened to. However, this type of art has being misused in the past, being employed as a weapon of torture to prisoners of wars by the United States military. The has been sufficient evidence collected from such prisoners and witnesses to incriminate the security forces with extreme abuse of human rights, where they blare loud music to prisoners while under inhuman conditions in an attempt to break their wills prior to interrogations. In this paper, I oppose the use of music as a weapon of torture as it robs off the beauty and pleasantness that music ought to be associated with. The use of music in this manner first came to public attention when United States military troops blared very loud rock music in attempt to flush out the then Panama dictator Manuel Noriega, who after fleeing from the troops had taken refuge in the Vatican embassy. After several days of undergoing through this ordeal, he surrendered and this marked the first successful experiment of using music as a weapon. Years later and the use of music as a torture weapon has been a common day practice on the detainees confined in prison camps. At the Guantanamo bay prison camp, detainees have had to endure brutal conditions while being subjected to loud hard metal music from artists like Deicide. This is done in a closed cell where the detainees are first made to pose in uncomfortable positions and then left there to bare the loud sounds for days on end. As a result, the experience is painful and results to a psychological breakdown. This is made worse as the detainee is subjected to sleep deprivation and beatings. Such actions depict extreme moral deprivation, as they do not yield conclusive results. Most of the detainees, who break, end up making false confessions just to make the tortures stop. Human rights activists and sympathetic artists have been on the forefront protesting against the use of music as a torture weapon. They argue that the interrogators violate human rights as they subject the prisoner to sexual harassment, weeks of sleep deprivation, all along while playing loud unpleasant music. Such groups such as the National Security Archive have steered such campaigns. They lobby for the declassification of government documents indicating the use of music by popular pop artists as torture. It is immoral to coerce someone to confess by subjecting them to unbearable conditions, as one cannot guarantee the authenticity of the confession. The use of music in doing so at prison camps, robs it off the pleasantness, appeal music is associated with, and hence I strongly oppose its employment as a torture weapon. ORDER PLAGIARISM FREE PAPER