In a curious way, the psychology of the (almost exclusively white) troopers and guards, more than the ideology of the inmates, seems most haunting now, as part of the permanent picture of American fixations. The inmates were doing what anyone would do in their situation: having seen a protest turn unexpectedly into a revolt that was sure to be short-lived, they desperately improvised a way to keep their dignity and be heard, to avoid the worst punishment and get some small reforms. Their occasionally overblown rhetoric was the act of men who, stripped of dignity, try to reclaim it. But the troopers and guards retaking the prison were indulging an orgy of racist violence neither ordered nor wholly explicable. There was no need for them to conduct a massacre to reassert their authority. They had all the firepower; the prisoners were armed only with homemade knives; the guards had control of the yard within minutes. Nor were they, so far as anyone can detect, under direct commands to kill. In an American tale already known fully to Mark Twain, a white ethnic proletariat could distinguish itself as superior only by its ability to be brutal to a still more subordinate class of color. When its members were denied their exercise of this “right,” they turned crazy and violent.
In social terms, what separated the guards from the prisoners was simply skin color and a gun. But pure racial assertion seems to have burned alongside something still more visceral. The horror story repeated most urgently among troopers and guards to justify the violence was that the prisoners had castrated one of the hostages. (They hadn’t.) This phantasm of emasculation was at the heart of the violence. A vast insult had been made to their masculinity, and the only way to avenge it was to kill, shame, and torment the helpless.
Thompson devotes the second half of her book to the efforts of the surviving inmates—and, indeed, some of the surviving hostages—to use the courts to get some recompense for what had been allowed to happen. The system “worked” only late, and lamely, but it eventually recognized that a wrong had been done and damages were owed. Attempts by the state to blame the inmates for the massacre failed in the courts; Big Black Smith eventually got a settlement. It should be said that it took thirty years. It should also be said that, in the history of mankind, only liberal democracies have ever done such things—held conscientious post-hoc court proceedings in which the state arraigns itself for its own injustices. The Tiananmen Square protesters are still waiting for their day in court, much less their recompense.