Still, most people are feeling revulsion in reading about the techniques actually used in our name.
Jay Mulberry asks:
"Why do we feel horror at this one-on-one violence [torture], done with a purpose, when we overlook the hideous burning, dismemberment, destruction of families, famine etc. that is war?"And Pete Zimmerman answers:
[Historically, as far back as the Bible,] "Violence was admired only when winner and loser were somewhat well-matched, when the winner could have lost catastrophically. It is tolerated when it is antiseptic (ie dropping bombs from 50,000 feet or launching an ICBM over 6,000 miles) and in our cause, but it's not admired. . . .In another article, writer Christopher Hitchens volunteered to undergo waterboarding at the training camp of the type that the Marine experienced. His description of the procedure is chilling. With his permission and with signed waivers that it could result in his injury or death, he was then seized, handcuffed with his hands behind his back, a black hood placed over his head, and then strapped down to a gurney. He goes on to describe the panic that allowed him to last only a few seconds when water was poured over the cloth covering his nose and mouth.
". . . we see the obvious analogy: the victim in torture has no chance to respond or fight back except by staying silent. Accordingly, what the interrogator does is an act of unmitigated evil, and probably sadism. We don't admire sadism for good reason. It offends our innate moral sense to kick a guy who's down or to shoot somebody in the back."
But the obvious thing here is that they had provided him with a pre-arranged signal that he could halt the procedure at any moment. And he did. It is my assumption that was also true for the Marine training.
So we have a major difference: with Marines, it had a purpose: to teach them to resist, and it was done for their benefit; with Hitchens, it also had a purpose -- his own purpose, and he could stop it at any moment.
So neither of these really meets the criterion that the victim has no chance to fight back or to stop the process. It seems that the essence is the one-sided power of torture, where there is a perpetrator who has all the power and a victim with no power. And that does seem to us more horrible than the fighting, the bombing, etc.
It also helps explain the absolute horror we feel about gas chambers and -- for me -- about capital punishment, in general.
Ralph
Another TBF comment, from Jim Collins:
ReplyDeleteThe inequality of it goes against our archetypal feelings of the nobility of heroic action . . . ; it may be hell for the tortured, but it is equally damaging to the torturer . . .
Torture demeans and dehumanizes us all; it is equivalent
in repulsiveness to the desecration of the dead, a
practice not uncommon in many cultures, but one that is
not without consequences.
I'm trying not to be a reflex liberal or self-righteous in responding to those Memos, but the rationalizations they contain are a bit too much for me. They make mockery of logic and the Law. To torture is to dehumanize the other, and those Memos do the same thing. Banging someone against the wall is okay because a rolled towel prevents whiplash? Near drowning is okay because it doesn't kill anyone? Confining someone who is terrified of insects is okay because they aren't stinging insects? Torture isn't torture if your motives are pure? They might as well have said, "Do what you want. Just don't leave any visible bruises." It's a bin Laden Logic, a Nazi logic, a Ghengis Khan logic - the barbarism of the enemy justifies our own barbarism, cloaked in pre-adolescent rationalizations. They only proved that "Civil"-ization isn't a given, but requires hard work and courage. They showed us neither...
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