Open Left

Stay Tuned For A Followup Torture Diary Tomorrow (0.00 / 0)

I'll be taking on the issue of just how deeply involved in it we really are.  Hint: a lot more than anyone likes to think.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

---

by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 18:08:32 PM CDT

[ Parent | ]

Very true (4.00 / 2)

I wrote a paper way back in 1985 on torture among American client states and closed with the question, "When will they bring this home for the rest of us to experience first hand?" When I presented it in class it damn near started a riot. I exaggerate, but it felt like that for a couple minutes.

Related to this is a smart little post over at Edge of the American West, quoting from Graham Greene:

http://edgeofthewest.wordpress...

"Did you torture him?"

Captain Segura laughed. "No. He doesn't belong to the torturable class."...
"Who does?"

"The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal.... One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don't recognise class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress."

"We're not shocked by that any longer."

"It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes." (pp. 164-165 in the collected edition)

Le plus ça change, no?

"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State" -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

---

by: Emocrat @ Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 21:25:26 PM CDT

[ Parent | ]

Yes, Well, Now We Have Tasers (0.00 / 0)

So we can torture almost anyone, even 72-year-old grandmas.

But, then, we don't have a welfare state so much anymore either.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

---

by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 22:39:39 PM CDT

[ Parent | ]