Just a note that in honor of our great American tradition of reckless expansion and genocide, and in a flagrant provocation to our foreign readers, we will be taking off Thursday and Friday. We will be back, well stuffed and with nationalistic hubris refortified, on Monday. See you then!
Flagrant provocation well received by the foreign readership.
Get stuffed well!
It’s only genocide when someone else does it. When Americans do it, it’s called ‘development.’
The indigenous population of the New World was perfecting genocide on a grand scale long before Europeans arrived. Many tribes also practiced slavery, human sacrifice, and had long histories of ruthless, bloody, and total war that would have made Julius Caesar green with envy.
But I guess that’s besides the point…
Have a great Thanksgiving, with no PC qualifiers!
The Aztecs were bad news, no doubt about it. But our celebration is of our genocide; you want to celebrate somebody else’s, find your own holiday.
The Aztecs had plenty of company when it came to fighting wars. There was also the Maya, the Inca, the Olmec, the Apache, the Cheyenne, the Blackfoot, the Cree, the Iroquois, the Shawnee, etc.
And, according to archeologists, the vast majority of Native American casualties caused by Europeans was not due to warfare — it was caused by the fact that Native Americans had not been exposed to many of the human diseases common in Europe, Africa and Asia. Why there were no uniquely Native American diseases around to ravage the Europeans is not explained, but if we agree the archeologists are correct, even any eventual benign contact between Europeans, Africans or Asians would have led to the near extinction of Native Americans.
So, while your usage of the term “genocide” sounds over-the-top and dramatic, the fact is the Europeans, when they did battle Native Americans, did not use any form of warfare that Native Americans themselves had not already been using for tens of thousands of years. If anything, the Europeans were usually far less brutal on those conquered than some of the native pre-Columbian peoples — particularly when compared to the Aztec and the Maya.
So you can keep your bitter opinion that Thanksgiving is a celebration of genocide. I’ll celebrate the more traditional definition of the holiday.
The “its okay because other people were doing it” defense appears in debates so often that I start to wonder if it seems an acceptable argument to employ precisely because of the fact that other people are using it…
Yes, Its a slow day at work. If only we had a genocide to take time off to celebrate…
R. Maheras –
“Why there were no uniquely Native American diseases around to ravage the Europeans is not explained”
A lot of historians and scientists think that European sailors brought syphilis back from the Americas. Then again, a lot don’t.
I’ve seen a couple possible explanations about the no-diseases-the-other-direction thing. For one thing, Europeans were a lot dirtier than Native Americans; Indians bathed, Europeans kind of didn’t. I think I’ve also seen some suggestion that a lot of the most virulent diseases were a product of breeding livestock (pigs, cows, chickens, etc.) which wasn’t done in the Americas (or at least on nothing like the same scale.)
Disease was obviously massively important in the American genocide. Europeans pitched in with a will by enslaving, killing, and generally decimating the people who were left (and even using germ warfare in some cases — I’ve seen at least one account where Europeans deliberately tried to spread smallpox among the Indian population.). And Columbus’ treatment of the Arawaks I think does actually qualify as deliberate genocide, performed against people who had offered him nothing but aid.
Anyway, I am pleased that even thanksgiving on the blog is filled with cheerful rancor and friendly hostility!
Ben wrote: “The “its okay because other people were doing it” defense appears in debates so often that I start to wonder if it seems an acceptable argument to employ precisely because of the fact that other people are using it…”
You’re looking at the past through a 21st century paradigm. During the period of history in question, it was perfectly honorable and acceptable to treat those conquered the way Europeans treated Native Americans. And, as I also mentioned, in pre-Columbian times, most Native Americans tribes treated fellow Native Americans they conquered far worse than the Europeans ever treated the folks they vanquished.
Elevating the nobility, “fairness” and plight of one side over another from that era is a waste of time and not at all reflective of the historical context and realities of that time period.
And Noah, your “cleanliness” argument about Native Americans rings hollow. After all, if that were true, one would expect Native Americans to be actually MORE resistant to disease transmission than their European counterparts.
As for the inferences that there was some sort of widespread effort by Europeans to deliberately spread disease using germ warfare techniques is almost laughable in its desperation. According to everything I’ve read, there were gaps of many decades between initial (relatively benign) contact between Europeans and Native Americans, and when the Europeans eventually returned, vast swaths of Native Americans were simply gone. Was it disease? Drought? Crop failure? Over-hunting that led to a mass migration that failed? The fact is, no one really knows for sure. Disease certainly seems plausible, but for many of the disappearances, it is by no means a certainty.
I don’t think you’re understanding the cleanliness argument. The point is, Native Americans got rid of most of their germs. Europeans bred them.
I’m actually skeptical of that one too though. I think the livestock argument seems more likely.
“You’re looking at the past through a 21st century paradigm. During the period of history in question, it was perfectly honorable and acceptable to treat those conquered the way Europeans treated Native Americans.”
It wasn’t honorable and acceptable by any standards to capture people who had befriended you, kill large numbers of them, enslave the rest, and cut off the hands of anyone who didn’t give you gold, as Columbus did. If anyone had done that to the Spanish, they would have felt that they were being treated unjustly, and with good reason. There were contemporary Spaniards and Europeans who objected to the way the Indians were treated. The idea that what they did was acceptable by their standards but not by ours simply doesn’t wash, and I think is actually insulting to the Europeans. They were not less moral than we are; they were perfectly capable of understanding that what they did was wrong. And it’s not like people today don’t do equally hideous things.
I didn’t say that the germ warfare was the cause of the depopulation. I don’t think it was. I’m just saying it was used. The Europeans had the intention to commit genocide…and they certainly also exterminated and mistreated Native peoples when they had the chance. The fact that smallpox killed more people and depopulated the country for their convenience doesn’t mean that they didn’t also commit as many atrocities as they could get away with. And as Ben says, the fact that some native peoples also committed atrocities is pretty much beside the point. (And I don’t think the Arawaks were especially imperialist or warlike; Columbus killed them because he was a fucking evil monster, not because they attacked him.)
“one would expect Native Americans to be actually MORE resistant to disease transmission than their European counterparts.”
Well certainly “one” maybe even a few more, but not anyone who knows a thing about disease. Lack of exposure, and the natural lack of built up immunity is the clear reason populations are vulnerable to disease.
This is why people are told “don’t drink the water” when going to China. It’s the reason The Plague was so devastating when introduced into Europe. It’s the reason insects build up a resistance to insecticides.
——————————
Noah Berlatsky says:
…I think I’ve also seen some suggestion that a lot of the most virulent diseases were a product of breeding livestock (pigs, cows, chickens, etc.) which wasn’t done in the Americas…
——————————-
Indeed so!
——————————–
Why were the natives so vulnerable? The best guess is that Europe had been a crossroads for war and commerce for millennia and so had encountered an extraordinary number of pestilences, while the Americas were isolated and had not. Europeans had also spent a long time around domestic animals, which were the source of many of the most virulent diseases to afflict humans in the Old World. In contrast, native Americans had few domestic animals. As a consequence Europeans had developed some resistance to disease but native Americans hadn’t.
That’s not to say Europeans were immune. While millions of native Americans died of European diseases, millions of Europeans died of European diseases, too. In fact, one reason the natives suffered such catastrophic mortality was that Europeans arriving in the New World were walking petri dishes for germs. In some years 25 percent of European immigrants died at sea, often of diseases such as typhus that they had picked up in the ports they had just left. Epidemics were common in Europe. It was not uncommon for a town to lose a third of its population to some new outbreak…
By comparison to Europeans, historian Thomas Berger says, native Americans were remarkably healthy. Most lived not in unsanitary cities but “in small, isolated bands and were therefore less likely to spread diseases over large geographical areas.”
——————————-
And, an interesting added factor:
——————————–
…recent research suggests that Native Americans lacked “genetic diversity”–bluntly put, that they were inbred, virtually the entire indigenous population of the Americas having descended from just four (4) women–or at least four groups of closely related women.
We also know that a virus you contract from a family member is far more likely to be fatal than one you get from a total stranger. That’s because the family-bred virus has already figured out your clan’s genetic code and thus can evade your natural defenses. Since Native Americans were all close cousins (at least compared to Europeans), a virus that killed one would pretty much kill them all.
———————————–
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/995/why-did-so-many-native-americans-die-of-european-diseases-but-not-vice-versa
The last reminding how our industrial farming methods, with their reliance upon “monoculture,” fewer and fewer varieties of certain crops, mean that a new disease which targeting those varieties could, say, virtually wipe out all our wheat…
Mike quotes a historian Thomas Berger, “native Americans were remarkably healthy.”
Berger’s comment is almost certainly based on the many letters and journals written by Europeans based on their first person accounts.
As an example Columbus wrote:
“They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
The Indians, Columbus reported, “are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone….”
Noah — Columbus discovered the New World at the start of the Spanish Inquisition, and at a time when it was perfectly acceptable and commonplace in Europe, Asia, Africa, and yes, the pre-Columbian Americas, to torture, maim or kill your “uncooperative” enemies or criminal suspects. England didn’t abolish torture for its own citizens until the mid-17th century, and most of its European counterparts didn’t follow suit until the 18th or even 19th centuries. China didn’t ban some of its most heinous forms of torture until the early 20th century, and Native Americans routinely tortured and killed their prisoners of war.
Like I said… it makes no sense to look at this whole issue through modern-day eyes.
Speaking of torture and the holidays, in England, Guy Fawkes Day is a big holiday celebrated every year, and Fawkes’ confession about his plot to blow up the British Parliament in 1605 was extracted via the infamous “rack.”
——————————
R. Maheras says:
…Columbus discovered the New World at the start of the Spanish Inquisition, and at a time when it was perfectly acceptable and commonplace in Europe, Asia, Africa, and yes, the pre-Columbian Americas, to torture, maim or kill your “uncooperative” enemies or criminal suspects. England didn’t abolish torture for its own citizens until the mid-17th century, and most of its European counterparts didn’t follow suit until the 18th or even 19th centuries. China didn’t ban some of its most heinous forms of torture until the early 20th century, and Native Americans routinely tortured and killed their prisoners of war.
Like I said… it makes no sense to look at this whole issue through modern-day eyes.
—————————–
More like through liberal eyes; modern-day conservatives have found nothing wrong about “waterboarding” (no worse than some college fraternity initiation, one of their propagandists maintained), Abu Ghraib, the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo; cheered on Dirty Harry and Jack Bauer as they tortured the “bad guys,” and needless to say, defend Israel in whatever it does, including widespread use of torture.
—————————–
Speaking of torture and the holidays, in England, Guy Fawkes Day is a big holiday celebrated every year, and Fawkes’ confession about his plot to blow up the British Parliament in 1605 was extracted via the infamous “rack.”
——————————
Fawkes was caught under rather incriminating circumstances, though:
—————————
Wintour introduced Fawkes to Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate King James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. The plotters secured the lease to an undercroft beneath the House of Lords, and Fawkes was placed in charge of the gunpowder they stockpiled there. Prompted by the receipt of an anonymous letter, the authorities searched Westminster Palace during the early hours of 5 November, and found Fawkes guarding the explosives…
—————————-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes
—————————–
…the plot hatched by a group of Catholics in 1605 reflected decades of frustration at their faith’s proscribed status. The would-be mass murderers planned to blow up the new King James I and his entire parliament in assembly at the Palace of Westminster on 5 November. They dug a tunnel from a nearby rented house, piled up enough gunpowder beneath the palace to send it into the sky in flames, but when Fawkes was caught down there with the barrels and kindling…
—————————–
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/04/occupy-movement-guy-fawkes-mask?INTCMP=SRCH
Mike — There simply IS no comparison between waterboarding/other present-day “enhanced interrogation techniques” and torture practices of the past, and making such comparisons is nothing more than politically-motivated hyperbole.
Um…waterboarding is one of the torture techniques of the past.
And you’ve now self-refuted in a lovely fashion. If drowning someone is morally acceptable today, it’s really unclear why we’re supposedly better than anyone in the past. People do horrible things to each other now; people did horrible things to each other then. People now occasionally point out that these things are horrible and unacceptable; that was the case in the past two. There’s a difference between historical consciousness and moral relativism. There was a time when conservatives were the ones who reminded us of that. It was a noble calling. Too bad modernity ate it.
Noah — I didn’t address whether or not waterboarding was morally acceptable or not. Mike brought waterboarding up and tried to use it as a political club by linking it to conservatives and likening it to torture techniques of the past — which is a totally absurd comparison. To even the most benign torturer of the past, contemporary CIA techniques would look tame and useless.
That is bullshit. Drowning has long been used as torture. Waterboarding itself (which is a basically a form of weaponized drowning) has been used as torture by hideous regimes, including the Khmer Rouge. Waterboarding is torture.
If you don’t want partisans to use waterboarding as a club to beat conservatives with, the best thing to do , as a conservative, to stop apologizing for torture. Stop apologizing for it when it’s waterboarding by the Bush administration, stop apologizing for it when it’s Columbus chopping off the hands of innocent people. Just stop it. Torture is vile whenever it appears in history. There have always been people who have seen it as vile and who have said so. This isn’t an issue on which relativism is useful or thoughtful. Torture and genocide; they’re bad whenever they show up. How hard is that to agree on, for pity’s sake?
If you really think that we’re more humane now than people were in the past, that’s not an excuse to let people in the past off the hook! It’s a sign that you believe that we have made real moral progress. I have my doubts, but at least that is a coherent argument (made by Steven Pinker in “Better Angels of Our Nature” recently.) But the argument that people in the past tortured and committed genocide…therefore it was okay in the past to torture and commit genocide is simply nonsense. If Columbus came from a culture which sanctioned torture and genocide, that’s an indictment of his entire culture. If the Indians did similar things (which, as I said, the Arawaks really did not) that is indeed an indictment of their culture as well. But since our culture prides itself on the achievements of the Europeans, it makes sense to think about their sins in particular, not anyone else’s. We’re not annually celebrating the Aztecs, after all.
———————
R. Maheras says:
…To even the most benign torturer of the past, contemporary CIA techniques would look tame and useless.
———————-
http://roundtree7.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/inquisition-waterboarding.jpg
So the Holy Inquisition ranks among “the most benign torturer[s] of the past”? If so “useless,” why did they (and the Japanese military in WWII, whom we found guilty of war crimes for its usage) employ it, then?
More on the history of waterboarding, or as our military called it when using it against Philippine insurgents, “the water cure”: http://roundtree7.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/how-for-home-and-freedom/ .
And yeah, more gruesome forms of torture were more widely used in the past, where there was less concern with creating a P.R. image as a benevolent power.
Still, prisoners undergoing “enhanced interrogation techniques” (love the euphemism!) by the modern-day “good guys” sometimes die, as they did in the “bad old days.”
Are they less dead, their fate less morally worthy of condemnation, because they were subjected to less savage tortures beforehand?
“Too bad modernity ate it”
Man, stop blaming everything on me!
Sheesh, is there anything modernity *didn’t* fuck up for everyone?
Also, Noah, is this you on the record repudiating moral relativism?
It’s been a long time (if ever) since I thought that moral relativism was a good idea. Like I said, one of the things I think is really worthwhile about (at least historical) conservatism is the rejection of moral relativism — which is different than embracing cultural chauvinism (or at least should be.)
Oh, sorry, I just meant “repudiate” in the sense of “deny”, without implying that you were casting off an old opinion. That said, the kind of Feyerabendian epistemic relativism that you sometimes espouse/flirt with/wink at makes a natural fit with moral relativism, even if you don’t like that fit. At the very least, if you take seriously the idea that appropriate epistemic methods are relative to one’s community, era, culture or whatever, then you have to wonder how you much faith you can have in the supposedly universal moral truths that you discover through these locals-only methods. Does that make sense?
I like the line that starts the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on moral relativism: “Moral relativism has the unusual distinction—both within philosophy and outside it—of being attributed to others, almost always as a criticism, far more often than it is explicitly professed by anyone”. Amen to that, brother. I’ve just become deeply involved with developing/implementing/testing ethics lessons in primary schools, and the *number one* thing they do not want kids to get from the classes is moral relativism…although, admittedly, that’s as much for political reasons as for philosophical.
Oh; yes, that makes sense. I like Feyerabend (besides his just being a lovely writer and an interesting thinker) because I don’t think the moral absolute is actually reason or rationality. Feyerabend himself has a fairly strong moral basis for his philosophy, I think — he’s for egalitarianism and against imperialism.
That’s a good point about no one wanting to be a moral relativist. I think a little moral relativism is probably a good thing, though, right? Maybe I’m just so morally relativistic that I’m not even willing to establish moral relativism as an absolute principle….
I’d agree that “a little moral relativism is…a good thing.” Not in the sense that we think that “slavery can’t be that bad, if Washington and Jefferson had slaves,” but for:
– Instilling humility: I’d bet if we were wealthy plantation-owners in the Old South, we’d all own slaves and find it perfectly justifiable.
– Avoiding “presentism” and thereby improving our capacity to understand not only other times, but present-day cultures, expanding our mental horizons (you can be a mighty warrior and really like little boys; you can be a great philosopher and still have the most idiotic ideas…).
– Discouraging the expectation of perfectionism in persons we admire, even accepting their massive moral flaws and blind spots (see those slave-owning yet still great Founding Fathers).
– Discouraging the simplistic thinking inherent in ideologies and facile, Mr. A-type moralizing (hardly the sole property of the Right).
– Preparation for when life offers you tough choices; if not as extreme as “do I steal this loaf of bread, and let my family starve?” or “do I toss this excess person off the lifeboat, or do I let their added weight sink it, and drown everybody?”, awareness that sometimes the best moral choice is, alas, the lesser evil…
The classic: Anti Anti-Relativism by Clifford Geertz.
Thanks! I’d never read that…or any Geertz, maybe? I should read more; that was pretty thoroughly entertaining.
You’d probably enjoy Interpretation of Cultures.
Noah wrote: “That is bullshit. Drowning has long been used as torture. Waterboarding itself (which is a basically a form of weaponized drowning) has been used as torture by hideous regimes, including the Khmer Rouge. Waterboarding is torture.”
I didn’t say it wasn’t. But torture is really in the eyes of the beholder.
For example, on the bus yesterday, a typical LA crazy person (of which there are legion — more than I’ve seen anywhere else in all of my world travels) was talking very loud and very irritatingly to nobody in particular. I thought everyone was just going to ignore him, but after a half-hour of the incessant babbling, one woman, who had obviously reached a breaking point, literally screamed at him to shut up, shouting, “No one cares.” Yelling at a madman is an obvious exercise in futility, but that lady just couldn’t take it anymore, while the other 80 or so of us on the bus did.
Closer to home, comicswise, is the case of Steve Rude, who violated a restraining order and was arrested because he apparently couldn’t take the incessant barking of a neighbor’s dog any more. As someone who has run across the same problem, the barking is akin to Chinese water torture in that very small irritations, over time, may cause some otherwise mature, rational people to snap.
That said, the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, while considered torture by some today, are truly noting compared to the more devastating and permanent tortures of the past. Let’s see… simulated drowning where I know they are not going to kill me, or losing an eye, finger, hand, foot, leg, arm, reproductive organ, tongue, bowels, or my life. Or perhaps death by a thousand cuts, days or weeks on the rack, a slow death in an iron maiden, getting buried alive up to my neck so the insects and birds can eat me alive, etc., etc. Hmmm… that’s a tough choice — not.
Above, I meant to write, “truly nothing.”
It’s not simulated drowning. It’s actual drowning. And how exactly do you know you won’t be killed? The U.S. has tortured a number of people to death.
Comparing a barking dog to torture techniques used by the Khmer Rouge and the Japanese during world war II is partisan hackery at a truly impressive level of obfuscation.
You realize that everyone in the U.S. called waterboarding torture until the U.S. itself began to use it, right? No one said, well, the Khmer Rouge were just using enhanced interrogation techniques.
From accounts I’ve read of waterboarding by people who were waterboarded, it is truly horrible, and definitively torture. The fact that it is possible to imagine worse things (or presumably worse; I’m not planning to compare and contrast) does not change the fact that internationally waterboarding is widely and justly recognized as torture.
George Bush and his crew should be tried for war crimes. Obama and his crew should also, since international law says clearly that refusing to prosecute those who commit war crimes is itself a war crime. The fact that folks like you will seriously claim that waterboarding is similar to having a dog bark at you just underlines how necessary those prosecutions are, and how utterly the embrace of torture by our leaders has rotted our public discourse. That conservatives are now in the position of apologizing for the Khmer Rouge is deeply depressing, to say the very least.
Noah wrote: “It’s not simulated drowning. It’s actual drowning. And how exactly do you know you won’t be killed? The U.S. has tortured a number of people to death.”
No, the definition of drown is, “To kill by submerging and suffocating in water or another liquid.” Thus, the CIA’s carefully controlled waterboarding is simulated drowning.
And terrorist suspects all know they will not die at the hands of CIA operatives, and if you think otherwise, you are being naive. Those guys have a better communications network than you can possibly imagine. Besides, most of the hard core-folks don’t care if they die anyway, which is why enhanced interrogation techniques are generally cited as ineffective — that and the fact our prisoners know we won’t kill them. What they fear the most is that we’ll turn them over to their home countries, where, in some cases, old-fashioned forms of torture are still practiced, and in places where they aren’t, life in prison is far worse than it is under U.S. custody.
I know of no contemporary cases where U.S. interrogators have tortured anyone to death. But if there are any, I’ll wager any such death was either accidental or the interrogator went rogue and acted unilaterally. The larger point here is that it is not U.S. policy to torture anyone to death, and that has probably been the policy for quite some time.
Noah wrote: “Comparing a barking dog to torture techniques used by the Khmer Rouge and the Japanese during world war II is partisan hackery at a truly impressive level of obfuscation.”
How ironic! You are using my same argument that there is no comparison between waterboarding and much more heinous forms of torture… such as those “used by the Khmer Rouge and the Japanese during world war II.”
“Those guys have a better communications network than you can possibly imagine”
Again I say, b.u.l.l.s.h.i.t. Pretending our enemies are incredibly competent is fun for defense appropriations, but in real life U.S. resources dwarf those of terrorist organizations. And, of course, when we torture innocent people — well, let’s just say they don’t have access to any particular communication network.
The Khmer Rouge used waterboarding; so did the Japanese in WWII. I can keep repeating it, I suppose. Or is it your contention that the Khmer Rouge were only using gentle enhanced interrogation when they waterboarded people?
There are about 100 cases of people being tortured to death in us custody, as I understand it. It is not our policy to torture people to death as I understand it. However, the ins and outs of our “policy” are not especially interesting to the people who have in fact been tortured to death.
Waterboarding is controlled drowning. Saying it’s “simulated” sounds like it’s pretend. It is not.
“life in [foreign] prison is far worse than it is under U.S. custody.”
Maybe. The U.S. makes fairly extensive use of solitary confinement, which is torture and can drive people insane. We also do a fair bit of torture in our prisons. Many of the techniques used at Abu Ghraib were the result of corrections officers who had gone into the military using techniques they were familiar with from their work in stateside prisons.
The assumption that the U.S. is always kinder and gentler than its opponents should be a goal to strive for; something we achieve by forswearing torture techniques like waterboarding. It’s not a self-evident truth that gives us the right to torture suspects, or to send them elsewhere so they can be tortured (because Bush and Cheney did a lot of that, too.)
I always wonder in these kinds of discussions…what could the U.S. do that would make you feel it had crossed a line? Using Khmer Rouge techniques is okay; apparently torturing to death is okay as long as we didn’t really mean it. Was the stuff at Abu Ghraib okay? Too much fuss about that, you think?
the guys at abu ghraib were roag agents acting unilaterally, it wasn’t the us’s fault!
(being facetious)
i think there were at least one or two deaths by torture at abu ghraib — at least, if you trust claims made and photographs taken by lindy and some of the others who were later indicted for arguably some of the milder stuff that went on there (the sex photos).
roag = rogue. pathetic.
I think it’s worth pointing out, while leaving open the question of whether it’s true, that knowing you’re not going to die doesn’t stop the physical effects of torture, which are what torture-as-interrogation takes advantage of. Torture works as interrogation because it defeats psychological resistance through physical distress. Eventually your body responds to the pain, and you become emotionally weaker due to the stress and less and less able to think about anything except “make it stop.” Obviously the threshhold for that is different from person to person, but everybody has a breaking point.
Torture pushes its victims past that breaking point. So whether or not the torturers care whether the victims die before they reach it should be entirely besides the point in determining whether or not an act is experienced as torture. Because while fear of death may make an experience of torture worse, it isn’t actually necessary for torture to break someone.
Here’s a slightly silly example: I had a crown put on without novocaine last year. I was extremely psychologically prepared for this and completely aware that not only was my dentist not trying to kill me, she didn’t really want to hurt me at all, would have preferred I take the shot, and was actively trying to be gentle with me. Nonetheless, after about 45 minutes of drilling, my body temperature was significantly elevated, I was really shaky and I was much more emotionally fragile that evening.
Dentalwork isn’t torture by any meaningful definition, of course. But it was discernable pain, intense and prolonged — a mild version of the physical stress caused by torture. Serious torture would have vastly more serious effects, effects exacerbated by the fear of being around people who don’t have your interests at heart. I try to imagine that experience times 1000, and it makes me pretty hardline in what a proper definition of torture ought to be. I won’t even go so far as to say it’s never justified; I can probably come up with situations where I think individual well being is less important than a greater good. But I’m pretty strongly opposed to calling it something other than torture in order to weasel out of making a defense of doing it.
Legal arguments aside, it’s pretty morally specious to make the motives of the torturers more central to the question of whether or not something is torture than the experience of the person being tortured. It’s only “in the eye of the beholder” if the beholder is trying to make excuses for something, trying to find a definition that gets around those experiences. Otherwise it’s pretty clearly in the eye of the, well, holdee.
Russ: “there is no comparison between waterboarding and much more heinous forms of torture”
So, the position is that waterboarding IS torture, but that its a much more benign form of torture than in the past? You seem to be taking great care to ensure that you’re not making an ethical statement such as ‘Waterboarding is wrong/right’, and trying to keep this at a comparative level.
But, as Noah keeps saying, thats bullshit. If you believe torture is morally wrong (though perhaps a necessary evil) then there is no point to debating ‘levels’ of torture. Its just torture, and its wrong.
If, on the other hand you dont believe waterboarding to be torture, or you think that there actually is a level of ‘acceptable’ torture, then its pretty much incumbent on you to define either ‘torture’ or ‘acceptable torture’. Caro and (to a lessor extent) Noah have pretty much given their definitions. If you want to make any useful distinction between waterboarding and ‘old nasty torture’, then you surely have to define yourself better than just ‘in waterboarding you’re not supposed to die’.
It’s worth pointing out too, that in all legal definitions of torture as a crime against human rights (UN etc), the intention to cause death appears as a characteristc in precisely none of them. Suggesting that the U.S is superior because it doesn’t intend death is completely beside the point
There is no defense for using interrogation methods on captives that Americans would not tolerate being used on our own soldiers. Having done so, we opened the floodgates for torture of our own people, and have no leg to stand on about other countries’ abuses of human rights. We lost the high ground long ago because torture of anyone unfortunate enough to fall into our hands was and still is a systematic policy directed from the highest places in our government.
Anyone who thinks that is fine probably thinks that it is okay to pepperspray non-violent protestors as well. The current climate in America is more disturbing than it has ever been. Some people do not have the right to free speech and the country-wide crackdown on dissent is indicative of, if not a Nazi state, sure as hell not what I thought America wants to be about. It’s shameful, and it’s a disgrace that people who consider themselves to be sensible are perfectly okay with it.
“torture of anyone unfortunate enough to fall into our hands was and still is a systematic policy directed from the highest places in our government.”
Like I said, I think Obama should probably be in jail for harboring war criminals…but I do give him credit for changing this. We’re not waterboarding people anymore as far as I know, and I believe renditions have stopped as well. Obama’s civil liberties record is terrible, but one of the few good things he did do in this regard was to end torture as an official American policy.
Unfortunately, since he hasn’t prosecuted those responsible for torture in the past, and since the Republicans have basically made torture a core plank of their party, we’re one election away from reinstating torture as an official American policy, I think. Which is really depressing. (Though it’s possible Romney wouldn’t actually embrace torture…I don’t know. I wouldn’t bet on that, though.)
I do believe the “core plank” of Obama’s administration (or approach to war) is targeted assassination. So instead of torture, they’ve just settled for plain murder. This is probably an improvement since I much prefer to be murdered (quickly) than tortured (not joking).
All: Keep in mind that this entire discussion revolves around the the inference by some here that the U.S.’s recent use of carefully-controlled, non-lethal waterboarding is comparable to a myriad of gruesome historical torture methods where death was not only possible, but a probability.
That comparison is silly and has absolutely no bearing on the pros and cons of waterboarding and other non-lethal enhanced interrogation techniques used by U.S, intelligence agencies.
Noah, as for your assertion that 100 people have been tortured to death by the U.S. in recent times, say I DOUBLE bullshit, and I say prove it citing some authoritive source.
As far as Abu Ghraib is concerned, as soon as the story broke, I suspected, based on many years in the U.S. military, that it was a localized, personality-driven situation that was NOT ordered by national command authorities and passed on down through the chain of command to the field. And it turns out I was absolutely right. As I said once before when this topic was raised on a different Web site, if I had been the NCO in charge at Abu Ghraib, none of that shit would have happened on MY watch.
Russ:
If torture is a crime against Human Rights (which it is), and the legal definition of torture covers both old school butality, and new school ‘enhanced interrogation’ (which it does under just about every definition), then I fail to see why they cannot be comparable. Legally, they are the same, the UN doesn’t distinguish between levels of torture when charging someone, the crime is simply torture.
Would you argue that murdering someone with a knife is not comparable with murdering with a grenade? It’s still murder. At least as far as legal judgements go, they are very comparable.
If you want to use some other measure of comparison such as a moral comparison, then you need to explain why you object to one form of torture more than another. Linking it to the intention of the torturer (to cause death or not) is objecting to the torturer rather than the actual act itself.
I just read Glenn Greenwald’s book, where he said about 100. Here’s an ACLU report after 30 seconds of googling that appears to list 44 dead. I’m not reading the whole thing, because this conversation has depressed me sufficiently as it is, but you’re welcome to go through it if you’d like.
The idea that Abu Ghraib is just a localized problem is really hard to sustain in the face of a report like that, don’t you think?
“Keep in mind that this entire discussion revolves around the the inference by some here that the U.S.’s recent use of carefully-controlled, non-lethal waterboarding is comparable to a myriad of gruesome historical torture methods where death was not only possible, but a probability.”
People have died and been driven effectively insane by waterboarding. And waterboarding itself is a gruesome historical torture method used by such authoritarian and hideous regimes as the Khmer Rouge and the Japanese during World War II. Again, I wonder; is the Khmer Rouge not sufficiently evil? Why don’t they count?
The US called waterboarding torture until we started to use it ourselves. The UN calls it torture. It’s widely accepted as torture under the Geneva conventions. The Geneva conventions don’t have degrees of torture, I don’t think; they don’t say, “well, if you torture a person in this way, that’s okay, but if you torture them in this other way, that’s really unacceptable.” Torture is wrong…in part, as James says, because we don’t want people torturing our own troops if they get captured. Not by sleep deprivation, not by waterboarding, not by drawing and quartering. Not by any of it. It’s illegal under international law, it’s illegal under US law, since we have ratified all these treaties. What possible moral ground do you think you’re occupying by lamely repeating, “well, other people elsewhere in the past have occasionally done worse things, so that mitigates this?”
You’re allying yourself with war criminals and torturers. And for what end? So you can sneer at democrats? The Democrats are fucking war criminals too; Pelosi was probably briefed on what was going on. That’s why the democrats won’t investigate it. It’s not a political issue. It’s an issue of minimal decency, and trying not to have our nation as a whole self-identify as craven cowards willing to toss our most cherished values overboard at the slightest threat to our personal safety. Can’t we have some minimal self-respect? I guess it’s too much to ask.
Suat, re assassination and torture, I agree.
Oh yeah, waterboarding is torture, torture is bad, waah waah waah. If I wanted to read these kinds of conventional bromides, I’d go read The Comics Journal. Won’t someone start arguing that they’d rather be waterboarded than re-read The Love Bunglers?
“Oh yeah, waterboarding is torture, torture is bad, waah waah waah.”
I kind of like to think of us all as the parents from the Peanuts cartoons….
By all means, continue to defend the practices concieved and vetted by Cheney, Wolfowitz and the rest of that pack of war profiteering, absolutely conscienceless scumbags. Don’t have the decency to be as disgusted and ashamed of these practices including waterboarding, as many Americans are. This isn’t about politics, it’s about being rational and honorable. We all knew our people did stuff like this through our wars of the last century, maybe they thought it was necessary but at least they kept it on the Q.T. because they knew it was wrong… but now, now we’ve got Americans who are actually proud of sadism. Boo, hiss.
————————
R. Maheras says:
…Noah, as for your assertion that 100 people have been tortured to death by the U.S. in recent times, say I DOUBLE bullshit, and I say prove it citing some authoritive source…
————————–
Don’t waste your time, folks; I’ve cited batches of data after similar challenges by Russ, and had them ALL dismissed because the sources (no matter how well backed-up their info) were “biased liberals,” “partisans” or “Democratic party activists”…
“Maheras- I didn’t say it wasn’t. But torture is really in the eyes of the beholder.” ….”Thus, the CIA’s carefully controlled waterboarding is simulated drowning.”
So if someone drowns, it’s not torture?
It’s funny how people who haven’t experienced waterboarding claim to know more than people who have, like John McCain, Jesse Ventura, many, many CIA agents and Navy SEALS.
“Besides, most of the hard core-folks don’t care if they die anyway, which is why enhanced interrogation techniques are generally cited as ineffective”
This is a stereotype. You’re generalizing here. Islamists aren’t comic-book villains. Some of them just might be pussycats once they’re locked up. Sure some are brave, but some are likely cowards as well.
I don’t expect to convince Russ of anything, since according to him the Iraq Fiasco wasn’t imperialistic.
“As far as Abu Ghraib is concerned, as soon as the story broke, I suspected, based on many years in the U.S. military, that it was a localized, personality-driven situation that was NOT ordered by national command authorities and passed on down through the chain of command to the field”
It didn’t have to be ordered. The men in the White House set the stage for it through their incompetence and arrogance. They created the atmosphere for it to be possible.
“Incompetence and arrogance”? Let’s not be too kind to the Bushites; they worked really, really hard to lay the legalistic groundwork for, and pushed for the usage of torture:
————————
In 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales bent to demands from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to push through new legal opinions sanctioning harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, according to e-mails written by then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
“The AG explained that he was under great pressure from the Vice President to complete both memos, and that the President had even raised it last week, apparently at the VP’s request and the AG had promised they would be ready early this week,” Comey wrote in one of several e-mails obtained by the New York Times.
The Times revealed the e-mails Saturday in an article that focused more on Comey’s acceptance of the legal interpretations of the anti-torture statute than on the behind-the-scenes battle over the White House demand that the Department of Justice reauthorize the “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
The White House role in pressing the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel to sign off again on the brutal tactics – after other OLC lawyers working with Comey had withdrawn the earlier approval – is crucial in assessing whether the OLC offered honest legal guidance or simply tailored its opinions to fit the desires of Bush, Cheney and other policymakers.
A key defense line for Bush has been that the President was just following the advice of the OLC, which is responsible for setting parameters on presidential authority, and thus Bush and his senior aides shouldn’t be held accountable for any law violations. However, if the White House had been stage-managing those opinions, that defense would crumble.
Comey’s e-mails offer additional proof that the White House was, in fact, pulling the strings on the OLC’s legal opinions, especially after Bush’s longtime legal counsel Gonzales was elevated to the post of Attorney General in 2005…
————————-
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/060809b.html
————————-
Bush led nation into war, and into torture
As President, Bush oversaw development of the military and intelligence environments in which torture seemed helpful, the legal apparatus by which it was “justified,” the legislative framework by which torturers might be immunized, and the public political climate in which everything was denied. Under his leadership, the U.S. abrogated long-standing international treaties, defied the clear intent of legislation, and lied repeatedly to the American people, all in hopes of establishing and perpetuating a culture of torture.
Duplicity, legalisms, secrecy, and power grabs at core of Bush torture regime
Soon after 9/11, Bush signed a secret order establishing CIA “black sites” overseas–secret prisons where the CIA might interrogate prisoners away from oversight by the Red Cross or anyone else. At prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba, Bush authorized a long list of “enhanced” interrogation techniques. He arranged for administration lawyers to sign off on the legality of torturous practices long considered illegal in the U.S. and around the world. He approved a memo stating that the Geneva Conventions would no longer bind the U.S., and when Congress tried to overturn this presumption with clear language to the contrary in the Military Commissions Act, he twisted the law by asserting limitless executive authority to apply legislation however he saw fit. He also sought and obtained congressional approval for retroactive immunity protecting torturers in his administration.
Throughout his presidential terms, Bush insisted publicly that the U.S. did not torture, even as it became obvious to the entire nation that horrendous torture had been inflicted in our name. Documents that became public after he left office have revealed that his involvement in approving lists of specific torture techniques was close and ongoing. But even when administration officials sought to keep the president at a distance from details of the torture regime, it is clear that he approved their actions and believed that torture was a good policy that should be implemented and defended by any means necessary, including lies and false promises.
————————-
http://tortureaccountability.org/george-w_bush
Now watch somebody here dismiss all these documented, widely-reported facts because I happened to find descriptions of them in places like “The Center for Torture Accountability”; obviously an anti-conservative, politically-biased group, if they call “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the T-word…
————————-
Obama Administration Pushed Hard to Protect Bush Torture Lawyers
Shortly after the his 2009 inauguration, President Barack Obama and his administration turned to two leading Republican politicians to help key subordinates of President George W. Bush who faced criminal prosecution in Spain for orchestrating the secret torture program used against terrorism suspects…
————————–
http://www.allgov.com/US_and_the_World/ViewNews/Obama_Administration_Pushed_Hard_to_Protect_Bush_Torture_Lawyers_110101
These guys must be really extremist, if they’re criticizing a far-leftist like Obama!
—————————-
Playboy.com journalist Mike Guy underwent waterboarding by a trained member of the U.S. military in the site’s new Lab Rat feature.
Guy bet that he could endure 15 seconds of the interrogation technique used by the Bush administration on al Qaeda chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah.
Watch the results:…
—————————-
Video at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/20/playboy-journo-bets-he-ca_n_189280.html
————————-
Jones, one of the Jones boys says:
Oh yeah, waterboarding is torture, torture is bad, waah waah waah. If I wanted to read these kinds of conventional bromides, I’d go read The Comics Journal…
—————————-
Yeah, how unhip can you get?
I don’t know who saw Joe Sacco’s piece in Harpers, I think it was, a few years ago…it showed American advisors training Iraqi conscripts. The Iraqis were physically unable to tolerate the stress positions they were supposed to undergo and the Americans were like, what wimps, we had to undergo this shit ourselves in basic training.
Okay…but these are some of the techniques used on prisoners and they are not deadly, but they are considered to be torture when one, for instance, has a black sack over one’s head for protracted periods and has no idea if one will be punched in the head any second, get a series of peroneal strikes or be kicked in the balls, or have their nards electrified. Similarly, when one is waterboarded, there is no reason to assume that the prisoners know they will not be killed, and often the idea is to take the prisoner as close to drowning as possible, for them in fact to believe they WILL be drowned, in order to get the desired information. And this process goes on with many individuals for years on end. This is torture and it is illegal.
I wanted there to be a more accurate depiction in Aaron and Ahmed of these techniques, but since I’m “only an artist” it wasn’t gonna happen at DC, so misconceptions are reiterated and multiply. Too bad that some don’t think this stuff belongs on a pop culture site, but when you see so much popular culture showing half-assed versions of these issues, then it needs to be discussed.
“So instead of torture, they’ve just settled for plain murder. This is probably an improvement since I much prefer to be murdered (quickly) than tortured (not joking).”
Well, maybe not since the “targeted” killings have resulted in many civilian deaths. And that’s assuming that one would be in the direct area of a strike. If one were just outside that area presumably there would be risk of “merely” serious injury. So which is worse, torture or the risk of being maimed for life?
Anyway, I believe Russ when he says that the more perverted practices of Abu Ghraib would not have taken place on his watch, but I am disappointed that he defends the rest of it, that so dishonors our services.
Some of you haven’t been following these posts very well because nowhere in this thread did I say waterboarding wasn’t torture. What I did say is that waterboarding is not comparable to the infinitely more gruesome torture practices of the past. I also said that it is not particularly effective for a variety of reasons.
Let me be very blunt here: Regardless of your views regarding the waterboarding rathole Mike took us down, if you honestly believe we should judge how people treated each other in 1492 through a 21st century progressive lens, you are ignorant of reality and attempting to rewrite history — something that is both unethical and anti-science.
“if you honestly believe we should judge how people treated each other in 1492 through a 21st century progressive lens, ”
A 21st century lens is the only one we’ve got, Russ. If you’re defending chopping people’s hands off, stealing their land, and murdering them on the ground that it’s historical so it’s okay, that’s a 21st century application of historical relativism (a poor application, I’d argue, but an application nonetheless.)
Every retelling of history is a rewriting of history. History is a genre of writing. It’s very much not a science; assuming it is takes you to very strange places indeed.
People in the past aren’t stupider or less ethical than us. In fact, what they did and how they did it has a lot to do with the ethics we have. Being honest about what our ancestors did and relating that to our own morality is crucial if either that morality or that history is to mean anything. Our country is built upon giant drifts of corpses and terrible injustices. Many other countries were too…but the history we need to deal with is (not only, but primarily) our own. The past isn’t past; pretending that what Columbus did has no relation to who we are, that we’re so far past that point ethically that his failures can’t possibly have any meaning for us, is willful blindness, I think. The problem with it isn’t that it lets Columbus off the hook; he’s long dead. The problem is that it lets us off the hook.
Oh okay, that’s what you said…but gee, Russ, you started it with your reaction to Noah’s three sentences(!), then had a poke about PCness, which is often used in a derogative way, but my impression of “PC” is that it is about trying not to be a dickhead, as we humans have been throughout history for flimsy reasons, y’know, the various oppressions of everyone who isn’t a white male, the Spanish Inquisition, native Americans killing each other and us killing them, Nazis, and on etc right up to now. We learn from history and hopefully begin to evolve. So yeah, you look at the past and say “that was wrong to do” according to the standards of today. Of course our primitive ancestors thought it was fine at the time to do whatever they got up to, but that’s irrelevant. Thanksgiving came down to us as a yearly reenactment of a meal the first European immigrants shared with the natives, a lovely scene which cannot help but also remind us of how the US treated the natives subsequently.
I’m a bit confused by both of you:
Russ is saying that we can’t judge torturers of the past as performing immoral acts because of incommensurability of worldviews AND because the torture used was so much worse.
Noah seems to be saying that we can judge people like Columbus as being unethical because “people in the past aren’t […] less ethical than us.” That is, the reason we shouldn’t judge those people as any less ethical is because the worldviews are commensurable.
Argh, sorry; that is phrased badly. I don’t think that people in the past were innately less ethical or more corrupt than we are today. Therefore you can’t just dismiss their actions as products of their time, or as irrelevant to us. People did in fact have the ability back then to criticize the European treatment of Native Americans (Bartolemew De Las Casas did).
Their ethical natures aren’t different in kind than ours. Therefore, we can judge their ethical acts. Does that make sense?
From here:
“By way of impressing this point upon you—that the Medieval Christian notion of virtue was indeed a serious principle and not, as Machiavelli suggests, always simply a convenient cover—I’d like briefly to mention one of the most extraordinary events in the history of Western expansion, an event little known nowadays perhaps, but one which had important effects lasting right down to the present day.
The example concerns the decision of Charles V of Spain, at the time Europe’s most powerful and wealthiest monarch, who was becoming fabulously rich with all the gold being shipped home from the New World, to call a halt to all Spanish expansion until such time as the philosophers and theologians could determine “the manner in which conquests should be carried on . . . justly and with security of conscience,” that is, until one could resolve the question whether his permission for and encouragement of such expansion was compatible with his Christian virtue.
There is no reason here to question Charles’s sincerity. He was an intensely devout man, concerned about the state of his own virtue, and he was profoundly disturbed by what was going on in the name of the Spanish monarch in the New World. So he summoned from all over Europe the best scholars and held a long debate on the question. In that debate in August 1550, Bartolome de Las Casas presented a case on behalf of the natives of South America, 550 pages of closely argued Latin prose, taking five days out in the hot sun to present his case that the Spanish had no right to take anything from the natives.“
Apparently unlike Noah, I think the human race has evolved sociologically throughout history. And, barring a mass breakdown in civilization due to an asteroid strike, super volcano eruption, or other sudden global catastrophe, this progression will most likely continue.
And if you take this sociological evolution out of context for some contemporary pet political crusade, you are attempting to distort and rewrite history.
For example, if you read Caesar’s own account of Rome’s war against European barbarians in his “Commentaries on the Gallic War,” you’ll find that what was perfectly acceptable during warfare in that era would have Noah and others screaming “war crimes” today — and rightfully so. But while times and attitudes change, the original historical context has not — hence my viewpoint that, in this day and age, protesting a holiday like Thanksgiving or Columbus Day because of the perceived “sins” of our distant ancestors is socially devisive and a waste of time.
Yeah, I remember you making that argument before.
Do you really think that what we do in wartime now is so much more morally advanced than what they did back then? Hiroshima seems fairly impressively awful to me, even by the standards of Aztecs tearing out people’s hearts.
The idea that humans have progressed and always will, and that therefore we have no moral lessons to learn from the past…I don’t think you could make an argument that could be so thoroughly self-refuting. No one who thinks that is in a position to think themselves morally superior to anyone.
Steven Samuels: “Well, maybe not since the “targeted” killings have resulted in many civilian deaths. And that’s assuming that one would be in the direct area of a strike. If one were just outside that area presumably there would be risk of “merely” serious injury. So which is worse, torture or the risk of being maimed for life?”
When questioned on such matters, it is always good to return to the best thinking on the subject:
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.
Russ, in fairness, I think the confusion over your position is because its a very confused position.
For myself at least, it seems very unclear why, if you accept both ‘the rack’ and waterboarding as torture you would want to make distinctions of any sort other than a practical, utilitarian, one between them. It seems that at the point of accepting waterboarding as torture, thats the end of the debate. There’s really no point in arguing why one method of torture is morally seperate from another – if its torture then its equally morally wrong (though you might argue that its a necessary wrong). The fact you continue to insist on a distinction is probably why people might imagine that you don’t actually think of waterboarding as torture.
As to the wider point of whether or not we can pass moral judgement on the actions of past cultures, do you feel there is a cut off point? Can I pass judgement on the actions of Nazi Germany which was before my lifetime, and a very different society to my own? You will, no doubt, respond that the actions of the Nazis were criticised in their own era too, but then, as Noah points out, so were the actions of the Spanish in the Americas. It seems that any line we draw over what we can or can’t criticise by modern standards is going to be so arbitrary as to be useless.
Oh and this isn’t (or doesnt have to be) a “contemporary pet political crusade”. I have utterly no commitment either way regarding events in the Americas. I’d be quite happy to accept that they weren’t a genocide, if only your argument was actually coherent enough to convince.
—————————
R. Maheras says:
…All: Keep in mind that this entire discussion revolves around the the inference by some here that the U.S.’s recent use of carefully-controlled, non-lethal waterboarding is comparable to a myriad of gruesome historical torture methods where death was not only possible, but a probability.
—————————-
To flip my “Let’s not be too kind to the Bushites” suggestion in verso, let’s have some respect for the professional expertise of “old school” torturers! They had dozens of “enhanced interrogation techniques” which caused considerable pain and physical damage, but featured virtually no risk of fatality.
Sure, getting your eyes burned out with a red-hot poker is — as far as the pain and permanent damage involved — worse than waterboarding.
Yet both are vile, morally corrupt and corrupting varieties of torture. That conservatives are falling all over themselves to defend/minimize/sanitize all this is all-too-painfully telling. That America reelected George W. Bush even after the Abu Ghraib story came out is also…revealing.
—————————-
…Some of you haven’t been following these posts very well because nowhere in this thread did I say waterboarding wasn’t torture.
——————————
No; but you said defending/minimizing/sanitizing stuff like:
“To even the most benign torturer of the past, contemporary CIA techniques would look tame and useless.”
“…torture is really in the eyes of the beholder. For example, on the bus yesterday, a typical LA crazy person (of which there are legion — more than I’ve seen anywhere else in all of my world travels) was talking very loud and very irritatingly to nobody in particular…”
“the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, while considered torture by some today, are truly nothing compared to the more devastating and permanent tortures of the past…”
“…the U.S.’s recent use of carefully-controlled, non-lethal waterboarding…”
“…the CIA’s carefully controlled waterboarding is simulated drowning. And terrorist suspects all know they will not die at the hands of CIA operatives…”
(That video of the reporter who had himself waterboarded showing how, whatever you may “know” in a calm situation evaporates in the panicky terror of the actual experience.)
“The larger point here is that it is not U.S. policy to torture anyone to death, and that has probably been the policy for quite some time.”
(I guess that’s what passes for claiming the moral high ground, in this sorry-ass era…)
Hey, kids! Cartoons!
http://www.elizabethscanlonthomas.com/2009/05/tom-tomorrow-on-torture.html
http://scienceblogs.com/worldsfair/2007/12/three_looks_at_the_torture_con.php
http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/f/imagecache/upto_600x600/f/cartoons/TMW2009-09-02.jpg
Suat: that is a truly horrendous quote from Allbright. It really makes one despair.
Noah wrote: “Do you really think that what we do in wartime now is so much more morally advanced than what they did back then? Hiroshima seems fairly impressively awful to me, even by the standards of Aztecs tearing out people’s hearts.”
C’mon, Noah… think about it. If there were nukes 2000 years ago, with the mindset societies had then, they would have been used freely in every single conflict. The fact that nukes have been used in exactly one relatively recent contemporary conflict (so far) speaks volumes as to how far humanitity’s mindset has shifted about what is and is not acceptable behavior against one’s perceived enemies.
But that shift is a fragile one, as the likes of Nazi Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia proved. Even worse, the shift is not universal — particularly amongst certain extremist Muslim societies — as was proved by relatively recent genocidal actions in pre-invasion Iraq and various parts of Africa.
Should Iran and other radical Muslim regimes get their hands on nukes, with their Middle Ages mindset, it is inevitable that all the progress humanity in general has made over the centuries could be lost in a few well-placed flashes of destruction.
That it hasn’t happened yet is something to give yhanks about.
Ben — Think of the way humanity views what is and is not acceptable treatment as the “mean” line on a graph that has, over the centuries, been slowing moving upwards. What Japan and Germany did to enemies (and its citizens) during World War II was an aberration for that time period. But it would not have been perceived as an aberration 2000 years earlier. Ditto for the genocide in Rwanda, Cambodia, Iraq (including the use of poison gas, which even Hitler and Tojo opted not to use 50 years earlier).
I don’t think it’s true that people would have quickly used nuclear weapons before. Nuclear weapons are really kind of unlike anything that was around for much of history. I think that certainly speaks volumes. I’m not sure it says exactly what you want it to say, though.
I agree that I’m glad we haven’t all been blown up though.
You should read Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature.” I think you’d probably agree with him for the most part, and might like the book a lot.
Oh; didn’t see your reply to Ben. You *really* need to read that Steven Pinker book. You will love it.
I would argue that World War II and the atrocities of the 20th century were not just aberrations…or rather, that they would have been aberrations at any time in history. People just didn’t have the technology to kill each other in that kind of concentration. You can read the extended argument here.
Here’s my problem with Mike and a few of you other folks. You inject hyperbole into your arguments so often and to degrees so extreme, your arguments lose all of their validity.
In the legal world, there are various degrees of crime, and thus varying degrees of punishment – everything from probation to the death penalty. In the world of some of you, every crime is a felony, and every action is akin to something Hitler’s Third Reich would do.
That is total bullshit, of course – yet, here some of you are, defending your “every crime is exactly the same” stance to the bitter end.
Non-lethal waterboarding, as was done by the CIA, is simply not the same as being drawn and quartered, blinded with hot pokers, stretched on a rack, disemboweled or “de-hearted” while still alive, etc.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
Noah — I’ll check out Pinker’s book.
Keep in mind that population sizes today when compared to 3000 years ago should be viewed as relative. After all, when a city-state was destroyed back then (which happened quite often), it was the modern-day equivalent to destroying an entire country.
“After all, when a city-state was destroyed back then (which happened quite often), it was the modern-day equivalent to destroying an entire country.”
Yep, that’s the argument Pinker makes. I think there are some fairly serious problems with it…but like I said, you’ll enjoy the book.
The reference to the Third Reich wasn’t for comparative purposes, it was just an example of an event in the past commonly judged as evil by us in the present. There might be an argument for comparison to be made, but I wasn’t making it. Obviously not every crime is comparable. But within a type of charge (such as torture or murder) they generally are. Thats a large part of English Law.
But when we’re back to simply stating “Non-lethal waterboarding…is simply not the same” then we’re just back to competing intuitions on torture. I disagree, but I’m not going to argue over statements of intuition stated as fact.
I want to read Pinker’s book now too
———————–
R. Maheras says:
Here’s my problem with Mike and a few of you other folks. You inject hyperbole into your arguments so often and to degrees so extreme, your arguments lose all of their validity.
———————–
Lemme stick to my own comments, and let’s see if indeed hyperbole rears its ugly head, or if such is in the nuance-free eye of the beholder. We read:
——————————
R. Maheras says:
…Columbus discovered the New World at the start of the Spanish Inquisition, and at a time when it was perfectly acceptable and commonplace in Europe, Asia, Africa, and yes, the pre-Columbian Americas, to torture, maim or kill your “uncooperative” enemies or criminal suspects. England didn’t abolish torture for its own citizens until the mid-17th century, and most of its European counterparts didn’t follow suit until the 18th or even 19th centuries. China didn’t ban some of its most heinous forms of torture until the early 20th century, and Native Americans routinely tortured and killed their prisoners of war.
Like I said… it makes no sense to look at this whole issue through modern-day eyes.
—————————–
To which I replied:
——————————
More like through liberal eyes; modern-day conservatives have found nothing wrong about “waterboarding” (no worse than some college fraternity initiation, one of their propagandists maintained), Abu Ghraib, the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo; cheered on Dirty Harry and Jack Bauer as they tortured the “bad guys,” and needless to say, defend Israel in whatever it does, including widespread use of torture.
—————————-
Which brought this immediate response:
————————-
R. Maheras says:
Mike — There simply IS no comparison between waterboarding/other present-day “enhanced interrogation techniques” and torture practices of the past, and making such comparisons is nothing more than politically-motivated hyperbole.
————————–
Who was comparing? More like grouping; as even you have conceded, waterboarding is torture.
(Why even in the bad old days, some forms of torture were much milder than others: say, getting whipped as opposed to disemboweled.)
—————————
In the legal world, there are various degrees of crime, and thus varying degrees of punishment – everything from probation to the death penalty. In the world of some of you, every crime is a felony, and every action is akin to something Hitler’s Third Reich would do.
—————————-
How about in the moral world, which is the focus here for the condemnation of torture?
Yet your analogy backfires miserably; because “in the legal world,” (as I’ve earlier related) members of the Japanese military who performed waterboarding in WW II were found guilty of war crimes, via the legal process, and hanged. (Details at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/yes-inational-reviewi-we_b_191153.html )
—————————–
That is total bullshit, of course – yet, here some of you are, defending your “every crime is exactly the same” stance to the bitter end.
—————————–
Ah, the hoary “accuse the opposition of making an outrageous argument — which they never made — and then attack them for being outrageous” tactic.
——————————
Non-lethal waterboarding, as was done by the CIA, is simply not the same as being drawn and quartered, blinded with hot pokers, stretched on a rack, disemboweled or “de-hearted” while still alive, etc.
——————————-
As I wrote earlier:
——————————-
Sure, getting your eyes burned out with a red-hot poker is — as far as the pain and permanent damage involved — worse than waterboarding.
——————————-
Oh, the hyperbole!
As one of those Tom Tomorrow cartoons said, “Seriously: who ever imagined that in the first decade of this new century, Americans would be nonchalantly discussing how much torture is acceptable?”
Just ’cause it’s too easy to blast away at Russ’s arguments (shotgun, meet fish in barrel), some sort-of-sympathetic arguments and a cartoon from the great Tim Kreider: http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly010905a.htm
Mike, my hyperbole comments were referring to the hundreds of previous posts here and elsewhere in the past five or six years you’ve made about a wide variety of topics. For example, over the years, how many times have you compared someone in, say, the Bush administration to Hitler and/or his minions? From a historical point of view, such comparisons are simply ridiculous, yet you fervently argued their validity anyway. The Bush administration certainly had its problems, but it was nothing like the Third Reich.
THAT’S what I mean by hyperbole.
True, the Bushie’s sense of design and fashion wasn’t as forward and they’d probably have had a hard time with the goose-stepping.
Just to polish this post off here’s some of things we get up to on the dark side that aren’t as bad as drawing and quartering:
http://www.worldwar3illustrated.org/37/darkmatters.html