So fucking tired
Jun. 3rd, 2005 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nancylebovNPR is interviewing an anti-torture guy from the ACLU, which is fine. Someone calls in to say that terrorists treat people really badly, so why should we do anything differently? The anti-torture guy says, "Because we're Americans."
I have this werid belief in universal values. I would like Americans to not torture because they have some respect for people and for truth and for the long run. I want Americans to behave decently because it's worth doing, not because it's a special American thing.
I have this werid belief in universal values. I would like Americans to not torture because they have some respect for people and for truth and for the long run. I want Americans to behave decently because it's worth doing, not because it's a special American thing.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-03 04:00 pm (UTC)I think the answer would better have been said, "Because we live in a democracy with rule of law." The trouble is, the terrorists are trained to be much more self-sacrificing for their cause than Americans. Democracy values each human life; these guys are more like cogs in the wheel. They'll kill themsevles AND others, and certainly they don't give up their secrets easily. I really don't know how Americans can learn anything from prisoners who probably wouldn't give up for anything but torture. It seems such a hopeless situation.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-03 04:21 pm (UTC)Have you included that some fraction (perhaps a large fraction) of the prisoners being tortured are innocent?
At this point, my greatest hope is that the terrorists' behavior is so outrageous and getting worse that the vast majority of Muslims will turn against them.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-03 07:24 pm (UTC)You can have torture in a democracy with rule of law if the majority and the laws want torture
But our constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment." I think it would be very hard to make torture legal in this country.
At this point, my greatest hope is that the terrorists' behavior is so outrageous and getting worse that the vast majority of Muslims will turn against them.
Yes, that seems the best possible solution. May Hashem help it to happen.
The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-03 10:47 pm (UTC)One friend said that the problem with torture as we did it -- by turning over the prisoners to low ranking people to soften them up -- is that anyone who didn't give you information after 30 hours of sleep deprivation isn't going to give it to you because you strip him naked and sic a dog on his balls.
The other point is that most of the people who are on the front lines/suicide bombers/etc. don't have huge wads of information in any kind of direct way. The way to collect their indirect information is to talk to them as human beings.
We're the monsters if we see them as monsters.
What you can get from torture is what the prisoner thinks you want to hear, enough and whatever will get you to stop torturing him. It doesn't have to be remotely near the truth.
Torturing people is what the side that wants to lose in the long run does.
Re: The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-05 04:33 pm (UTC)I never said I thought that torture was right or justifiable. I didn't even say that the average Islamic soldier is a monster. But their ideology and concept of human rights are very different than ours, and given that circumstance, it makes this war the complicated mess that it is.
Re: The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-05 10:38 pm (UTC)If you're going to take life, taking your on life in the process is more honorable than killing safely. We (US) have a tradition of sitting 60,000 feet above the carnage and dropping bombs.
Suicide bombing is honorable fighting compared to that. You lose your life if you take life. If it's worth it to you to take live, you should be willing to die, too.
When I hear anyone say that "their ideology and concept of human rights is very different than ours," I figure we're about to claim ours are superior. I believe that we don't really differ from any other country over time -- and we've killed and destroyed political groups that tried to stop American expansion as effectively as the British destroyed the Scottish and Irish clans when they were expanding. The enemy always has a problem that requires the Anglos to destroy them as an effective fighting force while feeling good that they're keeping the people whose culture they're destroying from being uncivilized. I don't think the Anglos are particular worse than anyone else, or much better. It's was a bullshit reason to shoot Japanese kamakazi divers when they were found in the water alive (which I know from a photograph someone sent my mom was done in that time). They don't fight like us; they must be monsters.
I've known Jews who were working with Palestinians to try to put a halt to the wreckage (the mother of one of my friends realized that the Palestinians were also a people without and land and began doing work with Israeli and Palestinian women to try to make things better).
Re: The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-06 08:37 am (UTC)I suspect that governments which put a value on their soldiers' lives are somewhat saner than those that don't--you have to start valuing life *somewhere*.
Re: The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-06 11:20 am (UTC)Captured Germans were treated with consideration because they were part of our cultural community even if their government was murdering people by ethnic group. Captured Japanese were treated worse, even though their war crimes were against political parties rather than ethnic groups (Chinese communists were the targets of their medical experiments).
Our culture's tradition is to value the lives of "real ethical people who share our values" more than the lives of people who don't.
I was trying to consider what justification the kamakazi guys might have about what they were doing and why the captain could justify murdering a a kamakazi guys who survived and was utterly helpless (maybe even bailed out to avoid the mission).
We exaggerated the savage fanaticism of the poor schmucks doing the flying -- post-war, we learned a bit more about what they were really like. That kid in the life raft may not have been even remotely interested in dying for his cause.
Cultures that have ritual purification for returning warriors seem to me to have a higher value placed on human life than cultures that don't. When I was reading a collection of Cherokee myth, I was struck that nothing with a human form was a complete monster. Even the most evil semi-human wasn't completely evil. Real monsters didn't have human faces.
Compare that with what Jezebel is in the Bible and you'll see the difference.
One of my friends has had a succession of Chinese roommates. One had a husband serving as a doctor in Tibet. Her opinion of the Tibetans wasn't much different than the typical American view of Arabs. The Chinese were saving them from a barbaric religion, were bringing in technology and medicine, and generally supporting human values and stuff. The Tibetans were savages who didn't appreciate humanistic civilization.
Depends on where you're coming from.
When a culture tells itself that it has better values than the cultures its fighting, it's making up excuses for bad behavior, whether it's the Japanese in Asia, Britain in Scotland, or the Tibetans doing random murders of Chinese when they can get away with it.
Re: The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-06 03:37 pm (UTC)Captured Germans were treated with consideration because they were part of our cultural community even if their government was murdering people by ethnic group. Captured Japanese were treated worse, even though their war crimes were against political parties rather than ethnic groups (Chinese communists were the targets of their medical experiments).
Our culture's tradition is to value the lives of "real ethical people who share our values" more than the lives of people who don't.
I was trying to consider what justification the kamakazi guys might have about what they were doing and why the captain could justify murdering a a kamakazi guys who survived and was utterly helpless (maybe even bailed out to avoid the mission).
We exaggerated the savage fanaticism of the poor schmucks doing the flying -- post-war, we learned a bit more about what they were really like. That kid in the life raft may not have been even remotely interested in dying for his cause.
Cultures that have ritual purification for returning warriors seem to me to have a higher value placed on human life than cultures that don't. When I was reading a collection of Cherokee myth, I was struck that nothing with a human form was a complete monster. Even the most evil semi-human wasn't completely evil. Real monsters didn't have human faces.
When a culture tells itself that it has better values than the cultures its fighting, it's making up excuses for bad behavior, whether it's the Japanese in Asia, Britain in Scotland, or the Tibetans doing random murders of Chinese when they can get away with it.
Re: The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-06 04:25 pm (UTC)The Rape of Nanking was an atrocity (370,000 killed out of a population of , but there was no higher level systematic plan to destroy the Chinese. The Japanese soldiers were told that the people would be grateful that the Japanese had kicked out the Europeans. The tendency of the troops to be nasty tends to go up when they've been lead to expect gratitude and get hostility. There's a site that argues the figures we have are an artifact of war time propaganda (370,000 killed would have been half the population of that city, looks like).
http://www.interq.or.jp/sheep/clarex/discovery/discoverylog03.html
Nothing like state-sponsored genocide by involuntary affiliations as far as I know. The Japanese Army was nuts enough to threaten Japanese Navy admirals, but that wasn't all of Japan.
A colleague at work tipped me off to something I haven't checked yet, but if true, sub-continental Indians couldn't become citizens of the US during the early 1900s. A couple of other groups were barred from bringing women or were barred from citizenship. I grew up in the American South and knew people who were barred from voting, and women were barred from serving on juries until the 1960s in South Carolina. We've always had great respect for human rights except for homosexuals, women, non-Europeans, and what have you. Those people were a threat to our way of life and strong moral values and needed to be treated as children at best.
The Cherokee war stories are very much, "we raided them, they reacted this way, we did that," without much moral judgment about the attacked tribe being better or anything. Aside from Dragging Canoe, who was the Cherokee equal and opposite asshole to John Sevier, who thought killing all Indians was a good thing, the Cherokee tended to be rather reasonable in their treatment of captives, probably less nasty than the northern Iroquoian tribes.
War was something you did for matter of fact reasons, not for moral reasons, so when you got what you wanted, you went home and purified yourself from the evil of killing, and that was that.
The other people in the SE tended to have a thing about Siouan tribes who were considered strange and awful, but the Cherokee took in Siouan reminents when the white pressure was obviously destroying all tribes without much concern for cultural differences. No people were more different from the Cherokee than the Natchez (highly class stratified society with human sacrifice), but the Cherokee took the last of that tribe in and assimilated it, ditto for some families of Catawbas (Siouan -- and they were weird).
Basically, people won't die for loot that much anymore, so governments have to cook up some other reason for war. "They killed our missionaries" has been a reason. "They murder Men and Women of God" makes it okay to go in and help the British overthrow their government (China).
I also tend to think the crisp line between adult civilians and adult warriors is more artificial than real. That children died because they were Iraqis before they knew they were Iraqis, in Galloway's words, is the most telling inditement of our government going, and the most telling condemnation of suicide bombing in general. I think few of us felt as horrified about the attack on the Pentagon as we did about the attack on the WT Center, and the thing I remember most about the Oklahoma City bombing is that children in a day care center there died.
Re: The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-06 05:24 pm (UTC)http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/China/Nanjing/nanjing2.html
The original figure I posted was probably a good 10 times what the true figure was. We've indirectly killed more Iraqis.
One of the problems of war time atrocities is that WWI had a huge number of faked atrocities supposedly committed by the Germans (and publicized in US newspapers by the British) which didn't turn out to be quite so. The Rape of Nanking was real enough, just about a tenth the size of what people commonly believe was the case. And the Chinese peole weren't welcoming the invaders as liberators, either.
The Japanese CP has insisted that Japan apologize for what it did do and pay reparations to the comfort women, but I suspect that demonizing the opposition and glorifying one's own side has been going on forever. I take the middle position here both for us in the Near East and the Japanese in Asia.
Re: The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-06 03:17 pm (UTC)If you're going to take life, taking your on life in the process is more honorable than killing safely. We (US) have a tradition of sitting 60,000 feet above the carnage and dropping bombs.
Suicide bombing is honorable fighting compared to that. You lose your life if you take life. If it's worth it to you to take live, you should be willing to die, too.
I'd say both are horrible and neither is honorable.
Re: The same argument was used in WWII about Japanese prisoners of war
Date: 2005-06-06 05:28 pm (UTC)