Input Junkie

I think "because we're human" isn't the right answer for precisely that reason.

I vote for "because we want to live well" or "because we want to do things that work" or, in my case "because we still want to be able to enjoy Doc Smith"--somehow, reading about the Delgonian Overlords (a species with a great fondness for torture--they're the bad guys) isn't as much fun as it used to be. Or possibly "because we don't want to look like monsters", but if I think about that too much, I'll circle back to "so fucking tired", and I really need to do some calligraphy.

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supergee.livejournal.com

I'd settle for that still working.

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james-nicoll.livejournal.com

"Because we're civilized" might do.

"Because we're Americans" runs into the tiny issue that encouraging torture of undesirables by the police and security forces of banana republics friendly to the USA is a fairly well established tradition in US foreign policy. See, for example, some of the less savoury courses offered at the School of the Americas.

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bruhinb.livejournal.com

Once upon a time the phrases, "because we want to live well," and, "because we want to do things that work," were synonymous with, "because we're Americans."

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bradhicks.livejournal.com

I grew up with American exceptionalism. I was taught, and I think it's still true to some extent, that America was the only nation in the history of the world founded not on language, or ethnicity, but on an idea: the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. I think the point of answering questions like that, "Because we're Americans," is that it's shorthand for, "Because if we're not a nation of moral principles, then we're just another bunch of fancy-dress ethnic warlords like the people our founders rebelled against."

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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.

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madfilkentist

Very nicely put. Saying "Because we're Americans" serves as a reminder that Americans should, by the principles under which the country was founded, abjure torture. Sure, America has repeatedly veered far from those principles. But there have always been people holding them up, pointing out that the deviation betrays the things that keep the country from going down the tubes. It has made a difference. I don't think there's any other country where the statement "It's unconstitutional" or the local equivalent is so damning an indictment.

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All true, but after over 200 years, American is an ethnicity (or a complex of somewhat similar ethnicities) at least as much as it's an idea.

And there's a difficulty with saying "We're special because we're the only ones who believe in universal rights".

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You can have torture in a democracy with rule of law if the majority and the laws want torture. I want a justification that's more primary than the structure of the government.

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.

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cellio

Um, yeah. It should be "because we're decent human beings".

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madfilkentist

I don't see "the only ones" as being part of that statement.

Any organized group of people should be entitled to appeal to the best of its traditions or founding principles. Group pride is a dangerous thing, and I think that's part of what you have in mind, since it can lead to thinking, "We're good because we're us." But it's also a legitimate tool for reminding people of what they have to live up to.

The right answer to a difficult ethical question is always long, and involves responding to a lot of counter-arguments. But people respond to concrete images which embody a broad set of principles. That means that not only is the simplified term useful for persuasion, it's important to keep it attached to those principles. If the politicians promoting war and torture are the only ones making statements about what "being American" means, then being American will mean being pro-war and pro-torture. Remember the "America -- love it or leave it" slogan during the Vietnam war, which really meant, "Love the war or leave America."

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redaxe.livejournal.com

"We're special because we're the only ones who believe in universal rights"

Not "the only ones". But substitute "at the forefront of the group" and it works for me; the US Constitution is now one of the oldest founding national documents, and certainly one of the first to establish broad rights (as opposed to, say, the Magna Carta, whose rights grants specifically excluded large segments of the populace).

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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.

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crazysoph.livejournal.com

I came, I saw, I clicked "make this user a friend."

Looking forward to your future postings, and the discussions.

Crazy(and lurking as cover for husbanding courage)Soph

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Get a copy of the recent Atlantic Monthly for an article about an interrogator of WWII captured Japanese who didn't believe this.

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.

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cathyr19355.livejournal.com

redbird's answer was the descriptive one; your answer is a prescriptive one. Which answer is appropriate depends on whether one is looking for a description of human behavior or, as you are, a precept that would result in humans living more ethically.

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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.

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The problem is that Christianity has a long tradition of beating the crap out of people who don't follow the same religious patterns it claims to follow (see the current pope's comment on no truce with error). Islam has at least tolerated other People of the Book throughout most of its history and tends to, in theory, be more democratic than the other monothesisms.

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).

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I'm more moderate about this--I just don't see a huge moral difference between being a suicide bomber and going into very dangerous combat.

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*.

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I think I showed you the photograph of the half-dead Japanese guy in the raft who was being rescued by Americans. And the note on the back of the photograph saying that the captain found out he was Kamakazi and had him shot.

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.

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papersky.livejournal.com

You're special because you were ahead of the field on granting rights two hundred odd years ago?

It does rather demand that someone ask what have you done for rights lately?

It's 2005. The "we're the land of the free and you all suck" rhetoric is getting really painful to hear. Living in other free countries with human rights all my life, I had no idea how much I'd bought that American exceptionalist rhetoric until the 2000 election, when it seemed to me so much worse that it had happened in America, "forefront of the group" of the free, than anywhere else. I was genuinely shocked to find out that counting votes wasn't something axiomatic for you the way it was in the democratic countries where I have lived. And now you're torturing people, and you want to fingerprint me if I visit, and give foreign visitors no civil rights at all?

Better than Syria, yes, but can you really claim to be "in the forefront of the group" of a world that includes Canada and Denmark?

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papersky.livejournal.com

Because we're decent human beings and besides, torture doesn't work anyway.

That seems to me to be the perfect sound-bite answer.

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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.

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I think I showed you the photograph of the half-dead Japanese guy in the raft who was being rescued by Americans. And the note on the back of the photograph saying that the captain found out he was Kamakazi and had him shot.

I don't think you did, but I'll take your word for the existance of the photograph and text.

Soldiers have personal reactions to what the other side is doing--frex, I've heard that flame-thrower operators were especially hated.

What was official policy in regards to captured kamikazes?

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).

I'm going to give the US credit for treating captured Germans decently--it's something to extend a sense of community that far, even though it should be extended farther. Imho, failing to give credit unless behavior and guessed-at motivations are perfect doesn't help.

Japanese war crimes included murdering huge numbers of Chinese, aka the rape of Nanking.

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).

Fear and anger, not to mention being able to get able to get away with exercising them, I should think.

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.

I can believe that Americans at the time were guessing at how much the kamikazes wanted to die for the cause, but this discussion also covers the people giving the orders.

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.

Even Cherokee might not be generous when fighting aliens.

More generally, it might be the case that societies with purification rituals do the best in valuing human life, but it's still possible that societies without suicide soldiers behave better than those that do.

I don't think of suicide attacks as such to be a tremendous moral issue--I'm more concerned with whether the attacks are on civilians. I think of suicide attacks as an indicator of desperation on the part of those ordering them.

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.

You may be right that focusing on better values leads to worse behavior, but I'd need some information of cultures that don't make a claim of better values than those who are fighting. Or would you say that claims of better values are part of what inevitably goes wrong during wars?

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We didn't intern Germans; we interned Japanese on the West Coast. People profited from having their property seized.

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.

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Boy, there's way more to the Rape of Nanking than I'd realized initially:

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.

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