A reader writes:
I almost wish you wouldn’t write about Kafka when you talk about Guantanamo. It’s pretty easy for me to imagine the worst about that place, and it’s usually pretty unpleasant when I do. I don’t need much help on that score.
I support abortion rights early in a pregnancy. But I’ve listened to enough religious talk radio to know where people who disagree are coming from. They see abortion as the murder of a baby – not just as a murder, but as the most heinous murder imaginable. And because that’s the way they see it, they will never be reconciled to abortion.
That’s the way I feel about torture. It is, in its essence, something so vile that I just can’t be reconciled to it. Even if most of the guys at Guantanamo are guilty, and even if they provide useful intelligence under torture.I read an article somewhere, a while back about torture, and how odd it was that people who are willing to accept collateral civilian deaths in places like iraq, as a normal and inevitable cost of war, can not be reconciled to torture. If I remember it properly, the idea was that those of us who are so opposed to torture are a little hypocritical for singling it out for special condemnation.
I keep telling people that it’s not about them, that it’s about us. That it doesn’t matter if the guy at Guantanamo is a monster – that if we torture him, we become monsters too. People who argue for torture always talk as if we aren’t really there – as if the criminal is there, the monster, and torture is there, a fate that isn’t underserved, and which might bring forth some useful information.
The problem, of course, is that we are there, and the practice of torture changes us. Approving of it changes us, carrying it out changes us, to become the sort of people who approve of torture means, in a sense, that the country we love so much has passed from the scene.
My view is the following: I’m not a pacifist, and I understand that in any war, innocents will be killed. But a just war minimizes such a cost as much as is humanly possible, and that cost must be weighed in the decision to go to war. But torture is something different. It occurs not on the field of battle, where fear and chaos and mistakes abound, but outside of combat. It is deliberate and pre-meditated. The victims are already under your control. They have nowhere to go. And yet you still commit violence against them. The use of cruelty against the defenseless – even for good reasons – is categorically evil. I’m not a utilitarian in this sense. Some things are wrong in themselves. A constitutional democracy that practices torture is an oxymoron. The newly formed National Religious Coalition Against Torture has a new ad that can be found here.
The Dish 