Torture? Racism? Genocide? When It Means Everything, It Means Nothing
The phenomenon of conflation occurs
when the identities of two or more individuals, concepts, or places, sharing some characteristics of one another, become confused until there seems to be only a single identity — the differences appear to become lost.
Michael Ledeen’s torture article at PJ Media — presented amid the capture and execution killing of Osama bin Laden, through the use of information some of which was apparently obtained through “torture” — shows the need for introspection. In addition to providing an example of conflation, as noted in many of the comments, it raises many questions. Among the answerable: Should we forbid all forms of “torture?” Should the Justice Department continue its investigation of “torture,” begun in 2009? “‘It’s unfortunate,’ Cheney said. ‘These men deserve to be decorated. They don’t deserve to be prosecuted.’” Should we continue to vent our self-righteous distaste for “torture” on those who obtained the bin Laden information (and, through its use, further important information) until they stop doing it? It was written here that
We have witnessed crimes against humanity. We want President Obama to show complete commitment to the rule of law so that the many lying, corrupt and criminal Americans from both the public and private sectors that have caused so much harm are punished. That includes Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and many, many others in the Bush administration, including those that were supposed to regulate the financial sector.
I disagreed here. What is “torture”? Are the slow removal of sensitive body parts in the most painful manner possible, on the one hand, and sleep deprivation by playing awful music at high volume in close proximity, on the other, both “torture”? Or does that term properly apply only to the former? Since the same word is applied to both, are they equally bad? What about waterboarding? It’s quite unpleasant and no parlor game, even though it causes only transitory fear and discomfort. Perhaps, with the copious publicity about its transitory nature, it has become less effective than previously.
“Torture” seems to occur along a spectrum rather than as one discrete band of activity. Perhaps a prism is needed to separate the various activities into discrete bands. We do that with light. Every point along the spectrum of visible light is by definition visible and there is light at every such point. The conflation of these points involved in simply calling them all “light” is harmless, unless perhaps one is working in an old fashioned darkroom developing photos, where low intensity red light can be used to see without damaging the negative or print but high intensity blue light can’t.
By sad contrast, many quite broad spectrum words and their underlying concepts have fallen prey to conflation: racism, poverty, genocide, promiscuity, and torture, for example. We can learn here, as in many other left-oriented articles, just how widespread “racism” is: all opposition to President Obama’s policies and initiatives is “racist.” “Poverty” is no less widespread; the word is used as applicable to both the United States and Haiti and all places in between. In Haiti, 40.6 percent of the workforce of 4.81 million are unemployed and eighty percent of the population exist below the “poverty line” (2003 estimate — it is likely worse now). Not having a color television and an automobile seems, in the United States, to be associated with poverty. Not so in many other countries. Genocide is a term often applied to Israel’s activities in trying to keep Palestinians from sending missiles and terrorists into Israel to kill Jews and anyone else in their way as well as to the activities at German death camps during World War II’s Holocaust. Promiscuity suggests flagrant sexual conduct, but that means many different things to many different people, particularly when it is done to mock religion. That’s true of many activities. Even threatening to burn a Koran is viewed by some as terribly bad because it sets off massacres among Islamists, but burning a Bible or soaking one in urine is hardly even newsworthy because Christians and Jews aren’t likely to go on killing sprees on account of it.
Torture — now there’s a biggie, at which some but not all of our enemies have been experts or at least vigorous and experienced. Being taken captive by the Vietcong during the Vietnam conflict could be an horrific experience and many tortured survivors still have harsh mementos. Sometimes captives were tortured to get information, sometimes for vengeance and, most likely, sometimes just for the fun of it. I have heard that some Native American tribes fancied placing captured enemies spreadeagled and naked on anthills and spreading honey on their genitals — not for information but vengeance. This sort of thing is patently uncivilized, as we commonly use that term, and it is simply inconceivable that the United States would ever to do anything even remotely similar. On the other hand, Germany was thought to represent a pinnacle of civilization until the horrors of the “final solution” were widely revealed.
The worst expression that Marxism have brought in the world is the “class hate”.
From the phylosophical “heights” Marxists have fallen into the abyss of hate,violence and blood.That have been the beginning.The class hate have gave birth to class justice that is the different attitude to criminals of the different classes.Expluatation of the poors,proletarians means the cruelty of high classes.
The reciprocal cruelty is just.the commercial actions toward poors are often named inhuman,cruel.This is not only doble standards but Orwellian`s doble mening of words. The leftists of today are playing the same games turning cruel Islamist murderers into freedom fighters and American and Israeli soldiers into torturers.
Perhaps this level of conflation is really a symptom of the pervasive and corrosive influence of postmodernism. The notion that, individually, we are responsible for (virtually) everything was a central tenant of Sartre’s existentialism. Creating a broad sense of collective responsibility for that beyond the individual’s control, of course, serves to create a sense of collective guilt which can easily be manipulated to serve those who seek power.
The difficulty you note in your essay was widely noted in critiques of Sartre – that when one so enlarges the concept of responsibility it becomes meaningless because there is no real distinction between what one is, and what one is not, responsible for.
While this is a philosophically difficult problem, it is one the 20th century brought into stark relief on more practical levels: unable to reasonably assert the horrors and savagery of WWII were caused by a small, largely hereditary elite as was WWI, we almost had to see the German and Japanese people as collectively responsible to (1) justify our retaliatory bombing of civilians, and (2) perhaps more importantly, to justify our own, and our leaders, failure to act against these aggressors at an early stage when they could have been checked at reasonable cost.
Unfortunately, this does not bode well for our longer term relationship with Islam….
Let’s remember that while it was a tragedy taht children were killed in those rais that first of all: there were no alternative methods to strike Germany as until March 1944 (ie before the Mustangs atrrived in force) bombing in daylight incurred 25% losses ie four raids and you are dead or in a prisoners’ camp and that the only alternative was indicrimante night bombing. Second of all that as long as the Geramn people gained econopmic benefits from the war it was very popular in Germany, that the German people largely knew about the final solution and that very few Germans were shocked by it (many components of the Walkure plot were in fact for it), that Hitler was popular until his very death, that even after his death the WEhermacht resisted Dönitz’s orders baanning the “Hitler’s salute”, that even in the 60s when it was known about final solution Schindler lived a pariah, frequently harrased and had to leave Germany. Let’s rememeber that between those civilians were those who built tanks and guns for the Wehrmacht and manufactured Zyklon B for the Totenkopf Verbande units.
Also when you say “we” in those passages where you assign the blame it loks like this “We” is America. Funny, but I thought that the blame had to be assigned first to the UK and France who were more directly threatened (Did you know that at that time planes couldn’t croos the Atlantic with a significant payload?) and who had ample means to stop Hiler had they had the will. Not to mention that it is Soviet Union and not America who by backstabbing Poland allowed the Wehrmacht to face France intact instead by an autumn in Poland’s mud, and that it was Soviet Union not America who delivered the oil and raw materials used by/in the tanks and planes who crushed France.
JFM – I’m well aware of all of the things that you mention and, to be clear, I did not mean to ascribe “blame” to the US or to the UK, for that matter. I am, however, suggesting that notions of collective responsibility, brought into broad consciousness originally by popular explications of Marxism, may have made it easier to deal with making the hard decisions which were (as you point out) almost certainly necessary to win the war. And, that took place in a context in which philosophy was trying to cope with the problem as well. Unsuccessfully, in my view, but I do regard Sartre at least, and much of existentialism in general, as a way of broadening notions of responsibility beyond the more limited notions in which the individual is responsible for his own actions, but not for those of others, into the more diffuse collective identities which justify much of the horrors of the 20th century.
Thanks for that information. I think your comment explains something about our culture that I haven’t understood. I can’t adequately describe it, but I feel it as a pressure to care – literally about everything. Maybe that sounds callous. I guess what I mean is, there’s a lack of acknowledgement that individual people have limits. Our efficacy – our ability to make things happen in the world – is limited. Some people are extremely effective; asking them to “change the world” may make sense because they really can. Most of us just do our best to get by. Yet the culture pressures us to be idealists, to pick a cause – something huge that we have no actual control over – and make gestures indicating that we care. Failure to do so seemingly makes one less human. Leading one standard-issue life, taking care of oneself, one’s family, ones business, is no longer adequate.
War is a Pandora’s Box and once open it will bite everyone as it has no moral compass. You can hand the demons and devils that escape all the dictionaries, rule books and copies of the Constitution you want but it’s not like a mark on the doorway that will enable an angel of death to do a pass over.
About the only thing demons don’t kill are ones that wear the same uniform – aside from that, it’s pretty much a free-for-all. Just ask the departed souls of the 9 zillion Soviet prisoners who died of homesickness while in German care.
Home sickness? Deliberately starved when they were not murdered for the fun.
While I agree that the horror of war always exceeds human imagination, I disagree with your overly inclusive characterization of the combatants. From the beginning of the Republic, there are recorded comments by those the American Fighting Men have defeated as to their ability to maintain the the distinction between combat and murder. As a people we have the expectation that those who willfully violate that distinction are tried and punished. A finer brush is in order. Additionally, Russia lost about 5 Million POW’s mostly to wounds, exposure and malnutrition. One would expect a ZILLION to exceed a Billion, so the number of Russians dying of homesickness while prisoners of the Germans exceeded the total population of the world, then and now by an order of magnitude!
Americans commonly killed prisoners in WW II without consequences and the Russian prisoners weren’t “lost” but murdered by starvation, execution, overwork and purposeful exposure to the elements and resultant diseases.
…the Russian prisoners weren’t “lost” but murdered by starvation, execution, overwork and purposeful exposure to the elements and resultant diseases.
You neglected to mention that the Soviets had refused to sign the Geneva Convention so their soldiers were not protected by that Convention. On the other hand, the Americans and British were signatories and the Germans (more-or-less) honoured the Geneva conventions in their case.
I guess the Jews didn’t sign the Geneva Convention either.
Silly oversight in retrospect.
True (like any other nation) but you can’t blame them in the case of Japanese as their wounded had the unsavoury habit of blowing up themselves as American mediacs approached them to provide assistance. Of course the consequence was that it soon became standard practice to finish off Japanese wounded from a safe distance. But who might blame the American service men who did so?
Just how many million are required to make a zillion?
“Americans commonly killed prisoners in WW II without consequences.”
Citations please.
“I guess the Jews didn’t sign the Geneva Convention either.”
Irony or stupidity? ‘Christians’ didn’t, moslems didn’t…
“Silly oversight in retrospect.”
Tongue in cheek? Flippant?
“Many of those complicit in the entertainment were court-martialed and punished when the allegations became matters of public knowledge.”
In point of fact, that is not true. The process of investigation and eventual punishment was undertaken before the images were public knowledge. That the process and the fact the images were public was for a long time concurrent does not change which came first.
Good catch, Tom.
Mr. Ledeen concludes, “So I don’t have an easy answer, the best I can do is this: in general, no torture, or anything that comes close to it. Go with other methods. Be willing to pay a price on the battlefield on those (rare) occasions when torture would have worked faster and saved some lives. But in those instances when the stakes are high, when the usual, civilized methods just won’t do, then you have to consider all the options. And be willing to stain your soul. You chose to get into this, after all. That’s part of the price.”
Be “willing to pay the price on the battlefield on those (rare) occasions when torture would have worked faster and saved some lives?” Sure, Mr. Ledeen, that’s easy for you to say in the comfort of your own home. But when actual American troops are killed because we didn’t get the necessary infromation from an Afghan P.O.W. to prevent an ambush, are YOU going to be the one to go to the parents or the wives or the kids of that fallen American soldier and say, “Well, hey, look, sorry that your family member died. But we did manage to maintain the moral high ground in our war against Islamic terrorists and jihadists.” Yep, I want to be there Mr. Ledeen when you try and sell that idea to the relatives of that dead American soldier.
This is war and bad things happen in war. And the first rule in war is to win that war by any means possible. Few people note today that hardly any Japanese prisoners were taken by American troops in the Pacific during World War II. This was mostly because the Japanese didn’t WANT to be taken alive, but on many, many, occassion American soldiers simply did NOT take any prisoners, especially on Guadalcanal. This was a war of no mercy where no quarter was given on either side. Was this morally wrong? Sure it was, but that was the way the war was fought and we were in it to win it.
Do we “taint” our souls when we torture people? Well, if you were pulling arms and legs or eyes or fingernails off of people, yes, that would be torture and that would be bad. But is waterboarding or sleep deprivation or playing loud music torture? NO,it is not. You walk away from waterboarding and sleep deprivation and playing loud music a whole human being, not to mention the fact that the terrorist could avoid all of that by simply GIVING us the information we want. So tell me, Mr. Ledeen, which is worse, to “taint” our souls by waterboarding someone, or to live with the fact that we allowed numerous Americans to die simply because we didn’t do everything we could to get important information from a terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
And people never ask to flip side to that question, too. What right does the terrorist have to withhold vital information from us, information that could save the lives of thousands of Americans? Are they more morally supperior to us for NOT giving us the information than we are for trying to squeeze it out of them? To me, potential mass murderers who are NOT American citizens (and, therefore, NOT protected by the Constitution) have NO rights at all. If we know that these individuals have important information that could save American lives, then we should use all means necessary to get it out of them.
This is war and war is a mean and ugly business. It has been this way since mankind decided to wage wars. Somehow, we now think that there is some “legal” and “honorable” way to wage a war, as if killing other people isn’t bad enough. So let the military do its job. They’ve served us well for over 200 years now, so I see no reason to change now.
Bravo! I too thought something was really “off” about Mr. Ledeen’s comments. We’ve become an adolescent society and can no longer make tough, grown-up decisions about almost anything anymore.
I’m reminded of the Star Trek episode in which the two warring planets would require a certain number of their citizens to report to the “elimination center” to become casualties of the war. Clean. Neat. No mess. No fuss.
What has become of us when we can’t even make sensible, reasonable, adult decisions because we’re so concerned about the feelings of people who want to kill us? It seems that however misguided our enemies are, they have more moral clarity than we do. They didn’t consider the “feelings” of Daniel Pearl before they chopped his head off.
Look around the world. Europe is on a suicide mission and we in North America are heading down the same road. We seem unable to act on behalf of our own survival anymore.
But is waterboarding or sleep deprivation or playing loud music torture? NO,it is not. You walk away from waterboarding and sleep deprivation and playing loud music a whole human being, not to mention the fact that the terrorist could avoid all of that by simply GIVING us the information we want.
Context is everything. While you may not consider sleep deprivation to be a form of torture, Solzhenitsyn certainly did. He knew from first hand experience how effective it was. Sleep deprivation was used to force him to confess to Stalin’s goons and he said in The Gulag Archipelago that this was the single most widely used method of coercing confessions from people in the Soviet Union. No one ever laid a hand on him: they simply denied him sleep for a week or more and he – and many thousands of others – were more than willing to confess anything, no matter how ridiculous, just to be left alone to sleep. Even if it meant their execution the next day, many many people begged to be allowed to confess – even though virtually all were completely innocent of everything – just to be allowed to sleep one more time.
The longest I’ve ever been deprived of sleep something in the range of 36 hours and that wasn’t inflicted by someone who was holding me prisoner; I just had a lot of studying to do before an exam. But I still remember how utterly desperate I was to finish my tasks so that I could go to sleep; I really felt like I was losing my mind. I don’t even want to think about how horrible it would be to be deprived of sleep for a week or more….
You are presumably thinking of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and assuming that all of them are massively guilty. In that case, it may make sense to argue that since sleep deprivation doesn’t destroy the physical body, it is harmless and since the people subjected to it are guilty, all they need to do is spill the beans and they can avoid even the discomfort of sleep deprivation. But what about people who have been rounded up by mistake and are innocent? How are they supposed to simply spill the beans to avoid mistreatment if they have no beans to spill? And what makes you think that the prisoner spilling the beans with only the threat of torture will be believed? If I were an interrogator, I think I’d be very suspicious of someome who talked too readily. I’d think he was telling me a tall tale just to avoid harsh treatment. I can well imagine my supervisors insisting that I use harsh measures just to be sure the prisoner really meant what he said.
Actually Solyenizhin discusses many methods of torture used by the NKVD from prolonged sleep deprivation (say, a week) until immersion of feet in ice cold water and crushing genitalia. I have reread the Gulag just a few weeks ago and don’t remember him telling what was used on him.
Words can be powerful tools. The meaning of them can change depending on who uses them. For instance; I curse very little but when I have to, the curse words have greater impact than if I willy nilly wasted them on trivial things.
The NAACP and the like have cheapened the word “racist”. True racism is vile and should make ones stomach turn. Like the boy who cried wolf, when we here them use the word “racist” it has no impact. Example; an exam is racist because it uses proper English. Give me a break.
The left will say “homelessness” is “genocide”, hard work is “greed”, church goers are “fanatics”. where does it end?
If you keep throwing those blunted darts, I will ignore you like the child you are.
It is crucial to understand what various organizations or persons mean when they use the much abused term “racist.” The awful thing is that most users know little about the history of racial theory, so while proclaiming themselves “anti-racist” may be using racially charged language. I wrote about that problem in my last two blogs: http://clarespark.com/2011/05/26/who-is-a-racist-now/, and http://clarespark.com/2011/05/28/who-is-a-racist-now-2/. What these language abusers have done is to eliminate the very idea of the individual or dissent, though in their official proclamations they claim to be the only ones defending these libertarian values.
Today is Memorial Day. Our fallen dead in wars did not die to protect “stability” and “cohesion” as the education establishment desires, but rather to protect discovery and finding the truth as a distinctive American project, one with universal application. I wrote about that here: http://clarespark.com/2010/04/04/what-is-truth/.
These confusions of language described in the article are pervasive in our schools. My last series of blogs take on the problem of who is a racist now? I call your attention to the big fight now erupting with the UFT and NAACP on one side, and the charter schools on another. Once more the assumptions of multiculturalism are confusing the fight: each side believes itself to be anti-racist, but they both cannot be correct. Where do we stand as students of racial theory and its horrid application? Pajamas readers should be interested in the first blog in this series: http://clarespark.com/2011/05/16/questions-for-education-reformers/.
Our Constitution forbids “Cruel and Unusual Punishment”. When it was written the whipping post was a common form of punishment. No one at the time thought the Constitution forbid it. In fact In fact it was used in Delaware in the 20th century.
Could you imagine it being used today?
Convicts are given 20 year and 30 year and life sentences of confinement to unpleasant places in this country without the slightest controversy. How is that less cruel than sleep deprivation or water boarding?
Here is something to consider: If you were given the choice of being water-boarded for 15 minutes with the understanding you would be alive and whole at the end of the ordeal in lieu of a 10-year sentence to a state prison would you accept the deal?
Or consider this: If one were to offer Charles Manson or Bernie Madoff their freedom if they were to accept 15 minutes of water-boarding would you be outraged?
And now 30,000 prisoners will be released in CA over 2 years because of that exact issue of cruel and unusual punishment. Victims old and new are not part of this package because every Supreme Court in America is nuts.
The goal posts have moved an awful long way since America was founded and if the current crop of Americans had landed on these shores at the beginning there never would’ve been an America but only people in urine stained clothes high-tailing it back to Europe.
Some illegal alien in MN is on a hunger strike against his cleaning company because he’s made 9 bucks an hour for 9 years and thinks that’s wrong. He needed an interpreter to be interviewed after 9 years in America. He’s actually set up shop for his tent strike at Cub Foods supermarket where he cleans rather than his company because Cub has a higher profile.
I once learned enough Indonesian and Portuguese to run around those countries on my own in a few weeks and on a whim not for employment. We’re importing morons into America and expecting Horatio Alger and rocket scientists cuz all men were created equal in a jar and measured before release.
Unbelievably the city council in MPLS and others are supporting him. No laws broken, just a lot of complaining by an idiot and sob sisters willing to hold his hand rather than tell him to learn English and make himself employable elsewhere or, shocking, deporting him. I weep for my country.
My solution would involve him waking up while being parachuted into Mexico like in that last Predator movie.
Ironically, the Left is in favor of torture and murder as long as it’s done inside and abortion clinic.
I think Ledeen’s use of the word “taint” is important. Maybe this goes along with my feeeling of lack of personal limits. There’s a sense that the culture wants total moral purity. Any achievement or attainment or acquisition that has the slightest negative effect on another person is considered impure – tainted, unacceptable, unable to be enjoyed.
According to this formula, America is tainted and not to be approved of because of our ancestors’ treatment of Indians and slaves. Our victory in WWII is tainted because we killed civilians and dropped two a-bombs in order to win. And today, in the GWOT, most of the measures we take to protect ourselves leave us morally tainted. This, for many people, has led to a dilemma: America is only worth protecting if we do nothing to protect it, and if we protect it, it’s no longer worth protecting. This is precisely where Ledeen’s battlefield scenario comes from.
Another problem is, once a taint is acquired there’s no way to get rid of it. No redemption, no expiation, only eternal guilt and penance. We rebuilt Japan and helped rebuild Germany, but people still argue about Hiroshima and Dresden.
Again, no sense of the inherent imperfection and limitedness of human life and individual humans. Anything less than belief in moral perfection and perfectibility is somehow a cop-out.
Being a combat vet, my opinion is that torture can be a viable means of extracting information. Out Vietnam POW’s will tell you that you eventually breakdown and will talk. My philosophy is that torture should be allowed if our enemy has responded in kind through torture of EPW’s or the murder of civilians as the principle target through terrorist acts. To extract information from high value terrorist prisoners, I would have no problem whatsoever escalating interrogation techniques to include inflicting any level of pain and permanent damage. Call me cruel, but we have a responsibility to ensure the security of our civilian population both domestically and abroad.
There are those that state publicly that information extracted through torture cannot be relied upon. I rebut this through my observations and briefings from former POW’s that these techniques do work the majority of the time and that the information is reliable. Regarding the so called water-boarding “torture”, I went through it in SERE training in the US Army. It is highly effective yet does not permanently injure or scar. If we can do this to our own soldiers, why can we not utilize this technique to extract information from terrorist detainees?
http://wwwtwosetsofbooks.blogspot.com/2011/05/breaking-israel-no-longer-civilization.html
Yes relative poverty is not as bad by any means as real poverty.
Here, in Australia, I’m assessed as way below the poverty line, yet I live a life of such luxury, compared to past ages, that ancient monarchs would look with envy on my steady electricity, lighting, entertainment, hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, cheap medicine, and the like.
As The Dues put it, in “’Tis No Fun to Be Poor”:
This is the problem of the liberal collectivist atheist society where the religious sinfulness is replaced by the sinfulness toward the “oppressed”.
This is in the accordance with the leftist theories of the class struggle.
Dan
Your essay makes a good beginning and would stand on its own as an example of the reprehensible rhetoric of equivocation used relentlessly by the enemies of America.
Why sully it by wasting time with the whole left right thing?
I say seek to persuade through reason and you will prevail.
Bush did a good job, his people did not torture and right will prevail.
Although not without a fight, it’s true.