FYI:

An interesting quote I came across:

“Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the argument that we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever savages and Asiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists use the metaphor “We must fight them with their own weapons.” Very well; let those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it literally. Let us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons. Their own weapons are large, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned gun. Their own weapons are also torture and slavery. If we fight them with torture and slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if we fought them with clumsy knives and old guns. That is the whole strength of our Christian civilisation, that it does fight with its own weapons and not with other people’s….

The elements that make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination. It is imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is imagination that makes him spare his enemy. It is precisely because this picturing of the other man’s point of view is in the main a thing in which Christians and Europeans specialise that Christians and Europeans, with all their faults, have carried to such perfection both the arts of peace and war.

They alone have invented machine-guns, and they alone have invented ambulances; they have invented ambulances (strange as it may sound) for the same reason for which they have invented machine-guns. Both involve a vivid calculation of remote events. It is precisely because the East, with all its wisdom, is cruel that the East, with all its wisdom, is weak. And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are still–merely savages. If they could imagine their enemy’s sufferings they could also imagine his tactics. If Zulus did not cut off the Englishman’s head they might really borrow it. For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.”

–G. K. Chesterton, “All Things Considered”

http://www.classicreader.com/book/2281/27/

by way of Mark Shea’s CAEI blog:

http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/04/boy-do-i-get-sick-of-having-to-say-same.html

BTW, another item I came across on Shea’s blog:

“Against Waterboarding”
by Jim Manzi, NRO’s “The Corner,” 4/29/09

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWZhNjg4MTQzZjUxNjBiNjczNzVmNmMxMTMzOGI2YWY=

http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/04/bravo-to-jim-manzi.html

by way of

http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/04/bravo-to-jim-manzi.html

(This one might interest you, Mr. Fernandez–briefly references your homeland.)