One little post about waterboarding seems to have stirred up the mob, but at least the majority seem to agree that it is torture. How could it not be? It’s a process for causing pain and suffering, nothing more. At least the commenters here, even the ones I disagree with most strongly, are more honest than our politicians, many of whom seem to be in a state of denial.
But then the argument becomes whether torture is a useful procedure. I’m going to surprise some people and agree that torture is an extremely powerful tool. It’s just useless for gathering information. There’s just no way you can trust information gotten while ripping somebody’s fingernails off with a pair of pliers — they’ll scream anything to get you to stop.
Here is all that torture is good for: inspiring fear in a population. If you want it widely known that your ruling regime is utterly ruthless and doesn’t care about individuals, all you have to do is scoop up random people suspected of anti-government activities, hold them for a few weeks, and return them as shattered wrecks with mangled limbs, while treating the monsters who would do such a thing as respected members of the ruling clique, who are immune from legal prosecution. The message gets out fast that one does not cross the government.
So, yeah, if you’re a tyrant in Uzbekistan who is holding control through force of arms, fear is a useful part of the apparatus of control, and torture is a great idea, as are barbaric executions, heads on pikes, and bullets to the back of the head.
When the US government announces it’s support for torture, they aren’t talking about intelligence gathering: they are simply saying “Fear us.” They are taking the first step on the road to tyranny.
The real problem is that fear isn’t a good tool to use in a democratic society. We are supposed to be shareholders in our government; when a process of oppression is endorsed by our legislators and president, we should recognize that they are trying to set themselves apart from the ordinary citizenry, and it’s time to rebel…before the goon squads come to your neighborhood. Anyone who supports torture is a traitor to the democratic form of government, and should be voted out of office, if not impeached.
And I know some are going to crawl out of the woodwork to claim it’s OK in this case because the US is mainly trying to torture non-citizens, outsiders and foreigners — but then what it represents is an announcement to the rest of the world that the American superpower is not planning to be a benevolent member of the community of nations.
Amen, Jud.
No, what Jude said was wrong and silly. The Allied authorities didn’t condone torture, and the Nazi authorities didn’t either. The Nazis were the bad guys because they wanted to impose their fascist dogma on the rest of the world — and this included, you know, the genocide and all that. Using torture to further this evil agenda would have been horrendously wrong. Using torture to save the world from fascism would have been a different story altogether.
Yes, I think the conscientious objectors in WW2 were unethical.
The conscientious objectors on the Allied side, obviously.
Then you live in a world turn’d upside down; a monstrous bizarro universe where pacifists are regarded as aiding the enemy. You do them a great injustice. Shame on you!
You remind me of the last person I debated torture with. He became so apoplectic with rage that he jumped the shark, shrilly screaming at me that anyone who was against torture was, by extension, a supporter of jihadis. You haven’t said any such thing yet, but we seem to be trending in that direction.
How long before we reach that place where our unwillingness to torture is cast as immoral? Where men of conscience are branded enemies of the state because they don’t have the heart to torture or kill?
Is this really the conclusion we are headed toward, Jamie? Is that what you believe?
Back for a quick reprise:
Truth machine writes:
If people had just taken what I said at face value, instead of leaping to read inito it lots that wasn’t there, we could have avoided most of this silliness.
I’ll cite the study linked to in post #397 as decent support for my claim. Note also how I worded my claim: “It seems fairly securely known that …”.
You’re most welcome.
PS Everything I’ve said here has been honest and staightforward.
PPS I do admit that that “PC-leftist” post was a deliberate wind-up and provocation in response to Steve’s rather amazing comparison to the race/IQ threads. He (and his ilk) deserved that wind-up for failing to take my posts at face value but instead making mistaken guesses about what was behind them.
This is how far things have come: we are the “good guys” not for what we DO, but for what we SAY.
Jamie wrote: “The Nazis were the bad guys because they wanted to impose their fascist dogma on the rest of the world — and this included, you know, the genocide and all that.”
The Nazis were the bad guys because they wanted to impose their fascist dogma on the rest of the world AND because they were murderous thugs who employed torture and committed genocide. Hitler’s Third Reich (and Stalin’s Soviet Union) were able to carry out their policies precisely because they used terror to cow their own populations into acquiescence, and to characterize those who objected as no better than “outsiders” who were dangerous to Peace and Prosperity and Order.
In other words, Fascism wasn’t evil simply because it denied people their freedom; Fascism was evil because it depended upon the exercise of evil – terror, torture, genocide – to maintain power. Any government – or society – that must depend on such extreme and inhuman methods to “protect” itself is immoral and does not deserve to continue to exist.
T_U_T writes:
Excuse me, but my claim was not quantitative; I didn’t say “never” or “very rarely” or anything similar. If you want support for my claim see the study cited in #397. That adequately supports me does it not? Note how I worded it: “It seems fairly securely known that … ” and “it seems that experience says that”. You see my whole complaint on this thread has been about overclaiming, and I didn’t overclaim. Which bit of my statement do you think is not adequately supported by #397?
How do I know? And did I make any claim about those issues? Did I? I think not.
No I can’t; but then I made no claim that they couldn’t, did I?
Sure, to the extent that I made any claim the burden of proof is on me. #397 supports my statement to the extent I made it.
Nope.
It got hostile because one of the few things that makes me want to torture people is listening to sheltered little soulless subhuman cowards spout mindless rationales for torturing people SUSPECTED to be bad until they “confess” their sins.
Seriously, when I hear these mindless animals spouting their shit it gives me a visceral desire to take them to a “Hostel”-like place where I could show them what torture is first hand.
jamie wrote:
The portion of this sentence following the comma would come as an entire surprise to a great many people I have known who have numbers tattooed on their arms.
You’re talking rubbish again, I see. Pacifism is laudable sometimes, as it was in WW1; and sometimes it isn’t, as it wasn’t in WW2. Defeat in WW2 would have spelled the total genocide of the Jews, and the conquest of almost the entire world by fascists. Refusing to aid the war effort was positively immoral. You’ll find no shortage of liberals who would agree with me here.
Let’s not obscure the facts. The Nazi regime did not advocate torture, and it was seldom practiced on their prisoners. I don’t doubt that they used it more frequently than the Allies, but this doesn’t say anything about the actual motives for the war. Our motives were ethically justified (we were defending the world from fascism), and theirs were not.
If the torture of one individual was the only way to stop the Nazi conquest of the world, of course it would have been morally right. I fail to see how this is contestable. Now if people stop ineffectually challenging this elementary moral reasoning, I will shut up about it.
The Nazis didn’t advocate torture of PoWs, and I wasn’t aware that they advocated torture of the Jews either. Persecution and extermination, yes; torture (by standard definitions of torture), I don’t think so. If can refer me to any sources that say otherwise, pray do so.
I think this is a perfectly reasonable standard. After all, if we are going to engage in tactics that are morally repugnant to the entire civilized world, we certainly should have evidence that confirms to better than THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE (p < 0.001) that torture is significantly superior than other information-gathering methods. Oh, that wasn’t what you had in mind?
“The Nazi regime did not advocate torture”
See this particular story. Concentration camps were not only places where so-called undesirables were eliminated; they were also places where those persons were first tortured and suffered all manner of torments and humiliations. Now, you may claim that torture for the purpose of extracting information is different than torture for the sake of merely inflicting pain – which leads me to:
“Our motives were ethically justified (we were defending the world from fascism), and theirs were not.”
Noble motives do not justify ignoble actions, especially when there are alternative, less ethically ambiguous means to obtain one’s goal. Motives may differentiate the democrat from the fascist, but what is the PRACTICAL difference between the democrat and the fascist if they BOTH engage in terrorism and torture in the furtherance of their goals? High-minded claims to liberal democracy and human rights ring false when they are advanced by the use of the dictator’s tools.
LCR @ 461
See my URL. The goons are already loose in the neighborhood. Don’t for a minute think they wouldn’t do it here.
http://www.freedomfchs.com/unwarranted_surveillance.pdf
Jamie @ 507/508
And
Well, this speaks volumes. While it is true that Germany, under Hitler, rarely tortured the Americans and British who were taken prison (well, the white ones at least), the same certainly is not true about the rest of their prisoners – prisoners of war and simple prisoners.
Obviously you are under the assumption that experimenting on living, unwilling people is not torture (or is justified because it gave us a great insight into the human body which may have saves a few more lives than it cost), and that concentration camps were not by their very nature a form of torture. You have an unusual world view.
You claim that tortuing a prisoner for information is ethical if the information saves lives. How do you know before you begin the torture if it will be successful? If it isn’t should the torturer be punished in accordance with his crime?
Anyway, until these posts of yours, I had tried to assume good faith and that you were actually trying to debate. Now I have to agree with everyone else and have realised you are just coming out with crap you think will offend and inflame.
Well done.
See my URL. The goons are already loose in the neighborhood. Don’t for a minute think they wouldn’t do it here.
http://www.freedomfchs.com/unwarranted_surveillance.pdf
From the man who threw accusations of moral relativism around, this is rich. The men who battled through WWI did not consider that they fought in an unjust war. And the horrors planned by the Kaiser–such as the ethnic cleaning of western Belgium and a ‘Year Zero’-style reduction of France to an agrarian backwater–are no less terrifying than anything the Nazis dreamt of. Indeed, the trenches became the crucible of Nazi ideology.
World War I was certainly the product of a blind dash to war, a war madness that engulfed nations and movements. But were the efforts of the Allies against the Central Powers any less vital a defence of freedom than those of the Allies against the Axis? There is a tendency to mythologize the World War II into a great crusade, but if you read Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights, recounting conversions with officers of the Kaiser’s army, many of whom were fervent social Darwinists, you might regard the Great War as no less important a battle for civilization.
Similar sentiments were raised against conscientious objection during World War I. The question is: who made you the moral arbiter as to which conflict was worthy of fighting and which wasn’t? Why is it acceptable to be a pacifist in one war and not the other?
It seems to me that they were either both just wars for the Allies to fight, or they were both not. Anything else is Jesuitical thinking.
For a moment, let’s ignore the fallacies underlying this bad-faith argument, such as the a priori knowledge of the results of torture. The fact remains that if an act is immoral, it remains immoral regardless of any wider good that it may do. Now, people may decide that it is a desirable to sacrifice one person for the wider good–the Christians have built an entire doctrine around this sort of thinking. But it does not make the act moral or just.
I view this thinking as fundamentally immoral because it leads people into error. If you construct a model in which it is virtuous to do evil to one person in order to save many, you are on a slippery slope that will only draw you into committing greater and greater crimes.
Once you cross the line, where do you redraw it? What if it takes two torture sessions to save civilization from fascism? What about three? Four? Twenty? A hundred? A thousand? At what point do you say ‘Stop! Here and no further!’?
Jamie, our narratives are full of stories of idealists who meant well but went too far. You appear to be one of those. I do not trust you to make wise decisions about these things and I pray you never get to hold such a power over another human being.
TW says (#511):
“One problem with the equivalency argument (it is wrong because it will be done to us) is that often the people advocating acts like torture (Jamie for example) are safe in the knowledge they will never be subjected to it themselves.”
I may be missing a point here, but that is indeed a problem if that is how you define the “equivalency argument”. Your definition is a reactive one, namely “I will condemn torture because if it can happen to someone else, it may happen to me as well.” When I consider the issue of equivalency, I am really looking at it from the other way around. Torture is not something I would condone for myself or my loved ones, and since I see (or do my best to see… I have my failings) all others as possessing equal value, I could never condone torture of others. Any other action would be hypocritical on my part. Its a positive, proactive action born of a need for justice rather then a negative, reactive action born of fear. Its the positive that we are missing… there is plenty of the negative going around. I hope the difference is apparent. I’m having trouble putting it into words.
And your comment about Jamie feeling safe from torture is interesting. I’m pretty sure that before Hitler came on the scene, there were plenty of Jews who felt safe from the danger of becoming a victim of torture and genocide. For those who feel safe from the dangers of torture, such that they can tolerate the torture of others because they are convinced it will never happen to them, perhaps a history lesson is in order. Any nation, even a democracy, can fail with a few bad apples running the country, leading to the atrocities so many of torture’s proponents feel they can never experience. My fear is that the growing acceptance within our government and its administration toward torture is one step toward the failure of our own democracy.
These ticking time-bomb scenarios are doubly stupid when you consider that the people most likely to be entrusted with “the codes” are those with great motivation and loyalty to the cause, who are exactly those least likely to give up this information under direct torture.
I’m always moved to consider the case of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic who smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto and hid them. She always intended for them to be reunited with their families, so she would make lists of their real names and their fake identities & locations, and she buried this information in glass jars in her garden. She was captured by the Nazis, who tortured her to find out where she’d sent the children. She didn’t tell them, and they sent her to be killed (she was rescued on her way to her execution).
All fascist and dictatorial regimes torture, but not because it’s wonderful at getting information. It’s the fear tactics above.
Also, as a bonus, if you’ve proven yourself incompetent at your mission–as the Nazis were with finding innocent children, and as George Bush has been at capturing the criminal Osama bin Laden–torture provides a wonderful cover for your organization’s incompetence.
You can claim you “did whatever it took,” and pretend that because your opponents would never do such an immoral and counterproductive thing, that they wouldn’t have done any better. Because, you know, they do not have the will to protect the nation, because they won’t torture.
It moves the debate from “what tactics should we be using to win” to “who’s less moral?” One proves one’s fitness to lead by how quickly one embraces immorality and vilness–regardless of how effective it actually is at achieving your objectives! The cruelty in torture becomes a feature, not a bug, and it doesn’t matter any more that you’re not getting any information–by just torturing people, you’re winning the domestic political debate and keeping control.
It’s disgusting, it’s destructive, and it’s anti-American. If we won the fucking REVOLUTIONARY WAR against the world’s greatest superpower without torturing, if we won the Civil War without torturing, I think we as a nation don’t have to destroy ourselves to capture a handful of dipshits in caves.
The Nazi regime did not advocate torture, and it was seldom practiced on their prisoners
Ge-sta-po
look it up
LCR @ 516
You are quite right here and I was being very simplistic in my example. I was, clumsily, addressing the issue that is often put forward which runs along lines of “we shouldn’t commit war crimes because if we do, the opposition will do them to us.”
You explained yourself very well and did so in less ambiguous terms than I did.
PS Everything I’ve said here has been honest and staightforward.
Self-serve much? The facts indicate otherwise.
How long before we reach that place where our unwillingness to torture is cast as immoral?
He’s already done that, repeatedly, in the other thread.
If the torture of one individual was the only way to stop the Nazi conquest of the world, of course it would have been morally right. I fail to see how this is contestable.
As I have noted repeatedly, this pure utilitarianism implies that we must torture people even if innocent if it’s the only way to achieve some end. I can contrive examples where it would be necessary to anally rape a dozen 5-year-olds (each time you prove you’ve done it you’re mailed one character of a password) in order to avoid some great evil. That you fail to see how your utilitarianism is contestable, despite having the slippery slope problem pointed out to you over an over again, simply illustrates your arrogance, intellectual dishonesty, lack of moral intuition, and stupidity.
look it up
One can simply google nazi+torture … if one isn’t an intellectually dishonest piece of garbage like Jamie.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/01/AR2005120101637.html
Legitimize torture in any way and you will get this sort of use of it.
The Nazi regime did not advocate torture, and it was seldom practiced on their prisoners.
LOL
how on earth do you take this guy seriously?
he just gets more and more ridiculous as he goes along.
I’m convinced he’s been trolling from the start.
Thinking you’re right doesn’t mean that you are right. You are advocating moral relativism of the most ditzy variety. I don’t care that the Nazis felt they were doing right — I say they were wrong. And I would torture someone if that were the only way to prevent their conquest.
Maybe the Entente Powers in WW1 were morally justified in going to war. I think it would have been better if we tried to make peace and weren’t so eager to fight. Bertrand Russell was of this opinion, and I have always thought his position wise and noble. But maybe he was wrong.
This doesn’t make any difference to my argument. It doesn’t imply that anyone who thinks he’s doing right can ethically use torture.
Jamie:
Priceless. If only you could follow that line of thinking a bit further. However,
Says you dont.
Jamie:
For once I agree with you. Nothing implies that anyone who thinks he is doing right can ethically use torture.
#524,
You “LOLed” at my statement that the Nazi authorities didn’t condone torture and used it rarely. No accounts I’ve seen of the Nazi treatment of PoWs mention torture, except in the horrific (albeit rare) “scientific” experiments that were carried out on some. I don’t believe it was used except in rare cases. If you’re privy to any historical sources which say otherwise, then do share them.
Jamie – you replied to post 524, but did you read 523?
I Dream Of Jeannie gives us a much more realistc way to deal with “terrorism”:
http://daltonator.net/durandal/blog/?p=102
When someone announces that he can justify torture, he has exposed himself as being every bit as depraved as someone who tries to rationalize child molestation. I appreciate their honesty, but I don’t want those sick fucks anywhere near a schoolyard. Maybe Chris Hansen can do a new show: To Catch a Torturer
@Jamie, #507
The first part of the statement is correct, they did not openly advocate torture, because they knew it is immoral and the whole world would see it the same way. For the very same reason, the US government tries to argue that water-boarding is not torture in defiance of the facts.
The second part of the statement is transparently false to the extend that one has to wonder about your motivations for even uttering such nonsense. Torture was used regularly on prisoners in concentration camps and in the cells of the Gestapo, as was pointed out in other posts already. Correct, often torture was not used to find information but just to degrade the victim or allegedly for ‘medical research’. Mengele probably thought that his research is ethically justified since the victims were ‘inferior’ anyway and the results could help in curing ailments of a more important ‘race’. In these cases, the immorality of torture is blatantly apparent. The simple truth, however, is that torture is ALWAYS immoral. And not only ethically but there are strong practical arguments why a civilized society should never use torture if it wants to stay a civilized society where humans are respected. (see #355 and other posts).
Your last statement also exemplifies your moral relativism and the resulting romanticization of the true motives. (Your reasoning is actually logically indistinguishable from somebody like Mengele who might argue his ‘research’ is usful in saving lives.) America did not enter the war because it thought it necessary to defend the free world from fascism (that was a welcomed side effect). It did it because it was attacked.
Had the moral imperative to defend the world from fascism been the real motivation to enter the war, America would have done it much earlier since the criminality of the Nazi regime was apparent long before that. A lot of people profited from Nazi Germany (e.g. Ford) too well. And to make it absolutely clear, being a German myself, I am very grateful for the American effort to get rid of fascism. Pointing out the above complications does in no way diminish America’s heroism.
No accounts I’ve seen of the Nazi treatment of PoWs mention torture
your “accounts” consisting of episodes of “Hogan’s Heroes” no doubt.
Jaimie,
I’ve been to a concentration camp, one that still has many of its facilities intact. Amongst other horrors, there was one building that was a medically styled facility, complete with steel beds and straps. Along one wall is a cabinet filled with all the instruments that were used, most of them purpose-designed. Now, I used to be a nurse and even with my limited theatre experience I’m telling you, they weren’t performing tonsillectomies in there. You are kidding yourself if you believe they didn’t indulge in torture.
Jamie –
On the chance that you are open to educating yourself on the subject of whether concentration camp inmates were routinely subjected to conditions that ought to be described as torture, I’d suggest you begin with a movie: http://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/catalogue/shoah/
Had the moral imperative to defend the world from fascism been the real motivation to enter the war, America would have done it much earlier since the criminality of the Nazi regime was apparent long before that.
And let’s not forget the U.S. declared neutrality during the Spanish Civil War but de facto support of Franco, transferring support through … Nazi Germany.
It doesn’t imply that anyone who thinks he’s doing right can ethically use torture.
That includes YOU.
Jamie – you replied to post 524, but did you read 523?
Especially the “One can simply google nazi+torture … if one isn’t an intellectually dishonest piece of garbage like Jamie” part.
Jamie wrote:
No accounts I’ve seen of the Nazi treatment of PoWs mention torture, except in the horrific (albeit rare) “scientific” experiments that were carried out on some. I don’t believe it was used except in rare cases. If you’re privy to any historical sources which say otherwise, then do share them.
You could start here. Then, you could move on here. You could read the Nurenberg Trial files concerning, say, Hans Frank. You could read the trial files of any gestapo and ss officer tried and convicted after the war in France, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia.
Prior to doing all that, you could also stop talking about things you have no idea about.
Jesus Fucking H Christ, Jamie!
All you need to do is crack open “The Nazi Doctors” by Robert Jay Lifton. There is enough material there to keep you absolutely ill for many days. How Robert Jay Lifton could keep interviewing these doctors with getting violent is beyond me.
Jamie, there is all sorts of information out there. It is up to you to know what the fuck you are talking about. You are arguing from ignorance.
No, the problem is not that I’m ignorant; it’s that you are stupid. The vast majority of PoWs were not tortured, and the Nazi authorities did not condone torture. My assertion was perfectly valid.
It’s so easy to accuse people of ignorance and pretend that you’re in possession of superior knowledge. You PC-fundamentalists seem to be the worst culprits.
The vast majority of the Nazi’s PoWs were not tortured, I intended to say. Can any of you provide citations that disprove this claim? No, so shut the fuck up.
I don’t doubt that the Nazis tortured many people, so cut it out with the strawmen. My claim was statistical.
I’ve never seen someone self-Godwin in order to take the moral high ground before.
Here you go, dumbass.
http://www.historynet.com/wars_conflicts/world_war_2/3037296.html
Now kindly go fuck yourself.
Sorry, but where does it mention torture? You didn’t provide any quotations from that big long article.
Sorry, but where does it mention torture? You didn’t provide any quotations from that big long article.
you’re too lazy to read it, just like you’re too lazy to research any of these things yourself.
you constantly expect to shift the burden away from your asinine ignorance.
frankly, I see nothing left but to just laugh at you.
go back to watching Hogan’s Heroes for your WWII history lessons.
I already knew that millions of Soviet soldiers were starved to death. Not to apologize for the Nazi crimes against the Soviets, but in all fairness it’s highly contestable whether the Wehrmacht could have prevented this. At any rate, starvation generally isn’t considered tantamount to undergoing torture.
Give me a quotation from the essay which alleges that most Soviet troops were tortured. I’ve looked through the essay, and I’m telling you I don’t see anything which surprises me.
So, as long as the prisoners die, it was not torture.
Jamie, guess what, as an intelligence gathering operation; the Gestapo sucked. Their use of torture was for the reasons PZ pointed out in the post previous to this. It was to create obedience through fear.
As for the Wehrmacht not being part of torture and terror, I would point you to “Ordinary Men” by Christopher Browning and “The Masters Of Death” by Richard Rhodes. And yes, I do think acts of genocide is a form of torture.
@Jamie, #541
If you mean by PoWs American, British, Russian, etc prisoners of war, the first part of the statement is likely to be correct, even though a lot of them died due to other forms of mistreatment and neglect. However, that’s not what you said earlier:
(post #507 to which I replied in #532)
The normal interpretation of the word ‘prisoners’ encompasses inmates of the concentration camps and the cells of Gestapo prisons. Here torture was used regularly.
You should not be surprised that people here have little patience with such obviously false statements and react accordingly. Only in your narrow interpretation of the word (which you supplied later) is it a somewhat ‘perfectly valid’ assertion.
Also, the statement that ‘the Nazi authorities did not advocate torture’ is banal and therefore dishonest. Of course, no government has ever openly admitted that it used torture, because even the worst dictator knew that it is immoral (Which is why, as I already pointed out, the US government tries to convince everybody that ‘water boarding’ is not torture). That they did not condone torture openly does not mean anything. And that they didn’t use it (or only seldomly) on PoWs doesn’t mean much either since the Nazis did torture. The historic record is unequivocal about this. So, why bother mentioning it and stirring up confusion about this by formulating sloppy statements, to what end? Are you trying to relativize their atrocities?
No-one can produce any quotations from reliable sources which disprove my assertions. Of course I don’t doubt that the Nazis practiced torture on many occasions. This doesn’t change the fact that (a) it was done only on special occasions even in Nazi Germany, and (b) the Nazi authorities did not publicly speak in favour of it. (Hitler didn’t acknowledge the rights of the Soviets under the Hague Convention, but this in itself isn’t equivalent to encouraging torture.)
If you think I’m trying to relativize the atrocities, I suggest you read my earlier posts before impulsively confronting me. I was merely refuting the claim that the Nazis were the bad guys in WW2 because they did torture more frequently than us. If you read the earlier exchange, you’ll see that it was those arguing against me who were trying to relativize Nazism. They seem to think that ethically approving torture to save the world from the Nazis inevitably ethically approves torture to save the world from the Allies. This would only hold if you think neither side in WW2 was “right” in any non-subjective sense — and I don’t think that. I think the ethical asymmetry was very real, and the Nazis’ occasional use of torture was not the main reason why.
By Toutatis, Jamie, you are priceless. Not only do you have <0 idea about ethics you dont really understand logic. Amazing.
@541
Actually you are, and that is the problem here.
Interesting assertion. It is true in the limited circumstances that lots of American and British POWs were not tortured – but compare that to the countless thousands of Russian, Scandinavian, French (etc) prisoners who were – and that the Nazi authorities did not official approve “torture” of certain classes of prisoner. What you woefully fail to realise is that the people you hold as an example are a minority. There were more Jews tortured than there were Anglo-US PoWs. There were even more Russians. Significantly, the Nazi authorities had a very different definition of what was, and what wasn’t torture.
I await your citations which prove the vast majority of Nazi Prisoners (or even PoWs) were not tortured. Until then, stop making this claim.
Do you really not understand the problem with your claim that torturing people to stop something you see as wrong is a GOODTHING™.
Jamie said regarding torture:
“This doesn’t change the fact that (a) it was done only on special occasions even in Nazi Germany…”
I think you need to define “special occasions”. Birthdays? Christmas celebrations? The birth of a first-born male child?
I’ll have to keep this idea in mind for our next family reunion. It should really liven up the party…
This point is completely tangential, and my original argument doesn’t even depend upon it. The reason we’re debating this is that people were pretending I made ignorant remarks. What I said was really factually correct.
Countless thousands? Would you care to produce statistics showing that thousands of PoWs were tortured by the Nazis? Starvation doesn’t count as torture.
Someone should starve you and record your non-tortured state.
Guess what, you are using the same argument Holocaust deniers use. You cannot provide an exact count, therefore the Holocaust did not happen. Your logic is tortured and fucked.
Jamie says:
“Starvation doesn’t count as torture.”
Well, apparently the U.S. Army considers it to be torture. From a CBS news article from 2006, here is a portion that pertains to your comment:
“…the new Army Field Manual was released Wednesday, revising one from 1992. It also explicitly bans beating prisoners, sexually humiliating them, threatening them with dogs, depriving them of food or water, performing mock executions, shocking them with electricity, burning them, causing other pain and a technique called “water boarding” that simulates drowning, said Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/06/terror/main1976599.shtml
Well, what do you know… the starving of all of those thousands of prisoners in the concentrations camps DOES count as torture, at least to the U.S. Army. Or does it only count if the torturers themselves officially call it “torture”?
Starvation doesn’t count as torture.
Cretin. Intentional starvation is torture:
“the deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information or to make a confession or for any other reason”
Chris Kelly, The Huffington Post, 12/3/06:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/stalag-911_b_35476.html
“In real life, bombing Germany killed a half million civilians, but interned American and British airmen were generally treated according to the Geneva Conventions. They weren’t systematically tortured. They weren’t deliberately humiliated.”
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Imprisonment as a rite of passage
Ian Thomson reviews POW: Allied Prisoners in Europe, 1939-1945 by Adrian Gilbert
The Telegraph
11/26/06
“Neither Nazi Germany nor Fascist Italy fulfilled Geneva stipulations for food provision, and the POW’s hunger was often the chronic hunger unknown to free men. … In the notorious Stalag VIIIB at Lamsdorf, little could still the inmates’ gnawing hunger (though sometimes cats were eaten). … German attempts to segregate Jewish from non-Jewish POWs were often met with outrage.”
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Wikipedia: “Berga is a town in the district of Greiz, in Thuringia, Germany. It is situated on the river Weiße Elster, 14 km southeast of Gera.
In World War II a Labor camp was operated here to dig 17 tunnels for an underground ammunition factory. Workers were supplied by Buchenwald concentration camp and from Stalag IX-B. The latter was in contravention of the provisions of the Third Geneva Convention. Many prisoners died as a result of malnutrition, sickness and beatings.”
New York Times, 2/27/05, ‘The Lost Soldiers of Stalag IX-B,’ Roger Cohen
“Of the 350 young G.I.’s sent there [Berga], at least 73, or 21 percent, died in the space of 10 weeks, the highest rate of attrition among American prisoners of war in Europe.”
OK, if you regard starvation as torture then I’m wrong. I personally wouldn’t call it torture. If one does, then one should consider the proposition that we Westerners are personally responsible for the torture of millions of people due to our not giving our excess money to charities.
Incredible that these hypocrites here would be prepared to risk millions of lives rather than torture one terrorist — and yet in their own opinion, they have the chance to save dozens of people from torture every day, and they don’t take it. Apparently, they think the torture of one stranger is so bad that preventing it is worth the lives of millions of people — but not worth enough to keep them from their DVDs and chocolate.
Dear Jamie, Honing in on “our” alleged shortcomings as charitable human beings coupled with a touch of the ole straw man (torturing prisoners is saving our butts – appreciate it and respect it) is cute. However the former has NOTHING to do with the conduct of a nation on the world stage and the latter has yet to prove its veracity in aggregate. Responsible citizens need to demand that their world leading nation follow laws and use effective strategies that are also as free as can be from deleterious repercussions. We are not hypocrites when we ask that our nation do this because it is responsible that we do. Further, at least speaking for myself, I do not claim to be totally unselfish, perfect, and chivalrous.
I’ll put aside any argument about our asking our nation to be respectful of law and humanity because it supposedly represents the best of us and also the impact of its mistakes far exceeds the individual’s and carries through posterity, to ask you this: what proofs (peer reviewed studies, scientifically accepted sustained and statistically relevant results, etc.) do you have that say our playing at the lower end of the noble scale is saving our butts now and for the future?
The following poem by Erich Kästner is from 1931. It starts with “If we had won the war, with [sound of waves crashing against rock] and [sound of storm], Germany would be FUBAR and would be identical to a soul asylum” and ends with “fortunately we didn’t win it”. In between he makes fun of the militaristic ideology before and during WWI. I’ll translate it later, maybe — I don’t have time.
Well, here’s the fourth stanza: “The women would have to have litters of children. One child per year. Or prison. The state needs children as conserves. And blood tastes to him like raspberry juice.” And the next stanza ends in “And God would be a German general.”
The following poem by Erich Kästner is from 1931. It starts with “If we had won the war, with [sound of waves crashing against rock] and [sound of storm], Germany would be FUBAR and would be identical to a soul asylum” and ends with “fortunately we didn’t win it”. In between he makes fun of the militaristic ideology before and during WWI. I’ll translate it later, maybe — I don’t have time.
Well, here’s the fourth stanza: “The women would have to have litters of children. One child per year. Or prison. The state needs children as conserves. And blood tastes to him like raspberry juice.” And the next stanza ends in “And God would be a German general.”
Talk about strawmen. I have not once tried to endorse the American government’s use of torture. I think what happened in Guantanamo was immoral, and a diplomatic fiasco. What I’ve been saying is that under very restricted circumstances torture might be ethical.
The only sane objection you can raise is that it’s pointless to discuss these unrealistic “restricted circumstances”. However, the hysterical, mobbish reaction I elicited in merely mentioning them suggests otherwise. Many liberals won’t listen to any moral argument that has the whiff of being politically incorrect. They abide by immutable moral axioms, whose sacrosanctness is not to be challenged. This is a dangerous, faith-based ideology, and I don’t like it.
My last post was addressed at Concerned Joe.
Another important point is one Sam Harris underscores well in The End of Faith. It’s hard to imagine how torturing a terrorist could be justified now, but maybe in 50 years’ time the world will be substantially different. Maybe if the new Al Qaeda is armed with nuclear and biological weapons it will be ethical to torture someone just to find out the whereabouts of the syndicate HQ. At the very least, it’s something that should be given thought.
(Note that no-one is suggesting that torture should be legal. Ethical and legal are two different things.)
Look out everyone, he has the ‘ticking time bomb scenario’.
Jesus Cthulhu Christ, Jamie, what do think we’ve been doing here if not giving this issue some thought? People have provided extremely well-thought out arguments here and in the other thread, and you go and simply repeat the above scenario as if the arguments never happened.
The so-called argument over whether or not waterboarding constsitutes torture is disingenuous and morally and ethically indefensible. The very simple and very obvious, common sense litmus test is, “Is it something we would be outraged about if it were done to my child by another government?” This particular litmus test is derived from your Bible and bespeaks the so called christian message of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
Come on now..your not backing away from the Bible now are ya?
“[E]xtremely well-thought out [sic] arguments”? Are you kidding me? Most of the supposed arguments that were trotted out against me don’t even make sense. I’ve easily rebutted all the ones which were in part coherent, and I don’t intend to repeat myself.
Jamie, have you read a different blog than this one to come to your conclusion? You certainly haven’t “rebutted” (easily or otherwise) any of the ones made in this universe.
You think that your constant assertion of something counts as a rebuttal. You ignore everything said against you and weasel your way out of questions. Well done.
Now, importantly, you haven’t presented a time when torture could be ethical. Your closest example, your cherished ticking bomb scenario, is not self-consistent. For it to be “ethical” in the manner you demand, you need to know enough information for torture to be unnecessary. Even with a self-Godwin, you haven’t rebutted anything.
You are clueless. You are doubly clueless about just how clueless you are.
Wonderful. Have you got an agent lined up for your stage show yet? You will be a hit.
“Constant assertion”? Don’t make me laugh. The “arguments” used against me are hardly worth addressing. Here are the more coherent ones:
Someone pointed out that my scenarios are all unrealistic. This is irrelevant, as many people here have given unflinchingly explicit descriptions of what they would do even if the scenarios I posited came to pass. Another imbecile (perhaps it was you) tried to argue from the reality of intrinsic human selfishness. No, I wouldn’t torture my family to save a million people — this hardly means that doing so wouldn’t be ethically justified. Even more ludicrously, people have tried to resort to a sort of dopey moral relativism — if Jamie can use torture to do what he feels is right, what’s to stop Nazis from torturing to do what’s right in their view? One could use exactly the same silly line of reasoning to prove that the law shouldn’t be able to punish criminals.
Those were the main “arguments” against me, and they are all intellectually bankrupt. Actually, there was some valueless equivocation about the putative unreliability of torture — no-one can explain how unreliable, or even why it’s unreliable. (The victim lies to his captors to gain temporary relief. So what? He’ll be tortured again, maybe worse, when they find out he’s lying.) The only “evidence” that it’s “unreliable” is the personal opinion of a few politically-motivated bureaucrats.
I have no intention of responding to every part of all of the dozens of posts addressed to me. I’m not weaseling my way out of anything. If you have a question you feel is relevant, tell me what it is rather than ever vaguely referring to something off-stage.
Jamie Jamie Jamie .. you never addressed my question — not even close – and your so called rebuttal was like so a denial of your own words … oh let me stop trying ..
JUST ANSWER MY OBJECTIVE AND SIMPLE QUESTION FACTUALLY: “what proofs (peer reviewed studies, scientifically accepted sustained and statistically relevant results, etc.) do you have that say our playing at the lower end of the noble scale is saving our butts now and for the future?”
If you have legit studies that actually assess risk-reward and suggest the risk-reward is assuredly worth it then you can intelligently discuss it here on those grounds. Else you are postulating an extremely unlikely scenario to support a course of action with unsubstantiated effectiveness. Hardly an argument. You may be right in your GUESS or INTUITION. But don’t say you well present your case. I have backed off any case I might make.. I leave you to answer the question and use data to show us the error of our inclinations.
It’s very simple Jamie.
1. Present your credentials for being an expert on torture.
Do your’s somehow out weigh the multiple examples from experts(CIA, FBI, British, French intelligence agencies) claiming it’s not effective? If so what is your evidence? The plural of anecdote is not data. Are there hard numbers? Nope, not that I’ve seen, but I’m far more inclined to believe the people who have actual knowledge of torture over the guy on a blog who uses movies as examples.
2. All of your examples assume knowledge that you wouldn’t have before starting the torture. You assume the person you are torturing has the information you want and just as important you know what information you are looking for. The real world isn’t that simple. For example in Iraq, the guys that place the bombs don’t make them, don’t know who makes them, and don’t know where they are made.
OK, if you regard starvation as torture then I’m wrong. I personally wouldn’t call it torture. If one does, then one should consider the proposition that we Westerners are personally responsible for the torture of millions of people due to our not giving our excess money to charities.
“the deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering … for [some] reason”, moron.
Everyone here is wrong but Jamie. Everyone here is an imbecile but Jamie. Hey, that’s plausible.
Jamie, I notice you are proficient in using words you dont understand. Well done.
You avoid answering any questions with self important dismissals (“The “arguments” used against me are hardly worth addressing”) and you say it with almost every post – which is why it is a constant assertion.
You accuse others of moral relativism without understanding your own position is relative.
You were funny a while back, you actually had a chance with your stage show, but now your material is old and boring. Come up with something new.
I would think that the person advocating actions contrary to the Geneva Convention and all civilized behaviour would bear the burden of proving that torture is reliable.
In the case of the “ticking time bomb”, which is the scenario continually hauled out, lying accomplishes the terrorist’s goal — the bomb goes off before the authorities determine he’s lying.