Let's start with this. A member of my family, someone I haven't seen in almost thirty years, turns out to have political views that are, shall we say, Fox-y. I mean hard right wing, the kind of man who has no problem calling me a "libtard". (Echoing that famous libtard Pierre Elliott Trudeau, I've been called worse things by better people.)
Anyway, he posted this this morning:
This isn't the first time I've been confronted with the yawning chasm between the way hard-core conservatives see the world and the way I do, but it's been one of the most telling. It's obvious to conservatives that a barbaric act calls for barbarism in return. It's obvious to me that it doesn't.
Because barbarism breeds barbarism. War begets war, torture begets torture. It's an endless loop, and it tends to intensify. To my mind, anyone who willingly engages in torture is an aider and abettor of terrorism and should be denounced as such. Seriously. You want more 9/11s? Piss more people off by torturing and killing their families and friends. Do you really imagine, even for a second, that the normal reaction to cold blooded murder is a bunch of warm fuzzies? Think back to how America felt after 9/11. Remember the shock, the horror, the anger? Now remember that American proxies killed and maimed literally millions of people in the Middle East in the decades leading up to September 11. 2001. They've also directly killed many more since: all sources agree it's at least 32 times the death toll of 9/11. That's in Iraq alone. Their bumbling has also led to (and ARMED!) ISIS. Practically every step America has taken in the Middle East over a long, long period of time seems as if it was precisely calculated to create war, not peace.
You'd almost get to thinking it was intentional..
Am I saying America deserved 9/11? Of course not, that's preposterous and offensive. They most certainly didn't, and neither did the innocent civilians killed before and since deserve their deaths. Nobody deserves to die because of somebody else's political beliefs. That goes at least tenfold for religious ideals. Gods preaching hate, death and darkness should be shunned by all those seeking love, life and light.
I've always said there is a time when people need to stand up and fight. I still believe that. But it is IMPERATIVE that we fight for the right things, and with the right motives. Inflicting our political and religious beliefs on others is not a justifiable reason to fight. It isn't, it never was, and it never will be. Do you think the jihadis are right to try and subjugate the world under their variant of ultra-conservative Islam? No? Then why is it perfectly okay for us to spread our own political and religious belief systems?
"Because they're inherently better."
No argument...here. But oddly enough, the people who would be the beneficiaries of freedom and democracy tend to disagree strongly enough either to reject it outright or to accept it and then twist it into something unrecognizable to us. Do they have the right to do that? I say yes. The proponents of American hegemony tend to say no, just as strongly.
We were in Afghanistan for thirteen years. We lost 158 brave men and women there, and even more by their own hand once they came home (what a disgrace that is!) What did we accomplish there by helping to kill over 21,000 civilians?
Not a whole hell of a lot.
Taliban support in Afghanistan has steadily been dropping: it stands at 29% now which is down nearly thirty percentage points since 2009. That's how death cults work: eventually people get sick and tired of dying. You find the same thing in Palestine, where a whopping 70% support a one-state solution to the ongoing conflict there.
War is never a long-term answer to any question worth the asking. People may believe strongly in a war; they can very easily be whipped into a frenzy against real or imagined enemies. But drive the costs of war home to those people, again and again and again, and sooner or later peace starts looking sensible.
It's the same with death cults (ISIS and the Taliban both qualify here). Does anybody even remember who the Galleanists were? They were an Italian anarchist group responsible for a large number of bombings in New York and elsewhere during the second decade of the last century, culminating in an attack just a few blocks from what would eventually be called Ground Zero. That attack killed 30 and injured hundreds--it was calculated to inflict maximum damage, using the technology available at the time; given stronger weapons they would not have hesitated to use them. They were ready to kill and die for their cause, and Galleani was, by all accounts, very persuasive. The bother of a follower of his said "You heard Galleani speak, you were ready to kill the first policeman you saw."
A mere six years later, Galleani and his cadre of death were all but forgotten. Today, they're a relic. As Jonathan Kay notes in the article linked above,
The good news, history teaches us, is that terrorist cults are morally self-extinguishing: Ordinary people become alienated by any movement that makes a systematic practice of killing innocent people.
But let's put all that aside. Let's pretend, for a moment, that bombing people and torturing people makes their friends and families all happy and peaceful and never for a moment thinking of retaliation. Let's pretend that death is what people want most out of life.
TORTURE. DOES. NOT. WORK.
Napoleon Bonaparte knew that over two centuries ago. His full quote:
The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.
Oh, I can perfectly understand why we'd like to believe torture works. We want to hurt people who have some link (even if that link turns out to be tenuous) to those who have hurt us. But again, I have to ask, why is it that our actions are always justifiable and theirs never are? Why is it that we can torture with impunity, but any retaliation on their part is barbaric and completely uncalled for? (And remember, there are peace-loving civilians, supposedly allied with our enemies, who are asking themselves the same question!) That we are engaging in torture to obtain information that is at best of dubious benefit marks us as monsters. And the existence of other monsters on the other side of the world should not excuse our monstrous acts.
At some point, somebody is going to have to stand up and say enough is enough. And if it's not going to be them, maybe it should be us. The alternative is a blood feud that has the potential to engulf much of the world. Why don't people see that?
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