Of all the increasingly bizarre discussions on CiF, the comments on Conor Foley’s attack on torture – ‘A Dangerous Equivocation’, 29th December – take the biscuit. An endless stream of self-professing ‘democrats’ and ‘defenders of Western values’ queue up to justify torture as an acceptable tool for the defence of ‘our way of life’. The few who demur are derided as woolly minded pacifists and [needless to say] ‘effeminate’.
The feeble excuses offered by these ‘realists’ for their ‘tough minded’ stance include the priceless one that all us European wimps don’t comprehend the fearful trauma Americans suffered through the 9/11 atrocity – which, apparently, gives them and their hangers-on such as poodle Blair carte-blanche to emulate Hitler’s and Stalin’s torturers and concentration camp guards to save freedom. The immediate response to this which springs to mind is “Diddums”.
There is, as several comments point out, a racist dimension to torture as now being practised.
It is black and brown ‘others’ who are being subjected to it – not white Caucasians like ‘us’. As one comment recalls, Graham Greene made this pretty obvious point in
Our Man in Havana :
"The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal.”
The whole thread is worth reading, if you are in the mood for apoplexy. Yet again, this generation of so-called ‘liberals’ seem to have shot their moral compass. The issue is pithily summed up in a quotation from Winston Churchill:
“In opposing evil, our greatest peril lies not in defeat, but in becoming that which we would oppose.”
