That Texas whippersnapper Molly Ivins has a few choice words to say (my emphasis in bold and italics).
A debate on torture. I don’t know—what do you think? I guess we have to define it, first. The White House has already specified “water boarding,” making some guy think he’s drowning for long periods, as a perfectly good interrogation technique. Maybe, but it was also a great favorite of the Gestapo and has been described and condemned in thousands of memoirs and novels in highly unpleasant terms.
I don’t think we can give it a good name again, and I personally kind of don’t like being identified with the Gestapo. How icky. (Somewhere inside me, a small voice is shrieking, “Are you insane?")
The safe position is, “Torture doesn’t work.”
Well, actually, it works to this extent—anybody can be tortured into telling anything that’s true and anything that’s not true. The more people are tortured, the more they make up to please the torturer. Then the torturer has to figure out when the vic started lying. Since our torturers are, in George Bush’s immortal phrase, “professionals” and this whole legislative fight is over making torture legal so the “professionals” can’t later be charged with breaking the Geneva Conventions, Bush has vowed to end “the program” completely if he doesn’t get what he wants. (The same thin voice is shrieking, “Professional torturers trained with my tax money?")
Bush’s problem is that despite repeated warnings, he went ahead with “the program” without waiting for Congress to provide a fig leaf of legality. Actually, we have been torturing prisoners at Gitmo, prisons in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan for years.
[....]
I was interested to find that the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is so in favor of torture he told McCain that the senator either supports the torture bill or he can forget about the evangelical Christian vote. I’d like to see an evangelical vote on that one. I don’t know how Sheldon defines traditional values, but deliberately inflicting terrible physical pain or stress on someone who is completely helpless strikes me as ... well, torture. And, um, wrong. And I’ve smoked dope! Boy, everything those conservatives tell us about the terrible moral values of us liberals must be true after all.
Now, in addition to the slightly surreal awakening to find we live in a country that’s having a serious debate on a torture bill, can we do anything about it? The answer is: We better. We better do something about it. Now, right away. What do we do? The answer is: anything ... phone, fax, e-mail, mail, demonstrate—go stand outside their offices or the nearest federal building in the cold and sing hymns or shout rude slogans, chant or make a speech, or start attacking federal property, like a postal box, so they have to arrest you. Gather peacefully and make a lot of noise. Get publicity, too. How will you feel if you didn’t do something? “Well, honey, when the United States decided to adopt torture as an official policy, I was dipping the dog for ticks.”
As Ann Richards used to say, “I don’t want my tombstone to read: ‘She kept a clean house.’”
Hello JayV and all,
ReplyDeleteAll three Faiths of Abraham spawn violence and hypocrisy
Christians and Jews can smugly lecture and chastise Muslims about violence, because followers of Islam are poorer, more oppressed, and thereby forced to defend themselves in cruder fashion. On the other hand, the rich and powerful nations of the west can fund, train, and equip state of the art militaries and intelligence services to do their bidding, by proxy. Likewise, smooth-talking politicians expertly equivocate about acceptable collateral damage to the homes and lives of poor people in other lands. With so many dollars spent, why don’t Muslims and others simply shut up and accept being exploited, oppressed, and massacred for such nobly expressed western ideals?
Those in representative democracies tout their governments as extensions of the citizenry. Accordingly, so are the militaries, intelligence services, corporations and other proxies used to expand and maintain the Judeo-Christian Empire. By extension, the citizens of western nations are much more responsible for the actions of criminals, killers, and torturers paid for and authorized by democratic institutions than people who live in less democratic nations who have much less control over the actions of their leaders.
It is undeniable that the Bush administration, its cohorts, and supporters are mostly Christian. Without the blind support of so many Judeo-Christians, the Bush administration would not now be embroiled in the current struggle to retroactively legalize torture, illegal domestic spying, and other crimes. By US law, hiring a proxy to murder or assault someone is still prosecuted as murder and assault. It is undeniable that the militaries and intelligence services of the west that kill and torture at the behest of democratic representatives are hired proxies of Judeo-Christian citizens.
Regardless of attempts to shift blame, history clearly records the widespread crimes of Christianity. Whether we're talking about the abominations of the Inquisition, Crusades, the greed and genocide of colonizers, slavery in the Americas, or the Bush administration's recent deeds and results, Christianity has always spawned great evil.
So, the next time any Christian, Jew, or Muslim, whether president, prime minister, religious leader or follower decides to chastise others for their failings, stop to consider that the logs in your own eyes have blinded you to the full truth about all three faiths of Abraham. Religion has utterly failed to solve humanity's problems because it is a strong delusion that spawns error and evil instead. The sheep's clothing of duplicitous ideals is an obvious deception used to hide the truth. Nonetheless, the veil is readily pierced by discerning the fruits of their deeds.
Here is Wisdom...