Informant38

Torture's still coming up here and there as subject for discussion, the central point not fixed anywhere particular that I can see, but floating between the pragmatic - works/doesn't; and the moral - good when it works-bad when it doesn't/always bad.
Something that requires so much preparatory background I can't ever seem to get to it in the limiting spaces available is the constant, and immediate, reshaping of an unnamed thing we are together, that's culture yes, but culture as sculpting breeder of what we'll be, or what that thing we become will be, keeping open the idea, and I think it's more central than any of the already covered main points are, that we can become something so completely other we'll have to shift pronouns and, eventually, nouns to speak of it honestly and accurately. And all that contingent on anything getting through the falling debris of what's obviously beginning to collapse, whatever names it ends up with.
To say torture is over one of those boundary lines that crossed nothing remains of what was, like death, or grievous sin - after there's only what stays behind, and for what's passed over whatever's there - for the dead be it nothing or eternal peace or purgation or eternal hopeless suffering; and for the sinner the arduous return with no possibility of real innocence, only remorse and permanent humility at best.
The change from here, or from innocence, is inalterable. Torture's a Rubicon, but there are people already living on the other shore.
What I wanted to speak of was not the theory and practice so much as the actual torturing of actual human beings, and I wanted to point again to that iconic figure on the cardboard box, with his arms held out like a saint and the wires strung from them and his bare feet splayed on the box and his bare legs above them. That was a real man.
Still, unless he's dead now, a real man.
Where is he?
How many of those whose repugnance at the image - and the vicious decadence that put it in front of all of us, and the hysterical cowardice that defends its creation, or excuses it, or condemns only the almost equally degraded enlisted personnel who put him up there - is fixed only on that, how many of them even think about his life now?
What that is is the infantile rejection of displeasing things. It tastes bad and we get angry. It hurts and we get angry - we're hungry and unfed and we get angry.
That isn't morality it's the demands of childhood dependence, to be cared for and fed and protected from danger. And it's a childish tantrum in response to those demands being thwarted. The screamed "NO!". Or earlier the wail and squall that are the original music of that negation.
Where is he now, what will he do in the morning? How much discipline does he bring to the choices in his path, and what are they?
Does he live in Baghdad, or out in the country? Do you think there's counseling available, of a professional quality like that you'd want for him if he were your son, up there with the wires dangling and sadistic laughter coming at him through the black veil? Does religion heal, or help him mask what he'll always carry with him?
The problem with the real and most cogent and vital argument against torture - that it degrades those who employ it and makes those who accept its use inhuman - is when it's presented to the torturers, the advocates and organizers themselves, degradation and inhumanity are empty terms. Inapplicable.
What the torturers bank on is a critical enough mass of the terrified who'll cooperate with anything and anyone that promises to keep them safe.
What we offer them instead is the great and uncertain risk of moral insistence and refusal to compromise.
The struggle isn't for humanity so much as for the architecture of the human, the actual structure of the hive.
What we are, what's lost when we cross into that darkness - it's naive and dangerous to expect the loyalty of the inhuman to what are human strengths.