Really? Even as much as people like to presume that democracy is, somehow, only connected to good stuff, there is nothing inherently undemocratic about torture. Really, the idea that whatever the majority wants goes and the idea that abusing, torturing and killing individuals if a larger number see fit to do so seem uncomfortably compatible. I’d love to be wrong on this, but I suspect that a majority in the U.S. are actually in favor of secret prisons, torture and the like.

For what it’s worth, I’m a good deal to the “right” of many here but I’m every bit as disgusted with this as anyone else. It’s telling that the same people who claim to believe that values are absolute and not subject to cultural construction or circumstantial revision consistently resort to amoral and legalistic defenses of these kinds of activities.

You mean use it to score some points when the issue gets raised in the press (yet again), and then quickly forget about it when more value can be gained from hard-hitting issues like what Malkin did this week?

Hypocrites.

‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’

Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.‘

I am sorry that you read “you” which in context clearly refers to America as a whole as referring to you personally and to the people here. I even agree with most of what you say. I’ll come back to you on this at some point in the next week or so on one or other of my blogs. I suspect that you may not like the answer you get but ultimately my concern is with the security, safety, and liberty, people here. The greatest threat to that is your country’s misguided behaviour over a long period of time I made the points above to point out that America treats her own citizens in this way and it is therefore unsurpising that she behaves as she does abroad. Nowhere in those comments did I aportion blame to you or any of the other supporters of this site. I regret that your feelings were hurt.

In my opinion, torturing defenseless prisoners is about as low as you can get. As Jane says, anyone that defends it should be exposed for his or her “utter moral bankruptcyâ€. But exposing the lies of the defenders of torture is not enough, nor is it enough just to explain why torture is wrong. In order to engage the public fully in this important discussion we must also remind them why it is in their interest that we treat prisoners humanely.

My thanks to Jane & FDL for taking the time to talk about this crucial issue. I’m hopeful that one day soon those who were responsible for this heinous policy will finally be held accountable. On that day those of us who fought back by speaking out can take comfort that when our country needed us we did not shrink from our duty to defend her.

“…We may well lose the US army in Iraq The same withdrawal plan could prevail. I think there is a civil war there. In fact I wrote a piece about a month ago that the New York Times and Washington Post turned down but the Boston Globe ran which said that if we wake up some morning and the whole country has erupted into a violent, countrywide civil war, we could lose our army there. No one’s talked about this. The Army is dispersed through by and large central, but to a degree southern, Iraq. If the nation became aflame, we’ve got platoon-size and smaller units scattered all over the country and the cities to try to pacify them, and they could be cut off. They couldn’t get back to the Green Zone to be extracted. And we could lose the American Army there as Napoleon lost his army in Moscow….” Wednesday, October 26th, 2005

Eliminationist antisemitism did indeed arise during roughly the period Goldhagen indicates. However, like the Social Darwinism to which it was so closely related, it was not a characteristic feature of German culture. It was far more a phenomenon found among cranks and sects. Goldhagen does not mention any of the antisemitic writers who advocated the physical destruction of the Jews, but I suspect that fairly typical specimens might be Joerg Lanz von Liebenfels and the other mystical Viennese racists whom we know influenced the Nazi leadership. (There are lots of bad books on this subject. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s “The Occult Roots of Nazism” is good, but perhaps James Webb’s “The Occult Establishment” is still the most comprehensive treatment.) Such people and their ideas might be politely described as a little on the obscure side. You could find people in Germany who thought like this, even people who were prominent, but there were not very many of them. There was no great advantage to blaming the world’s problems on the Jews. Public antisemitism was hardly rare under either the Hohenzollern dynasty or the Weimar Republic, but it did not, for instance, help much in electoral politics. Even the Nazis toned down the antisemitic elements of their program when they saw a practical possibility of electoral victory. Eliminationist antisemitism was important, not as a popular enthusiasm, but as an organizing principle for would-be elites. To paraphrase George Orwell, it was the kind of thing you had to flunk out of college to believe.

And when those would-be elites became actual elites, how did they get the rest of the Germans to kill most of the Jews of Europe for them? Well, they continually shouted the unhumanity of the Jews through every medium of communications between 1933 and the beginning of the Final Solution in 1941. They created an apocalyptic society in which the normal rules of morality did not apply. Then they sent ordinary Germans to destroy a whole people. And the ordinary Germans did it. Perhaps that is the most unnerving lesson of the Holocaust for later generations. It is appalling to think what perfectly sane and pleasant people will do, what you yourself would probably do, if put in a social situation where atrocity is a duty. There has been a lot of psychological research into the willingness of individuals to follow terrible orders. There has been even more into what crowds will do that their individual members will not. Goldhagen dismisses it all as “ahistorical.” He shouldn’t. It is something we must never forget.