On Torture

It is perhaps a little late to be exploring this topic, it being the end of Bush Jr's presidency, and after so much ink has been spilt over Guantanamo Bay.

But there is something to be said about definitions of torture, and perhaps one argument above all others that would suggest that forcing humans to watch Barney for hours on end is torture as much as the coals and hot irons is torture.

So let us begin.

There are only 2 motivations for torture, sadism and extracting information. To achieve either goal, torture is used as an instrument to break resistance, to break the human spirit.

In medieval times, understanding of the human psyche was more crude, and more primal. The only perceived way to affect the human mind was through the human body. Coming from a culture spanning over 5 millenia, human creativity in finding ways to target the human mind via the body is bone-chilling.

For those of us who feel more squeamish about blood and gore, we instinctively condemn such methods as paper cuts and heated irons. Take away the obvious physical wounds, and the concept now seems more palatable.

Yet, we forget that the blood and gore was but a means to an end, to breaking human dignity.

Today, we have far more advanced methods, like sleep deprivation and water-boarding etc, that remove the 'blood and gore' element from our interrogation techniques. As such, while essentially pursuing the same goal of breaking a person's humanity, we can maintain a semblance of urbanity and civility while doing so.

While the end result is not apparent, it really is the same thing. Destroying a person's self-worth, stripping him of his humanity, just minus the blood and gore.

So let us not mistake psychological torture for anything other than what it is, nothing more than a more sophisticated and elegant way of doing what we used to do with heated irons and barbed whips.