The Problem With Horror is That it Always Get Worse

Mad? Yes, they are Nuclear Mad!

There is a lot of justification for torture running around in various circles and the recent book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Alfred McCoy lays bare the problems of a culture that sanctions it, even with limits. When you start hurting people to extract information it's not long before you're pulling out fingernails or putting electrodes on testicles because you're bored or careless. Morality is frail and can't easily stand alone against our dark natures.

During the 1960's and 70's the CIA ran a program in South East Asia called Phoenix. Essentially, it was a war of terror to combat the spread of communism. According to the figures in the book, over 20,000 people were pulled off the street, tortured for information in all the ways we've grown to know and love, and then shot. It was a system they termed 'pump and dump'.

These techniques spread around the world. Why such drastic measures? Do they work? Was evil god-less communism stopped in its tracks? Or were we who performed or sanctioned this behaviour moved a little closer to being insanely cruel and vicious?

Much is being made of a recent poll in Iraq in which 60 percent of Iraqis felt it was acceptable to kill American forces. Much is being made of the presence of al Qaeda and their murderous works in Iraq. Much is being made of Iran's headlong rush to gaining nuclear weapons.

However, less is being said about North American attitudes towards killing Iraqis in the work of 'liberating' them (how many civilians died during the shock and awe phase of the Iraqi invasion - which itself represents an immoral concept of 'total war'?) We hear of 3500 American lives that have been lost but why do we never hear how many Iraqi lives have been lost? Or wrongfully imprisoned and tortured?

Less is being said over here about the willingness of Americans (and my fellow Canadians) to endlessly torture its enemies, violate our own basic tenets of habeas corpus and legal rights, the rights to a defense, etc. And memory is constantly being rewritten or layered with myth - we don't remember the 900,000 Japanese who were killed over a period of six days of bombing Tokyo during the war in the Pacific by the US Air Force. The attacks of September 11, 2001 killed thousands of innocent people in an act of 'total war' against the West. In 1944 nearly a million Japanese children, women and men too old to fight were burned alive with napalm in the West's total war against the East.

Think about that. We, the Allied forces, burned children alive in an effort to teach their leaders a lesson. Why didn't we just pitchfork them? Did our leaders 'learn a lesson' about our own predatory cultures when the Twin Towers collapsed? We decided (well Curtis LeMay and Leslie Grove decided - we never objected) to make civilians too young to walk and too old to fight a legitimate 'combat target'.

And a willingness to bomb children and women turns everyone into a 'combatant'. There is no such thing as an 'enemy non combatant' then, is there?

I watched the recent Republican debates of candidates seeking the nomination for the US presidency. At least two of the candidates (Mitt Romney, Rudy Guilianni) said they would consider using nuclear weapons against Iran.

This is madness. It's blood-thirstyness. It's insane.

The Americans rushed to war to prevent the Iraqis from using WMD but are perfectly willing to use them against women and children, the old, the halt, the tired and the lame in a weird twist of the promise on the Statue of Liberty.

Americans have lost their mojo. They have lost their sense of ethics, freedom, fairness, and decency. When the front running candidates for political office can openly acknowledge that they are willing to kill millions of people permanent tyranny can't be far behind.

Yes, when we lose our way in the black forests of the soul it's not long before we wind up soldier/slaves in the armies of Hell.

We need, as a nation, as a culture and as a people, to step back and find our moral centre again. We've become the monsters we feared.


M