CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States
There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .
The Majority of Americans Believe in Torture
this entry brought to you by datarock, "fa fa fa"
There's a line of thinking for arguing or debating that says once you bring up Hitler or the Nazis, you automatically lose. And it's actually a sentiment that I share. You shouldn't have to go to the absolute complete extreme in order to make a point.
And yet I'm about to go against that line of thinking, as I'm about to bring up the Nazis.
I heard a statistic that, as of April 2009, the majority of Americans supported torture in extreme cases. Now, for the record, I don't know the exact numbers, and a "majority" might be 37% support torture, while 34% don't, and the rest are undecided. But the fact is, more people support torture than don't.
And, frankly, that scares me. The Nazis didn't come to power and do what they did overnight, there wasn't peace and civility one day, a proclamation from the Fuhrer, and then a round up of the Jews the next. It happened slowly, while people weren't paying attention. Attitudes started changing. Propaganda started to exploit those attitudes. The inherent nature of people to be awful to one another and to scapegoat was given room to bubble over. Voices that would've never been allowed to be heard were given space to be spoken. Like a viral infection it started small, spread from host to host, until what happened happened.
The majority of the people in America support torture in "extreme cases". When did this happen? We prosecuted the Japanese for doing these very acts, we told our children during the Vietnam war that these things were happening to our soldiers, that the Vietnamese were awful for it. We still have men in office right this moment who were tortured, and yet only a generation later, we have the exact opposite attitude.
It didn't happen overnight. The politics of fear were allowed to ruminate. Fear combined with an ignorance to what exactly was going on, with disinformation. The voices of the lunatics who would otherwise never be heard were allowed to speak their minds without any retaliation, without any correction or deliberation.
The majority of people believe torture is okay in "extreme circumstances". How long before torture is okay under "some" circumstances. How long before it is just a matter of course? Exactly how many steps have we been from being Nazis? The idea that America could turn to Nazism is obviously absurd on its face, and it should be completely disregarded. And yet, here we are. Supporting torture. Debating torture on television as if whether it worked or not should matter at all. Our previous Vice President, a democratically elected ex-official, smugly and with much contempt has been saying publicly that yes, of course he tortured, and he's proud of that fact, and there has been absolutely no national recourse. He is simply allowed to speak his mind as if what he has to say should matter at all. This is even more absurd than the idea of comparing America to Hitler.
...All of this has happened while you were not paying attention.
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with love from CRS @ 9:05 AM
3 Comments:
If you intend on bombing my country, harming my countrymen or otherwise intend to do me or my family harm. I'll torture the fuck out of you.
Yes, spoken like a true Christian. You people don't know how to keep your true colors inside your wretched souls, do you?
Using psychological tricks to get a subject to answer your questions is one thing. Waterboarding, stress positions, forcing them to mock perform sexual acts, covering their faces with black hoods, whipping, beating, force feeding them pork all while taking snapshots and bragging about them is a completely different thing. It has been proven that torture DOES NOT work and that it, in fact, results in false answers more than half the time.
This is the United States. We do not torture and if you believe that, then you are NOT an American citizen. Period.
