Torture? What Torture?

When I was much younger in the early 1940’s, I was attending a small Methodist church in the north east corner of the San Fernando Valley.  The teacher was giving us a talk about sin.  Now this is a subject I never spend much time on, but the visual I got in my brain from what he said is still with me today.  He said that crossing the “line” over into sin was like a bird that was talked into plucking out a feather.  The bird was convinced that it wouldn’t make much difference, it was easy, and so it was.  Well, the bird kept on plucking out feathers (indulging in sinful activity, so to speak), and over time the bird had no feathers at all, and there it was, naked before God and all the other birds, and all could see what a sad repulsive creature it was without all of those moral feathers.  So, don’t cross that line!!”  Obviously, that really made an impression on me if I can still “see” that poor naked bird!

The actual lesson, I believe, was that what may seem like no big deal at first, and could have a whole lot of really good reasons for doing it, can harden one’s moral sense to a certain extent.  That little simple hardening makes doing a little more of what one really shouldn’t a tad easier, and on, and on, until something happens that all of a sudden shines a light on what one has been doing, and there you are, naked without your moral feathers.

I hadn’t thought of that Sunday school talk in years, but with the torture report that was released this past week, it popped back up, along with some other memories.  Over time as various countries have actually become fascist countries, the manner in which they did so followed a rather distinct pattern.  First, a group needs to be identified as causing all of the country’s problems.  Then somehow the group needs to be singled out.  In Germany that took the form of requiring Jews, for example, to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing.  After that, all sorts of lies need to be said and written about how awful the group is, and what the group has done to merit the disdain.  It then becomes the group’s fault that it is being singled out.  After that, it is easy to begin to mistreat the group, because if they weren’t such awful people they wouldn’t need to be treated so badly.  In fact, they are so awful, they are not even fully human, and thus one needn’t feel compassion for them.  And if abusing, torturing, or otherwise physically abusing them gains the group in power something tangible, that is OK because it is the singled out group’s own fault they are so awful.  In Germany, the group singled out originally were the Jews, but soon was expanded to people with disabilities, homosexuals, non-Aryans, or people who disagreed with what the power structure was doing or saying.  Here in the United States we didn’t need to single out a group since our singled out group already had skin of another color than the power elite. 

Now it is Muslims.  Although only 19 were actually involved, ‘they’ attacked the World Trade Center, and thus all are complicit in that outrage.  It was OK that we, with a really horrific 21^st Century war machine, attacked Afghanistan which really had nothing to do with the attack, and further, had a war machine right out of the 19^th Century.  All sorts of lies were told about the Afghanis, and later the Iraqis.  They were described as indulging in all sorts of terrible actions, and thus deserved what they got.  Lost in the rhetoric was the fact that it was actually 19 people from Saudi Arabia, and, relative to Iraq, there was no terrorist group active in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.  He wouldn’t tolerate them. 

Because these people whose countrymen had done such awful things, and are thus less than human, it is OK to physically abuse them to get information out of them about future attacks, or whatever information the power elite thought they had.  What was being ignored completely was the absolutely immoral, unethical and evil act that torture is.  So, how to solve that problem?  Change the name.  It obviously is not torture if we do it, so call it Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, or EITs.  Not a problem.  Now, who is next that is causing our country problems?  People who have not accepted Jesus as their personal savior? Liberal college professors?  People who write pesky blogs?  It wasn’t so bad torturing those others now was it?  Let’s see who else is causing us problems.

From an Editorial, ncronline.org, 12/12/14, “The use of torture by U. S. Government personnel is an indelible stain upon the nation’s conscience.  It will not wash off.  The release of the report is a first step in truth-telling, but reconciliation requires more.  It requires justice.  None of us should be naïve about the threat terrorists pose.  But all of us should have the moral intelligence to recognize that our strongest weapons in the fight against religious extremism and terrorist violence are our ideals.”

We have crossed over the line, and have begun plucking our national feathers.  If we don’t stop plucking feathers now, in the not too distant future, our country over time will be the country that has no feathers at all, and there it is, naked before God and all the other countries, and all can see what a sad repulsive creature it is, naked without its moral feathers.