Does torture become something less awful when we do it? Is it a function of "paranoia" to worry about it when it's done by Americans or Brits? When a "good man" like George W. Bush does it? When a personally humane person like Donald Rumsfeld does it? When we know our motives are good ones? Orwell's answer is categorical. That's why he set Nineteen-Eighty-Four in his native England:The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else.
Do you believe that or not? Churchill didn't, which is why, despite a 9/11 every week in London during the Blitz, he never capitulated to the evil he was fighting against. Bush and Cheney, in contrast, made it standard operating procedure after one attack by people armed with nothing but box-cutters and our fear. History, as John Ashcroft once said, will not be kind.
With the above passage from here, Sully rather neatly sums up some things I've hammered away at for awhile, including
Our sense that "we're the good guys!" and they are automatically "the bad guys" is foolish, which leads to our
Over-reacting, which may give an "opponent" exactly what they want, as we have since 9-11, for instance, which
sucked but it wasn't the worst thing ever, and we foolishly let ourselves be played by thinking it was.
No comments:
Post a Comment