Excerpts from article below: "Every film, play, novel and history of the Third Reich makes torture and other war crimes the hallmark of Hitler's regime...Civilization can have no meaning unless it condemns crimes against humanity unequivocally."
Justification of torture & revenge: personal or political?
by Christopher Vasillopulos (Christopher Vasillopulos, Ph.D., is a Professor of International Relations at Eastern Connecticut State University.)
Source: Today's Zaman*
"The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples' acting on their own. … The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees." -- US Senate Bi-Partisan Report on Interrogation
Every film, play, novel and history of the Third Reich makes torture and other war crimes the hallmark of Hitler's regime. Under the leadership of the US, Nazis were punished under the dubious jurisprudential process of the Nuremberg Trials. The enormity of Nazi crimes made due process seem an inappropriate and ineffective parlor game. Humanity had to send an unambiguous message: Law or no law, the civilized nations would punish crimes against humanity. Against the background of the ghastly Nazi regime, the Senate's report has tried to send a similar, if muted, message. No one expects war crimes trials, although I believe they are warranted by US law and the UN Charter. What is more disturbing to me is that many of the people who shrink from anything associated with Hitler, including his promotion of health and beauty, have had little trouble defending interrogation techniques of the S.S. and Gestapo. After all, the information gained saves American lives. Besides, we only apply these techniques to Arab terrorists, the enemies of all civilized people. These claims sounded better in the original German. Civilization can have no meaning unless it condemns crimes against humanity unequivocally. I do not believe in absolutes but, if I did, this would be one of mine.
Let me put this in perspective. If anyone injured or humiliated my daughter, I would not want them prosecuted. I would want them to suffer by my own hands. I am not proud of this response, but I know myself. For this reason, to deal with my human desire for revenge, I do not want my need for revenge to become public policy. I do not want to legalize or politicize violence based on all-too-human emotion. Policy should be rational, prudent and detached. Policy has an obligation to the community and to the long run. Personal and immediate concerns, while important, have to be subordinated to larger issues.
Although the act may be the same, an act of revenge and state-authorized torture must be distinguished. Just so, many agree. Therefore, torture as a rational response, as public policy, is more easily justified than personal revenge. My answer to this is: No. Revenge needs no rationale. It claims no justification. "I did it. I would do it again. I could not bear my life if I did not avenge my daughter. I will accept my punishment." Precisely because it is public, policy requires rationality and justification. It is a political, not a personal response to injury and outrage. Public policy is a human response filtered through reason.
To justify torture as public policy, one form or another of "the end justifies the means" rationale must be employed. The difficulty with this rationale is that in a world without ends, without universally held absolutes, all we have as civilized beings are means. In legal terms, we must rely on due process to come to our juris-political decisions. We must play by our own rules even when we are dealing with those who don't. Is an Arab suspect to be treated worse than a Christian serial killer because lives might be saved? Prisoners are released every day who will in all likelihood commit serious crimes. The risk entailed in due process, justifiable means, is the price freedom pays to civilization.
In other words, when anyone employs uncivilized acts on behalf of any goal, however laudable, that person ceases to be civilized. Lives may indeed be saved, but saved as what? Were not German soldiers' lives saved by the war crimes of the SS and Gestapo? Why was this not a justification at Nuremberg? The answer is that there can be no civilized life when public policy justifies a Hobbesian state of nature. Civilized life cannot be "solitary, nasty, brutish and short." Do not all civilized men and women believe that reason makes us different from other life forms? Do not many of us believe with Spinoza that we participate in the divine to a greater extent than other animals due to the complexity of our brains, our reasoning powers?
From this perspective, it is relatively easy to deal with the otherwise vexed problem of torture as public policy. Torture ignores the capacity of reason to consider the long-term consequences of torture on the victims and the perpetrators. Torture ignores our participation in God, for it defiles God's creatures. As such, torture is more than uncivilized, more than wrong. Torture denies creation.
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* "Today's Zaman" is one of two major English-language daily newspapers circulating in Turkey. Established on January 16, 2007, it is the third English-language daily newspaper in Turkey
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