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Torture is never about protecting, it's always about power and destruction. It's about making examples of people to terrorize a larger populace.
It goes through the same rationalization that genocide, slavery, and everything else does that systemic powers use when they want to justify evil- it transforms from the deeds of a monster, to a "moral grey area", to a necessary evil, to a viable tactic, to a virtue.
Then, afterwards, after those in power no longer can terrorize people, and sanity can return, the collective amnesia will hit, and people will say that they didn't know what was going on, and that it really was only a few people responsible, and that, "we didn't know better", though we've seen it happen a thousand times over.
It is the same excuses we hear about the Indians and the genocide. Every time a black person is lynched or shot in the back by police. The same excuse when we bomb and poison foreign countries. The same excuse when a man beats a woman for the last time.
It is not enough that we have evil. It's that we repeat it, and justify and excuse it, in the exact same way, every time.
Torture does reveal the truth- it tells us who the terrorists are.
It goes through the same rationalization that genocide, slavery, and everything else does that systemic powers use when they want to justify evil- it transforms from the deeds of a monster, to a "moral grey area", to a necessary evil, to a viable tactic, to a virtue.
Then, afterwards, after those in power no longer can terrorize people, and sanity can return, the collective amnesia will hit, and people will say that they didn't know what was going on, and that it really was only a few people responsible, and that, "we didn't know better", though we've seen it happen a thousand times over.
It is the same excuses we hear about the Indians and the genocide. Every time a black person is lynched or shot in the back by police. The same excuse when we bomb and poison foreign countries. The same excuse when a man beats a woman for the last time.
It is not enough that we have evil. It's that we repeat it, and justify and excuse it, in the exact same way, every time.
Torture does reveal the truth- it tells us who the terrorists are.
