The Mirrors of Reason

(1:45PM EST – promoted by kestrel9000)

“Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.”

Octavio Paz

The depths to which we have sunk as a nation, as a people, is confounding even to cynics like me.  As much as I know about the dark side of our government, I still expected its most diabolical and grotesque practices such as the outright torture of helpless prisoners to remain in the shadows – something whispered about, hinted at but never fully revealed.  Perhaps it is good that these terrible things have come to light.  Perhaps now we can confront them and deal with them as we should.  It is discouraging, however, that 44% of the American people approve of torture.  As recently as 7 ½ years ago this would have been unthinkable.  I suppose we can take some small comfort in the fact that 31% qualify their support by stipulating that torture should only be used on ‘terrorists’ when innocent lives are at stake (the 24 scenario).  I guess that’s something.  But that leaves 13% of us who believe torture should be generally allowed.  As Kurt Vonnegut might have said, Jesus wept.

Now comes neocon blowhard Christopher Hitchens, famous for his bellicose and unapologetic support of some of the worst national policies ever devised by human beings, volunteering to be waterboarded for the purpose of writing an article for which he was presumably well paid by Vanity Fair.  Hitchens, who defended conditions at Abu Ghraib, has an intellect that proves the old Chinese adage that the mind is a monkey.  Why people keep paying this monkey to publish his hateful drivel I’ll never know.

In kung fu there is a form called the Drunken Monkey – and it always makes me think of Hitchens.  Watch now as the MSM’s favorite Drunken Monkey gets waterboarded.

Hitchens Gets Waterboarded, Withdraws from Iraq in 11 Seconds

Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!

Hitchens announced the news like he’d brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. “Believe me,” he told a waiting nation, “it’s torture.” Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it’s “extreme interrogation.”

Alternet

How many people do you suppose lack sufficient imagination to realize, without having to experience it for themselves, that waterboarding is torture?  Way too many apparently.

Former UN Human Rights Chief John Pace has said that the United States is torturing to death 500 to 1000 people a month in Iraq.

Transcript of Amy Goodman interview with John Pace.

I repeat my opening quote:

“Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.”

Octavio Paz

Can anyone who is wide-awake look at another human being and not see their family?  Can you really look at another human being and not see them as an infant, a toddler, an elder at the end of life?  Who can possess any wisdom at all and not see that we are all connected?  

You don’t have to be very smart to realize that torture does not produce reliable information, you don’t have to be very moral to recognize its evil, and you don’t have to be very compassionate to be outraged and heartbroken over its practice by our government.

We desperately need to wake people up in this country.  We need to educate people, and I don’t mean in the sense of what education has become – little more than job training.  I mean in the old fashion sense of liberal education where people are taught to question things, to question them deeply, and to not be afraid of the answers.

As a nation we need to stand before the mirrors of reason and take a good hard look.

Human Rights Watch

International Committee of the Red Cross

Amnesty International USA

World Organization Against Torture

UN Committee Against Torture

Veterans Against Torture