Thoughts on Torture Awareness Month

For many of us, the concept of torture is so horrific, we find it difficult to believe that it is practiced. Torture is not practical, but sadistic. Those who practice it do so because of a desire to make others suffer. Who is stupid enough to think that people being tortured will not say just about anything to make the torture stop? In America, our government justifies the less horrible types of torture by calling them "abuse." But that is only when the government and military officials' backs are against the wall: Most of the time, they consider such practices normal.

Extraordinary rendition, in which the U.S. has been very active, is the passive aggressive bureaucrat's preferred method of torture. Send the "person of interest" to a country where torture is a fine art, and then wipe your hands clean of the consequences. "Not out problem anymore." How convenient.

The events that took place at Abu Gharib are perfect examples of torture as an exercise in deriving sadistic pleasure. Prisoners were hurt and humiliated because it gave their captors a high to hurt and humiliate them, not because they were providing essential intelligence about a war that, by the way, is being fought for no reason.

There is nothing new about any of this. The way to get soldiers to be amoral and hyper-aggressive is to get them to hate the enemy. Last year in Harper's, there was an interview with a Palestinian soldier who said that he figured the Israeli soldiers were okay people, but it was his job to kill them, so that's what he did, and he did it well. There is nothing extraordinary in this soldier's statement: It is the nature of war. You kill or be killed, you kill because it is your job, or you kill because you have been taught to hate the enemy.

But the concept of torture is not confined to war. Remember, during the 90s, how eager so many thousands of Americans were for the young American prisoner in Singapore to be caned? Look at American prisons: Sadistic torture is often the order of the day. Look at many American homes, where children are beaten, whipped, burned, and routinely humiliated by kneeling on rice, sometimes while holding cans of food.

And finally, consider this: Many of the people who are so appalled by the treatment of prisoners at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay sit down to discuss their indignation over a dinner of factory farm meat. Hogs crowded into gestation crates and hens stuffed into battery cages so small that they cannot turn around, downed animals left to die slow, painful deaths, very young and weak calves dragged behind trucks to slaughter houses, chickens' beaks cut off without anesthesia, chickens thrown up against wall for the "pleasure" of the chicken factory employees, geese with tubes forced down their throats to fatten them, veal calves confined to tiny cages where they, too are force-fed, hogs legs' pulled off, live chickens thrown into scalding water, sores and diseases everywhere, and on and on.

Some people were angry when PETA published its "A Holocaust On Your Plate" campaign, but a sentient being is a sentient being. I own the posters, and it is very, very hard to look at them.

In the end, the real difference between tortured humans and tortured non-humans is that the non-humans are eaten, worn as clothing, and swept away as lab trash.

It is time for Americans to take a look at our attitudes about torture. During wartime (even during fake wartime), we consider humiliation, pain, and rape "normal." Many parents consider the humiliation and pain of children to be "normal" because it reflects how they were treated by their own parents.

And millions of the biggest liberals around think nothing of dining on or wearing the products of daily, mass torture that is arguably the cruelest of all. If we are going to stop torture, we need to stop all of it.