Rationalizing Torture The Dance Of The Intellectual Apologists
Barber, James David
RATIONALIZING TORTURE The Dance of the Intellectual Apologists by James David Barber A t this moment, thousands of citizens sit in their cells waiting for the next session of torture by their...
...King’s ancestors had lived through generations of torment waiting for the supposed prerequisites for the abolition of slavery to arrange themselves...
...Therefore, if one is really interested in abolishing torture, one will begin by patiently and systematically working to stabilize the economy and thus establish civil peace...
...Insist on the substance of rights-on free speech and religious liberty and the rest-and get it in writing, they said...
...No government admits it...
...its record on human rights.’ -Theodore Adams, Jr., president, Unified Industries, before the House Human Rights and International Organizations subcommittee, April 1985...
...We will not make deals, in the political sense, with the fate of torture victims...
...Their economies stagnate under strangling and suffocating bureaucracies, but they do not dare to bestow economic liberties-for in their train all other liberties follow.’ -Michael Novak, as U.S...
...pseudo-legal dodges, such as incommunicado detention and “disappearances...
...RATIONALIZING TORTURE The Dance of the Intellectual Apologists by James David Barber A t this moment, thousands of citizens sit in their cells waiting for the next session of torture by their own governments...
...It is important that this nation, founded on human rights, stand forth to insist that whatever the political machinery, its m l t must be “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness I’ It is not the thrust of this argument that those who fight to end torture in the world should refuse to talk politics with those who have other priorities...
...These questions answer themselves-and there is no shortage of examples directly evidential to each...
...Although I am not an apologist for Haiti’s past problems with regard to human rights, I think it necessary that Congress establish and be open to a realistic perspective...
...Does economic stability-or even strong economic growth-protect a torturing dictatorship from revolution...
...We have our values, they have theirs...
...But what at first looks like reasonable compromise can easily drift over into the justification of cruelty...
...Specifically, according to this argument, if you get free elections in a country, the public will not stand for torture...
...In the real world, each nation’s primary obligation is to use its power where it can make a difference-a calculation involving a lot more than deciding where the blame lies thickest among the torturers of the world...
...Is Turkish torture more or less hideous than Guatemalan torture...
...Consider the allocation of blame for torture...
...Martin Luther King, Jr...
...But as the text made its way to the states, skeptical patriots like George Mason and Patrick Henry rose up in adamant resistance...
...Is blundering torture to be more readily forgiven than efficient torture...
...Scholars and intellectuals play a particularly important role in shaping our perception of the extent of governmentsponsored torture and what can be done to combat it...
...Roman imperial culture developed the custom of crucifixion...
...But compared to to ta I ita r i an governments, their arbitrary power is limited...
...Such reasoning is often very subtle...
...Analysts mesmerized by the lure of precision can lose sight of the most elementary political facts of life...
...Many bear the responsibility of revealing and James David Barber is James B. Duke Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies at Duke University and chairman of the board of directors of Amnesty International USA...
...If you get an independent judiciary, justice will prevent torture...
...Even the most sincere torture abolitionist can be trapped by apparently sensible alternatives to the steady, adamant insistence that torture stop...
...To destroy this line of sophistry requires but a moment’s reflection on the meaning of what Tom Paine called “The Rights of Man...
...An obvious criterion would be to assess whether the nation’s performance is getting better...
...The liberal lesson is, judge not that ye be not judged...
...Backers of Paraguay’s dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, have been pushing this argument for more than 30 years of virtually continuous torture and repression...
...Was that supportable “progress...
...The blame trap Intellectuals are notably prone to believe that when they have said something they have done something...
...But beyond its stone-hearted immorality, the prerequisites argument vastly exaggerates the calculability of politics...
...November 1981...
...It can connect with genuine realism, with the duty all of us bear to bring virtue into real life, not to be satisfied with merely hypothetical or vicarious decency...
...We assert the fundamental dignity of the person, not the clan...
...military bases there has to supercede our concern over what Ferdinand Marcos does to dissidents...
...But knowing is not the same as doing...
...The problem is not torture but economic exploitation, or famine, or inhuman ideologies, or the lassitude of the church, etc...
...I find the idea of strategic relations with Chile and South Africa not nearly as offensive to my moral values as I did relations with the Soviet Union in World War II, which were, however, necessary, indeed unavoidable .‘ -Robert Nisbet, Commentary The national security trap Perhaps the most common form of supposed “realism” in foreign policy is the argument that national security comes first...
...Humane intellectuals can make a special contribution by pushing the key questions into the public debate and applying their findings to real change in the real world...
...Aztec culture ripped out the hearts of maidens...
...The argument calls to mind the patient instruction American blacks used to receive from certain white intellectuals as to the conditions and developments that would have to pave the way for the march to civil rights...
...We should welcome every step by the United States government toward support of human rights...
...If you bring the army and police under the control of civilian government, death squads will be effectively controlled...
...How long should it take a government to eliminate torture from its own practices in its own jails...
...But there is an even darker path for the intellectual...
...What if the Soviet Union were to release Andrei Sakharov tomorrow-should that good news constitute “progress,” justifying a more generous economic policy by the U.S...
...Haiti is by all accounts the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere...
...Recently Turkey, an ally of the United States and a government practicing torture on a massive and systematic scale, reduced from 45 days to 30 days the legal period of incommunicado detention in areas of emergency military government...
...The moralists, they say, distort and distract policy from its fundamental responsibility: to protect and advance the national interest...
...Even those prepared to set aside their morals cannot escape the facts...
...The progress trap If the U.S...
...We can respect cultural differences and still require nations which wish to have dealings with us to uphold certain standards of government conduct...
...Then it will be possible to start the process of dismantling the torture system...
...If any would insist that torture is somehow acceptable because it is culturally existent, let them make it voluntary on the part of the victims...
...Those who must, flee elsewhere for protection...
...Six months...
...The logic that prerequisites must be accomplished before torture can be abolished goes like this: Torture is but one relatively minor pathology in a society beset by much larger problems...
...It was no accident, in our own national history, that the ratification of the Constitutiona political system-could not be accomplished until there was attached to it a Bill of Rights-explicit guarantees of human rights...
...The resultfrom Vietnam to El Salvador to lbrkey-has been about as unstable a situation as we could have created had we set out to do so...
...The trouble with these delicate moral distinctions is that they contribute nothing to effective action to stop torture...
...Putting aside the many ways governments can play with numbers, what constitutes progress...
...Can any realist reasonably argue from the facts that the Marcos regime in the Philippines or the Botha regime in South Africa is gaining security by torturing more and more people into insanity in their prisons...
...Generations of intellectuals have toiled to understand-and thus to contribute to healing-the miseries of humankind...
...The alternative is surrender to the sophists, who know perfectly well how to make cruelty look merciful...
...Does that “progress” deserve approval and support from our government...
...Mengele, would never take part in the personal torment of the helpless...
...Generally we should let them be as they want to be, should protect them from our own disruptive exploitations and interventions...
...If a representative national legislature is established, torture will be outlawed...
...It is that way with torture...
...A favorite example is the Philippines: surely our need to secure U.S...
...Issued by unanimous vote of Congress, endorsed by the recommendation of George Washington himself, advocated by the best brains of the American republic, the original Constitution supposedly needed no Bill of Rights because the procedures it set forth did not grant the government the power to deny basic freedoms...
...Assistant Secretary of State Stephen Bosworth, July, 1982, praising the new government of General Efrain Rios Montt...
...Our callings differ, but we share a common sense that our thinking has a purpose, an end beyond itself, which is to advance a civilization in which the human spirit can flourish...
...The following are, I think, the major examples in our day...
...I am convinced that as Haiti’s economic situation improves, so, too, will...
...they toy with the destruction of civilization...
...We need] a steady preference for the lesser over the greater evil...
...Thb article mpmsres hb personal views...
...Who could tell what the procedures would produce...
...Some are passionate careerists...
...The test of prophecy in the social sciences is contingent prediction: on the basis of a theory, one poses as clearly as possible what will happen in the future, given certain conditions, and then tests the predictions explicitly against the actual results...
...If there is any principle this country stands for-at home or abroad-it ought to be respect for the individual per se...
...h o centuries of United States experience make us grateful that the AntiFederalists had sense enough to demand a tough Bill of Rights...
...If we take sovereign equality seriously, we will recognize that the people of every state should determine their own system of justice and how they want to defend themselves against domestic or foreign dangers...
...How does that relate to torture...
...ancient scenarios, such as children forced to watch the torture of their mothers-these practices have spread rapidly around the world...
...The democracy trap Critics of the human rights movement often say we are looking in the wrong place...
...Of course, there have always been people who, shying away from the Erasmian principle, pursue instead whatever little puzzles help them while away the hours of tenured tranquility, comforting themselves with the thoughts that they, unlike Dr...
...if not, it will be cut down or cut off...
...Above all, if torture works to produce stability, our national interest may require us not only to tolerate it but even to lend it our quiet support...
...The truth about torture must be told: the world must know what is going on inside those fake Soviet “mental hospitals” as well as inside African dungeons...
...citizens have economic liberties, inevitable pressures lead toward greater political and civil liberties...
...This is precisely why totalitarian regimes are stubbornly opposed to economic liberties...
...We should welcome every step toward decency by an allied government...
...Today the judiciary system of South Africa grinds out its procedural decisions-condemning long trains of victims to the foulest of tortures...
...Thus even those prepared to cut and burn prisoners for a higher political purpose and even those unaffected by the reputation of the United States as the staunch ally of disgusting dictators ought to pause before the facts...
...Any attentive student of history can discern that cruelty arouses revulsion and, in the end, organized resistance...
...Most constitutions forbid it...
...The intellectual prepared to put off the abolition of torture until the world is “ready for it” needs to imagine himself making that speech to a gang of brutes about to deal with his teenage daughter...
...In other cultures, what we call torture is to them nothing more than “behavior modification” or the treatment of mental illness by aversive conditioning...
...Rights in the human rights tradition reside in individuals, not cultures or groups...
...from the thousands to the hundreds...
...Amnesty International reported that during the last six months of 1982 more than 2,600 Guatemalan civilians had been killed in more than 100 massacres...
...The great majority of human rights advocates are advocates of political democracy...
...But in deciding what topics to research and what to make of the findings, we confront the fundamental obligation to put whatever talents we have to work on behalf of justice, freedom and compassion in the world...
...The United States was asked to continue and increase aid to El Salvador because, in a given period, death squad murders declined massacres...
...Some cultures, take a very dim view of homosexuality or religious deviation and believe that torture is appropriate in such cases...
...In this field, what people think, or say they think, has consequences...
...T.E...
...Then: Within a national system, can the “government” be blamed for what the army does-especially in off-duty hours...
...If any case clinches the contemporary argument, it has to be Argentina, where mass torture and murder, far from securing the military junta in charge, precipitated its overthrow, arrest and trial...
...If they are realists, it is in the medieval sense of those who believe in the pictures in their heads rather than in the realities of political life...
...That would be like allowing a murderer to continue because he has been murdering fewer lately...
...Then the torture problem will take care of itself...
...They let us be, we let them be...
...This ideal in no way contradicts the ideal of objectivity...
...It is that little “if” around which this “realist” argument collapses...
...Those who can, find a gun and a group to fight with...
...Is torture of peaceful religious dissenters more awful than torture of violent revolutionaries...
...Quotations compiled for The Washington Monthly by Steven Waldman working against torture-intellectuals in and out of universities, the press, government officials in this and other countries...
...Well, the argument goes, in some cultures they think it more just to flog a man in public than to lock him up for five or ten years...
...The cure for torture is democracy...
...The key problem is to establish the rule of law and basic democratic institutions...
...Far from it...
...The “democratic” Greeks and the “gentle” Eskimos practiced child exposure...
...A year...
...How does Cambodia rate on a moral scale of torture in comparison to Iran...
...Regimes that fought dissent with terror-from perverted Rome down to the slaveholding American South, the British in India, the Japanese in Manchuria, and in our day torturers like the Shah of Iran, Idi Amin, and Somoza-have provoked the popular hatred that eventually helped to destroy them...
...The first major contribution to the dialogue is information-revealing the facts of the torture epidemic-but we also seek cooperation in transforming information into policy...
...I cannot emphasize strongly enough the favorable contrast between the current human rights situation in Guatemala and the situation last December...
...It is not simply that different societies at different stages of development require widely different institutions for their survival and prosperity...
...Our government’s influence in Honduras and Turkey is, for example, considerably greater than our influence in Bulgaria or Iran...
...Those who think a free election in Iran or Cuba today would topple those tyrannies are dreaming...
...Some are cynics...
...various cultures have their own dignity, their own integrity, their own respect-worthy differences from the American Way of Life...
...Vigorously advanced distinctions, covered by the press as if they were events, slip into an equivalence with reports of changes in the flow of actual goods and services and bullets and bodies in the real world...
...A country in such dire economic straits as Haiti can ill afford to jeopardize the political stability it has established thus far...
...Analysis can paralyze action, but it can also, curiously, substitute for action...
...Instead we have whole libraries full of post hoc wisdom, sociological tomes translating weak correlations into laws of nature, argument that relationships that held in the last era will hold in the nexttheories denied by every great advance of rights in human history...
...We no longer call the outlanders “primitive” or “barbaric .” No longer indignant, we are rather fascinated by the Zuni and the gentle Tasaday, the Masai and the Bushmen, the wonderful ways of the Eskimo...
...New techniques, such as painmaking drugs...
...No later than the regime of the second president, the federal government made it a crime to defame the president...
...The United States once again discovers itself facing a choice between a butchering government and a resistance movement ready to take help wherever it can get it...
...Systematic, government-performed burning, shocking, smothering, cutting, crucifying, castrating-whatever horror you can imagine is probably being tried somewhere today...
...The prerequisites trap It is written that Augustine, before he became a saint, lived with a mistress for 15 years, during which he prayed for the blessing of chastity, “but not yet...
...But the trap is also obvious...
...Does a nation’s international reputation as a vicious repressor of the rights of millions enhance or detract from its ability to lure foreign investment...
...One set of prerequisites is clear, however: the determination of fellow human beings to get the facts of torture out into world consciousness and to press torturing governments to stop it once and for all...
...What mode of judgment will work-in the real world-to end abuses...
...From ancient slave rebellions to the women’s movement of today, those demanding their rights again and again have been handed a plateful of “sometime” when they have asked for a serving of “now...
...The majesty of law is little understood in traditional societies where ethnic identity tends to supersede all other claims on loyalty and obedience.’ -Ernest W. Lefever, Policy Review 1978 Today civilians control the Soviet police and armed forces, who engage in systematic torture from the Arctic Circle to Afghanistan...
...Theories must be subjected, coldly and systematically, to the test of fact, not bent to fit the hopes of the researcher...
...The cultural relativity trap Twentieth century anthropology brought home a useful observation: people live differently, not just as deviants from a Western norm, but in a rich variety of cultural patterns...
...That is when most torture takes place-during incommunicado detention, before family or friends or a lawyer can see the prisoner...
...Is “authoritarian” torture or “totalitarian” torture worse...
...answered, in his book, Why We Can’t Wait, that “the Negro wants absolute freedom and equality, not in Africa or in some imaginary state, but right here in this land today...
...Utley, policy Review 1978 L foreign policy is a nation’s capacity for distinguishing between potential allies and potential aggressors...
...The doctrine of the American revolution declared men (today read: persons), not cultures or ethnic enclaves, equal and possessed of rights and applied those attributes to aff human beings, not those in the neighborhood...
...Think of the analogy (inexact, but relevant) to civil rights in the United States: how long should a state be permitted to practice racial segregation in public schools before the federal government cuts off its funds...
...A tradition of tyranny is no excuse for its existence one more day...
...The truth is that torture subtracts support from the torturing government and adds support to the resistance in other countries just as it would in our own...
...But to suppose that the latter guarantees the former is to fly in the face of human history and common sense...
...But only a handful of daring or foolhardy scholars do that...
...The purpose of foreign policy, this argument continues, must be to build those alliances and mutual commitments that will best buttress the odds of survival in a dangerous world...
...And so on...
...Before we deal with torture, we must deal with the right to eat...
...When it comes to torture by governments, the “realist” argument proceeds, we are in principle against it but in practice must permit our allies to operate on the same priority we do-namely, that their own military security comes first...
...At least since the age of Erasmus of Rotterdam, intellectual communities have held high the banner of humane learning...
...But in the name of the child being tortured today and tomorrow, we must not accept “progress” in this sense as satisfactory...
...Even when we are faced with a society which is grossly unjust in the sense that it maintains oppressive laws for which there is no conceivable excuse, we must pause before inferring that the members of that society have a right to the abolition of those laws...
...In the actual conduct of research, sentiment is out of place...
...Effectiveness means persuading governments to change their ways, which in turn means entering into dialogue with the powers that be and those who can influence them...
...Democracy is a structure-but also, and essentially, a culture in which structures are there to implement human rights, not to substitute for or replace them...
...In this field, merely moral comparisons are truly odious, for they distract from effective work to stop torture and result only in meaningless equations OF blame...
...But all you have to do is pay heed to the grisly accounts coming out of the trials of Argentina’s former military rulers to see how deep and wide the morass of cruelty has become...
...The sophisticated version is procedural: we should not treat the symptom (torture) but the cause (dictatorship...
...But we will vigorously seek out allies to work with for the good of the cause...
...That the fafaga (beating of the soles of the feet) is fashionable in Iraq or the cachots noirs (totally dark cells for long-term detention) is a facet of Rwandan culture gives us not the slightest pause in demanding reform...
...6 Authoritarian governments have significant moral and political faults, all the worst of which spring from the possession of arbitrary power...
...Our obligation is to be effective-to accomplish an end to the horror and blasphemy of torture...
...At least since Machiavelli, scholars who would never dream of hurting anyone themselves have put their brains to work justifying cruelty by others...
...The government of the United States, in full knowledge that conditions may be worse elsewhere, should concentrate its efforts where they will do the most good, not merely focus attention on where the violations are the most evil...
...Moralists who would risk that result are not being moral at all...
...The mangled body of a teenager dumped in the village square scares everybody, but when the fear passes, hate takes its place...
...Freedom and justice are the fruit of long organic growth nurtured by religious values, personal courage, social restraint and respect for law...
...From time immemorial, cultures have supported cruelty-which never made it right...
...In short, cultures differ widely in the value they place on human life and the compassion they accord victims of torture...
...In the years ahead, the resisters turned out to be right...
...Is Castro more secure because his imprisonment and torture of dissidents and suspected or potential dissidents has engendered in thousands of Cubans a passionate determination to bring him down...
...Five, ten, 20 years...
...Is torture for intelligence purposes more permissible than torture to intimidate opponents or to satisfy the sadist...
...Today the national legislature of the Philippines has been unable to restrain the Marcos regime from daily torture in the jails and camps...
...This school would convince us that the basic opposition is between moral idealists and practical leaders...
...If the nation’s human rights record is improving, the aid will continue...
...The idea that torture should be absolutely and universally abolished- “but not yet” -gains credence and a fancy vocabulary in certain circles of modern social science...
...Can a regime whose subjects hate it recruit popular support for social reform...
...In short, genuine democracy is far more than a set of mechanical processes of decision-making...
...Is there anyone prepared to argue that Batista’s brutality built national security for his regime in Cuba...
...Therefore when a government threatened by terrorism, revolution, or invasion jails dissidents, tortures to produce intelligence or intimidation, executes traitors or dangerous suspects, we must exercise understanding, must appreciate that their desperate situation contrasts with our secure one...
...Amnesty International has tracked torture in nearly a hundred countries...
...Is torture by communists worse than torture ofcommunists...
...Is torture worse in the Soviet Union or in South Africa...
...government makes foreign aid contingent on a nation’s human rights performance, how is that performance to be judged...
...Another way of posing the progress question is, how long...
...The essential national interest is military security-not being conquered...
...representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1981...
...4eane Kirkpatrick, Commentary, November 1981...
...If this requisite is not fulfilled, no other considerations can compensate...
...Empirically speaking, torture has been stopped-in Greece, in Argentina, in Brazil, and elsewhere-but the socio-political conditions for that advance have varied widely...
...Far from producing stability, governmental brutality has again and again undercut the military security of states...
...When the response of the regime, counseled perhaps by modern “realists,” is to step up its rate of cruelty to the helpless, the familiar process of polarization speeds up...
...As long as the economy is plagued by rocketing inflation, wild swings in the business cycle, disastrous dependency on fluctuations in world markets, and so forth, the government will fear for its life and thus resort to torture and other repressive measures...
...But a good many think of themselves as realists who, alas, must undertake the awful business of crafting reasons for supporting, or at least ignoring, government brutality and murder...
Vol. 17 • December 1985 • No. 11
