People Who Think Torture is OK Need to Die and Go Away

Ted Rall writes that People Who Think Torture is OK Need to Die and Go Away.

If you think torture is OK — under any circumstance, for any reason — you are dangerous.

Pro-torture? You should not be tolerated.

If you believe that “they” had torture coming because “they” attacked “us” on 9/11, or because “they” chop off “our” heads, you are psychotic and sociopathic and should not be free to walk the streets, much less sit on juries or vote or drive a car or hold a job that a perfectly sane unemployed person needs.

If you diminish the exquisite horror of torture — if you think sleep deprivation and blasting loud music into victims’ ears and solitary confinement and stress positions and mock executions and beatings are not “really” torture — I want you locked up, the key thrown away, never to be heard from again. You are not fit to be near children or animals.

Emphasis Mine

How desensitised the Americans have become to the pain of others? This is what prolonged exposure to neo-liberalism does to people. Only the individual matters, and the more money you have, the more you matter.

Here we have the roots of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, etc.. This inability to see the other as a human being is the root of all this evil.

And the material basis for all this is that we want to share things with people like us. The narrower we make this category, the more there is for each member.

The cult of individualism is the shackle that binds us to Capitalism. This myth is propagated the ideological superstructure as the heroic individual who defies the ignorant and brutish mob who are like so many orcs to be slaughtered for sport by the noble and wise elves.

This evil of torture rots the very soul of those who do it and those who condone it. It corrodes whatever smidgen of humanity they have left.

Our humanity is nourished by the daily exercise of practising and seeing the humanity in others, not just people like us. Every time I confront the prejudices that have burned in my soul by schooling and cultural influences, I scrape away a tiny flake of that prejudice.