[lbo-talk] For Woj

W. Kiernan wkiernan at ij.net
Fri Nov 4 18:39:05 PST 2005


Dennis Perrin wrote:

>

> And the others who piped up on the Violent Rube

> 'Mur'can thread:

>

> <http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2005/11/meat.html>

>

> ...So, if torture doesn't work, since a prisoner in

> agony will say pretty much anything, then what is

> the point of it? Revenge? Fun & sadism?...

Come on, Dennis, you know the answer to that as well as I; the point of it is, what did that guy say, "pour encourager les autres," to scare _other_ potential opponents into, if not cooperation, at least inaction.

Why else would the CIA have revealed the existence of these so-called "secret" gulags at all? It's not as though they couldn't have spirited their captives off to Diego Garcia or some other heavily-guarded, inaccesible island and set their torturers and butchers at their filthy work in perfect hermetic secrecy. Just like with the photo evidence out of Abu Ghraib, the idea is to make the "enemy," all 1.3-billion of them, know and fear what might be in store for any of them should they dare defy imperial America's will.

The one-word term for this, of course, is "terrorism."

Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:

>

> I am suggesting that the American style of expression

> tends to be brash and bombastic, high on hyperbole

> and low on nuance, and that style creeps into

> conversations even among intelligent people.

I wrote earlier in this thread, "It's our turn." What I mean is, imagine the internet existed in the 1930s, so the man-in-the-street could fire off comments to international news websites with smaller effort than popping the cap off a bottle of beer, do you think emails out of the German or Japanese commenters would have been less stupidly arrogant than Americans's are today? or Englishmen's emails from the "by jingo if we do" era of Indian and South African colonialism? or Frenchmen's emails during Napoleon's Spanish and Russian wars, or during that revolting Dreyfus business? Spaniards's emails about the destruction of the Aztecs? Romans's emails during Caesar's conquest of Gaul? Athenians's emails regarding the sack of Melos?

What I think is, whenever through historical accident the ruling class of _any_ nation gets hold of overarching power and, because they _can_, the leaders throw off all pretense of moral reasoning and plunder and butcher their neighbors far and wide, you'll probably also see the essentially powerless and absurdly proud (what's he so damn proud of? _he_ has no power) man-in-the-street in those nations playing the part of a "patriotic" puffed-up little swine, "brash and bombastic, high on hyperbole and low on nuance." Where you see that in so many Americans today it's not because Americans are inherently all that different from 1930s Germans or 1810s Frenchmen or 400 BC Athenians; it's just our turn.

Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net



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