James Heartfield wrote:
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> In the 1980s (and before then) the IRA used punishment beatings, interrogation and what I guess would be called torture. So did many other national liberation movements. I wouldn't say that they were right to, or wrong to, only that it was their right to decide what means to use in the prosecution of their cause, and that that was a secondary question to whether their overall cause was just.
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> A revolution is not a tea party, as Engels explained.
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> The reason to oppose torture by the state is that you do not trust that state to act in the interests of the people. Is there is an absolute moral case against torture? I don't believe so.
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Neither do I. But I think one can maintain as a historical fact that the use of torture constitutes a violation of solidarity, and that its use is incompatible with revolutionary aims at the present time, whatever might have been the case in the wars of liberation. Even I suspect it created an tension between revolutionary leadership and the masses, as well as exerting a corrupting influence on cadre who carried it out or sanctioned it.
So there is something very close to an absolute political case against it..
Carrol