[lbo-talk] Americans kinda like torture

[James Heartfield]

Gar says that I should support rape and paedophilia as well as torture. But I don't support torture in the abstract. I just point out that liberation movements and workers movements have often engaged in violence that would be called torture under current legal definitions. Viet Cong prisoners were ill-treated in ways that one would surely call torture. Martin McGuinness (currently northern Ireland's education minister) is alleged to have been head of the IRA's intelligence team, which interrogated and executed informants. Strike-breaking miners in the year-long dispute in Britain were plainly put in fear of their lives by pickets. South African militants 'necklaced' informants by putting burning inner tubes around their necks.

Of course the liberation movement ought to struggle to avoid the degradation of the struggle into sadism or cruelty, but class struggle is violent. In 1945, the Red Army disciplined soldiers who raped German women, but though it is exaggerated, there clearly were instances of rape, and that was something that one could predict would happen. If they had not invaded Germany there would have been no rapes. Would that have been the right thing to do?