Torture, working.
Since the Moscow trials of the ’thirties, in which so many of the Old Bolsheviks confessed to almost every possible crime—an actual majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee that had made the October Revolution were capitalist agents if the evidence given at the trials was to be believed—we have all grown considerably more sceptical about evidence extracted under torture. There is a remarkable similarity between, for example, a young German girl of the sixteenth century confessing that, naked, she had attended the Sabbath and there indulged in every variety of perversion and some of the confessions produced at the Moscow trials. One remembers that one of the Moscow accused confessed, in a fervour of self-recrimination, to having met and plotted with Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen although, in reality, the hotel had been burnt down some years before; this is very like the fervent repentance displayed by some accused witches for impossible supernatural crimes to which they had confessed.
—Fancis King, Sexuality, Magic, & Perversion
It still stops me, gobsmacked, on the street, when the thought crosses my mind: I live in a country that seriously argues whether torture is justifiable.
How thin and threadbare civilization is.
Remember this: they tell us our constitution is not a “suicide pact,” that give me liberty or give me death be damned, some things are more important. —Such as keeping them in power. That, it seems, is worth dying for.
...live in a country that seriously argues whether torture is justifiable.
Ours too:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/War-on-Terror/Make-torture-legal-say-academics/2005/05/16/1116095906016.html
(Link tags don’t seem to work here.)
Meant to say something earlier: this blog runs on Textpattern, so comments run on Textile. I should probably get around to the re-design of the chunks around the comments that would make that more clear. —Maybe once I’ve better assimilated the rather staggering past couple of weeks. Baby steps. —If you want to make a link, put the text you want to be the link in quotes, follow immediately with a colon, then the intended URL:
Voila!