Bright lines
Mar. 2nd, 2007 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydyI just had a painful conversation.
Someone who was a speak-to acquaintance with some good will between us, and a lot of social discomfort, argued some time ago -- possibly the last pool party -- that there could be legitimate reasons for what happened at Abu Graib. After some shouting, and some later thought, although perhaps not calmer thought, I informed him that we are no longer on speaking terms.
He has just called with all the good will in the world on his part, wanting to give me valuable information. I established that he still felt that torture was, under some circumstances, acceptable and useful. I told him that if he wished to send me the information in email, that would be a kindness, but that I was now going to hang up.
He's the only person in the world that I'm not speaking to, the only person in the world where the resolve lasted past a few contacts. He's prone to depression, which makes what I did worse. He's a Viet Nam Vet, so he quite reasonably believes that he is speaking from an informed decision. I hated doing that. I'm shaking. But torture is wrong, and anyone who believes otherwise is not a good person. I told him that, too.
I have other friends who, I know from conversations that tiptoed around it, believe torture is acceptable under some circumstance or another. They haven't crossed the bright line, they haven't said that point blank. Are they less of a bad person because they haven't said it to me? Probably not. My excuse is that if they do not speak to me of it, then I do not have to judge. Am I copping out? To some extent.
If you are my friend, do not ever tell me that you think torture in any form is moral or useful for gaining intelligence. I will, in fact, stop speaking to you, no matter how uncomfortable it makes both of us. I will stop being your friend. It will hurt me, and if you are my friend, presumably it will hurt you. I am restricting this to conversations, both in voice and in photons. A blog, though, is not a conversation, and I consider it exempt. I'll geet back to you about comments in someone else's blog.
This may not be a brave or appropriate line, it is my bright line.
In the normal course of things, I would say I was sorry I was being so rigid. On this topic, I'm sorry I'm being so flexible.
Someone who was a speak-to acquaintance with some good will between us, and a lot of social discomfort, argued some time ago -- possibly the last pool party -- that there could be legitimate reasons for what happened at Abu Graib. After some shouting, and some later thought, although perhaps not calmer thought, I informed him that we are no longer on speaking terms.
He has just called with all the good will in the world on his part, wanting to give me valuable information. I established that he still felt that torture was, under some circumstances, acceptable and useful. I told him that if he wished to send me the information in email, that would be a kindness, but that I was now going to hang up.
He's the only person in the world that I'm not speaking to, the only person in the world where the resolve lasted past a few contacts. He's prone to depression, which makes what I did worse. He's a Viet Nam Vet, so he quite reasonably believes that he is speaking from an informed decision. I hated doing that. I'm shaking. But torture is wrong, and anyone who believes otherwise is not a good person. I told him that, too.
I have other friends who, I know from conversations that tiptoed around it, believe torture is acceptable under some circumstance or another. They haven't crossed the bright line, they haven't said that point blank. Are they less of a bad person because they haven't said it to me? Probably not. My excuse is that if they do not speak to me of it, then I do not have to judge. Am I copping out? To some extent.
If you are my friend, do not ever tell me that you think torture in any form is moral or useful for gaining intelligence. I will, in fact, stop speaking to you, no matter how uncomfortable it makes both of us. I will stop being your friend. It will hurt me, and if you are my friend, presumably it will hurt you. I am restricting this to conversations, both in voice and in photons. A blog, though, is not a conversation, and I consider it exempt. I'll geet back to you about comments in someone else's blog.
This may not be a brave or appropriate line, it is my bright line.
In the normal course of things, I would say I was sorry I was being so rigid. On this topic, I'm sorry I'm being so flexible.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-07 07:41 am (UTC)My husband has been watching a DVD of the TV show 24 Hours, and I'm finding it morally repugnant, specifically because of the way torture is shown. It's just a TV show, but one problem is that I suspect its effects can spread outside the tube.
My other reason for commenting here is that, given your bright line, I'd suggest you try ard to avoid seeing that show.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 02:29 am (UTC)For what it's worth, I don't blame the show for society, I blame society for the show. A personal factoid: I was watching Nova tonight. It was about the Great Escape, when seventy-odd prisoners escaped from a German prisoner of war camp in WWII. Only three got clean away. The rest got caught. The Geneva Convention had a specific penalty for escape: 10 days solitary. Hitler was fit to be tied, and so a "great war crime" was committed. He ordered all of the recaptured prisoners to be shot. And my first thought was, What do you mean, a great war crime?
I think we lost a lot of our perspective because of WWII and Nazi Germany. What Hitler and the SS did was profoundly disturbing and infinitely evil. Somehow, though, it seems to make smaller evils less evil. And greater evils, too. Pol Pot's regime is thought to have been much worse. (I know almost nothing about it, save for the stacks of skulls, so I rely here on historians, probably historians with agendas). The thing about Pol Pot, though, is that it wasn't documented. For all its heartlessness, it seemed somehow less horrible because there weren't careful records of the pounds of tallow rendered into soap.
Now, stir in a back-lash to the Great Society and the counter-culture (and do, please, try not to confuse the two) and you come up with motivation to do evil and the justification that "it's not as bad as..."
It grieves me, but you know, nobody ever said the human race was sane.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 02:59 pm (UTC)