Bleeding Heart
15th August 2009, 09:09
Greetings, fellow commie pinko bastards, latte-sipping liberal intellectual elites, crazy chaos-loving anarchists, and other assorted miscreants. Long-time lurker, first-time poster here. I'm pretty new to radical politics in general too so forgive me if I ask obvious questions and whatnot :blushing:.
Anyway, I was reading a thread about torture (which, for reasons I wish
were self-evident to everyone in the human race, I am against) and several people brought up the point that, aside from the obvious barbarism and violation of basic human rights, torture generally doesn't even work, at least not very effectively. Which begs the question: why, then, do governments continue to use it?
You'd think by now the ruling class would have figured out it isn't a useful tool for gathering information. So it must be a tool for something else. I'm from the States, so I usually hear about torture from corporate-media talking heads in the context of stopping "terrorists" (i.e., brown people) from setting off a ticking time bomb or something. So what is its true purpose in this situation? Is it to terrorize Middle Easterners into submission so they won't fight against American imperialism? To get the American populace used to the government having even more power? Or is there no reason at all, and is it just like a real-life version of that Stanford Prison experiment, and torture is the inevitable end to giving any group of people the power to do it?
What do you think about it?
Anyway, I was reading a thread about torture (which, for reasons I wish
were self-evident to everyone in the human race, I am against) and several people brought up the point that, aside from the obvious barbarism and violation of basic human rights, torture generally doesn't even work, at least not very effectively. Which begs the question: why, then, do governments continue to use it?
You'd think by now the ruling class would have figured out it isn't a useful tool for gathering information. So it must be a tool for something else. I'm from the States, so I usually hear about torture from corporate-media talking heads in the context of stopping "terrorists" (i.e., brown people) from setting off a ticking time bomb or something. So what is its true purpose in this situation? Is it to terrorize Middle Easterners into submission so they won't fight against American imperialism? To get the American populace used to the government having even more power? Or is there no reason at all, and is it just like a real-life version of that Stanford Prison experiment, and torture is the inevitable end to giving any group of people the power to do it?
What do you think about it?