I’d be against torture even if it wasn’t Torture Awareness Month, even if I hadn’t signed up to the blog roll against torture and even if I hadn’t thought that it would make me famous overnight, well-liked and rich.
I assume that, except for some really strung out characters and free-lance sadists, that nobody thinks torture is, in itself, a good thing.
For people to accept torture, you have to bamboozle them with qualifiers. One is to use word that mean the same, but don’t sound so bad.
Another is to say/imply that some greater good will be achieved by using torture.
A third is to dehumanize the people who will be tortured – the corollary being that we are especially good, even perhaps chosen by God to realize some noble cause or destiny.
This is why, depending on which poll you read (I don’t), whether you trust them (ditto don’t) a lot of people, some of them Americans, approve the use of torture.
The ends justify the means, right? No, wrong!
The ends never justify the means. It is the means which justify the ends!
The way you go about trying to accomplish something, the means you use, determine the results you actually achieve.
I think this was put quite nicely by an unknown poet of the Third Galaxy who addresses the Supreme Hole of Arrogance in this sonnette,which could be applied to several leaders in our world who suffer from the delusion that God has appointed them to serve the causes of
My considered guess is that he thinks that God
Has handed him, upon a silver platter,
A role to “save the world” and a rocket rod
That he alone, like Zeus, has the right to hurl...
And that he, somehow, supposedly fulfils
A prophecy in the Apocalypse?
And for that he needs most of all a will
As hard as steel, sharp -- and merciless!
He’s not afraid to break the egg or three
He needs to make an omelette, the taste
Of which is fired with the desire to be
The ruler of a Universal State!
Alas!
The role which,
in the end,
he meets,
May not exactly be the one he seeks!
In the final analysis, my dear friends,
It is the means which justify the ends!
3 comments:
You are so wise, but it really doesn't show, Mr. Bird -- your work is full of logical phallicies and non-secreters
Do you still have a day job?
I assume that's you Ed, yeah, still putting in 8 hrs. plus 3 commuting. That was my comment just above -- I just figured how to make it so the comments can be put in by anybody. I made the kind of comment the real bloggers get from trolls sometimes, with creative spelling and all. ;-)
Chuck
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