DISHONOR AT GUANTANAMO: Jendi Reiter

[Parts of this are overstated. But the bits I’m quoting are powerful and right. –Eve]

…A culture that treats the body as a mere machine for pleasure will produce the perfect recruits for the machinery of pain. The breakdown of ethical restraints in our military prisons has been made possible by the liberal idolatry of the self, whose will to power cannot tolerate the restraints of chastity or religious obligation. …

…The greatest blasphemy is using Christian rhetoric to stick a happy face on a regime that would have us act from fear instead of faith, and that uses self-justifying legalism to exclude prisoners and aliens (those special objects of Christ’s concern) from the circle of our ethical obligations.

I merely want to warn progressives to think twice before breaking down the taboos that we once called civilization. The body desacralized, the appetite unleashed, so easily become the torturer’s tools. Why did we ever believe that if given the choice, the children of liberation would always make love, not war?

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