Catholic and Enjoying It!
…from people who mistake brutality for courageous realism.
The facts of the article are not particularly contestable, so the response by the Brutality as Courageous Realism crowd is simply to laugh and mock, because they got nothing.
This stuff is not new, by the way. Henry Kolm was part of a group of WWII interrogators who condemned the confusion of brutality with efficiency when he noted, “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.”
Now some may say the change in policy is due to the fact that in WWII we were not fighting truly evil and fanatical people but merely nice warm and fuzzy Nazis. I think it’s due to the fact that the man driving the policy change, Dick Cheney, was a man who knows a lot about brutal arrogance but not very much about courage at all. In this, he resembles nothing so much as the leader of the Clinton Administration, but we seldom were told to contemplate this by Talk Radio for some reason.
Ultimately, apologetics for torture come back to the fundamental question of whether or not Catholic teaching is actually revelation or merely an impractical ideal that cannot, of course, be heeded when “real life” intervenes. I think it’s revelation. I think it tells us something real about how human beings are actually built and what does and does not correspond to reality. So when the Catholic revelation tells us that prisoners are to be treated humanely, I take it that God knows more about what does and does not correspond to justice and the proper functioning of the human family than we do. Advocates of torture constantly talk as though they are being “realistic” and that anything less than brutality is bleeding heart wimpiness living in a dreamland of idealism. The Soviet felt the same way–and drove thousands of Nazis to the West because they knew we’d treat them humanely. Result: we got good intelligence from prisoners.
Seems to still work. That might be becuase God knows what he’s talking about, whereas the “brutality is realistic” crowd are actually the ones who are indulging in fantasies.
Am I saying that prisoner abuse is completely fruitless? No. Nor is diving into a full septic tank utterly without reward. One might ocassionally find a penny down there. But there are much wiser and more efficient ways of earning money–and of gathering intel. However, the pride that mistakes itself for courage is notoriously resistant to common sense, or even to the testimony of people who defeated the Nazis and the Commies.
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