The Orwellian Language of Thiessen and His Acolytes

The man who can’t tell the difference between breaking codes and breaking human beings does the old “insinuate that opponents of torture are like Neville Chamberlain” trick. Par for the course for the same guy who poses the false alternative between torture and pacificism.

Cowardly torture defenders *love* to pose as manly realists.

In other Orwellian news, a reader a few days ago was outraged that I cited M.Z. Forrest’s remarks about Thiessen’s eagerness to waterboard the panty bomber. What cracks me up about this is the two-faced way in which Thiessen’s defenses of this form of torture are handled.

It’s like this: for the past six years, the whole discussion of torture has been based on the recognition by all parties that it is an evil. One side (that would be, you know, the Holy Catholic Church of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, apart from which no mortal flesh can be saved) says that torture is intrinsically and gravely immoral and can therefore never be justified by any circumstance. The other side has always rung the changes on some variation of “Well, yeah, it’s evil. But it’s a *necessary* evil.” That, and the perpetual pretence of salvation through persistent pig-ignorance of the bleedin’ obvious (“I’ms sooooo confused! What *is* torture anyway? Golly, it’s so hard to know! So I guess since we can’t be sure, let’s go ahead and subject people to simulated drowning!”) have been the twin pillars of the pro-torture case.

But with Thiessen’s argument something new has now entered the mix. It follows precisely same pattern that apologists for the intrinsic evil of chattel slavery followed in the 19th century: namely, the apologist for evil sears his conscience more deeply by moving from saying “My preferred grave evil is a necessary evil” to saying “My preferred grave evil is a positive good“. So, in the case of slavery, as the conversation gets more radicalized in the early to mid 19th Century, you begin to see people like John C. Calhoun explain:

let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding States is an evil:�far otherwise; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both, and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.

In precisely the same way, Marc Thiessen is now advancing the claim (for the first time that I have seen anywhere), that torture is not a necessary evil at all, but is actually a positive good for its grateful victims.

And this, mind you, on E-Freakin’-WTN, to the nods and winks of Raymond Arroyo and the very great disgrace and harm of the name of our Holy Catholic Faith.

Which brings me back to my irate reader, who complained about assuming that Thiessen’s zeal for interrogating the panty bomber must ipso facto imply a zeal for submitting him to torture. How dare I suggest such a thing! As he put it, “Calling for someone to be interrogated is not the same as calling for someone to be tortured, and to suggest it is is a vicious lie.”

A vicious lie. Golly! But that would suggest that waterboarding is not the beneficent source of healing and catharsis that Thiessen paints it as. One might even get the impression that people who waterboard prisoners or (worse still order it and defend their bosses who order it) are scum and that only a scoundrel would do such a thing. But, surely, that can’t be because Thiessen himself has clearly explained that waterboarding is not only not torture, it’s not even bad! It’s good! It’s psychologically liberating! It confers a sort of pseudo-absolution on it’s victims who are liberated and healed by it. Why *wouldn’t* he recommend such a procedure as a normal part of interrogation when it holds the key, not only to our security, but to the mental health and well-being of its so-called “victims”?