Well done, thou good and faithful!

Joshua Mercer makes the right call on Bush’s appalling defense of his decision to order torture. Usual suspects show up in the comboxes to offer the usual defenses of torture and issue various excuses, redefinitions and acts of defiance against the bleedin’ obvious teaching of Holy Church that you shall not do evil that good may come of it. In particular, I note this one:

And just how do the pious choirboys shocked at the use of waterboarding propose we defend ourselves against, say, the Muslims who just slaughtered near 60 Catholics, including priests, engaged in the infidel practice of the Mass? Would waterboarding be acceptable to prevent the al Quaeda assasination of the Pope? Hans Kung?

Several things strike me about the rhetoric deployed here. The first is the pure contempt for Church teaching. Also, note again the strange conflation that the coward always makes between courage and brutality. The logic appears to be that because deliberately screwing oneself up to do something violently contrary to the law of God *feels* painful (because it does violence to conscience) it is identical with self-sacrifice (which also feels painful). You can see identical logic being deployed in a now-infamous secret speech given by Himmler to members of the SS who were engaged in genocide:

It is one of those things that is easily said. “The Jewish people is being exterminated,” every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter.”

And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew.

And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000. And to have seen this through, and — with the exception of human weaknesses — to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.

We have taken away the riches that they had, and I have given a strict order, which Obergruppenführer Pohl has carried out, we have delivered these riches completely to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing from them for ourselves. A few, who have offended against this, will be [judged] in accordance with an order, that I gave at the beginning: He who takes even one Mark of this is a dead man.

A number of SS men have offended against this order. There are not very many, and they will be dead men – WITHOUT MERCY! We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have. Because at the end of this, we don’t want, because we exterminated the bacillus, to become sick and die from the same bacillus.

Note the sick logic here: the willingness to commit murder is transmuted, in Himmler’s diabolical imagination, into a brave act of self-sacrifice. “SS soldiers are tough men willing to do the dirty work of war. They don’t moralistically refuse to do acts that risk hell. They have the guts softer men lack to slaughter thousands of innocent Jews and are willing to endure this hardship—the psychological trauma that goes with doing monstrous evil—for the sake of the love of country without looking for any loopholes. But see! We don’t take any spoils for ourselves as we carry out the slaughter. All is given to the Reich. So our charnel house of race murder is pure of heart!” So great is Himmler’s self-inflicted fear and hatred of the Jews that he becomes a child-murdering monster in order to destroy what he fears and hates—and tells himself he is a hero for doing it. It is a supreme act of cowardice.

Similarly, defenses of torture which proceed by denouncing as weak and unmanly those who will not steel themselves to commit crimes and which portray as “courage” the willingness to defy God are simply one more instance of cowardice draping itself in pride in order to cover up its guilt.

Finally, note again the complete detachment from reality posing as “realism”. The fact is torture would not have prevented the slaughter in Iraq. We don’t live in a television show. The insistence of torture enthusiasts that torture would somehow prevent some tragedy that has already occurred is rubbish.

Anyway, well done, Josh!