AT this moment, thousands of citizens sit in their cells waiting for the next session of torture by their own governments. New techniques, such as pain making drugs; pseudo legal dodges such as detention and “disappearance”; ancient scenarios such as children forced to watch the torture of their mothers — these practices have spread rapidly around the world.
Amnesty International has tracked torture in nearly a hundred countries. Systematic, government performed burning, shocking, smothering, cutting, crucifying, castrating — whatever horror you can imagine is probably being tried somewhere today. No government admits it.
Many bear the responsibility of revealing and working against torture — intellectuals in and out of universities, the press, officials in this and other countries. Scholars and intellectuals play a particularly important role in shaping our perception of the extent of government sponsored torture and what can be done to combat it. What are the traps in this effort?
THE PROGRESS TRAP
If the U.S. government makes foreign aid contingent on a nation’s human rights record, how is that performance to be judged? What mode of judgement will work in the real world to end abuses? An obvious criterion would be to assess whether the nation’s performance is getting better, If the nation’s human rights record is improving, the aid will continue; if not, it will be cut down or cut off.
The trap is also obvious. Putting aside the many ways governments can play with numbers, what constitutes progress? One way of posing the progress question is, how long should it take a government to eliminate torture from its own practices in its own jails? A year? Five, ten, 20 years?
THE CULTURAL RELATIVITY TRAP
Twentieth century anthropology brought home a useful observation: people live differently, not just as deviants from a Western norm, but in a rich variety of cultural patterns. We no longer call the outlanders “primitive” or “barbaric”.
How does that relate to torture? Well, the argument goes, in some cultures they think it more just to flog a man in public than to lock him up for five or ten years, Cultures differ widely in the value they place on human life and the compassion they accord to victims of torture.
Rights in the human rights tradition reside in individuals, not cultures or groups. We assert the fundamental dignity of the person and not the clan. The doctrine of the American Revolution declared men, not the cultures or ethnic enclaves, equal and possessed of rights and applied those attributes to all human beings, not those in the neighborhood. A tradition of tyranny is no excuse for its existence one more day.
THE BLAME TRAP
Consider the allocation of blame for torture. Is torture worse in the Soviet Union or in South Africa? With a national system, can the “government” be blamed’ for what the army does? Is “authoritarian” torture or “totalitarian” torture worse? Is torture for intelligence purposes more permissible than torture to intimidate opponents or to satisfy the sadist? Is torture of peaceful religious dissenters more awful than torture of violent revolutionaries? And so on.
The trouble with these delicate moral distinctions is that they contribute nothing to effective action to stop torture. The truth about torture must be told: the world must know what is going on inside those fake Soviet “mental hospitals” as well as inside African dungeons. But knowing is not the same as doing. The government of US, in full knowledge that conditions may be worse elsewhere, should concentrate its efforts where they will do the most good.
THE NATIONAL TRAP
Perhaps the most common form of supposed “realism” in foreign policy is the argument that national security comes first. The moralists, they say, distort policy from its fundamental responsibility: to protect and advance the national interest. The essential national interest is military security.
When it comes to government torture, the “realist” argument states, we are in principle against it but in practice must permit our allies to operate on the same priority as we do —— namely that their military security comes first.
Any attentive student of history can discern that cruelty arouses revulsion and, in the end, organized resistance. Regimes that fought dissent with terror — from perverted Rome down to the slaveholding American South, the British in India, the Japanese in Manchuria, and in our day torturers like Shah of Iran, Idi Amin, and Somoza — have provoked the popular hatred that eventually helped destroy them.
The truth is that torture subtracts support from the torturing government and adds support to the resistance in other countries just as it would in our own. The mangled body of a teenager dumped in the village square scares everybody, but when the fear passes, hate takes its place. Those who must, flee elsewhere for protection. Those who can, find a gun and a group to fight with. When the response of the regime, counseled perhaps by modern “realists” is to step up its rate of cruelty to the helpless, the familiar process of polarization speeds up.
THE DEMOCRACY TRAP
The great majority of human rights advocates are advocates of political democracy. But to suppose that the latter guarantees the former is to fly in the face of human history and common sense. It was no accident, in our own national history, that the ratification of the constitution — a political system — could not be accomplished until there was attached to it a Bill of Rights — explicit guarantee of human rights. No later than the regime of second president (without the Bill of Rights) the federal government made it a crime to defame the president. Democracy is a structure — but also and essentially, a culture in which structures are there to implement human rights, not to substitute for or replace them. It is important that this nation, founded on human rights, stand forth to insist that whatever the political machinery, its result must be “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
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