I much appreciate the Belgian website In Flanders Fields posting the text of the Freeman article on torture. I was amused at some of the comments, though I’d be prevaricating if I said I was more fluent in Flemish than in Swahili.
Here are the comments the piece has so far generated on this European blog. The one comment in English sounds like a dutiful neoconservative recycling the same talking points the Bush White House circulated immediately after the Abu Ghraib photos leaked out. The fixation on my presumed “self-hatred” is amusing.
“Pffff” is a great expression for these kind of debates.
Als je het exclusief over Guantanamo en Abu Ghraib hebt dan vergeet je dat die arme terroristen uit landen komen waar echt gefolterd wordt, dagelijks, en veel harder dan in die amerikaanse gevangenissen. Het zit zo diep bij die “poor terrorists” dat ze, als ze niet gefolterd worden er van uit gaan dat ze mogen liegen tot ze zwart zien, dat is nu eenmaal hun cultuur.
Ik heb persoonlijk amnesty international gevraagd om tussen te komen in Indië tegen zeer serieuze folteringen. Antwoord: we kunnen ons intern niet moeien???
Ze kunnen zich natuurlijk wel moeien met het westen dat nog geen 1% van de folteringen toepast die in het Midden-Oosten plaats vinden. We spreken ook van het geografisch gebied tuseen Marokko tot China, dus niet alleen in de moslim landen. Verder in gans Zuid Amerika en Mexico.
Het is wel degelijk “bleeding heart” politics.
— In the first paragraph he links torture to “Leviathan”. One would expect that from a single-minded (and thus blinded) libertarian, but torture has nothing to do with the size of government. It takes place in virtually all societies irrespective of the size of their governments (relative to whatever yardstick) and there are of course many forms of ‘torture’. The prevalence of torture or physical abuse in ANY society has primarily to do with 2 factors: first, the quality (or ‘democratic’ nature)of its culture and thus the quality of its average citizen and, second, the circumstances in which particular individuals can find themselves (obviously soldiers fighting terrorists are under greater stress than silly libertarians in a safe environment). This article however, focuses solely on one kind of purported ‘torture’ by the US in a military context, and its politicized nature should be transparent. It does not deal for instance with the laxity of the Belgian justice sytem towards murderers who have tortured or abused their victims, i.e. with its refusal to punish “torture” severely.
— In the second paragraph he starts with the “Abu Graib Prison photos”. The case of “Abu Ghraib” has nothing to do with “torture”, but does indeed resemble some kind of “college fraternity hazing”. The case of Abu Graib was an example of average citizens (in the US military) ‘speaking up’ and reporting misconduct of fellow soldiers. It was of course also an example of the perverse selfhating western (‘lefty’ and anti-American) media making a mountain out of a molehill. The case has been extensively litigated and the culprits have been appropriately (and rather severely) punished, NOT because of any “torture” but because of misconduct and especially misconduct by public servants in ‘uniform’.
— In the same paragraph, the author parrots Amnesty International’s ludicrous assertion of the US as a “leading purveyor and practictionar of torture”. That says everything there is to know about the author’s self-hatred, and also what should be known about the type of people who are today in control of Amnesty International and their inability to make contextual and proportional judgements.
— Does one really have to continue after observing the author further claiming that “the US government has appropriated the title of the Supreme Defender of World Freedom, akin to the Catholic Church’s role as the Defender of the true faith in earlier centuries”. Obviously, the US government has never appropriated such a title. Apart from the author revealing some infantile grudge here against the catholic church, what is much worse is that this self-hating American apparently does not know that the US has been de facto the main defender of “world freedom” over the past century. However, his affliction with silly BDR, or Bush Derangement Syndrome, seems to have affected his powers of historical and contemporary observation.
3) If this is the best what ‘libertarians’ can do, ritually repeat some simplistic (in the sense of absolutist without proper context) dogmas, and run with fashionable crowds, it should be clear that they are not the ones who will preserve “freedom in the world”. No, that wil be left to others who know human nature better. But the freedom-haters in the world must love all this, to see what decadent comforts can do the human spirit. They do not suffer from cultural self-hatred, although they are just as dogmatic, but their hatred is directed at the enemy (people who actually ‘fight’ for freedom), and not at the self.
http://lvb.net/item/6532
Even de puntjes op de i zetten. Ik ben niet VAN MINNEBRUGGEN, maar een andere Hugo, en ik ga prat op mijn anonimiteit.
Verder zei ik dat het laf is de soldaten die de zaken moeten oplossen ten koste van hun eigen leven belachelijk te maken.
Jouw kwalificatie van Marc Huybrechts, een man die 100 maal intelligenter is dan jouw post over jezelf doet uitschijnen, bevestigt mijn mening over jou.
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