April 30, 2009
Who Would Jesus Torture?
There is no shortage of repulsive aspects to
the current debate surrounding the efficacy
and appropriateness of U.S.
government-sanctioned torture – pardon me,
“enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Let’s start with the nomenclature. Calling
barbaric, inhuman practices such as
waterboarding, forced stress positioning and
other forms of physical and psychological
abuse “enhanced interrogation techniques” is
rather akin to labeling rat poison as baby
food. Those who do so with a straight face
are no less than sociopaths, and are barely
deserving of being considered human.
Such people, unfortunately, have always been
abundant within American society. This
nation has always been a welcoming host to
that sick subspecies of the human race that
will turn a blind eye to human suffering in
return for personal power and profit or the
advancement of an ideology. At various
times, this diseased breed of homegrown
Goebbelses and Eichmanns have provided moral
cover for the extermination of Native
Americans, the My Lai massacre, the
napalming of Cambodian villages and the
rejection of Jewish refugees during World
War II. The 21st Century sees
them sitting soberly in commentators’ chairs
on Fox News, blithely dismissing the most
barbaric of war crimes as being the ethical,
sensible conduct of American statecraft.
Some of the apologists do it for their own
power, profit or prestige. Their motivations
are clear and comprehensible, however
disgusting. But a significant and strange
subset, possibly the most risible and
inexplicable of all, are those who somehow
square such practices with their Christian
“faith.”
Some of the same people who wept their way
through the sado-porn that was The
Passion of the Christ are now
cheerleading the CIA’s inquisitors and their
cut-rate contractor counterparts,
enthusiastically embracing the notion that
fevered imagined threats against Godly
America are sufficient justification for the
barbaric abuse of their fellow human beings.
It’s sad, it’s sick, and it’s a measure of
the depths to which American culture has
descended. The nation that once proudly
welcomed the tired, the poor and the huddled
masses now prefers to beat and drown them,
with some of its most ostentatiously pious
leading the charge.
Perhaps actually reading and comprehending
the Bible they profess to follow has fallen
from favor amongst these most rabid lambs of
God. Perhaps they feel that its messages of
charity and compassion apply only to the
in-club of themselves, their families,
friends and fellow flag-wavers. But nowhere
in the Good Book that I am familiar with is
wanton cruelty by one human being against
another sanctioned in the name of country,
apple pie or national defense.
Matthew 25:40 lays the ground rules out
pretty clearly: “Verily I say unto you,
Inasmuch as ye have done unto one of the
least of these my brethren, ye have done it
unto me.” It is simple as it is written:
According to the inerrant,
universally-applicable “Word of God,” what a
person does to even the least of his fellow
men, he does to Christ also – whether the
act be sacred or profane. Show compassion,
mercy, charity and humanity, and the
scripture tells you you are “righteous” and
bound for “life eternal.” Act less
charitably – say, by waterboarding a POW –
and it’s “Depart from me, ye cursed, into
everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and
his angels.”
What part of this don’t these “good”
Christians understand as they cheer those
who act in ways diametrically opposite to
the “savior” they profess to follow? They
are not exceptions to this dictum, because
there are no exceptions according to their
faith. For all its other inconsistencies,
the Bible is pretty clear on a couple of
counts: Hypocrisy isn’t cool, and human
beings are not supposed to treat their
fellows like crap. Presumably, this means
that we are not to chain them to walls for
days at a time, lock them in enclosed boxes
with biting insects, strip them and blast
them with icy water, waterboard them or
partake in any of the other exercises in
creative cruelty that the crippled minds of
Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza
Rice, Jay Bybee, John Yoo and the rest of
Bush’s cabal of criminals conjured up. Nor
are we supposed to come up with clever
euphemisms or logic-leaping justifications
for such behavior after the fact whilst
pretending to virtue.
“And these shall go into everlasting
punishment,” says Matthew – presumably
accompanied by the fawning supplicants who
cheered them on.
Fortunately, there’s no such thing as a “Get
out of Hell free” card.
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2009 North Star Writers Group. May not
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