February 2005

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

From the Editor's Desk

"The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word - these are never the publicans [barkeeps] and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals."

- Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939)

I don't agree with Huxley that any person is truly evil; I believe many people commit truly evil crimes. But as Huxley implies, when people in positions of power institutionalize torture, they are perpetrating atrocities on a grand scale.

Peace sign in the snow. Photo: Sam Diener

The new Attorney General of the US, Alberto Gonzales, did not personally torture anyone, as far as we know. We do know he committed atrocities by devising specious legal camouflage to institutionalize impunity for military personnel and CIA officers who engage in torture, and for the President who authorized it.

When Gonzales asserted the power to shred Constitutional due process, and to ignore clear statutory and treaty-based prohibitions on torture, he was trying to construct a defense for himself and the Bush Administration against charges of committing crimes against humanity. He claimed, not just that the President should have the authority to assume the dictatorial powers of a torturer-in-chief, but that since the President has already done so, by definition, it was and is justified. These are not abstract arguments: the Bush administration has actually tortured over two dozen prisoners to death, according to the Washington Post. The administration continues to hold hundreds, perhaps thousands, of "ghost" prisoners in secret facilities they've kept beyond any scrutiny at all.

We are witnessing the horrifying spectacle of torture's architects being rewarded and promoted. The Senators in the Republican Party (not one of whom voted against Gonzales's confirmation) have now staked a claim to being the unified party of torture. The Democrats did not deem systematic torture, the destruction of constitutional due process, and a claim of imperial Presidential power worthy of a filibuster. We can but weep, rage, and organize. Now, it's all the more important that we understand and oppose the policies that the Senate has officially endorsed.

For when the Senate votes to confirm a Torturer General, we all become de facto accomplices. Thoreau said, regarding the US invasion of Mexico in a quest to expand slavery's geographic reach, "[W]hen--oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a-- whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men (sic) to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."

It thus becomes incumbent on us to rebel and revolutionize by altering and abolishing the machines that perpetuate torture and militarism, including the institutions of the military, patriarchy, racist domination, and economic exploitation. Josè Figueres of Costa Rica abolished the country's military in 1949. It's time for the rest of us to follow his lead.

The maw of the military machine, the engine of dehumanization for millions of soldiers worldwide, and for hundreds of thousands of enlistees in the US military each year, is Basic Training. Basic Training is, for many, an experiential course in abuse and torture - and it directly produces more torturers and abusers.

In Tyler Gilbert's personal account of US Army basic training today, he unconsciously echoes Helen Michalowski's classic essay, The Army Will Make a Man Out of You. He depicts the systematic nexus of misogyny, violence, and cruelty designed to train young men to dehumanize others enough to kill.

And yet, despite the indoctrination, despite the dehumanization, the spark of conscience continues to catch, and Pablo Paredes, a Navy resister, shares with us his newfound determination to conscientiously object to the war machine for which he was trained.

Especially because the US military faces personnel shortages, the indefatigable organizer Rich Jahnkow, in his article, urges us to increase our efforts to deprive the military of the human resources it needs to continue prosecuting wars.

The poverty draft fuels the war machine, and poverty and economic exploitation are themselves systematic forms of torture. A baby who is hungry in a land of plenty is surely being tortured. A sick child who has no health care suffers the torture of malign neglect. This is true for farmworkers in the US, trying to live on $7,500 a year, as well as for children around the world, who, as UNICEF points out, are suffering the tsunamis of hunger and disease every day. Yet again, the survivors of these horrors are organizing themselves for change, and urging us to protest, boycott, rebel, and revolutionize the global economic system.

Also in this issue, from a tortured land, come reports of hope. The Palestinian elections have opened a window of opportunity to end the cycles of violence and to end the Israeli government's military occupation of Palestine, as highlighted in reports from Daoud Kuttab, from the organizers of a joint Israeli-Palestinian grassroots petition for peace,and from a Quaker study group that traveled to the region and has produced a book calling on us all to help stop the suffering.

As democracy takes root in Palestine, Rep. Tubbs Jones and Code Pink call on us to revitalize democracy in the US by transforming our voting systems. Finally, Shirley Chisholm's speech reminds us of the power of the prophetic voice crying out against the systematic dehumanization of sexism and racism. She spoke out, then, too, against killing and torturing and telling lies in the "sacred cause" of the US war against Vietnam. Let our voices ring out like hers in rebellion against dehumanization of all kinds.

- Sam Diener, Peacework Co-Editor

    Next Article