Torture in Germany after World War II

There’s a tendency among some liberals to talk as though the Bush Administration is the first one to use torture. I think it’s part of the whole American exceptionalism thing–we used to be God’s gift to humanity, until that evil Bush came along and now I’m so ashamed, blah, blah, blah. In criticizing some current American evil, the civil religion requires you to pay tribute to how he has sullied our spotless record. Even just typing this I feel a strange urge to begin singing “America the Beautiful”.

Not that one shouldn’t regard Bush as a walking pestilence, of course.

I think the problem is the ambiguous name of the American War Crimes Investigation team. You could interpret it to mean “investigate war crimes,” but maybe it was supposed to mean “commit war crimes during your investigations.”

it’s not as if their grievances can have passed you by unnoticed

That makes some remarkable assumptions about how vocal the Germans have been about what happened to them post-surrender. Even the carpet bombings have been treated with silence until recently; W.G. Sebald got a long essay out of that subject.

The last 4[!] paragraphs should be blockquoted of course..

I am not sure why any of this should be a surprise. The US and UK demonization of the Germans during WWII led to a lot of crimes against humanity after Germany was defeated. Among the worst of these crimes in my mind was the forced repatriation of over 200,000 Russian-Germans to the USSR by the Allies in 1945 and 1946. Nearly 70,000 of these repatriates were children under 16. It was quite obvious that the Soviet government was going to enact a brutal and racially motivated revenge against these people. Yet, US and British soldiers forcibly turned over these men, women and children to the Soviet authorities anyways.

Posted by Seth Finkelstein: “Though it all does undermine Dershowitz’s argument that torture must, must, be institutionalized because we now face unique terrorist circumstances where Western governments will do so. As in, if Western governments have been torturing as an interrogation technique for decades, his hand-wringing over the need to legalize it has a very different aspect.”

IIRC, Dershowitz switched his position on torture when the government of Israel admitted that it does, indeed torture. Before that it was ‘they don’t do it, and it’d be wrong’; afterwards he had no problems with it.

So it wasn’t a case of ‘9/11 changed everything’.

Bush does not get off the hook at all because Americans previously routinely tortured people. America does not get off the hook at all because Bush turned torture from unofficial into official policy. The Americans who preferentially voted for Bush have a long-standing cultural approval of torture. They got what they wanted, and Bush was happy to give them more of it.

More surprises, the British seem to have dirty hands as well.

“Photographs of victims of a secret torture programme operated by British authorities during the early days of the cold war are published for the first time today after being concealed for almost 60 years.”

AMAZing isn’t it?

This question may sound like asking for an explanation of “What is Jazz?” that is you either “get it” or you don’t but I’ll ask anyway.

Pacifism makes sense to me as a coherent moral position.

“All’s fair in love and war” makes sense to me as a coherent moral position.

“Its OK to kill you in a just war but its not OK to torture you in a just war” strikes me as valuing a lack of suffering or a lack of evil above life itself which seems odd to me.

What am I missing that some of the anti-torture arguments seems like “Its OK to burn down your house but not to steal its contents”?

I can see why killing and torture are morally dangerous and corrupting to those who carry them out. Its just drawing a line between the two that I don’t understand.

Samcherve,

Thanks for the explanation. What you say makes some sense to me, in that the “puppy drowning” characters I’ve run into were pretty scary people.
But are you really ENTIRELY OK with the humane killing of animals? The same feelings that make me think animal abuse is wrong give me guilt about all the meat and poultry I eat, but somebody’s got to be at the top of the food chain, right?

Its an old saw that the daintier hand has the more sensitive morals, but you seem to be saying the opposite that people who work in a meat or chicken packing plant and hence have a lot of experience with killing would be more likely to be horrified by brutalizing animals. You may be correct but I doubt it.

How exactly would me having more experience with killing make me better understand the moral difference between killing and torturing?

Even conceding your point that there is a difference, in what war has “humane” killing ever been the norm? In fact, some forms of “humane” killing such as vaporization with nuclear weapons seems more repugnant than more painful methods.

I probably don’t have a principled objection, I just think that since I think asceticism is a moral good, it troubles me to see torture as something worse than war.

The point of war is to win. The point of torture after a while at least seems more to be the pleasure of revenge or of torture for its own sake. Most often it’s counterproductive and irrational. For some liberal grandstanders however the attacks on torture as barbaric are backed by an implicit argument that war is civilized.

He tells us a revealing anecdote about standing in Aden’s Crater District in 1967 with the notoriously bloody British “:counter-insurgency” specialist Col. Colin (“Mad Mitch”) Mitchell, watching as some of the soldiers under Mitchell’s command were…

stacking, as in a butcher’s shop, the bodies of four Arab militants they had just shot and Mad Mitch said: “It was like shooting grouse, a brace here and a brace there.”

I associate such arguments with a rationalist’s dislike of history as a subject.

““It’s OK to kill you in a just war but it’s not OK to torture you in a just war” strikes me as valuing a lack of suffering or a lack of evil above life itself which seems odd to me.” – Martin James

It seems odd to you that ‘a lack of suffering or a lack of evil [might be valued] above life itself’. But one has to ask if there could be anything valuable enough to die for. If there could be, then life should not be held as an ultimate value.

In any case, though it may be perverse that one can visit horrible death on ones enemies, but not pull out their fingernails, the conduct of war is a highly codified practice – there are rules of engagement and laws or war. Torture is proscribed, and those who do so in war are, precisely, war criminals.

America is just as evil and wicked as any nation is on this planet.

Having said this, one finds it disconcerting, repeated constantly in this blog, that Americans have always had a unique innocence complex. As if other nations do not consider themselves the Best Of All Humanity! As if the American Left and Intelligentsia have not had, from very early in America’s history, a peculiar hatred for their people, unique among the world’s peoples (think of H.L.Mencken).

Further, one is not very credible denouncing torture unless one extends it as a universal principle. Alfred McCoy does not do this very well; neither does John Pilger.

Finally, were not a number of these people SS and Gestapo people? Could it not be that Allied soldiers, seeing the concentration camps just recently, lost their heads? It does not justify torture, but it does offer an explanation.

I think the Nazi’s deserved any torture they got

“had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation team.”

good is no less than they deserved