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24 Apr 2008 06:17 pm

Why Torture Is Different

A reader writes:

I've been following your debate with McArdle and Larison about war crimes and total war with interest.  I think it's misguided to conflate things like Night Area Bombing of Nazi Germany, or even the use of the Atomic Bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with things like torture camps. They're just entirely different in kind.  Strategic bombing in World War II fulfilled clear strategic objectives in fighting very powerful industrialized nations: it weakened the will of the people to fight; it destroyed industrial capacity and killed factory workers; and it demonstrated the severe consequences of starting wars.  I put things like this on par with General Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea during the Civil War, in which he burnt down houses and destroyed essential infrastructure.  His professed aim was to: "make war so terrible that they will be ready to exhaust all peaceful remedies before taking up arms."  These aims--a speedy end to war and the prevention of future war--are legitimate and real: the south has not fought again, nor (yet) have Germany and Japan.

 

Torture and torture camps are an entirely different aspect of war, and in my view they are unjustifiable.  The difference is that torture's aim is as much humiliation and dehumanization as it is to obtain information. 

A personal anecdote: I went to a Quaker High School, and when we attacked Afghanistan, many people at the school expressed disapproval at our Meeting for Worship (the Quaker religious service).  I stood to defend the war.  I'm still proud I did that. What I'm not proud of was the words I used.  I called the men we were fighting "animals, who deserved to be treated like animals."  This is the mentality that not only justifies torture but makes it appealing: to reduce your enemies to pathetic creatures; to at once demonstrate your superiority and to make someone--anyone will do--the vessel for your own pain and your own humiliation.  It's a psychological form of warfare all the way down, and it dehumanizes all parties.

 

So it confuses the issue to talk about strategic bombing as being comparable to the torture regime.  Strategic bombing and the like aims to end war and prevent war.  The torture regime is a war on persons and an exercise in power and domination for its own sake.  If we can't make this distinction, it's difficult to see where the Allies and the Nazis would part ways in our moral calculus.

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