There are days where I feel like Kafka's protagonist K. in Das Schloss (The Castle): the landscape looks familiar, but I can't find the signposts. I don't know any more where I am. Yesterday I was transported into Kafka's nightmarish world when I heard the neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer make a passionate defense for waterboarding on National Public Radio. You can listen to Krauthammer's paean to torture here. The fact that we are now "debating" torture on a nationally broadcast radio program shows how public discourse in the United States has fallen into a moral spiderhole.
Krauthammer has elaborated on his torture defense in the (Murdoch-owned) Weekly Standard. Here, in addition to waterboarding, Krauthammer endorses hanging people by their thumbs and injecting them with sodium pentathol. This behavior is completely justified as way to prevent another 9/11 attack:
Have we learned nothing from 9/11? Are we prepared to go back with complete amnesia to the domestic-crime model of dealing with terrorists, which allowed us to sleepwalk through the nineties while al Qaeda incubated and grew and metastasized unmolested until on 9/11 it finished what the first World Trade Center bombers had begun?
In other words, if only we had had the courage to torture more, the 9/11 attacks could have been averted. But whom should we have tortured? Krauthammer is consumed by a hatred for Muslims and all things associated with Islam. Here he complains that we have not tortured the detainees at Guantanamo enough:
We give them three meals a day, superior medical care, and provision to pray five times a day. Our scrupulousness extends even to providing them with their own Korans, which is the only reason alleged abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo ever became an issue. That we should have provided those who kill innocents in the name of Islam with precisely the document that inspires their barbarism is a sign of the absurd lengths to which we often go in extending undeserved humanity to terrorist prisoners.
We have been told that the young detainee from Germany - Murat Kurnaz - was subjected to waterboarding while in US custody at Kandahar, Afghanistan. US intelligence officers now believe that he has no connection with terrorist activities. Yet Krauhammer would endorse further torture; the simple fact that Murat Kurnaz is at Guantanamo means he must be a "terrorist prisoner" and no longer deserves our humanity,
Krauthammer is hardly considered a "crackpot" extremist: he is a respected syndicated columnist who writes for The Washington Post, one of the few remaining world-class newspapers in the US. Needless to say, Bush-Blogs like Non Pasaran! erupted in paroxysms of joy when Krauthammer's torture apologia appeared.
In Kafka's brilliant short story In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony), one of the principal characters - the Officer - is so enamored of his torture machine that he straps himself to the apparatus in order to demonstrate its beautiful mechanics. But instead of the hoped-for redemption and transfiguration, the torture machine produces horrible death:
Hierbei sah er fast gegen Willen das Gesicht der Leiche. Es war, wie es im Leben gewesen war; kein Zeichen der versprochenen Erlösung war zu entdecken; was alle anderen in der Maschine gefunden hatten, der Offizier fand es nicht; die Lippen waren fest zusammengedrückt, die Augen waren offen, hatten den Ausdruck des Lebens, der Blick war ruhig und überzeugt, durch die Stirn ging die Spitze des großen eisernen Stachels.
(At this point, almost against his will, he looked at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in his life. He could discover no sign of the promised transfiguration. What all the others had found in the machine, the Officer had not. His lips were pressed firmly together, his eyes were open and looked as they had when he was alive, his gaze was calm and convinced. The tip of a large iron needle had gone through his forehead.)
Kafka's story allows us to visualize what we sense when we listen to Krauthammer's words: we have killed our humanity.
There are many times where I am ashamed of my governement. The CIA report is one of them. Just another thing the German left-wing can crow about.
Posted by: Harvey Morrell | December 11, 2014 at 08:53 PM