"Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1970
"...the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the Government does not rely on such assurances in the future."
British House of Commons, July 9, 2008
The subject of "torture" is probably not on your list of weekend reflections, but maybe it should be.
On Thursday, I attended a lecture by Dr. George Hunsinger, professor of Systematic Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary and the founder of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. Whenever I write or read or hear about the subject, I still find myself reeling that this has been perpetrated by my own country, and that our own president has rationalized and authorized it. My reaction was no different Thursday as I listened to Dr. Hunsinger’s lecture.
I do not know personally persons who have been tortured under the auspices of the Bush administration’s "war on terror," but I have personal friends who were tortured in Taiwan’s period of "White Terror" in the 1960s and 1970s. I know what it did to them. It’s not over when the torture session ends; it is with the tortured the rest of their lives. I suspect that it changes the person who does the torturing as much as the tortured.
President Bush has said repeatedly, "We don’t torture." This weekend in your reflections, consider these words from the annual report on human rights around the world by the British House of Commons Committee on Foreign Affairs, issued July 9, 2008:
We conclude that, given the clear differences in definition, the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the Government does not rely on such assurances in the future. We also recommend that the Government should immediately carry out an exhaustive analysis of current US interrogation techniques on the basis of such information as is publicly available or which can be supplied by the US. We further recommend that, once its analysis is completed, the Government should inform this Committee and Parliament as to its view on whether there are any other interrogation techniques that may be approved for use by the US Administration which it considers to constitute torture.
And then, let your mind wander to these words of Aleksandra Solzhenitsyn in his lecture when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, a lecture that was smuggled out of the Soviet Union.
We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.
I sat in Hunsinger’s lecture and wondered why only thirty people were present when there should have been at least three hundred persons of faith in this town who are scandalized and outraged by torture perpetrated and authorized by this administration.
Sadly, I think I know the answer, or at least part of it. Many are still unwilling to believe that a president of the United States of America would condone, let alone authorize, the use of torture. If he says, "We do not torture," many believe him.
During the question period after the lecture, one asked why people could still advocate the use of torture when we know it doesn’t work. I almost screamed, "Because the conventional wisdom says it does work!" We live in a culture ready to believe that lives can be saved by torture. How many spy movies have brainwashed us?
For the third part of your weekend meditation, try to imagine why George Bush and Dick Cheney opted to authorize torture. Meteor Blades has an excellent analysis. If you missed it, be sure to check it out.
But on this weekend, I’ll focus my reflection on the words of Solzhenitsyn as his lecture continued from the paragraph cited above:
And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.
And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness - and violence, decrepit, will fall.
I am weary of thinking and writing about torture. I want to forget about it and enjoy the weekend. But I think we dare not forget; we must keep remembering, thinking and writing, and be the "courageous" persons Solzhenitsyn calls for who will not partake in falsehood, not to support false actions, nor tolerate them by our President.