Quotes from the Underground
Briarpatch Magazine
May/June 2009
“Those who, without outrightly advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of debate, are in a way more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It only thrives if it is sustained by what Hegel called ‘objective spirit,’ the set of unwritten rules which form the background of every individual’s activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. For example, a sign of progress in our societies is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is ‘dogmatically’ clear to everyone that rape is wrong, and we all feel that even arguing against it is too much. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, it would be a sad sign if one had to argue against him – he should simply appear ridiculous. And the same should hold for torture.
“This is why the greatest victims of publicly admitted torture are all of us, the public that is informed about it. We should all be aware that some precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.”
Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes
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“…if torture and coercion are both as useless as critics pretend, why are they used so much? While some abuse and outright torture can be attributed to individual sadism, poor supervision and so on, it must be the case that other acts of torture occur because interrogators believe, in good faith, that torture is the only way to extract information in a timely fashion. It must also be the case that if experienced interrogators come to this conclusion, they do so on the basis of experience. The argument that torture and coercion do not work is contradicted by the dire frequency with which both practices occur.”
Michael Ignatieff, “If torture works…”, Prospect, April 2006
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“Despite the mystique that surrounds it, and the understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behaviour beyond politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed to rule: Marcos in the Philippines, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, the French in Algeria, the Israelis in the occupied territories, the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list could stretch on and on. The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system – whether political, religious or economic – that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling.
“Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain ‘indicator species’ of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.”
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
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“I have nightmares about being tortured.”
(A statement volunteered during an student ice-breaker exercise in Regina last year, which asked politically active undergraduates to state truths about themselves. Participants were asked to indicate agreement with the statements of others. Organizers were surprised that nearly every student present expressed agreement with the above.)
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Suggestions for Quotes from the Underground are welcome and can be sent to editor AT briarpatchmagazine DOT com.
