Torture

"The purpose of torture is not getting information. It's spreading fear." -Galleano

"The coward wretch whose hand and heart

Can bear to torture aught below, 

Is ever first to quail and start 

From the slightest pain or equal foe"

-Bertrand Russell

It never fails to amaze me how the people of the planet seem to have always managed to be surprised at the actions of those who rule them. You'd think sometime during the 400 odd generations of history we would have managed to realize that power is never an end in itself, nor is it in the habit of showing restraint. Guess it's all about that plausible deniability. 

One would also logically think that after The Trail of Tears, Mai Lai, Abu Ghraib and the horrors perpetrated by the many violent regimes the US helped establish, fund and advise, people the world over, and in America in particular, would be incapable of the slightest surprise at the things revealed in the recently released torture report. 

The oblivion that has become the American psyche is so staggeringly impenetrably that it seems almost to be a granite monolith when I think of it. As a historian perhaps it is especially difficult for me to grasp the paucity of memory that so many people today are working with. They sound and seem like senile ostriches that bury their heads in the sand, and when they pull it out occasionally are perpetually shocked at what they see and thus go back to their subterranean safety after making some absurd noises and incoherently running about for a bit. 

Another salient example of this is the drama surrounding the murder of several black folks by the cops, and the subsequent pardoning of the murderers. How incomprehensibly ignorant of the black experience in North America do you have to be to be shocked by this? For fucks sake, sit your naive ass down to read the autobiographies of Fredrick Douglas, Malcom X or Mumia Abu Jamal. Perhaps then you will wake up to the horrendous history that you have apparently managed to stumble through reality without bothering to learn. 

How people can say things like 'Black Lives Matter' and at the same time not even know about the Second Congo War speaks to the profound depths of the ignorance that I find so impossible to fathom. For me the attempt to understand it is mentally like throwing a rock down a well and listening intently for minutes, only to hear nothing but the heartbreaking silence. I suppose it is all part and parcel to the alienation that is the foundation of the modern consumer society. Everything is experienced independently, personally, within an invisible existential cell that renders almost impossible the consideration of the whole overarching reality that dictates our existence. 
I do understand that it isn't easy to stare the brutal soul crushing truth in the face and chart your course from that nauseating point. That it is far easier to psychologically slumber in the organs of the beast that perpetrates the horrors that you occasionally denounce than to wrench yourself from everything easy and comfortable. I just feel that somewhere hidden away among all humans is something commonly called a conscience and that true happiness and contentment will never be possible while that is being betrayed. For me, I think that the first step in dealing with reality, is to admit that it isn't something new, nor is it a secret, but a reoccurring nightmare that has been following us for at least 400 generations. 

"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error that hints at active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all pervasive system." 

-Simone de Beauvoir  

"The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think" -Luther Burbank

Shifting Sands

"We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!" -H.G. Wells

Indeed, here it is. Brazen, brutal, barbaric and beautiful, it lumbers on down the sordid path. It doesn't seem that any people could have anticipated it a century ago. Most estimates saw us living in some advanced technology driven utopia or falling off the tightrope of progress into the abyss of oblivion. Amusingly, people today seem even more certain of these two disparate futures, with more favoring the latter as time goes on and our inability to get our shit together becomes starkly contrasted to the challenges we face as a species.    

H.G. Wells had a really interesting theory about what was needed to give humanity a chance. His project was to get all humans to acknowledge our collective history, not as a divided chronology of petty identity, but as a sprawling mosaic that unites us all. Living as he did during an era of unprecedented nationalism, he said "our true nationality is mankind".  

This was coming from an Englishman at a time when England owned an absurd amount of the worlds surface and controlled a staggering percentage of its population. For this reason English is still dominating globally, and the heirs to the Anglophone Empire still hold preeminent power globally in the two things that have always mattered on such a scale- the ability to get what you want and vanquish those who oppose. 

These days it seems to me that nationalism is fraying at the edges, and in some places getting torn apart. It was always a questionable concept, this large scale sanctified tribalism. Especially so when we consider were most of the worlds nations came from. There was a chance during the era of decolonization to build a world more focused on commonality than conflict, but that was very cleverly diverted by the cunning of Western businessmen and the ruthlessness of vested power in the recently liberated regions.

Today there is very little indication we have learned anything from history, but somehow there seems to be a growing awareness in some areas that all the things we were so convinced made us different was all a lie. I find a lot of hope in the message Wells tried to get across all those years ago.  

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress."

Our collective inability to surmount the primordial problem of Oligarchy is surely of primary importance. In connection with this is the need to start working towards eliminating borders, not so much on the ground, although this is important as well, but in our minds. The longer we keep thinking of this person as this or that nationality, or that somehow the border between two countries is anything more than a dirty trick, the more we work against ourselves. 

It's a hell of a struggle to forget what we have been taught for ages and to learn that which is currently only an idea. Somehow I get the feeling that people are starting to realize more and more how stupid most accepted things truly are, and this makes me think that perhaps this absurd political map of the world that one sees so on so many walls will someday be relegated to its rightful home, the museum. 

"There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope."

"A time when all such good things will be for all men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it."