if you thought a person was an enemy, could you torture them?

say your president convinced you that a certain nation attacked our nation, and in a swell of patriotic pride you joined the military with a sense of vengeance thrown in, and you suddenly found yourself in charge of a whole prison full of persons from that same nation.

could you, would you, just pick some randomly, and torture them for your nation, or maybe just for the fun of it? maybe cause you were tricked into thinking they somehow all deserve it?

i don't sympathize with any fucking torturer, or persons who ordered or allowed torture, and i personally could not find it in my soul of souls to do that to another living human being, no matter what his crime. i'm the kind of guy who would just as soon outright kill anyone who harmed me or mine personally, but i couldn't torture them.

i just ain't that kind of guy, cause i was raised in the old, pre-bush america.

edit: I wouldn't want any of my brothers or sisters in arms to be tortured.

That I would say "No way." But then, I'm a little older than the standard military recruit -- okay, a LOT older, so sue me. But in my younger, more naive days, taken away from my family, community and support system, placed in a hostile environment for months on end with no relief in sight, subjected daily to the possibility of sudden death, depending on and being depended on for my very existence with a handful of other men and women in the same situation?

I like to think I'd still say "No way." But I don't KNOW.

Assuming they are actually suspected of a crime and awaiting trial or have been convicted of one, that is sufficient.

I prefer to be really annoying for a really long time. Have you noticed?

If the situation is powerful enough anyone is capable of anything at anytime.

(Look up Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment or Phillip Zimbardo's prison study at Stanford)

I would do anything I could to save my family.

But the circumstances would have to be very extreme, I could not torture random people for no reason.

animals

i can totally understand how they program the soldier. out of necessity they break em down, to create them how they need. that is why leadership is so important. the army isnt about individualism. it is group thinking

leaders are the ones responsible for keeping htem in check, keeping eye on them. they have created the abuser, what you need to murder, what is done in war.

It was a "wrong" question.
Torture a person? No
An "untermenschen" well, that's no worse than blowing up frogs.
I will say that I have never been in that situation and never want to be, who knows what we are capable of in extremis

It is certainly against my values and even my natural proclivities--I am a total chicken about even seeing pain.

However, I keep remembering the experiments run by the social psychologist who found that he could easily make regular people think they were administering lethal shock to other people, yet they would go ahead and DO it.

His results were repeated over and over again in all different kinds of groups here in the United States. All it took to get people to do it was invoking the need for their compliance by a white-coated, clip-boarded fake scientist saying "The experiment MUST continue."

my being. Not everyone is like me, unfortunately in that regard.
Of course, fortunately not everyone is like me in regards to body weight.

:)

...unless of course, he/she is a certified sociopath/psychopath with a sadistic bent.

,...until I forced myself to acknowledge that there are those who believe they will be relieved/fulfilled by pursuing their emotionally-driven sense of revenge. They don't know that,...their own violence will NEVER, EVER fill up or fix or heal their loss or emptiness,...and their own violence simply refuels/ignites further loss and emptiness.

:shrug:

If i had a prison of really proud people, wise ones, the first
objective would be to break and destroy their dignity. To achieve this,
the prison could make them pay for food and medical care, and then offer
them really low paying jobs, so low, in fact, that they would be
near death from exhaustion to recieve medical care.

Then, we'd add the spirit breaking ingredient. The prison would offer
cable TV for a mere day's wage, so that the prisoners were increasingly
introduced to a slick imaginary world where everything they know about
themselves, their dignity and their culture has been completely erased.

So, after some time, the only culture that would survive in the prison
would be the culture of cable TV. Then we would make TV more and more
expensive, so that people would have to choose medical care, OR,
the only way of escaping from their miserable work-slave lives.

Then we'd do a form of musical chairs. Each week, someone would lose
their job due to efficiency, and that person would have to beg for
scraps of food from the other prisoners, not have TV or medical care.
Over time, an increasing element of the prison would become so
disenfranchised.

Then the only people who were actually not addicted to TV and the
fantasy escape culture, would be those who were the outcasts in the
prison culture. This would be the ultimate perversion, as the very
dignity and pride of the original prisoners would be turned
completely upside down, and only those who sold out, would be
elevated... but if it was done subtly enough, the entire culture
could be dstroyed, all human dignity could be removed, and the last
prisoners working would fight tooth and nail for the right to watch
cable TV and be part of the fantasy.

Sadly, my prison is called USA. :-)

:applause:
Did you just make that up?

2 drams of whiskey.. :-)

here I am drinking coffee...

What do they type after 4 drams?

Buenos Noches... :hug:

nt

Never.
I don't even need to think about it.
I pity the pathetic wretches that do get satisfaction from cruelty, but I don't sympathize with them.

Compassion does not mean apologizing for and justifying torture.

Oh wait, I forgot it does mean that for kkkompassionate kkkonservatives.

I know, it's wierd but this liberal has morals.

I tend to localize my hatred to certain individuals that cause me pain.

But yeah, I admit it, if I had been tortured, I could torture back.

many things to be accepted by your peers in a war scenario. Group thinking yellow ribbon stickers torture me every day!

Even if I hated the person, even if I thought they deserved torture - because I know that the moment I stooped to the point of torturing someone, I would become the very thing I most despised.

I would refrain from torture out of self-preservation, if nothing else.