Trump is Right! Torture Works!

As a retired history teacher, I sometimes find President Donald J. Trump’s statements chilling. There is, for example, his stated willingness to send U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism to Guantanamo to stand military trial.

Still, in all fairness, I should support him whenever he might be correct. He insists torture works.

History proves it does. In fact, history shows that when it comes to torture, Mr. Trump’s ideas are just weak tea. If we’re going to torture, shouldn't we do it right? Let’s Make America Great Again.

Let’s bring back the rack.

Many Trump supporters are white Evangelical Christians. So let’s start our lesson there. When Rome blazed up in A. D. 64 and Nero fiddled a cheerful tune it proved easy to load all blame on a despised religious minority. Nero set out to torture and kill as many followers of Jesus as he could find. The Roman historian Tacitus, no fan of Christianity himself, was nevertheless shocked by Nero’s cruelty. Executing prisoners was no “fun.” Nero loved to watch them suffer. Tacitus explained:

A sport was made of their execution. Some, sewn into the skins of animals, were torn apart by dogs. Others were crucified or burned, and still others, as darkness drew on, were used as torches. Nero devoted his gardens to the spectacle, provided a circus, and himself, in the costume of a charioteer, rode around among the crowd, until compassion began to arise for the victims, who though deserving of the severest penalties were actually suffering not for the public good but to glut the cruelty of one man.

Torture remained in fashion for many centuries to come. I mean: why mess with what works so well, right? The English tortured with great enthusiasm in the time of Henry VIII. When Alexander Leighton questioned the new Anglican dogma he paid a horrible price. The courts ordered him whipped, fined, and sent to the pillory. One ear was sliced off and his nostrils were split with a special device inserted up the nose. He was branded on the forehead with an “H,” for heretic. “At some convenient later time,” the judge ordered, Leighton was to be whipped again. Then his other ear would be cut off and he would serve life in prison. Torture worked so well  it drove the Pilgrims out of England. 

The Puritans, a group that understood the virtues of nose-splitting and lopped off ears—when not applied to themselves—followed the Pilgrims to these shores in 1630. The foundation of their law was the Bible and the only interpretation accepted was their own. Those who questioned Puritan ideas might have their tongues bored with red-hot irons. Obadiah Holmes, an Anabaptist, earned even worse punishment when he refused to baptize his young children, as Puritan church leaders insisted he must. Holmes was sentenced to be struck thirty times with a three-corded whip, the same punishment as for rape. Sometimes the Puritans whipped or hung Quakers too.

In the fullness of time the Roman Catholic Church also applied the bludgeon and the torch to encourage the recalcitrant to talk. 

Members of the Inquisition perfected the use of thumb screws to force suspects to confess, and, as a bonus, reveal the names of co-conspirators, even if none existed. Such screws were powerful vices designed to crush the ends of all ten digits, one by one, if required. A prisoner could be stretched on a rack and a set of ropes cranked till arms and legs came out of joint. Those who confessed to various forms of heresy were burned at the stake.

Also: witchcraft! In the good old days all the best methods for ferreting out those who practiced the dark arts involved torture. During the Salem Witch Trials, confessions (and we do expect people to confess if we’re going to torture) were effectively elicited from dozens of suspected witches. Only Giles Cory proved resistant to the powers of logic. Cory was staked to the ground. A large rock was placed upon his chest. “Are you a witch?” Massachusetts authorities wondered. Cory refused to say. Another rock. Same question. Cory remained mute. More rocks. The query repeated. Finally the weight so compressed Cory’s chest that his ribs cracked and he suffocated and died. 

Presto: One less witch! 

Call me a skeptic, but for some reason I get the feeling President Trump doesn’t read much history and may not have glanced at the U. S. Constitution in years. (See Amendments IV, V, VI, VII and VIII.) Still, if he insists torture works, who am I, a humble liberal citizen, to disagree?

In fact, let’s go full Gestapo! Those boys knew how to make pain work for the Nazi regime. Consider the case of a Polish partisan who refused to reveal the location of a hidden camp. His skull was crushed and his legs broken to make him talk. Finally, his body was dumped in a wood coffin and sent to the ovens to be burned. At the last minute, he regained consciousness and screamed, “Open up! Open up! I am still alive!”

Every self-respecting Nazi knew torture worked. Sometimes they tied prisoners’ hands behind their backs. Then they ran a rope round the prisoners’ wrists and dangled them from trees. One victim was hung up because guards wanted him to reveal the names of other inmates involved in forbidden activities. An eyewitness explained what happened next:  “[H]e would have talked, but he does not know them [the names]. His hands are tied behind his back and he is hung from a pulley by his wrists. After a few seconds his arms come out of their sockets and remain twisted upward, vertical behind his back.” A 19-year-old Czech prisoner refused to break despite hideous abuse. The boy’s mother was in custody; but unknown to her son she had committed suicide to end her misery. Gestapo agents cut off her head and brought it to the young man’s cell to break his will.

At last he talked.

Remember that happy day when Candidate Trump insisted Saddam Hussein was good at dealing with terrorists? Well, Saddam was very good. He declared all Kurdish people terrorists. In 1988 he ordered poison gas dropped on dozens of  villages. Estimates place the death toll at 50,000. That’s how you kill terrorists, including toddler terrorists. Also terrorist babies who can’t talk—even if you do bring the pain. As for Saddam’s critics, the body of one dissident who died in police custody was returned to his family. Nine nails had been pounded into his flesh. An eye had been gouged out.

His penis had been cut off. 

Does torture work? Raping prisoners, male and female, often makes them talk. Mock executions are fun for all. You can include rats in the process, in homage to George Orwell. (Sales of 1984 have recently spiked.) You can stick a bicycle spoke in a prisoner’s eye and douse the wound with acid. Another neat trick to spur a little prisoner-to-guard conversation: Take suspects up in a helicopter and pose questions. Prisoner #1 claims not to know the answers. Out the door he or she goes!

Prisoner #2, do you have anything to offer?

In the end, President Trump is right, as the Nazis were right, as ISIS is right in its sick, twisted “radical Islamic terrorist” methods. (See, I even used conservatives’ favorite phrase!) 

Torture induces terror. 

Terror cows, at least for a time, entire populations.

Don’t believe me? Read what Amnesty International has to say. A sixteen-year-old in Nigeria is suspected of burglary. Police beat him, shoot him in one hand and hang him by his limbs for hours. The kid admits he did it! A Mexican woman is suspected of being involved with the drug cartels. Drag her off to jail and administer electric shocks to the most sensitive parts of the female anatomy. Wrap her in plastic to disguise any marks of a beating, and kick and cuff her till she spills some extra-judicial beans. She will soon sign a confession without bothering to read it. “If they had not tortured me, I would not have signed the statement,” she later told Amnesty International.

Well, too bad for her!

Don’t get me wrong. I loathe ISIS, in large degree because they’re such a savage crew. The sooner they are stamped out the better. 

But I wonder how far this kind of torture regimen might go. If it works on foreigners, and U. S. citizens suspected of terrorism, couldn’t we put an end to murder and rape and…oh, maybe even criticism of the U. S. government by bringing back the thumbscrews?

What better way to prove the superiority of American values than to inflict hideous suffering on other human beings.

***

Also: think of the fun when some of the victims turn out to be innocent. (See comments by GOP Senator Rand Paul.)

Also opposed to torture: General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, President Trump’s own Secretary of Defense.

Also against: John McCain (Trump: that guy is no hero), the only victim of torture serving in the U. S. Senate.  

Drawing of torture positions done recently by a political prisoner.
(Source: Amnesty International.)

Trump: What a Liberal Believes

I DEDIDED RECENTLY, if for no other reason than to protect my grip on sanity, that I must say what I think of President Donald J. Trump. After all, freedom of expression is one of our cherished rights. 

I’ve been a liberal most of my life, although conservative friends sometimes claim I’m not. They don’t seem to understand what liberals believe. For starters, liberals love America just as much as they do.

We may even love core American values more.

In my case, over the strenuous objections of my father and ignoring the tears of my mother, I enlisted in the United States Marines in December 1968. I thought American values were vastly superior to communist ideology then and still do. Here I might note that several “patriotic” Americans, who can be counted on to wear flag lapel pins, even on their pajamas, were happy not to enlist. 

They include Dick Cheney, who piled up five draft deferments and Mr. Trump, who earned five more.

(President Bill Clinton never bothered to serve. Yet, to my knowledge he never draped himself in the Stars and Stripes, which conservatives are always anxious to do.)

The author, c. 1974.
Pictured after discharge from the Marines, of course.

LET ME ALSO STATE emphatically that among liberal friends I’ve never heard anyone in the last forty years tout communism as a preferred economic system. We liberals do believe in regulation of Big Business. We were happy to see British Petroleum held accountable for ignoring safety regulations (hated word to those on the right), getting eleven workers killed during the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April 2010, and dumping 4.9 million barrels of oil into the sea. 

In the same way, no self-respecting liberal trusts a Wall Street hedge fund manager any farther than you can heave a barrel of BP oil.

Nor do liberals believe government is the answer. Liberals believe you can change and improve human society, sometimes through government action. 

Huge difference, my conservative friends.

My path to liberalism began in the 1960s. My grandfather, Rutherford Hayes Viall, was born the same year Republican President Hayes took office and named accordingly. If my father ever voted for a Democrat, I’m not aware. As a teen, however, I watched Southern deputies crack the skulls of African Americans who had the audacity to demand the right to vote. I remember when Negroes (then called) could not sit at the front of an Alabama bus, occupy a seat at a North Carolina lunch counter or check out a biography of Robert E. Lee at a South Carolina library.

I watched Adolph Rupp’s all-white basketball teams fly back and forth on the court at the University of Kentucky. I was happy when an all-black team from Texas Western defeated Kentucky in the National Championship game in 1966.

IN THE 1970s, I WATCHED women join the fight against inequality. In those “Make America Great Again” days females could not join a plumbers’ union, drive an eighteen-wheeler or fly a commercial jet for good pay. A stewardess could be relieved of her post if she gained ten pounds. She “aged out” at 35, when companies deemed her too old for male commuters to ogle. If she married, she was also finished. I remember working in a cafeteria at Ohio University in 1973, and how cooks (all female) asked me to go to the freezer and get boxes of hamburgers so they could grill. State law limited to 25 pounds the weight females could be asked to lift on the job. This made it impossible for women to enter a variety of fields.

I also remember when girls were told not to play sports because sweating was unladylike. A young lady was expected to use the word “perspire.” Even the word “sweat” was distasteful on female lips.

I remember when females were said to be too weak to run long distances. I remember 1984, when the Olympics finally introduced the marathon as an event for females, as women increasingly proved sweat wouldn’t kill them.

Joan Benoit won in 2:24:52. If you do the math that means she ran 26.2 miles at a pace of 5:30 per mile.

Try running one mile at that pace yourself.

I BECAME A LIBERAL for many reasons, including distrust of Big Government. Not long after I was discharged from the Marines, I discovered that our leaders weren’t telling the truth about Vietnam. I remember Richard M. Nixon and his minions breaking a wide array of laws. They tapped reporter’s phones without warrant, burglarized doctors’ offices to get “dirt” on opponents, broke into the Watergate, and followed with a vast cover up. I remember how Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew draped themselves in the flag and claimed to love this country a thousand times more than the “nattering nabobs” and “dirty hippies” did.

I became a liberal. 

I still am.

The fundamental question today is this: How does liberalism play out in 2017? I believe values that make this nation great include free expression, free speech and free religion. Like most liberals I support the Second Amendment but believe you can register guns and do more to keep them away from terrorists and the insane. I register my automobile. No state or federal agent has ever tried to take it away. 

LIBERALS DON’T blindly trust Big Government. That’s a convenient conservative myth. Clearly, history is replete with examples of abusive government, where a well-armed citizenry might have been able to fight back. Think: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Robert Mugabe, too.

Not to mention the whole Kim il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-Nutjob clan that rules North Korea today.

In fact, one might argue that conservatives, by definition, have sided with bad government for centuries. Conservatives wish to preserve traditional values. They supported King George III in 1776. They burned heretics all across Europe until the last flames flickered out in 1793. The cause of racial segregation was championed by conservative luminaries, from George Wallace, to Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond. 

(Yes, I know Democrats used to be segregationists, too. That’s why I like Harry Truman’s decision to desegregate the U.S. military during the Korean War. I’m a liberal. I believe in progress.)

Conservatives railed against the threat of Catholics immigrants to American values in the 1850s. 

They railed against Chinese immigrants in 1882.

They railed against Italians and Poles and Southern Europeans in the 1920s. 

The rail against all Muslims now.

REMEMBER WHEN RUSH LIMBAUGH and other conservatives claimed that Mr. Obama was Muslim and thereby unfit to serve? As late as September 2015, 43% of Republicans still believed Obama was Muslim. Worse, they were too obtuse to understand that if he was it wouldn’t matter. 

The U. S. Constitution clearly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Look it up if you don’t believe me.

(But it does.)

It is true, not all liberals are religious. A good liberal may or may not attend church or synagogue or mosque.

A good liberal does hold that adherents of all religions as well as agnostics and atheists have equal rights. If a Mormon or Baptist family heads to church on Sunday and an atheist mocks their beliefs, a liberal says let all do as they please. As both a liberal and a former history teacher, I understand how much blood has been spilled across the centuries by one religious group battering and butchering another. 

A good liberal knows that Sunni and Shia factions in Islam are blasting and butchering each other today. 

A liberal has sympathy for the vast majority of Muslims who neither want to butcher or be butchered by zealots. 

And I don’t know a single liberal who would argue that ISIS should not be smashed. 

AS A LIBERAL, HOWEVER, one asks: Is it wise to paint all Muslims as dangerous, to antagonize 1.6 billion people round the globe, if we want to root out those Muslims who are a threat? One fears that the rage of Trump supporters is aimed at all Muslim Americans, an estimated 3.3 million already living on our shores. Are all dangerous? Aren’t most U.S. citizens? Are we getting ready to trample their rights, as our forefathers trampled the rights of Japanese Americans in 1942?

My concern is that we are.

I have serious issues with where our new president is leading us. Mr. Trump and many of his aides threaten a free press. Steve Bannon has expressed the opinion that the media “should keep its mouth shut.” 

To a liberal that sounds like a direct assault on the First Amendment.

A liberal also wonders about—about many matters, really—like President Donald J. Trump’s support for torture. A liberal believes a resort to torture would reduce this great nation to the same low as Saddam Hussein, or the Nazis, or the Spanish Inquisition. Mr. Trump insists torture works.

Yes, it does. Torture worked for centuries to convince victims of the rack and thumbscrew and crushing weights that it was wise to confess to being a witch. But I happen to be a liberal.

I DON’T BELIEVE in witches, even if the Bible warns against them.

POSTSCRIPT: My liberal fears have only been heightened since posting this in February 2017. We have watched a U.S. president vilify the free press as “enemies of the people,” a sentiment almost identical to sentiments expressed by Adolf Hitler in 1934. We have seen Trump deny taking help from the Russians to win the 2016 election—only to turn around recently and say he’d take foreign help again in 2020. We have seen him dangle pardons in front of aides under investigation—and insist he has “the absolute power” to pardon himself if needs be.

A good liberal, like a good conservative, understands the critical role the rule of law plays in any free society.

Therefore, a liberal shudders at this Trumpian notion.

Of course, we can fairly argue policy with our conservative peers. But we should remind them we are just as good Americans as they are. We simply happen to believe stricter gun controls might be wise, since our schools are getting shot up and our murder rate is among the highest in the industrialized world. We believe government should crack down hard on drug companies who gouge the public and push opioids as perfectly safe. We believe in climate change, too—whereas President Trump can’t tell the difference between weather and climate. We believe in climate change because we believe the scientists, and the overwhelming evidence.

IN SUMMARY, we believe Trump is a danger to our country now, and to our children’s and grandchildren’s futures.