A garrote is demonstrated in 1901 during the Philippine–American War. The United States condoned and participated in the torture and execution of insurgents during the war. (National Archives)
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In 1849, pacifists felt history was on their side. A series of idealistic revolutions had shaken autocratic regimes across Europe the previous year, extending universal voting rights in many countries and spurring extensive constitutional reforms in Denmark and the Netherlands. Hundreds of intellectuals, philanthropists, and politicians had gathered in Brussels to discuss how to bring an end to war itself, endorsing arms limitations and a ban on military lending. In August of that year nearly a thousand delegates from Europe and North America convened in Paris to further their plans to bring down "the war system" and replace it with the rational adjudication of a Congress of Nations.
Some 150 years ago, the West all but abandoned torture. It has returned with a vengeance
"A day will come when a cannon will be a museum-piece, as instruments of torture are today," French author Victor Hugo told the Paris delegates. "And we will be amazed to think that these things once existed!"
The pacifists were to be disappointed. The Crimean War—a continental-scale conflict, despite its name—broke out four years later, killing 400,000 and foreshadowing the horror of industrialization visited upon the battlefields of the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the First World War. The 20th century would see more war deaths than any in history, and the early 21st promised the killing would continue apace.
But Hugo was right about one thing: Torture as a matter of state and military policy had indeed all but vanished from the Western world. Torture—the use of physical coercion to extract information or break down the subject—had fallen out of favor in Europe for a variety of reasons, including the rise of Enlightenment philosophes, revised attitudes to battlefield treatment of prisoners, and new thinking among doctors. By 1851, every country in Europe had banned torture altogether. A few years later, Union armies went to battle with rules for warfare that explicitly condemned prisoner abuse.
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Torture by military forces was thought a thing of the past. Indeed, the American historian John Fiske in 1889 declared it almost "as extinct as cannibalism."
Then it came roaring back.
The 20th century saw military forces around the world torturing prisoners as a matter of operational policy, some at a scale that might have shocked Genghis Khan or Vlad the Impaler. Americans tortured and slaughtered prisoners in the Philippines. Japanese raped, tortured, and murdered captives by the tens of thousands in China and dissected Allied prisoners on Pacific islands. German military units were ordered to treat Soviet POWs as subhuman slaves, transferring some to be experimented upon by state-employed medical doctors. In more modern conflicts of every size and type—Korea and Vietnam, the Belgian Congo and Liberia, the Algerian civil war and the bitter Yugoslav split, Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and American-occupied Iraq—soldiers tortured soldiers on the orders of their superiors. "It has reached a scale that dwarfs even the darkest Middle Ages," wrote British foreign affairs columnist Jonathan Power in his 1981 history of Amnesty International.
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An interesting (but rarely mentioned) aspect of the Chinese "brain washing" tequnijes applied in the Korean War is the use of American History. Many Americans were appalled when they learnt for the first time just how, e.g., U.S. philanthropists accumulated their wealth. This had minimal effect on Australian P.O.Ws (who probably had mild reservations about the U.S.A. anyway; but with Turkish P.O.Ws it proved completely ineffectual, changing none of their attitudes to the War.
Where can one find more information about the philanthropist history you mention? If accurate, this should be common knowledge.
Thank you.
A good place to start learning about how US philanthropists accumulated their wealth is the book A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
Only Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith, the commander who had ordered a murderous reprisal by American troops in 1901, was severely punished; he was forced to take an early retirement.
—
Ha-ha. Best laugh I've had all year.
Yes, indeed. I noticed that glaring incongruity also.
= sarcasm
This topic cannot be intelligently discussed without addressing the exponential escalation of abuses in prison systems, dating back to isolation in Pennsylvania penitentiaries, flowing through industrial-era dungeons like Sing-Sing and Alcatraz and the neo-Confederate prison farm system — which operated as an unabated extension of black slavery — and culminating with the nationwide resort to supermax prisons and the Stalinesque use of mass incarceration in contemporary America.
Every type of physical and moral abuse rightly decried as torture was practiced, and continues to be practiced, in the domestic context in these institutions. Whatever happened on the battlefield, there was never any substantial interruption of torture as an instrument of government control in the prison context. As for Europe, see also Devils Island, Newgate.
[...] By the end of the 19th century, torture was "as extinct as cannibalism." Then it came back. What happened? Guerrilla warfare… more [...]
Here's the nub of the issue:
"The torture convention does not distinguish between temporary pain and permanent damage, nor should it," said Duke University law school professor Scott Silliman in 2003. "All pain, physical or mental, is torture, no matter how long it lasts."
If "all pain"–no matter how fleeting–is torture, then the concept is meaningless.
The concept is meaningful because the pain is inflicted. If pain characterizable as torture is defined as being felt, then torture becomes indistinguishable from pain. However, if the pain is inflicted by an agent, then it becomes torture.
Of course, my argument is made whilst keeping in mind the existing specifications of torture, i.e. the object of torture being a prisoner of war.
Good article, but in terms of modern history I'm surprised not to see mentions the highly systematic use of torture by US-backed/trained dictatorial regimes and paramilitaries in Latin America. In places like Chile and El Salvador techniques sicker than anything from the worst serial killer's imagination were used indiscriminately on people thought to be "Communist sympathizers."
Cooperative or union members would be made to watch the worst tortures inflicted on their wives and children, adding a new low. The US was aware of and even directly involved with the torture of their client regimes. (For an excellent account based on eye-witness testimony, you can read online the book "Hidden Terrors," http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Torture/Hidden_Terrors.html)
Also, the idea that the US participated directly in just "141" acts of torture in SE Asia is absurd. Read revelations from the "Winter Soldier" testimonies of US vets, which despite huge efforts to "debunk," are still corroborated by huge numbers of draftees:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/History/Seventies_TGSNT.html
[...] The History of Torture—Why We Can't Give It Up: Some 150 years ago, the West all but abandoned torture. It has returned with a vengeance [...]
[...] The History of Torture—Why We Can't Give It Up: Some 150 years ago, the West all but abandoned torture. It has returned with a vengeance [...]
The use of "torture" exemplifies the inability of the torturer to control a given situation, hence the need for escalation. It's use is evidence of impotence.
The Viet Cong used methods that were use on convicts 150 years earlier. Human Nature is such that power, fear, control and conformity all contrive to make us inhuman. Science has proven it, the Mafia have used it while the rest have remained pure. Occasionally criminals do it.
Why? It comes from conditioning Skinner Conditioning and the freedom not to be rebuked or punished for the transgression.
The Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment proves that ordinary students will go the whole mile and cause psychological stress in ONE WEEK. And proves that it starts at the top by the prison governor condoning and not rebuking transgressions by the guards, as required by the rules of the game and the prisoners demanding playing by the rules and not receiving it!
The Stanford Prison experiment, while fascinating, doesn't "prove" much at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Criticism_of_the_experiment
What does that actually mean Theodore? That torture doesn't work? Would you care to volunteer to be disabused of that nonsensical idea? I suspect you'd crack in a jiffy – soft mind = soft body and all…
Hardly a justifiable response. Theodore's meaning is exactly what is written, and nowhere does he say that torture is ineffectual. Rather, that it is effective is the problem. It is analogous to the phrase, "All war is a failure of diplomacy."
What he is saying is that when an interrogator resorts to using torture, it means he has lost control of the situation, and is a failure as an agent of interrogation. What is not written is the implication that torture is not a valid tool for interrogation.
Aside from addressing the ad hominem argument, the threat of implementing a torturous regimen to a person who happens to disagree is troubling and indicative of bloodthirst.
@Sean: Torturing Theodore would accomplish what? Cause him pain and discomfort? What actionable information would torture get out of him? Would you want him simply to confess that torture works? I am sure he would say that it does – if that meant that the torture would stop. And you would have learned what? Nothing. Your reasoning is not well constructed and, frankly, rather disturbing.
Psychiatry.
Much of forced treatment in psychiatry is genuine torture ålthough
it is legalized by the community ; just alike the islamic punishment
methodes . Before psychiatry common torture was used to achieve
social control.
It's important to point out that the search "Lars Jensen Scientology" yields unsurprising results.
In fact the method used by Chinese forces founded the basis for modern alcohol and drug-treatment. You find many residential treatment programs which function on isolation and daily exhausting lectures.
The Senate shut one of them down in the 1970s because the methods were basically the same as those used in Nord Korea, but there are many programs out there which continues to work just like that.
[...] History.net: In 1849, pacifists felt history was on their side. A series of idealistic revolutions had shaken autocratic regimes across Europe the previous year, extending universal voting rights in many countries and spurring extensive constitutional reforms in Denmark and the Netherlands. Hundreds of intellectuals, philanthropists, and politicians had gathered in Brussels to discuss how to bring an end to war itself, endorsing arms limitations and a ban on military lending. In August of that year nearly a thousand delegates from Europe and North America convened in Paris to further their plans to bring down "the war system" and replace it with the rational adjudication of a Congress of Nations. [...]
"Philosophy triumphs over past and future evils, but present evils triumph over it."
– la Rochefoucauld
According to the US Army Field Manual on Interrogation (FM 34-52), torture does not work. No useful information is gained, and the counterintuitive, yet more effective, method of making "friends" with captives is effective and recommended.
I just happened to stumble across this article, and I'm glad I did. Enlightening, and unfortunately, a sad description of man's regression into the abyss…
The article makes one absolutely inaccurate assertion, in the caption to the photograph shown above, which accuses the Japanese of "predations in the Russo-Japanese War." The exact opposite was true…the Japanese treated their Russian POWQs–of which there were more than 60,000–extremely well, in full accordance with the provisions of the recent Hague Conventions. They even permitted some of the Russian senior officers' wives to join them. While there were fewer Japanese POWs held by the Russians, there were some, and they were well treated. There were likely several reasons for all of this, not least of which was the realization that this was a war for a piece of territory, not national survival, and both sides would have to live with the other after the war was over. The Japanese treated the Russians far differently than they did the Chinese. The Russians were also members of the "big powers club" which the Japanese had just joined, so they followed "the rules", but the Chinese were different, and no one held much interest in what happened to them. If you see reasons for current Chinese paranoia and suspicion, they were well earned throughout the first half of the 20th Century.