Ariel Dorfman: Are We Really So Fearful?

[Briar]

Are We Really So Fearful?
By Ariel Dorfman
The Washington Post



Durham, North Carolina - It still haunts me, the first time - it was in Chile, in October of 1973 - that I met someone who had been tortured. To save my life, I had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy some weeks after the coup that had toppled the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, a government for which I had worked. And then, suddenly, one afternoon, there he was. A large-boned man, gaunt and yet strangely flabby, with eyes like a child, eyes that could not stop blinking and a body that could not stop shivering.

That is what stays with me - that he was cold under the balmy afternoon sun of Santiago de Chile, trembling as though he would never be warm again, as though the electric current was still coursing through him. Still possessed, somehow still inhabited by his captors, still imprisoned in that cell in the National Stadium, his hands disobeying the orders from his brain to quell the shuddering, his body unable to forget what had been done to it just as, nearly 33 years later, I, too, cannot banish that devastated life from my memory.

...

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be that hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering?

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092406E.shtml

[fasttense]

1. In answer to his question

"Can't the United States see....? No they can't. There are those who can see but they are being drowned out by the corporate media and propaganda machine that screams terror at them.

"Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this?" Yes, our government and its media machines are that sick. They fail to understand the moral implications of torture. And to allow discussion of it on the news mediums.

"Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?" Yes, they are convinced that torture is the answer to their own safety.

"Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be that hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering?" Yes. they think it is only the other guy, the bad one, that will be tortured. They think it will stop when it gets to them.

[Benhurst]

2. Recommended #2