Bill Kaufmann writes in The Calgary Sun
It comes in stages — first it’s denial which then morphs into trivialization.
Sometimes the two are blended, with hopes of building public tolerance for the normally unacceptable.
It seems to be working.
When Ottawa’s own foreign affairs officials tell their bosses Afghan suspects handed over by our troops were possibly subject to extrajudicial executions, torture and disappearance, a sizable section of the populace heaves a shrug, with some even applauding.
We are blindly going down the same road that Americans went with the torture and abuse of suspected Muslim insurgents. First we saw much chest thumping and national outrage, ‘we don’t torture’ they said, ‘we’re not like that, we have laws’, but then, when it became impossible to deny that indeed the American military and American intelligence agencies were torturing suspects we saw the redefining of torture.
Thus ended the denial stage
America then entered the trivialization of the events, there was what the American military and intelligence agencies were doing, and then there was real torture - something that “the other guys”tm did.
Under one defrination the Bush administration floated it wasn’t torture unless internal organs failed, some bodily function was impaired, or the person died - and even when prisoners were beaten to death in interrogations, somehow it still wasn’t torture.
Induced hypothermia as part of interrogation techniques and intelligence gathering wasn’t real torture, because medical personal were there to [hopefully] make sure the suspect didn’t die.
Waterboarding was torture when it happened to US military personnel in other wars, but somehow it wasn’t torture when US military/intelligence personnel did it?
– and who can forget a bunch of Marines stripping prisoners naked and stacking them up like fire wood being compared to a cheer leader pyramid at a high school football game?
What do we have to look forward to?
Well, if we follow the American model pretty soon our leadership will be admitting to our military and our intelligence agencies engaging in activities that are torture when the other guystm do it, but isn’t when our guys do it - and the Canadian public will willingly accept that.
Eventually we will, as Kaufmann writes, and exactly as our American cousins to the south did, either be found shrugging our national shoulders over our military and our intelligence agencies routinely engaging in torture and abuse of prisoners, or backing them whole heartedly when they do so.
Think it couldn’t happen?
Ask just about any American you meet if they thought that, as little as 5 years ago, their leadership, their military, their intelligence agencies, and their nation, would be endorsing, engaging in, or minimizing, torture, as opposed to decrying it.
We only have ourselves to blame, really. We get what we want or what we are being pushed, in a lazy, instant gratification-style. This is especially true for us in Canada and the USA, in light of the overwhelming numbers who voted in France’s last presidential elections.
It is up to all of us to stand up for our democratic principles-founded societies - before it is too late and we end up living under de facto authoritarian regimes.