Category: Politics

Cattle Prods for Humans

Apparently, it isn’t torture if it doesn’t leave a mark, or so we are led to believe by the recent study approving the safety of tasers. Since the electric stun devices cause serious injuries in only 3 out of 1000 cases, we should not be concerned that they are unsafe, notwithstanding the fact that the increasing frequency of their use may make even this low rate result in thousands of injuries, including over 200 fatalities already, according to Amnesty International. This debate over safety ignores what should be the more obvious issue: that any use of a 50,000-volt shock stick will result in excruciating pain far beyond that received by beatings or other practices commonly regarded as torture. It seems that a practice is not torture, no matter how intense the pain, so long as the duration is brief and no lasting injury results.

For those wondering how such a simple technology did not achieve widespread use until the 1990s, this is to be accounted for by Taser International’s development of a firing system without gunpowder, so that the device is no longer regarded as a firearm under the notoriously lax gun laws in the U.S. Selling the devices to police departments across the country enabled Taser to expand abroad, where the devices have met much more mixed reception, sometimes being withdrawn from use after a trial period. People in other countries tend to object more strenuously to being treated like cattle.

Apart from its use of twin tethered darts for long-range deployment, the taser is essentially a cattle prod for humans. The short-range stun gun end of the weapon is in fact the same device as a cattle prod, modified only in appearance and voltage. Of course, the taser does more than stun its victim, but sends searing pain through every nerve in the body, causing even the toughest men to scream in agony, as they experience what might be called maximal pain, if only for a few seconds. Even involuntary functions are affected, so the victim loses control of breathing and excretion, and even the heartbeat is affected. Victims with pacemakers or heart conditions can be sent into cardiac arrhythmia. Neurological conditions can also be aggravated, but these sorts of complications are only to be expected from a device that simply electrocutes the entire body for several seconds, in eerie reminiscence of the electroshock “therapy” previously favored by psychiatrists in the treatment of mental patients. The real purpose of the device, whether for cattle, mental patients, or persons under arrest, is coercion.

Here we arrive at the crux of the taser problem: whether it is licit to administer excruciating pain simply to obtain the compliance of a suspect. We should note that even the threat of the use of a taser can obtain this end. It is one thing to use a taser in substitution of a firearm, but more commonly they are used as simple coercion devices in situations where a firearm would be totally inappropriate. The belief that police have a right to use a taser when a suspect is simply being non-compliant or resisting arrest entails the belief that a suspect never has the right to be non-compliant or to resist arrest. Even in the law-enforcement-heavy United States, federal courts have ruled that a suspect has a right to resist unlawful arrest. Giving police the power to enforce compliance through torture undermines this right of resistance, and indeed can be used even against those not under arrest, such as public protesters.

The taser’s predecessor, the cattle prod, has a long history as a torture device, used in regimes such as Baathist Iraq during interrogations of political prisoners. Electrocution sticks are an effective torture weapon, since they can be administered repeatedly to the victim without injury or diminished effectiveness. They generally leave no mark or other evidence of their use. In other words, the very features which the proponents of the taser tout as evidence of its safety are what make it an effective and easily abused torture device. For every act of police brutality caught on film, there are many others that are not, so it is the height of irresponsibility to entrust officers with a weapon that leaves no evidence of its use or abuse.

Setting aside the more egregious abuses, any use of the taser as a compliance device undermines a citizen’s right not to be punished without a trial, as well as his status as a citizen equal in stature to the arresting officer. The pain inflicted by a taser is at least comparable to that of flogging, which we now hypocritically regard as barbaric, though at least in English common law, it was used as a punishment after conviction by jury. Not only are the police now empowered to inflict punishment without a trial, but the threat of this type of coercion creates an environment where citizens cannot speak freely with officers, for fear that any non-compliance will be punished. This undermines citizenship itself, as anyone interacting with a police officer is immediately placed in a subordinate position, bound to comply with any instruction reasonable or unreasonable under pain of electrocution.

If most people are content to be treated like cattle, or rather to have others treated like cattle, secure in the confidence that they will never be among the unfortunates, then the considerations discussed above will have no impact on public policy. On the other hand, for those of us who demand citizenship, we must recognize that police who use the threat of torture to obtain compliance are enemies of republican government, as are their “pro-law-enforcement” political enablers. These enemies of society should be opposed at every level, through financial, political, and physical resistance.

Fascistic tendencies in the United States are not limited to criminal law enforcement, but are expanded into the military sphere, where “pain boxes” are being developed that can inflict intense, incapacitating pain remotely over an entire region through electromagnetic transmission. It is easy to see how such a device could bring entire cities to submission, and make modern warfare even more cowardly than our current practice of dropping precision munitions from high altitudes at night. Such a device would have been of interest to many fascistic regimes, but it is difficult to see why a freedom-loving country would have any interest whatsoever in this form of coercion, though this is the same country that developed the neutron bomb. These ghouls who devote their energies to finding new, exotic ways to kill or coerce people should be opposed from below, and the beast of their creation must be killed by draining its political and financial lifeblood.

The West Lied About Kosovo

It should be obvious by now that the idealistic rhetoric of American and Western European hegemonists is a whitewash of their neo-imperialist ambitions, as evidenced by their reversal over the sovereignty of Kosovo. Prior to the 1999 NATO invasion of Yugoslavia, the Western allies agreed to UN Security Council Resolution 1160, which affirmed “the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” During the bombing, the G-8 countries agreed to “an interim administration for Kosovo … under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”

As the Russians and Serbs recognized, these assurances were empty lies, as the West in practice has shown little regard for Serbian sovereignty over the province, which dates back to the Middle Ages. After the NATO bombing, the Yugoslav army was forced to withdraw from Kosovo, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Serbs from the province under the intimidation of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a Muslim guerrilla organization with a history of kidnappings and reprisal killings. Historic Orthodox churches and monasteries were vandalized or destroyed, erasing much of Kosovo’s cultural legacy.

The aftermath of the war revealed that NATO accusations of Serbian war crimes were greatly inflated, but nonetheless the West relentlessly pursued the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, while neglecting similar crimes committed by Croats and Muslims during the Yugoslav wars. This ploy of magnifying the threat posed by a weak adversary is a common imperialist tactic used to justify lopsided military interventions.

Now, President Bush’s statement that Kosovo should be independent is nothing more than a logical culmination of Western policy designed to weaken Serbia to the point of irrelevance. Since the bogeyman of Milosevic can no longer be invoked, it is clear that the real crime of Yugoslavia was its strength and independence of the West. With its dismemberment, the West can easily impose its interests throughout the Balkans as it has done in the rest of Eastern Europe.

Putin knows better than to trust the West, which is why he had the prudence to send troops into Pristina ahead of the NATO forces. He also knows that the U.S. claim that Eastern Europe needs a missile shield against North Korea and Iran is a clumsy lie, so he has sought to defuse this claim with a counterproposal for a shield based in Azerbaijan. The destruction of Yugoslavia and expansion of NATO are an affront to Russian ambitions that will not pass without firm resistance.

Apart from exacerbating tensions with Russia, the West’s reversal on the independence of Kosovo undermines the credibility of claims to support a unified Iraq. Once again, the real goal of invasion was to squash the regional ambitions of a second-tier power, in this case rendering Iraq militarily impotent. With the systematic destruction of the Baath regime down to its lowest levels, economic chaos and sectarian violence were the inevitable results. Finally, some U.S. presidential candidates are recognizing the consequences of this destructive policy, and calling for a partition of Iraq, contrary to the long-standing assurances of the current administration. The moral of the story: when the West pretends to help your nation, prepare to be dismembered.

The Leyenda Negra Rears Its Head

Historical objectivity has never been a strong point among leftist ideologues, as Pope Benedict recently discovered when he ventured to contradict the anti-Catholic myth of a genocidal evangelization in the Americas.  Like most good myths, this is a confused mixture of facts and half-truths linked in an implausible chain of causality and intentions.  The brutalities committed by the conquistadores are conflated with the commendable actions of Catholic missionaries, and the term “genocide” is abused to refer to the effects of diseases on the indigenous population.  The falsity of this myth is amply demonstrated by the visible presence of people of indigenous and mixed races throughout Latin America, often seamlessly integrated into the population, whereas in condescending North America, the Indians are almost all either dead or on reservations.

The Pope’s offending statement was that “The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.”  To accuse this erudite pontiff of a gross historical error is to reveal one’s own ignorance, but few leftists could resist the opportunity to trot out the tired old trope of an old man supposedly out of touch with reality.  We are to ignore the fact that their supposed genocide rests on the implausible assumption of a pre-Columbian indigenous population many times greater than that of Europe, and also plays fast and loose with causality.  It is a clumsy error indeed to say that because missionaries were later followed by opportunistic conquistadores that the former endorsed the actions of the latter.  Even if that were the case, it would not affect the truth of the Pope’s statement, lost on careless minds, that evangelization itself did not involve the alienation of pre-Columbian cultures.

A fair-minded person can hardly avoid the conclusion that Catholic missionaries showed tremendous respect for indigenous cultures, in fact to the point that they were sometimes faulted with being too indulgent toward Indian traditions.  The leftists ought to be red with shame for their display of historical ignorance, as evidenced by the career of Mexico’s first Archbishop Juan de Zumarraga, who lived among the Indians in friendly communion, as did many of his successors in the secular and regular clergy.  Catholic missionaries learned Nahuatl and other indigenous languages, composing grammars and publishing histories in the indigenous tongues.  Far from suppressing the indigenous cultures, they gave them a voice through the printed word.  At times, they would even appeal on behalf of the Indians to the government, over matters such as relief from obligatory labor in the building of churches, or more famously, against more heinous crimes such as those related by the Jesuit Bartolome de Las Casas.  Almost everything we know about crimes against the Indians in Latin America are related by outraged Catholic clerics.

In a twist of cruel hypocrisy, the accounts of Las Casas and others were used by the English as propaganda against their Spanish rivals, even as English pirates raided Spanish galleons with Crown’s blessing, privateers trafficked millions of Africans into slavery, and colonists warred with the Indians, who often sided with French Catholics.  To this day, the accounts of Las Casas are cited for rhetorical purposes, without embedding them in the broader historical reality of ordinary relations between the Spanish and Indians, which, if even a tenth as bad as they are portrayed by the left, would never have resulted in a racially integrated Latin America.  There would be hardly any mestizos and mulattos, but demographic reality unmistakably proclaims the contrary.  In contrast, there was virtually no racial mixing in North America; the Indians practically vanished, and mulattos are such a rarity that there is no word for it in English.  Many hand-wringing Caucasians fret over insubstantial disputes over terms like “Indian” or “mulatto”, but a non-bigoted society has no need for sensitivity over arbitrary labels.

Meanwhile, Hugo Chavez tries to appeal to impoverished indigenous peoples by repeating the myth of genocide, while he cynically consolidates his own power and suppresses dissent.  We could hardly ask for a better illustration of the insincerity of supposed concern for indigenous peoples, when the real motivation is poorly disguised hatred of the Church.  The Church has no army, so it is an easy target for weak-kneed revolutionaries who would certainly lack the temerity of those missionaries who went unarmed among the fiercest Indians of South America to preach the Gospel, even to be killed by their catechumens after years of living among them.  For all the modern talk of respecting other cultures, few would have the courage to live this principle to that degree, once again showing how “tolerance” is grounded more in rhetoric than in action.