Ulysses S. Grant Robert E. Lee
What are the historical and antidotal references to torture? Do we ever ask ourselves about the birth of our noble nation, the agony that General Ulysses S. Grant, in 1865, endured in saving the Union? He confronted Robert E. Lee in a series of very high casualty battles known as the Overland Campaign, those casualties “tortured” (notice, perceive the nuance of the word) his very soul but he soldiered on. This was most certainly torture, butchery, and agony.
One rarely consider the “agony” of historic, noble leadership, or that of our fallen heroes, patriots, and those consumed with fear who managed to function anyway, visit the Veterans rehabilitation hospitals, those who honestly believed in the bravery of their commitment, the courage of their convictions and the nobility of our nation’s cause. What is the true nuance of “having skin in the game?” It is the fabric of character, and “character” counts.
General Patrick Cleburne
“Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy […].” “[…] a brutal and unholy war on a people who have done them no wrong, in violation of the constitution and the fundamental (political correctness has re-defined “fundamentals”, essentials to mean “compromise”, concession) principles of the government.” General Patrick Cleburne. Is “brutal and unholy”, a rejection of fundamental principles, not torture?
Surrender “tortured” General Robert E. Lee’s soul. ”Governor, if I had foreseen the use these people desired to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox, no, sir, not by me. Had I seen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in this right hand.” – General Robert E. Lee – as told to Texas ex-Governor F. W. Stockdale. This agony was the brick and mortar used to build and preserve the Union. Should we abolish this “torture”, or honor it, and hold it in reserve when ever, and that time will come, needed again?
The survival of the Union was a victory of Ordinary America (Grant) over the Mythical Aristocracy (Lee), both great leaders who took “risks.” Had Grant, an assassination target of John Wilkes Booth: celebrity, Confederate sympathizer and assassin; not defeated Lee, a Conservative, then a gentleman named Abe, might not have saved the Union, the wrath against him was so great, and John Wilkes Booth would have been a Confederate hero.
General Custer
Our nation is awash with history that “tortures” the senses. Place the blame, search for absolution, and hope for peace and closure. General George Armstrong Custer on April 6, 1865 was a survivor of Sayler’s Creek, one of the most barbaric and ferocious battles at the end of the Civil War. Eleven years later, on the morning of June 25, 1876 he was massacred by a vastly superior force of Oglala Sioux under the legendary warrior Crazy Horse at “Custer’s Last Stand”.
“When the battle of Little Big Horn was over, the bodies of the slain soldiers were stripped and mutilated, thanks to an Indian belief that the soul of the mutilated body would wander the earth without rest for eternity. Scalps were taken, stomachs slit open, eardrums punctured and genitals dismembered.” Custer’s brother Tom had his heart cut out and eaten. Another brother was killed and scalped. Behold Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who in “Ecce Homo”, Nietzsche called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a “calamitous error”.
We feign with great moral outrage, at the highest levels of pomposity, at the image of four frustrated marines who micturate on the bodies of Taliban soldiers, those who are the enemy, those who tried to kill them, those who failed in their attempt at organized murder, rules of engagement from the respective battlefield CEOs; from their positions of great comfort and security provided by these very same soldiers.
Punish these four, for sure, for the ones who deserve to be reprimanded are themselves too morally tainted and in very high positions of power.
The time has come, my little friends, to talk of other things
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wigs
Calloo, Callay, come run away
With the cabbages and kings.
“Who’s been painting my roses red?
WHO’S BEEN PAINTING MY ROSES RED?
Who dares to taint
With vulgar paint
The royal flower bed?
For painting my roses red
Someone will lose his head.
Off with their heads.
Alas, let’s pretend we are civilized doing uncivilized things. Oh, but for those medals of “restraint”! Please, “Round up the usual suspects!
This same body, judged , while passing judgment, is inextricable guilty, involved and responsible for providing money for another act of frustration, the murder, abortion of viable fetuses, innocent children, discarding “Life”, an Unalienable Right, without any qualms of conscience. One step removed so as not to get their pects!” hands dirty. They learned nothing from Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Jackson
“Andrew Jackson’s first experienced war at thirteen, fighting in the Battle of Hanging Rock, South Carolina (6 August 1780). Subsequently captured, he remained uncooperative and was slashed by a British officer, creating an antipathy as permanent as the scar on his face. Jackson’s entire family perished in the Revolutionary War.” To paraphrase Newt Gingrich; “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear idea about American enemies. “Kill them”, all else trivial?
That was then. Now, the 21st century, David Kiley shares with us. “My father, Charles Kiley, led a story-filled, exciting war. A correspondent for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, he finished the war at the side of General Dwight Eisenhower, covering, for the media, the future President as he and his staff negotiated the final surrender by Germany. Was this not the “war to end all wars?”
But he had a brother, Eddie, who lived a very different war. An infantryman in the Fifth Armored Division, he was killed on December 11, 1944 at the age of 24 in a place called the Huertgen Forestin western Germany.”
What a tribute to “clarity of purpose going in (to battle), as well as clarity of victory at the end.” Today the nobility of “winning” and “victory” for a just cause are tarnished, a twisted nuance, a re-definition, and unwillingness of purpose, “Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” by our national leadership. Every second of those days, every battle in that war was agony. This was more than a story; it was a tribute to the highest honor that could ever be bestowed on this nation, the life of a hero. Agony has value, is “torture” and often is the price of freedom. Are we still up to the challenge?
Do not tread on the sacred ground, the “agony of the soul”, experienced by Presidents like Abraham Lincoln being thrust by their conscience and country into America’s hallowed history. Where have all the “great” men and women gone? We need them so and pray for them.
As we become morally and physically softer, so claims our President, we lower the threshold of pain and suffering, and cloud the embrace of the concept of the obscured semantic doppelganger of “torture.” Why, pray tell, is the amount of torture experienced by our heroes in direct proportion to how much of their wisdom we are willing embrace? Torture, physical and psychological, often is the currency of earned wisdom.
Professional boxing, major league football, and extreme sports exceed our threshold of what politically and U.N. defined “torture” becomes by virtue of pain, suffering and permanent injury. And yet radical “isms”, of all ideologies, avoid this poser, this riddle, this conundrum. We will say, uncomfortably, “That is different”. We will allow the worst torture for the thrill of victory in the arena of “Bread and Circuses”. And deep down, how many take “pleasure” in the agony, despair and sadness of defeat, of the loser? This is our “Roman Coliseum”.
Is being forced to tell the truth to save our nation, our national leaders, the inhabitants of our cities, the lives on a populated train, plane or subway, to avoid the grave and lethal statistics of a weapon of mass destruction, is that so hard a decision that we tremble because we are consciously, and unconsciously, in a deep dark secret place in our souls, afraid of critical decisions, pain, agony and suffering, the Darwin manifestation of survival of the fittest, and yes, even cowardice? It ultimately, in reflection, is a personal thing.
People, the mothers of dead soldiers, especially the Confederates, hated Abraham Lincoln. Abe’s “atomic bomb” was a steadfast, resolute, staunch, unyielding pursuit of the survival of our beloved union. Franklin Delano Roosevelt gets a “pass”, Harry S. Truman and George Walker Bush deserve the same. National security was the objective. America lost over 600,000 young men and women in that Civil War, add the wounded and moral sobriety sets in. They suffered “real” torture to be avoided by the future with any means? And we failed them also.
Does the “risk” of fallibility always trump decisive action? Of course a tortured person will say anything, but from an analysis of that “anything” came the fruit of the poison tree that ensnared Osama bin Laden. Lucifer was not put in a corner of heaven with a dunce cap. How many will embrace man’s fallibility as an argument to dispense with the “greater good” analysis?
The movies carry moral messages, as in “Guarding Tess”, a reluctant Doug Chesnic, secret service, captures the essence of “justified” enhanced interrogation technique magnificently, brilliantly and admirably. What was the “Cage Wisdom”? What did he do? And what would you or I have done…let Tess die?
If the Arab Spring rise of democracy in the Middle East searches for a model, is it not Israel, the evolution, revolution and rise of a republic out of a flight for survival, a democratic struggle? Is this not existential, worth of life, the struggle for meaning and purpose, “agony” to those in fear of never achieving it, or worse ….once having won it, losing it? And should they cease and desist or endure? Their fight for simple existence is torture. “Torture” is not always a bad word. It is often the substance of earned “value”, monumental and colossal sacred worth!
And when one enters into a compact to go into a conflict called war, do we not directly accept the “rules of engagement”; review the Seals training, and indirectly, review the ideological rationale of a patriotic soldier, giving their consent to the pain, agony and suffering that war commands, demands and offers? And is not the object of war, survival, “winning”, surely “something” must be paramount? And the victors will always make the rules.
One forgives and embraces the passivists who hold the doctrine that all violence is unjustifiable. What did Lucifer, was there not a revolution in heaven, and the crucifixion, price paid, earn? All of us wish that evil did not exist…..but it certainly does. “Why”? “Really”? Free Will!
For our culture it has become obvious, that in a deep dark secret place, we are afraid of the “truth”, refuse to tell the truth, are accustomed and amenable to lies, ponder political lies, and so we will rail against any and all reasonable means to arrive at honesty, integrity and ethical confrontation, especially if it “hurts”.
Is there a single politician who will tell the “truth” if it might cause them “harm” politically? Of course there is and we are still looking. Where is the “torture” of conscience? We not only want that, we pray for it!
The soliloquy from another movie, “a Few Good men” is always relevant.
“Col. Jessep: Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? […] And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.”….. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post.”
Less we forget, no one would or should seriously commend, applaud, recommend or accept the psychopathic, aberration of violence, a version of torture, the context of an enjoyable, manifestation of revenge, irrational vigilante punishment or self gratification.
One need not agree but there is a demand for choice. Choose! Things which hurt, instruct! One can learn from difficult experiences – to repeat, wisdom is worth repeating, a quote from Nietzsche: ”That which does not kill us makes us stronger”.
Was the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a difficult imperative with extreme consequences inevitable in an eternal “just” war on evil or just “torture”? Did the “greater good” prevail? Moral nihilists like Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche assert that morality does not inherently exist, and that any established moral values are abstractly contrived. This must have been something that troubled Ayn Rand.
Christianity is a marvelous case study, a work in progress. There was the torture of the desert fasting of forty days and nights. Is there nothing harsh about using a whip, the instrument used to chase the money changers out of the temple? The Stations of the Cross were unbelievable pain, agony and torture, let alone the crown of thorns. And then the violence and torture of the crucifixion seems to escape everyone in the discussion of torture.
One must ask what happens to Christianity if all of this “torture” never happened. Would Christianity never have happened? So does this alone open the door to a sacred, useful and sanctioned existence of “torture” properly defined…by a Superior Intellect?
The very last conundrum, dilemma the United States needs is a leader who will not take justified reasonable risks, when circumstances demand, which can have horrendous costs. Remember, remember, yes, please remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is the turmoil, the fog of war, the win/lose syndrome, a concept that pushes aside a hypocritical salve of conscience. This is a cameo of Darwinism. Yes, that debate is still unsettled.
The United Nations is arguably useless, unless, unless, one can relocate these diplomats, each and every time, each and everyone, to ground zero, to the very front lines, shoulder to shoulder with the fighting soldiers, of each and every conflict, genocide, and atrocity, and let the definitions, decisions, spring up, come forth, from real time experience, with the true wisdom of experience, in situ, from this venue of “torture”. Do we not use armed torture to suppress the torture of genocide? Alas, the United Nations back door to permissible “torture”. And one exception begets the intelligent design of Nietzsche morality. All actions have unintended consequences.
As natural disasters rain down on us, 8/11 Hurricane Irene, the 3/11 Japan earthquake and tsunami, the 8/05 Hurricane Katrina and the 8/04 great Tsunami in Southeast Asia is there significance given to the “torture’ of natural disasters for we can’t control the “spin”. Natural disasters raise havoc with mankind. Do they not also give rise to ushering out the “old” and clearing the horizon for new and better tomorrows? Without the “circle (Disney), cycle (Darwinists) of life” existence might suffocate from a paralysis of analysis.
Would we ever have the courage to live like Israel, rockets into our cities every day, with enemies on three borders and vulnerable from the sea, struggling to live in peace whilst our neighbors, not only don’t love, or like us, they would kill us. No. They want us, the Infidels, exterminated. And in that instance that it all begins to crumble, we realized that we, America, are Israel. Arriving at that conclusion will be torture.
Do the Historical & Antidotal References suggest that our view of torture is influenced more by reality, the outcome, and not necessarily the politicization of morality?
Frank Cervone
Again, read the Blogs on MSA on www.hollywoodrepublican.net by Frank Cervone. MSA is a degenerative neurological disorder. MSA is associated with the degeneration of nerve cells in specific areas of the brain. One cannot help but be in awe, overwhelmed by the charity, love and generosity flowing from the deepest roots of the souls with this affliction. The question is in the ether, is he still with us when this is read?
Do we continue to allow the American erosion of trust, respect, and leadership and the growing national security confidence deficit? Find a culture anytime, anywhere, a window in our survival where “torture” of all kinds, definition and intent, did not exist. Does one then struggle with the existence of “free will” and the purpose of “torture”. Pray tell us that physical “torture” does not occasionally beget “good”.
Maybe “Morality does not inherently exist, and that any established moral values are abstractly contrived.” Could this not be a truism? Character does count, earned in the school of “hard knocks”. What does that mean? Embrace what fits, discard the rest.
Coming Next Week Part 3
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Okay, I’ve held off on commenting on these because they’re by and large so incomprehensible that they’re clearly the ravings of an insane person. And IF you’re trying to create a defense of torture, then you’re truly even more demented than you come across, but honestly, I can’t tell, as your writing is such gibberish.
But this I know for sure:
It’s “ANECDOTAL references”.
Not “antidotal.”
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, I know this whole website is a nickel and dime operation run by clowns, but is there even an attempt to edit? Does ANYONE here actually give a shit about anything other than Obama-hating and protecting the rich?
Just unreal.
Clowns.
No doubt there is a certain lack or economy of skill in the offering of my thoughts. We share that affliction. However, a message has triumphed, both ways, and the messengers survived.
>>No doubt there is a certain lack or economy of skill in the offering of my thoughts. We share that affliction.
Uh, speak for yourself. My prose is comprehensible, and yours isn’t. See the difference?
>>However, a message has triumphed, both ways, and the messengers survived.
You’re insane, your columns make no sense, and you confuse similar-sounding words with each other. “Messenger” might not be your calling.
You’re welcome.