---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Juan Cole <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 5:35 PM
AP reports on a French reality show where contestants proved willing<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n78z5d4jfc8>to administer torture-level shocks to human beings, replicating the findings of the classic Milgram Study at Yale: The show repeated the classic social psychology experiment of Stanley Milgram of Yale from the early 1960s<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7791278.stm>, which has been successfully repeated numerous times around the world. Apparently about 70% of human beings have no independent conscience and will torture others if simply ordered to by a person in authority. The good news is that 30% will resist. This finding helps explain the "Cheney Effect," whereby he illegally ordered torture but Americans are not eager to put him on trial for breaking the law. A super-majority is willing to go along with Abu Ghraib, and not blanch when the former vice president talks about being a "big supporter of waterboarding." The only way you even got laws against torture is that they were self-interested-- forbidding one's own troops to torture is a way of trying to prevent their being tortured when captured by the enemy (and ensuring there is punishment, a la Nuremburg, for war crimes. Note that Stalin wanted just to summarily execute 50,000 - 100,000 German officers. Roosevelt demurred, jesting that surely 49,000 would be enough. In the end Henry Stimson's plan for war crimes trial was approved by Truman. Nowadays, the Liz Cheneys and Bill Kristols prefer Stalin's methods of summary punishment<http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/03/conservative-lawyers-slam-cheneykristol-attack-on-doj-lawyers.php>, as Matthew Yglesias notes, and are attacking the whole idea of defense attorneys for enemy combatants. No doubt the attorneys would inconveniently object to the torture Cheney and Kristol want inflicted. Anyway, most people don't get anti-torture laws. What is really hard to explain scientifically is how the US Republican Party got almost none of the ethical 30%. Shouldn't conscience be roughly equally distributed by party? __._,_.___ the last is a joke, but I'd guess that the pro-torture crowd would be over-represented among the powerful and well-to-do, since they have the power to treat people as mere objects and most often utilize that power. The GOP is more explicitly the part of the powerful and rich, so there's likely some social pressure among them to conform, to go along with the torture fad. Of course, the Dems also have their history of torture, as under JFK, as part of the Cold War. Cheney and the like are hearkening back to the "good old days" when torture was "okay." -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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