Lost In A Haunted Wood

I have a lot of thoughts right now, and I’m not sure how to express them. There’s so much going wrong in the world that on one level, it feels insincere or trivial to focus on anything other than the worst, most visceral horrors; but on another, there’s a point past which grief and fury becoming numbing. The angriest part of of me wants to wade into the wrench of things and wrangle sense from chaos, but my rational brain knows it’s impossible. I hate that I know it’s impossible, because what else but this do the people who could really change things think, to justify their inaction? I have words, and they feel empty. The world is full of indifferent walls and the tyrants who seek to build more of them; words, no matter how loudly intoned, bounce off them and fade into echoes.

Our governments are torturing children.

I could write essays detailing why particular policies and rhetoric being favoured by Australia, the UK and the US right now are inhumane, but I don’t have the strength for it. Some actions are so clearly evil that the prospect of explaining why to people claiming confusion about the matter makes me want to walk into the sea. I can’t go online without encountering adults who want to split hairs over why, in their view, it’s completely justifiable to steal the children of refugees and incarcerate them away from the parents they mean to deport, because even though they don’t want adult refugees they see no contradiction in keeping their babies indefinitely, in conditions that are proven to cause severe psychological damage, because – why? What the fuck is the end-game, here? People don’t seek asylum on a goddamn whim; they’re fleeing violence and terror, persecution and war and destruction; yet somehow the powers that be think that word of stolen kids will pass through some non-existent refugee grapevine and stop people coming in future? And even if it did, which it manifestly can’t and won’t, what the fuck do they plan to do with the ones they’ve taken?

Our governments are torturing children.

Refugees caged on Manus Island are committing suicide, their families left to learn of their deaths through the media. Disabled people of all ages are dying and will continue to die in the UK of gross neglect. None of this is conscionable; none of it need happen. Billionaires are privately funding enterprises that ought to be public because they can’t conceive of a better use for that much money while workers employed by their companies die sleeping in cars or collapse on the job from gross overwork or subsist on food stamps.

I want to say that the world can’t continue like this, but I know it can. It has before; we’re at a familiar crossroads, and the path down which we’re headed is slick with history’s blood. That’s why it’s so goddamn terrifying.

Please, let this be the turning point. Let’s fix this before it’s too late.

Our governments are torturing children.

Simulated Torture

You can blame Nick Harkaway – or rather, his thoughts on waterboarding – for this post, which began life as a comment on his blog. So: my thoughts on the subject of simulated torture.

“Simulated drowning” makes the whole question of waterboarding sound like a question of virtual reality. Which is intriguing.

Say someone developed a perfect VR machine and plugged in a suspected terrorist without that person’s knowledge. For days, weeks or hours, the suspect undergoes what they believe to be excruciating physical torture, when in fact it’s all just skillful, pain-and-sensory simulated VR. Having subsequently divulged their information or, if innocent, made up enough to satisfy their captors, they are then unplugged, waking – disoriented and frightened – to find themselves whole and strapped to a table, their flesh undamaged.

Which begs the question: in this hypothetical instance, has the Geneva Convention actually been violated? Given the fact of psychological torture, one would think so, because the intent was the same as if actual torture had been employed, a sort of Orwellian examination of the limits of human endurance. Which would, by inference, suggest that simulated drowning, despite the name, cannot be differentiated from torture, the entire point of which is not to kill, but to extract information under threat of pain and the fear of more to come. How anyone can believe waterboarding doesn’t fall into this category is beyond me; but if a VR torture chamber were invented, would anyone condone its use as a more ‘moral’ alternative to conventional torture purely on the basis that no physical harm was done?

The thought of people responding in the affirmative frightens me.