I can’t just respond to weirdos in swamps and atheists that love bananas up their ass, so let’s respond to some serious shit today.
The first time I watched the entirety of this video, I found myself struggling to disagree with Tim Kennedy and Joe Rogan. But watching a clip outside of the context of the entire conversation really allowed me to think with a clear mind what I really thought about the opinions being expressed here, which boil down to, “Yeah, torture is horrible, but ISIS would do worse to us, and waterboarding isn’t as bad as other types of torture, therefore, no wrong has been done.” It’s quite a convenient stance to take when you are the one receiving scrutiny for your own crimes. And to take a moral high ground while you state that, seems really short-sided and partisan.
For example, if we started fighting Russia or China, and they waterboarded our soldiers for information, I can virtually guarantee you that would be used as war propaganda to enlist more soldiers and to justify the conflict. And maybe justifiably, but that only furthers the argument that waterboarding is bad, and regardless where it sits on the sliding scale of torture, it should be viewed as in the same category, which is really what Ted Kennedy is trying to convince you otherwise. It takes the form of this taciti confession of, “Yeah, waterboarding is TECHNICALLY torture, but, push-cha, it’s not REAL torture, not like the REAL torture ISIS would do to me if I was captured.”
The problem with that argument is that we’re supposed to be better than ISIS. We’re supposed to be the good guys, so being above ISIS is no grand accomplishment, it should be viewed as an extremely low bar to hit and we should feel no pride as a nation hitting that bar. Now, you could argue that it’s necessary to save innocent lives, and maybe you’re right. Maybe you actually have a point while you torture people who actually have a legitimate reason to hate us, to despise us, to kill us and torture us, as we’ve dictated their own governmental rule for the past hundred years. Maybe the United States is perfectly justified torturing ISIS fighters, but we can’t absolve the responsibility we had as a nation in creating ISIS and that ISIS fighter you’re torturing. Do you think it’s just blithering retards that joined ISIS after living in western democracies their entire lives? With access to the internet and the most information we’ve ever had in the history of man?
Maybe we as the West need to accept our responsibility in creating these monsters, and there’s a cruel irony in torturing them in order to stop them from hurting people that would never actually be in danger if we had kept our Western noses where they fucking belonged; in our Western democracies.
This tacit, faux nation-building foreign policy we’ve adopted over the past few decades has not made the middle east a better place, and there are a litany of reasons why; just look at all of the competing interests within the American government alone, with rebels backed by one American organization fighting another American backed organization inside of the same fucking country, like Syria, and Iraq and a million different countries that our president affectionately refers to as shitholes, with plenty of American men and women to thank for that. Maybe for once in our god-forsaken lives, we should have the forethought to actually judge our own actions in the middle east and take some god-damn fucking responsibility for what’s happened there. I thought military guys were republicans, and I thought republicans loved personal responsibility, but when it comes to the failures of the American government in its foreign policy, especially when their side is in control of the government, they have NOTHING to say. And why would they? How do they benefit by confessing their sins? The democrats will just beat them over the heads with it and then get elected and make the SAME fucking mistakes. They have no political strategy to walk this back; so they double down. And in the meantime, the country they preach to protect and love burns slowly from our own mistakes.
And there is no magical easy solution, not while each political party is a carbon copy of each other with different colored tassels. I don’t mean to hit one political side harder than the other, because there really is little difference between them in this political climate. Maybe it’s been that way forever, but I can only speak for the time I’ve been breathing. And as each side fails to produce an actual solution, they further and further radicalize, hoping that the solution exists somewhere inside of a political extreme. I’ve got news for each side of the political aisle; we tried that shit in 1936, on the right and on the left; if you want to know what that looks like, you can look at Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And if you think that shit is gonna happen again, there’s a reason I own guns, and why there’s 300 million in the USA alone.
We need to put aside the petty bullshit and start taking responsibility for what our country has done and stop white-washing it with the crimes of the monsters we created. The idea that the only solution to this problem war has created is more war is old, tired, proven wrong a long time ago and frankly, intellectually lazy.