We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
Because there’s no proof the communists ever used this tactic against the Americans.
I think we’d be better off just not doing torture tbh.
One reason and one only: torture is self-defeating. Torture is universally understood by people who have basic empathy as something Bad People do. (That’s why when it was revealed that the US had torture as SOP in their black sites, people would automatically say “The US does not torture” because they couldn’t square with reality and needed to repeat the lie to themselves.)
It doesn’t give reliable intelligence, and hardens the individual and anyone associated against what you are trying to communicate. Critical support for Vietnamese comrades, but using torture played into the hands of the imperialists by giving them an easy way to say “Look! They’re the bad guys!”
I’m not of the opinion that one has to “play nice” but using torture is always a bad move.
Edit: corrected a word.
I’m of the opinion that torture isn’t completely ineffective. Its definitely not as effective as Hollywood or the Amerikkkan military likes to pretend, and as you said, it can harden the victim or lead to them saying anything to get out of the situation.
I also know that the Soviets didn’t torture people as widely as most anti-communists believe, and I do agree that torture is very abhorrent, and while I can respect the moral and practical arguments against it, I think that completely disavowing torture is almost as big a mistake as using it whenever you want all willy-nilly.
Some scientific papers do note that torture can be effective in certain contexts, and torturing enemies for information is probably a multiple-millennia old tradition, and I find it very hard to believe that it would be kept in practice if it wasn’t useful at least some of the time.
It’s been used for millennia because humans are violent animals. In war that violence is amplified and focused on the enemy, so torturing the other side is a “good way” to release those emotions.
Torture serves basically no purpose whatsoever, the CIA, KGB, FSB, MOSSAD, BOSS, MI6 and so on have studied it thoroughly, and the results are always that torture is a lackluster, unreliable, and poor intelligence gathering method.
Do you have any reading about the KGB finding torture to be a poor method? I’d love to read their findings. I trust the other agencies about as much as a drink from Bill Cosby, but given that they are all intelligence agencies with similar findings, that gives them credence.
because human beings can sympathize, even with people they shouldn’t
Yeeeeeeah, you will never catch me sympathizing with the people who have their boot on my people’s neck. …Ever. That’s just not happening. The only thing I believe in is get-back, typically in blood if not in broken pride.
That’s not what they mean. Sympathy in this situation does not mean you sympathize with their plight, but that there are some lines that should never be crossed even in retaliation against oppressors and evil. Rape, torture, psychological breaking, forced starvation, and other moral and ethically reprehensible actions.
Those are needlessly horrific and vile. Executing a war criminal, or felling a solider in battle preforms the exact same job, so why stoop to war crimes and disgusting acts?
Even in this case, randomly torturing grunt POW’s to death serves basically no purpose whatsoever. It’s just vile, and bolsters the oppressors propaganda arm while motivating other grunts to not surrender or trust the Vietnamese.
Gonna be honest. I’m having a hard time believing bamboo grows so fast it can go through someone. I can’t visualize it.
I think I read somewhere that it is possible, but as I said earlier the communists never did this because we aren’t evil pieces of shit.
It’s possible, the torture method came from the Japanese. They would do it to POW’s and civilians during WW2.
Also “stalk” plants grow abnormally quickly. Asparagus for example can grow an entire stalk multiple times a day when cut, and bamboo grows absurdly quickly, 70 or so centimeters a day is not uncommon. Especially for young plants.
There’s actually a Mythbusters episode about it (you can find it on youtube)
Fast is relative, but yes bamboo can actually grow through a person, the shoot is surprisingly sharp and the human body is not that much tougher than soil
It’s fast but not that fast.
It could be half a millimeter per minute.
That’s a centimeter in 20 minutes. Or 72cm in a day.
The math checks out.
