Worth quoting...

I was just reading some blogs and came across this:

In the real world, not the paranoid fantasies of anti-Patriot-Act mouth-frothers, there is not a shred of evidence that America is using torture anywhere. Not even in Guantanamo.

And if we learn anything from the aberrant events at Abu Gharib, it's this: If wacko mistreatment of prisoners is going on, it can't be kept secret.

American soldiers are not perfect. In the heat of battle, terrible things are done. There really is such a thing as blood-lust, the berserker mentality in which adrenalin-charged people carry out appalling acts of slaughter, and Americans are not immune to it.

There are also sick or evil people who use war as an excuse to indulge their immoral desires.

These things happen in all armies, throughout all of history. And in many cultures, such acts are institutionalized. Many American Indian tribes routinely tortured prisoners; the Spanish Inquisition really happened.

What is remarkable about American soldiers is that, on average, there has never been a more humane group of soldiers in the history of the world. Sure, Yanks have been resented as occupiers or conquerors -- what occupiers or conquerors have not been?
[...]
American soldiers have died or risked death to save civilian lives. They have also served the civilian population in many other highly visible ways. Many Iraqis -- perhaps most -- trust an American soldier more than any other figure in their country right now.

Yet somehow most charges of widespread torture by Americans in Iraq come from insane anti-American Americans, like Ramsey Clark and his ilk. Most Iraqis know they have been liberated from a terror state, not had a new one imposed on them.

With our highly targetable weaponry, America has virtually renounced damage to civilians as a method of war. In our ground engagements, our soldiers are able to be far more selective in targeting than any army in history.

No army has ever been as self-restrained as our army is today. And that is not because of pressure from the Left. It's because our soldiers are decent American citizens who are serving their country, not getting vengeance or indulging authority fantasies.

So these charges of torture, so carelessly and negligently made by our leading television writers*, are being applied to Americans who are innocent of such offenses.

Yet foreigners are being convinced that Americans are all torturers, because our own TV shows admit it; and it is hardly far-fetched to say that this creates part of the climate from which our terrorist enemies recruit their bombers. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that there will be an undeniable causal chain from these charges of torture to dead American, military and otherwise.

(Orson Card from Ornery.org)

*The only television show I watch is Lost because the writing is decent, although some may argue for other reasons, and sure enough the Americans as torturers notion was written into it. It seems to be an element of the pop-culture now. Usually all it takes to shatter the pop-cultural imagery of the moment is a minimal amount of historical and philosophical knowledge. E.g., the American Empire is the most benevolent to have ever achieved hegemony and even if it purposefully tortured and killed thousands of people it would generally still have to be ranked at the top given how low the standards for running the human race have been set by other cultures. For what is the standard, is it relative to other cultures and Empires or not? In the case of America, it seems to me that there has never been another nation founded on metaphysical notions of transcendence to the same extent. Instead, most nations have always been about the physical tribe, culture and so on instead of the metaphysical ideas like those at the roots of America that are applicable to all its citizens because all its citizens are supposed to believe that an essential Natural Law transcends cultures, race/skin pigmentation, ethnicity/communication habits, etc., like light defining and sustaining all the colors of a rainbow.

I tire of the Leftist tendency of rebelling against all notions of transcendence, yet living as intellectual parasites on the very same notions anyway. I believe in shaking them off of what they live on, thus opening the possiblity that they will evolve and learn to support the metaphoric Tree of Liberty rather than eat away at its roots.

Note that in America the most neurotic Leftists who take the pattern to the point that it is the material of satire are so phobic and neurotically anxious to defeat the "Christian Taliban" (Who establish their theocracy by putting "In God we trust." on the money and this sort of thing combined with assorted horrors like public displays of the Ten Commandments.) that they'll turn a blind eye to the real Taliban succeeding. Yet they will come to find what "theocracy" and the Taliban really is if they succeed in their goal of treating cultures which are not equal, as if they are equal. Once a physical host dies there is no longer anything protecting a parasite from cold external realities and the same seems to apply in the metaphysical world of ideas. It's the same with these intellectually incompetent artists and writers who cannot find the courage to engage in negative imagery with respect to other cultures, leaving only their own to create such imagery of. You can be sure that someone is going to have negative imagery created about them, as there is not much of a way to tell a good story otherwise, so when it is politically incorrect to be creative in that way with respect to pretty much all other cultures it finds an outlet against our own. We're probably the only culture that does this, as artists in other cultures seem to have no problem creating negative imagery about America.

E.g.

This film portrays the Kurds of northern Iraq as puppets of the Americans and as a motley crew of dirty, cowardly soldiers with the exception of one soldier who (what else?) sides with the Turks. The Americans' atrocities include attacking a wedding and killing the groom as well as a child -- in front of its mother of course -- before relishing in the torture of any survivors. The doctor who peddles organs is a Jew who selects his victims as if in a concentration camp before readying their organs for export to the US and Israel. Another traditionally dressed Jew with ringlets of hair (in northern Iraq!) leaves the area at the first sign of danger.

(Spiegel)

The irony of negative imagery is that it is usually a projection of one's own conscience creating the imagery of its own condemnation. That's why you have to be careful about such things when it comes to creating metaphors and verbal pictures. Or in this case film, as note that it is Turkey as a culture and nation that engages in torture often enough that evidence of it threatens its path to the EU and so on. It seems that the film may be a fitting national projection. It would be interesting to see what American artists projected onto their screens if they ever felt comfortable with creating and projecting negative imagery outward. Yet for now most of their creativity is masked behind cultural and moral relativism, a sort of inward and subjective babeling if you will. If the artist engaging in that is pressed, then their latent creativity/imagination will come forth.

[Still reading? If so, I'm surprised you lasted this long. Reading and thinking can be hard, just watch your own imagery and metaphors as they will usually reveal that your mind is condemning you again. But that's not always the case.]