Totalitarian Tools

by
Thomas J. DiLorenzo


Recently
by Thomas DiLorenzo: The
Party of Great Moral Frauds



What do
the Nazi Gestapo, the South African police during Apartheid, the
Japanese military during World War II, Spanish “Grand Inquisitor”
Tomas de Torquemada, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Sean
Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Senator Joe Lieberman, and Marc Levin have
in common? The answer is that they were/are all practitioners of
or apologists for forms of water torture that have long been illegal
under U.S. and international law. (The U.S. executed Japanese soldiers
during World War II for the war crime of water torture). In the
U.S. in recent years it has been called “water boarding.”

These parallels
were brought to mind recently while re-reading F.A. Hayek’s classic,
The
Road to Serfdom
. In Chapter 10, entitled “Why the Worst
Get to the Top,” Hayek wrote that in a totalitarian state (or
one that is becoming more so), “to be a useful assistant in
the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man
should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds;
he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he
has ever known . . .” Moreover, he “must be completely
unprincipled and literally capable of everything.” Those who
aspire to “leading positions” in “the totalitarian
machine,” wrote Hayek, will come to understand that “there
will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous”
where one can prosper by practicing “cruelty and intimidation,
deliberate deception and spying . . .” Hayek was referring
to the fascist and socialist regimes of the 1940s, but his words
also seem increasingly descriptive of contemporary American government
with its taser-armed rogue police thugs, its TSA gropers and perverts,
its constant bombardment of the public with lies about just about
everything, and its spy cameras on street corners, in satellites,
drones, warrantless wiretaps, internet spying, and worse.

The Spanish
“Water Cure”

Water torture
was a totalitarian tool used by the Spanish “Grand Inquisitor”
Tomas de Torquemada during the fifteenth-century Spanish Inquisition.
The accused were placed naked on a table with their feet elevated,
hands and legs bound, and their nose blocked. Water was poured into
his or her mouth which was then stuffed with a rag so that the water
could not be spit out. It would create the sensation of drowning
and in some cases the stomach would feel as though it would burst
– or it would burst, killing the victim.

The purpose
of what the Spaniards called “the water cure
was to torture people who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism
but were suspected of secretly practicing their original religion.
(For example, the absence of smoke from chimneys on Saturdays, the
Jewish Sabbath, was considered to be a strong indication that the
accused was a Jew since Judaism forbade performing labor such as
lighting chimney fires on the Sabbath). Several thousand Jews were
eventually convicted and executed after enduring “the water
cure.” The sentence for “heresy” was burning at the
stake. This was one of the worst examples in history of the evils
of the non-separation of church and state.

The American
“Water Cure”

The U.S. military
has employed a version of Torquemada’s “water cure” almost
from the beginning of the republic. It was used extensively by the
Lincoln administration on Northern civilians during
the War to Prevent Southern Independence according to historian
and Lincoln cultist Mark Neely, Jr. in his book, Fate
of Liberty
. Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution
defines treason as “only levying war upon the States . . .”
which of course is exactly what Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern
states was. But Lincoln took it upon himself to personally redefine
treason as being any criticism of himself, his policies, or the
Republican Party. Consequently, hundreds of newspapers in the North
were shut down and tens of thousands of Northern civilians were
imprisoned without due process (Habeas Corpus having been illegally
suspended) under the guise of battling “treason.” Lincoln
himself even once announced that a man who merely remains silent
while his administration’s policies were being discussed was
being traitorous. All of the totalitarian communist governments
of the twentieth century espoused the same notion and enforced it
vigorously.

Neely writes
of how Northern state citizens suspected of not being fully supportive
of the Lincoln regime were frequently dragged into a gulag without
due process and tortured with hoses shoved down their throats until
their stomachs sometimes burst. The practice came to light when
a British citizen visiting the U.S. was mistakenly arrested, imprisoned,
and tortured. British envoy to the U.S., Lord Lyons, learned of
it and protested loudly. If it were not for Lord Lyons, the American
public might never have learned of the use of “the water cure”
by the U.S. Army. Even though such barbaric practices were illegal
under U.S. law, Neely wrote of how the Lincoln administration did
nothing more than make note of Lord Lyons’ protest and then continued
on with the practice for the duration of the war.

The Spanish
“water cure” was also used extensively during the U.S.
military’s next Big Adventure, the Spanish-American War. As described
by Gregg Jones in Honor
in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the
Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream
(p. 209), tactics
against Filipino villagers included:

. .
. burning of houses or entire villages, torture of witnesses or
suspects, and, in some cases, summary execution of suspected guerrillas.
Gordon’s Scouts, an elite 18th Infantry mounted outfit, was widely
feared . . . for its harsh tactics. Its favorite interrogation
technique was the ‘water cure,’ in which a victim was held down,
his mouth pried open with a piece of bamboo or a rifle barrel,
and dirty or salty water poured down his throat until the stomach
swelled to the bursting point – a painful procedure that typically
produced quick results.

Jones further
describes the torture of the mayor of a small village who, when
asked if he knew where the leader of the rebels was, said that he
had no idea. A Captain Glenn, who had kicked Catholic nuns out of
their convent and made it into his headquarters, ordered “water
detail” for the mayor. As Jones writes (p. 213), the mayor
was:

Thrown
to the floor beneath a water tank, his mouth forced open and the
spigot turned. As water gushed down the Filipino’s throat and
filled his stomach, an interpreter stood over him, ordering .
. . Answer! Answer! When [the mayor] was filled with water, [soldiers]
pounded his stomach with their fists. Water spurted from the man’s
nose and mouth, and the process began anew.

The mayor
eventually talked, but the American soldiers didn’t believe what
he told them, so that a second round of “the water cure”
was ordered. His stomach was filled with water again, and a “syringe
was placed in his nose and more water forced into him. When that
also failed to yield the desired answer . . . salt was thrown into
the water can . . .”

Frustrated
by their lack of success with the “water cure,” the American
military officer in charge then “ordered the town burned. Torches
were lit and, as terrified families fled their houses with the few
possessions they could carry, the American soldiers fanned out”
to start more fires. “By midnight, fewer than twenty of the
five hundred structures in [the town] remained standing.” And
Theodore Roosevelt called the Filipinos “savages.”

General Sherman
would have been proud, since it sounds so much like his bombardment
and burning of Atlanta in 1864 after the Confederate Army
had evacuated that city. Earlier in the war, Sherman had ordered
the burning of the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee, in frustration
over his failure to apprehend rebel sharpshooters along the Mississippi
River.

As Hayek
said, totalitarian societies provide ample “leadership”
(and money-making) opportunities for those who are willing to abandon
all morals and brutalize or even murder for the sake of the regime.
There are also lucrative “leadership” opportunities for
academic or journalistic apologists for such regimes. Which brings
us to today’s champions of the U.S. military’s use of “the
water cure.” First we have Senator Joe Lieberman who has declared
that “water boarding is not torture.” (Senator John McCain,
who was extensively tortured for years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam,
has unequivocally stated that it is indeed torture).

William Kristol
once suggested that the military practitioners of water boarding
be given the Medal of Freedom. Writing in Kristol’s magazine, The
Weekly Standard
, Michael Goldfarb wrote that “to call this
torture . . . diminishes the very real torture” practiced by
“rogue states.” Goldfarb also suggested that this favorite
tool of the Nazi Gestapo may actually “give you a buzz,”
kind of like having a couple of martinis before dinner or smoking
a joint.

Psychiatrist
and television talking head Charles Krauthammer defended the American
“water cure” by making the intellectually sophisticated
argument that “you have to do what you have to do.” The
screeching and screaming radio loudmouth Marc Levin once shouted
in defense of water torture on his radio program: “Why in the
hell would we take an effective tool off the table?!”

The answer
to this question posed by “The Grate One” was answered
by Jesse Ventura on a television program in which he said (paraphrasing),
“Give me Dick Cheney and water boarding and I will get him
to confess to the Sharon Tate murders.” In other words, human
nature suggests that people undergoing such torture will say anything
to end their misery. This is not a complicated or sophisticated
point. The public will never know if any information of any value
at all was ever acquired by the U.S. military’s use of this totalitarian
tool, for the government lies about everything, especially the conduct
of the CIA, the administrators of the twenty-first century version
of the Spanish “water cure.”

July
12, 2012

Thomas
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail]
is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of
The
Real Lincoln;
Lincoln
Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe

and How
Capitalism Saved America
. His latest book is Hamilton’s
Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution
– And What It Means for America Today
. His next book is entitled
Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

Copyright
© 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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