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The Zimbardo link is to Wired magazine: my favourite! Consistently libertarian-leaning, techno-utopian, futurologist, the only magazine I consider worthwhile my monthly subscription.

And Zimbardo himself; I studied at some depth his prisoner/guard experiment, it was one of the most interesting pieces of practical psychology I've ever seen.

Interesting results from yesterday's voting. McCain certainly does have a great track record on opposing the use of torture (though, opposing aggressive interrogation techniques after being a POW could be like opposing air travel after surviving a plane crash - one must be careful to consider the subject logically and dispassionately). I'd add that I'm surprised Hillary is still here; it looks like she still has some traction in this thing.

William,
This is not a new book. It appeared in hardback last year but has now been reissued as a paperback.
Any work that attempts to explain why people do horrible things is to be welcomed. As a psychologist, Zimbardo naturally stresses such factors as obedience to authority, group pressure, and deindividuation. This reminds me of a well-known essay, ‘The Urge to Self-destruction’, by Arthur Koestler, who argues that the trouble with our species is not an overdose of self-asserting aggression but an excess of self-transcending devotion.

Even a cursory glance at history, he says, should convince us that individual crimes committed for selfish motives play a quite insignificant role in the human tragedy compared with the numbers massacred in unselfish love of one’s tribe, nation, dynasty, church or ideology. Wars, he suggests, are not fought for personal gain, but out of loyalty and devotion to king, country, or cause. Of course, if we love these things, then we hate those who have opposing loyalties and are prepared to do horrible things to ensure that our love endures. The savagery of the group depends on the devotion of its members.

This urge to belong to a group and surrender our individuality to it implies a surrender of our critical faculties and it is good to see that Zimbardo calls for a greater emphasis on the need to develop critical thinking, which is exactly what freethinkers and humanists have been saying for centuries.

Question: if there is a Lucifer effect, in which good people come to do evil things, what do we describe its opposite (for example, when a demagogic sectarian fundamentalist comes to do good things?

Will, it seems that it's not just Clinton who has been parsing their opposition to torture.

Erstwhile opponent of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, John McCain, recently voted to oppose the US Army torture ban being extended to the CIA, arguing that the agency should have a freer hand when interrogating suspects.

Fuller story at the .

Given McCain's own treatment as a PoW at the hands of his Vietnamese captors, this change of stance is, to say the least, disappointing.

McCain once argued that the torture debate Couldn't agree more.

Why do good people turn evil? The devil made them do it. Isn't that what Christianity is all about, being saved from the evil one and spending all eternity damned to hell?

How can you compare the pointless torture of people who were filled with hatred, possibly for very good reasons or were simply bored, or were at least slightly mentally deranged (war has a way of doing that to people, I mean getting shot at and never knowing when an IED might go off and kill you) at Abu Gharib and the waterboarding of captured top al Qaeda leaders to find out what plots and threats to the national security of the US and of other nations including the UK for that matter he was aware of?

We constantly hear that the US must not torture prisoners of war because our own soldiers might be tortured if they are captured in return. That we conformed to the Geneva conventions didn't prevent the North Vietnamese from torturing John McCain. I wonder how many of those who did participate in torturing him are now wondering what he will do if he gets his finger on the trigger of up to ten thousand hydrogen bombs. That could be their worst nightmare. Who knows why makes good people turn evil? The answer in one case might just be a few extra votes in the US Electoral College which creates the opportunity.

Mark #4- You're suggesting that John McCain is mounting a presidency so that he can launch nukes at the Vietnamese in retaliation for his torture as a POW those years ago?

Is it immoral to torture terrorists to extract what they know about heinous plots to kill people, potentially thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of them? The question could be asked more forcefully the other way around, is it immoral not to? What do you say about countless casualties among your own countrymen, your kith and kin so to speak when that might have been avoided by inflicting pain and suffering for a period of time on a single individual believed to have the knowledge which could have prevented it? Funny how the question never gets asked that way?

John Wright #5
No, I am suggesting that once in office, the power to extract revenge could overwhelm someone, especially if they are under enormous stress. Every human has his breaking point. Nobody knows for certain what another person would do given a particular chain of events or set of circumstances. The President of the United States happens to be the Commander-in-Chief of all US armed forces in the world. People falsely accuse President Bush of single handedly engineering the invasion of Iraq. Well that would sound absurd to me even if I didn't know the facts (remembering all the way back six years ago) about how the nation and Congress felt. So is it a stretch if you believe as so many do that he surrounded himself with people who saw things as he did and then followed their advice to think McCain might also find equally like minded people to appoint as his closest advisors who are still fighting the war in Vietnam deep inside themselves? We just don't know but then look at the alternatives. Not a very palatable choice this time around. Funny, it always seems to me that it never is.

Mark #6 - the traditional answer in moral theology is that it is never right to do wrong and the ends don't justify the means. The greatest evil the not the sum of suffering inflicted or received but the individual sins people commit. If I do something wrong (torture someone) to prevent a massacre, I don't lessen the evil, I add to it. I become another person living falsely and saving lives is neither here nor there.

That's why States looked at torture in isolation from threats of ticking bombs and said "this is wrong in itself and should not be done". Going back on it now because of circumstance is madness - moral madness. But then this a world in which Westminster is voting to allow experimentation on embryos and cloning of chimeras.

Mark,

I see that on Saturday Bush vetoed the bill that would have explicitly prohibited the CIA from using interrogation methods such as waterboarding. So, once again, the Bush administration shows a disregard for the international rule of law and an indifference to how America is perceived by the world at large.

Of course, a critic of American torture cannot win from your contradictory perspective. Either torture is redefined to exclude anything done by Americans (see below) or it is justified to defeat the inhuman, evil enemy. You ask: Is it immoral to torture terrorists to extract what they know about heinous plots to kill people, potentially thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of them? Apply that question to Iraqis who have captured American soldiers, knowing that America invaded their country illegally accompanied by a notion of freedom that appears to be the freedom to bomb the living hell out of them and kill hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens.

Of course, you won’t apply it because you think Americans are always different. They are always the good guys (thanks to the movies), and indeed so good are they that the ordinary rules don’t apply to them. But in reality, it is the same coin, different side.

Your question also presumes that all those held are ‘guilty’ before they have even been tried. The CIA publicly admitted last month that it water-boarded three terror suspects between 2002 and 2003 and recorded the sessions. But now those tapes have mysteriously been destroyed. If the information gleaned from these interrogations was so manifestly ‘critical’, why were they destroyed?

Let us look at the facts, Mark (although you think that they shouldn’t get in the way of your prejudices). Take Quantanamo Bay, a cruel farce.

Q: How many have been held there? A: 778.
Q: How many are there now? A: About 300.
Q: How many have been sent back to their home countries? A: 450.
Q: How many have been charged with a crime? A:10.
Q: How many have been convicted? 1.
Q: What is the age of the oldest prisoner? A: About 78 (as he put it, "How could I be an enemy combatant if I was not able to stand up?").
Q: Are Americans safer because these men were/are held without a trial, locked up without knowing what crime they have committed? A: No.
Q: Are Americans safer now that they have violated the Geneva Conventions and the standards of decency for the sake of the so-called ‘ War on Terror’? A: No.

Your other alternative is to redefine the word ‘torture’ so that it excludes anything Americans do. Thus an old form of cruelty like water torture is given a new name with a connotation of a pleasurable thrill and made to sound half-respectable  – almost as much fun as surfboarding. Who’s kidding whom, Mark? As the KGB realised, and the CIA has adopted since the 1950s, the most devastating torture often involves, not crude physical beatings, but psychological harm such as simply forcing the victim to stand for days at a time (the so-called ‘stress positions’ seen in photos from Abu Ghraib).

We know that, as Zimbardo says in his book, it’s not a question of a few bad apples spoiling the barrel; it’s a bad barrel spoiling good apples. In 2003, after a visit from Guantanamo chief General Miller, the US Commander for Iraq issued orders for psychological torture at Abu Ghraib. The photos merely confirm these orders.

I've added a bit of a 1970s Northern Ireland flavour to this debate over at the just-revamped.

Patrick,

You make the case against torture too easily. In fact, this is much more complex. If we can defend killing in the context of a just war, why can't we defend waterboarding or other techniques that may prove useful to intelligence gathering? You have not persuaded me that waterboarding, which causes no lasting harm to a person, is a form of torture. This technique may cause a person a little distress (sufficient to elicit some information) but that's about it.

Amnesty International: why good people turn evil.

So Patrick Corrigan, perhaps you can take a break from remembering torture in the the 1970s to thinking how Amnesty now supports torturing the unborn.

Waterboarding and other techniques of torture - whether carried out by State agents of the USA, Syria, Saudi Arabia or others - are indefensible on moral, legal and efficacy grounds.

Henry, your question of whether waterboarding constitutes torture is bogus. Torture is not just torture when it leaves lasting physical marks. The internationally accepted definition of torture is provided by the U.N., in the convention against torture, and that simply is the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering to extract information.

Let me quote my colleague Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA executive director, on President Bush's veto of the Intelligence Authorization bill, which prevents the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. agents from using waterboarding, sexual humiliation, dogs and other techniques that amount to torture and ill-treatment.

"President Bush's veto, in essence, spat on domestic and international law and compromised human rights to justify illegal, ineffective and immoral practices.

"The Bush administration continues its stubborn and reckless disregard for basic decency and values the United States should model. The president’s action further compounds the incalculable damage to United States’ standing at home and abroad.

"While asserting that the United States 'does not torture,' as he vetoes anti-torture legislation, President Bush's rhetoric rings more hollow than ever."

Don't forget that majorities of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate voted in favour of such limits, so Bush's backing for torture does not have mainstream political support. Amnesty is in tune with mainstream America on this; the President isn't.

If you don't want to listen to what Amnesty has to say on the matter, what about listening to American military and intelligence service personnel?

Rear Admiral (ret.) John Hutson, former Judge Advocate General for the Navy
"The United States has been a strong, unwavering advocate for human rights and the rule of law for as long as you and I have been alive. I'm not ready to throw in the towel on that just because we are in a battle with some terrible people. In fact, in a war like this, when we are tempted to respond in kind, we must hold ever more dearly to the values that make us Americans. Torture, or "cruel, inhuman or degrading" conduct, are not part of our national character. Another objection is that torture doesn't work. All the literature and experts say that if we really want usable information, we should go exactly the opposite way and try to gain the trust and confidence of the prisoners. Torture will get you information, but it's not reliable. Eventually, if you don't accidentally kill them first, torture victims will tell you something just to make you stop. It may or may not be true. If you torture 100 people, you'll get 100 different stories. If you gain the confidence of 100 people, you may get one valuable story." (Legal Affairs "Debate Club" January 27, 2005)

Bob Baer, former CIA official
"And torture -- I just don't think it really works. I think it works for the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Saudis, who want to scare the hell out of people. But you don't get the truth. What happens when you torture people is, they figure out what you want to hear and they tell you." (Interview with Slate, May 12, 2004)

Lawrence Korb, former Naval Intelligence officer and Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan Administration
"The highest levels of the U.S. military, the Defense Department, and the White House must be held accountable for putting our troops at greater risk and diminishing America's moral authority across the globe." (Article co-written by John Halpin, Center for American Progress)

Michael Scheuer, formerly a senior CIA official in the Counter-Terrorism Center
"I personally think that any information gotten through extreme methods of torture would probably be pretty useless because it would be someone telling you what you wanted to hear." (60 minutes "CIA flying suspects to Torture?" March 6, 2005)

Dan Coleman, retired FBI agent
"It's human nature. People don't cooperate with you unless they have some reason to." He added, "Brutalization doesn't work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul." (The New Yorker "Outsourcing Torture" by Jane Mayer)

Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1
"The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

More discussion at our media blog: .

patrick you make some good points but I wonder if these kinds of considerations can make sense in the world we live in. Every state and every army engages in rough treatment that comes close to the definition of suffering. Those figures you mention must know that. As for waterboarding, I don't think it amounts to either intense pain or suffering. It is a softening up technique. No one suffers, though the subject may feel uncomfortable for a long period of time. If that is suffering, then imprisonment of any kind could constitute suffering.

Thanks Patrick#12 for that, all of which I agree with.

Can you now explain why Amnesty thinks it's not only okay, but a human right, to torture unborn children?

Smasher - am glad we agree.

I have blogged extensively on the matter you raise. I don't intend to do it again on this thread.

Jane#13 - being held down while someone pours water over you to make you feel like you're drowning is clearly torture and not he same as being imprisoned. "Softening up" is the sort of phrase you'd hear in Life on Mars before the cops give you a hiding.

Patrick#15 - you can run but you can't hide. What is the point in putting in a link to Slugger O'Toole home page? Amnesty has lost all credibility and people like me will keep raising this issue every time people like you try to talk about torture. That's the price you pay for having a hypocritical position. But I'm not surprised you don't want to defend the indefensible.

According to :
"An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion."

I generally think it wise to follow the advice also carried there: 'do not feed the troll'

Patrick Corrigan #3, 9, 12, 15, 17-

Having made no fewer than 4 links to your own blog posts elsewhere in this thread alone, I'd say you've done very well in your capacity to be a generally irritating contributor and not as well in your ability to carry on a reasonable and engaging conversation. I have a blog , without incessantly plugging it for ego's sake while singularly failing to engage in any kind of meaningful discussion here.

Just an observation. :-)

smasher lagru, brian mcclinton;

"let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Is it so long ago that the four hundred year period where people in Ireland killed each other relentlessly for achieving their political goals one way or another with regard to their association with Britain came to an end has been forgotten? And while there was probably only a small minority of people who actually engaged in the violence, it seems to me there was a great deal of sympathy for those who did on both sides of the issue. So in what is left of what was once just Ireland, a small corner where Protestants are the majority of the population, it was only a few years ago that there was an end to all that killing. And now with that behind them, there is a sense of a new start where those whose passions were so intensely aroused can feel free to go out into the world and pontificate to others how they should act in their own self defense when they feel threatened because these newly born evangelicals to the gospel of thou shalt not torture, kill, bend, fold or spindle have truth and wisdom on their side.

Patrick Corrigan;
For every American who was in the military, in intelligence, or government who says torture doesn't work, you can find many others who say it does. That you selectively quote those who say it doesn't is meaningless. Frankly, I'm glad that at least some of them are retired. I'd hate to think my own security is being protected by those too squeamish to take whatever action is called for in particuar circumstances.

I am invariably disgusted by those who quote or cite international law. As I have posted here and elsewhere many times, no such thing in fact exists if for no other reason that it is invariably trotted out selectively to make a political point at a given moment when it is expedient to do so and then put back into the drawer to be ignored and forgotten when it isn't. It is also invariabley true that those who cite it the most, take the side of someone who has violated what it is purported to be far more then the presumed current transgressor. So we have the laughable spectacle of Palestinians railing at Israeli violations of international law by building settlements on what they consider their land while ignoring four genocidal wars the Arabs waged to destroy Israel and kill all of its people, two intifada wars of terrorism to do the same, and the relentless war that has gone on for 60 years towards that end.

And by the way (as we used to say in NYC schoolyards as kids) who is going to enforce this international law, your motha? Fageddabowdit.

Henry (#10):

Waterboarding was used during the Spanish Inquisition to interrogate, coerce confessions and punish individuals. Japanese troops and Hitler's Gestapo used it to torture and interrogate prisoners. And Pol Pot's notorious Khmer Rouge used it extensively between 1975 and '79.

Waterboarding not only causes extreme pain and the sensation of dying, it can also severely harm the lungs, damage the brain due to oxygen deprivation and, if uninterrupted, result in death. What has made the technique so popular over the centuries is that it leaves no marks on the body.

Today, many legal experts, human rights organisations, war veterans, intelligence officials and military bigwigs consider waterboarding as torture to the extreme, being on a par with placing electrodes on a person's genitals.

Check out:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI2p0IdSAn

Mark:

You say of international law (#19) that “it is invariably trotted out selectively to make a political point at a given moment when it is expedient to do so and then put back into the drawer to be ignored and forgotten when it isn't”. This is a good description of the behaviour of the government of the USA. The rest of your rant is the usual blindly one-sided pro-American, pro-Israeli guff which wouldn’t pass muster in a 13-year-old school debate. One thing is certain: the rest of the world ought not to permit the bullying USA to uphold international law since it sets such an appalling example.

Smasher:

Don’t inflict your Catholic hang-up on abortion on the rest of us (#14 and #16). As Patrick says, it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic in hand. ‘Torturing unborn children’ is tripe. Most researchers believe that foetuses can only begin to feel pain during the third trimester, which is after 99% of all abortions are performed. Some researchers even suggest foetuses cannot sense pain, no matter how far along in pregnancy. They believe that pain can only be felt after birth. And what about the pain of the rape victim? It is somewhat perverse, to say the least, to place the ‘feelings’ of a foetus above those of a real human being. And why aren’t you protesting with emotive photos about all the torture we Irish inflict on animals every day of the week? Look around the world, Smasher. There is an awful lot of cruelty going on, and the foetus is the least of our worries. You are right about waterboarding: stick to what matters.

As for losing credibility, it seems to me that by frequently acting as a servile mouthpiece for the ‘official line’ of the Catholic Church, it is you who are in danger of losing it. You are defending a Church which in Ireland is infamous for its illiberal actions over the years and for its own ‘torture’ of hundreds of children. I humbly suggest that you get all your priorities right.

Brian#20 - quite an anti-Catholic rant from you so business as usual. I never mentioned the Catholic Church in my posts, though I have no problem in associating myself with my Church which has been a force for good over the last 2,000 years and, in fact, the inventor of the notion of human rights.

Abortion continues to be the greatest human rights abuse in the world today. It is part of a long tradition of dehumanising others, establishing categories of, what you call, "real human beings". It's what Nazis did with Jews and Slavs and gypsies and homosexuals and, indeed, with Catholics - reduced them to the category of sub-human and then killed them. It's what the Apartheid system in South Africa did. And it's what people like you are trying to do with unborn children. For God's sake, it's simple biology - if it's not a human being when it's in the womb how can the act of birth turn it into a human being?

brian mcclinton
There are serious human rights violations on a massive scale in at least a third of the countries of the world today. Maybe half. And that doesn't include the sporadic but real violations in most of the rest of the countries. I'm talking about the Universal Declaration of Human rights written into the Charter of the United Nations.

The victims of government sponsored or government inflicted atrocities include countries with populations comprising well over half the human race. There are so many of them, it's hard to know where to begin. What are some specifics? Start with women, untouchables, and Moslems in India. Victims of political persecution in China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, Burma. How about the victms of the Russian government in Chechnya? Gypsies all over Europe. European citizens whose parents either migrated illegally or were imported as cheap labor all over Europe, many of whom can't get a job due to racial and religious discrimination such as in France no matter how qualified they are. Street children in Brazil's teeming cites. The impovrished economic victims of widespread corruption all over Mexico who have to migrate illegally to the US where they are often treated as less than human just to make enough money to feed their families back home. What about almost all of Africa. It's hard to find a place in Africa where there isn't one serious form of human rights violation or another. Women all over the Arab and Islamic world who are systematically denied all human rights to one degree or another. In places like Taleban Afghanistan where they were forced to wear Burkahs in public, their very existance as human beings denied. And then there is the rest of Asia where human life is so cheap, you can traffic in women enslaved as prostitutes and children forced into slave labor in many countries for next to nothing in bribes anytime, anwhere you want. In Australia the government just apologized for some of its most egregious human rights violations against aborigines of decades ago, what does it have to say about those it is committing today. Women in Japan are treated like second class human beings. In fact if you look hard enough, you can find it almost everywhere. Yes and in Northern Ireland too where Catholic communities live in isolated enclaves, the end of the civil war NIers absurdly call "the troubles" only recently over but hardly forgotten. When does the marching season through their neighborhoods to incite and humiliate them begin, it's now March?

And what does the world do when it is so blatant, so massive that it cannot be ignored? In Uganda, Cambodia, Ruwanda, Sudan just as a few examples? It says what a shame and then goes right back to business as usual. For two weeks the world will honor China this summer in the farce of "Olympics" where professional athletes fortified on the latest designer body building drugs their inventors hope will escape detection will compete for medas honoring them while China continues to support Sudan whose government murdered two hundred thousand and has driven another two million people from their homes into refugee camps where they are doing everything they can to get the rest of them to die too. Meanwhile, back in China billions were spent to pull off this two week showcase while five hundred million people struggle to survive on less than two dollars a day and have no access to medical care. Don't you call that human rights violations?

And what did Europe do when the genocide was right on its doorstep in the Balkins? At first nothing. Dutch soldiers stood by and looked the other way while thousands were murdered in Srebrenicia. When a million Kosovars were driven from their homes into the snow to die after thousands had been raped, tortured, and killed by the Serbian government and their surrogate militias and pictures of hundreds of them being forced onto trains were broadcast around the world reminding Europe of its atrocities of just a couple of generations earlier during WWII, Europe called 1-800-USA-HELP beggin the US to intevene because it couldn't. It relies on the US to pay for and provide the military muscle to defend it and then has the audacity to criticize the US when it uses it. No UN Resolution in the Security Council for Kosovo because everyone knew Russia would veto it, they just told America to get the whole thing over with any way it could as fast as it could under the cover of NATO. No screams about the unauthorized use of military force to bomb Kosovo and Serbia then from European lips. So much for the farce of international law. It does not surprise me that Europeans teach lies to 13 year olds in their schools, Europe is nothing but one big lie to begin with and it always was and always will be.

Humanity is just as barbaric as it ever was. The thin veneer of civilization barely covers it up in some places at some times but beneath the surface, for the most part we are still the same savages we always were. That veneer had its beginnings only a few centuries ago after a million years of human existance. It's a veneer many who don't have it would gladly like too as evidenced by the millions of Afghanis and Iraqis who risked their lives to participate in free elections for the first time ever in their entire history. And whom do the hypocritical Europeans blame for the violence there? Those who would deny them that chance for what they almost lost themselves in WWII and the cold war? No, the Americans who saved it for them both times and were most reponsible for giving Afghanis and Iraqis the same chance. Don't pontificate to me Mr. mcclain, you and your kind have nothing you can defend by way of the crimes your governments and socieities have committed not to mention their own indifference and inactions in helping those who fight against oppression. What did Ireland do to fight the Nazis in WWII? Nothing, it remained neutral. It is basically an amoral society.

Nothing to attack insofar as the US defending its own security from threats which seemed very real at the time and trying without the help of much of the rest of the world to extend what little chance for a peaceful society these countries like Iraq have. What has Northern Ireland done to help Iraqis. If it takes the incarceration of a few hundred people in a high security prison in GITMO and a few other places and the torture of a relative handful of the worst people on this earth to give whatever help is possible, that does't need defending either.

Patrick Corrigan

is abortion torture for unborn people?

I guess it isnt on two conditions;-

1) You have a liberal outlook

2) You are not the one in the womb.

Not very objective

Seems every liberal considers it their kneejerck reaction to support "a woman's right to choose" without stopping to think about the devastation it causes to women on all levels.

Seems to me you would make more progress if you looked for common ground with pro-lifers.

for example, pro-choice and pro-life can surely agree that many steps can be taken by us long before the woman has an abortion.

These could include better education on contraception, the profile of just who is likely to abort especially more than once, the full emotional and physical impact of abortion, the mechanics of adoption, active practical support for vulnerable pregnant women.

Seems to me this is something like a win-win approach which is gaining some credibility.

PB

Smasher (#21):

There appear to be two Smashers: the liberal, pro-human rights Smasher  – defender of the foetus, humaniser of homosexuals  – and the theocratic, homophobic, ultramontanist Smasher, who on the Poots post declares: “I, being a believing Catholic, consider homosexuality a disorder and the
homosexual acts sinful”.

An embryo and a foetus are not human beings but potential human beings, just as a sperm or an egg are potential human beings. A foetus becomes a human being when it is viable outside the womb. This is simple biology, Smasher, not ‘theology’.

As for the Catholic Church being a force for good over 2000 years and the inventor of the notion of human rights, this is a major rewriting of history. Are you referring to the Church which launched the Crusades, spawned the Inquisition, had ‘heretics’ and ‘witches’ burnt and banned some of the world’s greatest literature?

The Catholic Church has been one of the greatest enemies of freedom of thought in the Western world. For nearly 1,500 years it kept its flock in ignorance and when the Renaissance and Reformation developed as challenges to its authority it did everything in its power to stamp out the New Learning. In 1521 it excommunicated Luther and it set up the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office to ban books which were judged to be harmful to faith and morals.

This organisation then proceeded to wage war on the Copernican theory for over two centuries. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600 and Galileo was hounded because of his assertion that the earth revolved around the sun. In 1633 this frail old man was compelled to kneel before a row of ignorant cardinals and publicly recant his scientific beliefs. All works which supported the new cosmology were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. Even in 1704 this Index prohibited ‘all books that teach the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun’. It was not until 1822 that the Holy office consented to allow the heliocentric theory to be disseminated among Catholics.

In his 1864 Syllabus of Errors Pius IX condemned as ‘pernicious’ the notion that the pope should reconcile himself to and compromise with ‘progress, liberalism and modern civilisation’. All the great movements of western progress, enlightenment and freedom have occurred not only outside the Catholic Church’s influence but usually also in the teeth of its vehement opposition.

As for what Nazis did to Jews etc, they were supported by the main churches, both Protestant and Catholic. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that 'in defending myself against the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work'. He made a Concordat with the Catholic Church in 1933 which gave his regime the stamp of moral approval. In 1938, after the Anschluss, he declared in Vienna: "I believe that it was God's will that from here a boy was sent into the Reich and that he grew up to become the leader of the nation". As for the Pope, in 1941 in his Christmas message Pius XII (whom de Gaulle called the 'Nazi pope') blessed Hitler's invasion of Russia as a crusade against a 'nation that has strayed from God' (the Soviet Union).

So spare us the deluded revisionism which turns a major enemy of progress into its champion.

Mark (#22):

I agree with much of what you say about the absence of human rights around the world, but I don’t agree with your diatribe against Europe. I should also point out that I live in Northern Ireland which was and remains part of the UK, which was not neutral in WW2.

brian mcclinton;
NI fought against the Nazis in WWII because it had no choice, it was in effect a colony of Britain. We do not know what a freely elected truly indepndent NI government would have decided to do, one did not exist. Furthermore, NI is an artificial political construct carved out of Ireland where the Protestant descendants of invaders of 400 years ago were predominant in an enclave. This is how Iraq was formed too, its borders decided largely by one man, Winston Churchill. Somewhere I saw a quote in which he said it was the worst mistake he ever made. Funny how the ethnic and religious strife in nations all over former colonial empires which were "liberated" mirror each other.

I agree with you completely about the Catholic Church. However, nobody should get the notion that most Protestant sects were any better. The only reason the Anglican Church exists at all is that King Henry VIII needed a male heir to the throne of England and when the Pope wouldn't grant him a divorce so that he could remarry, he created his own Catholic Church and threw the Vatican out. It strikes me that of all Protestant denominations, the Anglican Church is the one most like the Catholic Church, its differences in theology relatively unimportant.

I'm hardly surprised you don't agree with what you characterize as my "diatribe" about Europe's sordid history or the false facade it tries to paint over it. For every philosopher, painter, or writer who made a positive contribution to human society, you can probably find a war in which thousands were killed, not to die figting for their own benefit but for that of some dictator who remained well protected at home in a heavily guarded palace fortress. Nor has it changed much. Europe is as undemocratic as ever. Now that the Eurocrats and Parliamentarians have gotten over the shock of seeing that the electorates of France and the Netherlands would not only have the utter foolishness let alone the audacity to reject the EU Constitution in a public referendum, they are busy scheming how to ram it down their throats peacemeal without the need for elections which would again risk another rejection of their grand scheme for one unified central power over all Europeans. Nor do most Europeans seem to mind. And it is not surprising. After all, many of the newcomers are recipients of money, the Hungarians for instance who will get new roads built from subsidies paid for by British and German taxpayers. Why should these taxpayers get a say in how they are governed or by whom or where their tax money goes? What irony. Americans fought the British for independence on the slogan "no taxation without representation." Now over 2 centuries later, they will get a taste of that medicine themselves, the notion of a public referendum on the EU being the British government's worst nightmare (and that includes the so called shadow governments of the Tories and the Lib-dems.) It's like the fruits of all of Europe's crimes of prior generations and past centuries are coming back to haunt it all at the same time.

BTW, if you believe what Stiglitz had to say about the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being largely responsible for the coming economic downturn in the US economy (as opposed to my theory which has it Iraq and Afghanistan had nothing to do with it, it was the sub-prime mortgage fiasco) then Europe's unwillingness to share the burden of even the cost of it has helped create the imbalance which will ultimately have dire consequences for its own economies when the US goes into recession. That was just one more crime Europe committed. Why do good people turn evil? In the case of Europe, they didn't, they were always evil to begin with.

Brian - thanks for recognising my complexity which is part of my brilliance and for confirming your lack of knowledge of biology if you think that an embryo is the same as an egg or a sperm. What is the essential difference between a child before and after birth? You think the passage through the birth canal changes its biology? Words like "viable" and "potential" aren't biology but ideology spouted by pro-choicers who know they cant' rely on biology to support their case. Do you support partial birth abortion?

As for the Church - saviour of civilization, inventor of universities. Crusades? You betcha - a defensive war against hostile muslims - bring them on. Pope Pius X11, described by the New York Times as Europe's last voice against the Nazis. Read what the President of Israel said when he died, before the play produced by the Bulgarian KGB warped the minds of those too stupid or too lazy to read beyond tabloid denunciations of a great man.

Smasher:

Ah, such is the complexity of your brilliance that it even extends to both historical inaccuracy and defending the indefensible! The Catholic Church was the inventor of the University? What was Plato’s Academy, then? Or the Buddhist Nalanda University in Bihar, India, in the 5th century BC?

As for Pius XII:

1919: Letter to Monsignor Shioppa, describing an insurrection in Munich, is a barrage of anti-Semitic utterances and makes the Nazi connection between Judaism and Bolshevism (the text of the letter is reprinted in Cornwell: Hitler’s Pope, pp74-75, and in Goldhagen: A Moral Reckoning, pp45-46)

1933: Concordat with Hitler was the first diplomatic triumph of the Nazi regime. It was the work of Pacelli (later Pius XII), then papal nuncio to Germany.

1937: ‘Mit Brennender Sorge’, Pius XI’s encyclical objecting to violations of the Concordat, was toned down by Pacelli and included a reference to the ‘story of the chosen people [Jews]... repeatedly straying from God’.

1939: Pius XI’s antiracist draft encyclical ‘Humani Generis Unitas’ was suppressed by Pacelli when he took over on his death. He buried it in the archives.

1939-45: Pius XII never once made a public statement condemning the Germans’ persecution and extermination of Jews

1943: Encyclical ‘Mystici Corporis Christi’ states that ‘on the cross the Old Law died, soon to be buried and to be a bearer of death’. The ‘Old Law’ was often used as a stand-in for Jews, so why were they ‘a bearer of death’? To make such a statement in the middle of the Holocaust is almost beyond belief.

1944: Pius XII did nothing to halt the deportation of Trieste’s Jews, even though he himself was perfectly safe in allied-occupied Rome. 15 of the 22 trains took 1200 of Trieste’s Jews to Auschwitz.

1949: Pius XII excommunicated all communists throughout the world, but never once from 1939 to 1945 did he excommunicate a single Nazi.

And this is your great man??