albatross of euphemism

Here's a good clue as to where something fits in the moral labyrinth (or firmament): is it called by what it is? or do its users use a euphemism?

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" is torture. We can debate whether torture is moral or permissible or odiously necessary or an evil choice among other evils in wartime (or peacetime), blah blah, and so forth, but it is still torture.

If you have to resort to a euphemism, what is that telling us?


I salute commentary at the blog Orange Crate Art in this regard.

Of course, the military has a long history of employing euphemisms, as do governments.

worth asking

Last night, having viewed the movie "The Railway Man" I encountered a "fearful symmetry" a day or so after the Senate released a report five years in the making (which I have not read) on "enhanced interrogation techniques," i.e., torture.

Don't people (a nation, a community) (don't I, don't you) have both a right and an obligation to ask:

What are we? What do we espouse? What do we stand for? What defines us?

I do not pretend these are simple questions evoking simple answers. Nor do I pretend to speak with authority, as I type this in a comfortable chair in a public cafe in a free society. (Allow a digression: are you "free" if you are cajoled, motivated, nudged, coerced every day by forces you do not recognize or acknowledge? I'm not talking conspiracy or paranoiac whisperings. I am referring to the relentless onslaught of consumerist stimulation that tickles our fancies and enslaves our wallets.)

I propose the asking (and potentially answering) of these and like-minded difficult but profound questions as part of our civic discourse  -- beyond pieties, cliches, jingoism, chauvinism, and bromides.

As G.K. Chesteron said, " 'My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' "