Alternatives
We can make torture unnecessary and even unthinkable by _________________ [fill this in yourself].
“The idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery....Paradise is hidden in each one of us, it is concealed within me, too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life....Until one has indeed become the brother of all, there will be no brotherhood.”
Dosoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“Without love, you are trying to find out what is the right thing to do, and your action only leads to greater harm and misery; it is the action of politicians and reformers. Without love, you cannot comprehend cruelty; a peace of sorts may be established through the reign of terror; but war, killing, will continue at another level of our existence.”
J. Krishnamurti
“The years we have just gone through have killed something in us. And that something is simply the old confidence man had in himself, which led him to believe that he could always elicit human reactions from another man if he spoke to him in the language of common humanity. We have seen men lie, degrade, kill, deport, torture--and each time it was not possible to persuade them not to do these things because they were sure of themselves and because one cannot appeal to an abstraction.”
Albert Camus
“The organization of our society rests, not as people interested in maintaining the present order of things like to imagine, on certain principles of jurisprudence, but on simple brute force, on the murder and torture of men.”
Leo Tolstoy
“What is unique in man is that he can be driven by impulses to kill and to torture, and that he feels lust in doing so; he is the only animal that can be a killer and destroyer of his own species without any rational gain, either biological or economic.”
Erich Fromm
“The brutality with which we fought [Vietnam] almost certainly contributed to our defeat. In a war for ‘hearts and minds’ rather than for land and resources, justice turns out to be a key to victory…One might almost say that justice has become a military necessity.”
Michael Walzer
Palden Gyatso
Palden Gyatso is a Tibetan Buddhist monk who survived thirty-three years of torture and imprisonment in the Chinese Gulag. Gyatso called upon his training as a monk, using a meditation technique called tonglen, to refocus his thoughts when he was undergoing torture.
“What is the worst thing the Chinese did to you?” I asked, crudely.
Silently, the Tibetan monk reached and took out all his fake teeth. Then he told me that the Chinese had rammed an electric cattle prod into his mouth and shocked him so severely that all the roots of his teeth were destroyed. Palden Gyatso curled his tongue upward exposing some deep scars on its underside. Me, I just sat there dumbfounded and ashamed of my insensitive question. “The worst thing,” the translator conveyed to me, “was that the Chinese almost made me loose my compassion for them.” Again silently, the old man put his teeth back in his mouth and smiled, waiting for my next question.
“What will killing more people solve?” Gyatso asked, sadly. “Nothing! Violence only produces more violence. Compassion and non-violence is the only way to stop the deadly cycle,” he answered himself.
-- Michael Leube, World Tibet Network News
“I have spent 33 years in prison and have been physically and mentally tortured many times, but somehow I was able to endure those sufferings.”
“I like to mimic the path of a bodhisattva (a person motivated by altruism, who lives to serve others). Even after all this brutal torture, I don’t have an individual grudge against anybody. Yes, of course, at a given moment there is anger,” he says. “But it might help the world if this ordinary Buddhist monk talks about how anger causes our peace to deteriorate and destroys communities and nations. It all breaks down to anger, hatred and revenge. I am hoping that the telling of my story will bring some sort of hope for the future.”
“I don’t have any anger or grudge against the Chinese. It behooves me not to have anger. As a Buddhist practitioner, anger is your worst enemy. Any religious person should be able to make his anger subside. I really believe anger will bring unhappiness to yourself and others, and turn friends into enemies. I have to have tolerance and forgiveness.”
“If we continue to insist on truth, we begin to possess a sort of power that in the end is stronger than any violence we will come up against. And this has given us hope and laughter where it seems there shouldn’t be any.”
“Those who are driven by ignorance and anger are like a crazed or drunken elephant. That kind of elephant will only make a mess for himself and others. There’s nothing to feel for him but sympathy and pity.”
Palden Gyatso wrote The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk (1998). He will be speaking in Anchorae on November 3 & 8. See page 4 for details.
Mohandas Gandhi
“A man who, when faced by danger, behaves like a mouse, is rightly called a coward. He harbors violence and hatred in his heart and would kill his enemy if he could without being hurt himself. He is a stranger to non-violence.”
“One must learn the art of dying in the training for non-violence....the votary of non-violence has to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice of the highest type in order to be free from fear.”
“I accept the interpretation of Ahimsa namely that it is not merely a negative state of harmlessness but it is a positive state of love, of doing good even to the evil-doer.” 24
If there is dogma in the Gandhian philosophy, it centers here: that the only test of truth is action based on the refusal to do harm. Tapas came, in the Gandhian interpretation, to mean willingness to suffer in oneself to win the respect of an opponent. Gandhi extended suffering through sacrifice to the social and political sphere. Ahimsa is not just ‘non-violence.’ It is ‘Action based on the refusal to do harm, to kill or to damage.’ From Conquest of Violence, by Joan Bondurant
Jewish Statement Against Torture
Inspired by the teachings of our tradition, we call on the United States Government:
To repudiate the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in any and every setting under United States control;
To affirm that it will uphold the letter and spirit of the laws regulating interrogation and detention, including the Constitution of the United States, Acts of Congress, and the international treaties that it has signed and ratified and to which it remains bound;
To state in unequivocal terms that the use of any tactics of physical abuse, the deprivation of food, water, sleep, disorientation, or purposive humiliation of a prisoner is prohibited;
To provide visits with the International Committee of the Red Cross for all those in the custody of U.S. military, military contractors, or intelligence officials;
To reject the practice (referred to as “extraordinary rendition”) in which certain prisoners are sent to countries which use extreme forms of torture in interrogations;
To investigate all allegations of torture in any setting under United States control and to apply proper legal sanctions against individuals found to have committed acts of torture and
To create an independent commission to investigate and report on the detention and interrogation procedures of US military and intelligence agencies and to set a course of corrective action.