The slogan or phrase, "Arbeit Macht Frei" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei), meaning "work will set you free," was present at the "gates" of Nazi concentration camps, during World War II, and I shouldn't need to say that there is a fundamental similarity between that message and a message that is implicit in a commonly-reported "rationale" for the use of torture. Proponents of the use of torture would have people believe that the "purpose" of the torture is to cause the person being tortured to provide some sort of specific or as-yet-unspecified information, and the implication of this supposed "rationale" for the use of torture is that the person being tortured must simply do the "work" of providing the information and then either be charged with the crime or released, although the latter outcome seems unlikely to be something that would commonly follow the revelation of information through torture. One has to ask oneself if a person who would viciously assault a person in a torture session of indeterminate length, in a manner that is almost indistinguishable from rape, as I've discussed in recent postings on this blog, is going to be satisfied with only the information that the person purports to want the person being tortured to reveal. Torture always constitutes a no-win scenario for the person being tortured (and also for the people engaging in the torture, given the tendency of violence to incite violence and the erosion of trust and credibility that must result from obsecenly-violent actions by people who have tremendously-more power than the people they are assaulting), given that the revelation of the desired information by the person being tortured is almost certainly going to provide a message, to the torturer, that the person must have even more significant information that has yet to be revealed. The torturer won't take no for an answer, and nothing can ever satisfy someone who would abandon all of the characteristics of a living being for the sake of a few pathetic bits of bullshit, monkey "intelligence" that no one with any real "intelligence" would give a goddamn thing about. As everyone knows, the torturer can assume, even though it is unlikely to be true, that a person who is being tortured and who has failed to provide the "desired" information has simply not been pushed hard enough, through the use of more physical and, by way of the domination over the person's body and mind, sexual assaults, to "do the work" by revealing the information. No one thinks that people being held in concentration camps could have earned their release, during World War II, by "doing more work" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei), but, for some reason, people buy into that bullshit when some half-wit marches around on a tv talk show and blabs in an icy way about the potential value of torturing people and acting like a bunch of fucking animals.
There's a similarly-disturbing message that's implicit in the rationales that people have offered to support the idea of mandating public service by young people. Apparently, it isn't enough that young people are forced to do 16-24 years of mindless tasks, in the educational system, that have little relevance to the work they ultimately do. The notion of "self-sacrifice" for the greater good can become very similar to the situation one saw in Nazi concentration camps. As soon as you decide that someone has a responsibility to sacrifice his or her basic human rights (and one needs to be honest and acknowledge that this is exactly what mandatory public service would demand of people and exactly what the military draft demanded of people) and do some arbitrarily-defined set of tasks in "service" of the government or the public, you've handed an absolute form of control to the people who have thrown away the human rights of young people or the other people performing the "services." One saw some of these terrible consequences in the ways in which young people were treated in the 1930s by the agencies or contracted organizations that managed various government-associated public works programs. Many young people were never paid for their work, and the pittances of money were, instead, sent to their parents. Of course, this is slavery, much as the military draft is, as many people have argued, slavery and is almost certainly unconstitutional, but they're young people and apparently don't deserve to have the same rights as other people do. If the government were to require young people to do public service, no one is going to be likely to do anything in response to a young person's reports that he or she has never been paid or that the fulfillment of his or her "requirement" of forced labor is having a devastating effect on his or her well-being, etc. Who is going to believe a young person or a detainee in a secret prison, especially when the young person or detainee doesn't have any money or any means of defending himself or herself? A detainee in a secret prison doesn't even have the hope of ever obtaining any means of defense against the ongoing assaults, and any proponent of that kind of treatment of a person should be ashamed of himself or herself.
There's a similarly-disturbing message that's implicit in the rationales that people have offered to support the idea of mandating public service by young people. Apparently, it isn't enough that young people are forced to do 16-24 years of mindless tasks, in the educational system, that have little relevance to the work they ultimately do. The notion of "self-sacrifice" for the greater good can become very similar to the situation one saw in Nazi concentration camps. As soon as you decide that someone has a responsibility to sacrifice his or her basic human rights (and one needs to be honest and acknowledge that this is exactly what mandatory public service would demand of people and exactly what the military draft demanded of people) and do some arbitrarily-defined set of tasks in "service" of the government or the public, you've handed an absolute form of control to the people who have thrown away the human rights of young people or the other people performing the "services." One saw some of these terrible consequences in the ways in which young people were treated in the 1930s by the agencies or contracted organizations that managed various government-associated public works programs. Many young people were never paid for their work, and the pittances of money were, instead, sent to their parents. Of course, this is slavery, much as the military draft is, as many people have argued, slavery and is almost certainly unconstitutional, but they're young people and apparently don't deserve to have the same rights as other people do. If the government were to require young people to do public service, no one is going to be likely to do anything in response to a young person's reports that he or she has never been paid or that the fulfillment of his or her "requirement" of forced labor is having a devastating effect on his or her well-being, etc. Who is going to believe a young person or a detainee in a secret prison, especially when the young person or detainee doesn't have any money or any means of defending himself or herself? A detainee in a secret prison doesn't even have the hope of ever obtaining any means of defense against the ongoing assaults, and any proponent of that kind of treatment of a person should be ashamed of himself or herself.
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