I have actually seen a number of commentators today pointing at the Taliban massacre of children at a school run by the Pakistani Army as justification for the torture of prisoners. "See what animals 'they' are? 'They' deserve everything they get."
(Ignoring that apparently quite of a few of "them" that we tortured weren't really "them," but innocents as well.)
This lines up nicely with Dick Cheney saying that "real" torture was the 9/11 attacks and the human suffering they caused, so anything done under his watch was a necessary triviality.
This attack by the Taliban was a heinous crime, the intentional targeting of children. If anyone behind this were captured I would have a very hard time feeling too sorry for them if they were mistreated or tortured while in custody.
But this "Look at how awful these animals are" called to mind something else. I was just reading Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association noting that in war, bad things happen, but that torture is okay because the Bible has all sorts of cases of God sanctifying rulers and the "Good Guys" to commit violence against the "Bad Guys."
Which then leads us to one example of that, in Numbers 31:7-18 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+31%3A7-18&version=NIV). After the Israelites have conquered Midian, per the Lord's orders, Moses is torqued off at them after they've only massacred all the adult males: _"Have you allowed all the women to live? They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."_
See, I'll stack that up against what these Taliban assholes did, any day. Kill all the men. Kill all the women. Kill all the boys. Save the virginal girls "for yourselves."
And that's hardly an isolated instance in the Old Testament.
"But we don't do that today," some might argue. But you've got conservative Christian dolts like Fischer arguing that this sort of "total warfare" is a God-given justification for us to use torture (or anything else we want, presumably) in war against The Bad Guys today.
How is that any different from the Taliban attacking an Army school, retaliating (they say) against Pakistani Army attacks that have killed their women and children? I'm sure Fischer would say that the Christian God is good and real and the Muslim God is fake and evil, and therefore anything our side does is just and anything they do is unjust. But that's a wee bit hard to objectively prove, and it doesn't really help settle much.
And, no, it's not just about religion. Consider the actions of the Nazis before and during World War II, the intentional mass starvation of the Ukraine by the Soviets in the 1920s, the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge — none of them driven by religion in the traditional sense. But all of them cases of people putting ideology and tribalism of any stripe ahead of a common humanity, turning off compassion and seeking excuses for bloody vengeance against those who they feel (sometimes rightly) have done them wrong.
And it's always a litany of "They started it" and "They did it more," like righteous first graders brawling in the school yard, only with more blood and more tears. And "I'm going to stop them from doing it again by scaring them off" or "by dealing with them once and for all" also shows up, providing an excuse for vengefully upping the body count, no matter what the cost.
I'm not going to argue "moral equivalency" games here, because they're meaningless. Doing wrong is doing wrong, whether ordered by the ideological leaders of past or present, whether done for vengeance, or the tribe, or the One True Idea, or because God is whispering in your ear.
I agree 100%. I was listening to an interview this afternoon on NPR. All I could think was "and now the govt will retaliate in kind or worse, continueing the spiral." I would think at some point someone would say "Hey, wait a minute! We've been trying to up the ante on these sorts of situations for decades. Human kind has been doing it since day one. But who wins? When does the attacked finally say "ok, we give up! you've killed enough of our children, sisters and brothers, that we cant win, so here is the white flag." It takes an atomic bomb or practical genicide, and even then there is still a smoldering, waiting for the chance to retaliate. We have to stop at some point… dont we?
+Brian Barth There's a lot of different issues floating around the cluster of thoughts. Part of it is, "Yeah, how do we break the cycle without either destroying the other or being destroyed?" Part of it is, "Are we so different? Do we want to be?"