Professor Sir Nigel Rodley argued on BBC News this evening that President Bush’s admission of torture should be followed by a criminal prosecution. That torture is quite simply wrong and ‘they will torture us if we torture them’. Excuse me Professor, I think you haven’t quite grasped the situation: They want to kill us. Whatever their reasons for killing us or torturing us, it’s not to do with our water-boarding them (in fact the perceived barbarity of the enemy is to be respected and honoured historically in some warlike/terrorist perpetuating cultures). This demonstrates how far the human rights dreamers are away from the reality of the war. They want to kill us for being Western, economically successful and believing in democracy. This jealousy and often base hate is masked in all sorts of dissimulations (it is both the prerogative and habit of evil to deceive), E.g. Israel’s acts in Gaza, the war in Iraq, the presence of Western troops in Afghanistan. Unfortunately it is often the courage to do brutal acts that perpetuates the survival of civilisation over barbarity. While evil exists, preservation of the greater good is paramount through often visceral courage. President Bush, thank god, had the courage to do this and not live in a dangerous subjective utopia that leads to elimination.
Professor Rodley, sitting in his warm room in his university (like many a human rights lawyer) needs to understand a few very fundamental things:
1. The world is very horrible place with lots of nasty people that want to destroy his way of life. His ability to sit there warm and safe to dream and abstractly pontificate in his office is based on the existence of the nation state.
2. The nation state has to be protected, without it we can’t dream of the non-sense of human rights or the commonsense of liberty.
3. That human rights can destroy the nation-state, by giving unmeritorious people rights through being universal and thus economically crippling Governments. It can also do so by weakening us in the face of those who are our enemies.
4. That the people whom we torture are fighting to end all talk of human rights and liberty, and if they win the human rights lawyers will either be censored or, most likely as the Taliban have shown with respect to dissent, killed.
The obvious advice for Professor Rodley is to follow President Bush and self-preserve. It is self-evident, to all but those who have lost touch with common-sense and reality, that preserving life and liberty has to come before the ability to dream.
Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2010.
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010.
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