Torture: an instrument of State Terrorism (12)

Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism

12 – Torture: an instrument of State Terrorism

Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo

In policy, Terrorism includes war, repression, deportation and any action that uses Terror as a means to achieve political ends; and it has torture as an excellent component. All Governments with “insoluble” political problems, confronted with conflicts that cannot reduce in a different way, do systematically practise the torture and without even bothering to hide it to their allies; which, for their part, do not conceal the understanding and sympathy that “the reason of imperialistic State” inspires them.

Torture is not an occasional excess of the repression, nor a gratuitous procedure, nor simply or only a means of interrogation, information and research, or instrument of vengeance: effect of the cruelty and sadism of the henchmen who practice it. Torture is an “institution” inseparable from Despotism and Terrorism, and does by itself reveal the criminal and terrorist nature of a political activity or régime; whatever their alleged ideological affiliation may be. It is, above all, an invaluable element of Terrorism, to physically and morally crush and humiliate the Peoples who resist oppression. It is only hypocrisy, the “condemnation of violence, terrorism and torture” formulated by all those who at the same time do support the imperialistic régime of military occupation and colonization over the subjugated Peoples a régime that needs and makes possible, necessary and effective such procedures.

An absolute imperialism cannot do without State Terrorism, and the State Terrorism cannot do without torture: an invaluable, fundamental and unavoidable instrument of repression against all political – actual or virtual – opposition in the face of imperialism. Colonialist imperialism, and the continuation of imperialism, are crimes incompatible with fundamental humanrights and with all authentic Democracy.

 The hypocritical formula – recently coined – to describe the practice of torture in our Country as: “more than exceptional but not-systematic”, is a new discovery of the globalized imperialistic and fascist casuistic. A discovery likely called to provide great services to the worldwide reaction, inasmuch as it has been quickly adopted by the officials of the UNO; which allows us to suppose the use they will make of it. Meanwhile, the Head of State of the hegemonic Power finds himself powerless to prevent that its “specialized” Agencies – whose shamelessness and contempt for the public opinion and their own legislation allows them to exhibit torture with the cynical euphemism “Enhanced interrogation techniques” – can create and maintain cesspits of criminality in various places of the world, whose function is the unpunished practice of torture.

“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.)

The “torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” is an absolute crime, whereas the homicide is a relative one; what would have represented a progress with respect to the ecclesiastical and civil – ancient and modern – law if it had been consistently applied at the UNO and in the member States, which has not happened. War has also been “banned” – except by decision of the UNO or in a case of self-defence – with the same result. The successive Declarations or Conventions against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment have not even established how to perform this regulation.

Commissions and Courts of human rights, as well as various NGOs, are also unable to even raise the question of State Terrorism. Their Commissioners and Delegates in functions are more concerned about not disturbing or upsetting the sovereign Governments: which with that condition and in their own interest tolerate them, than about denouncing their State Terrorism and defending its victims. The fear towards Governments, the distortion of the method of investigation and evidence (with selection, filtering or corruption of the Commissioners and Witnesses), and the “polite” and ethereal “denunciations” of repressive behaviours described as a “threat” or a “danger” to human rights (when it is notorious that these ones have been violated for centuries and are being violated daily and effectively in everybody’s view and conscience), are attitudes that characterize these Commissioners and Delegates, and that result in the defence of the criminal State and the discredit of its victims.

The scrupulous negativistic weighting of torture: described by the Committee against Torture as “not exceptional but not systematic”, illustrates well the firm intention of doing nothing against the one nor the other. (If that “not exceptional but not systematic torture” were applied directly to the same Commissioners, could these perceive better, by simple introspection, the mediocre relief provided to victims by means of so refined considerations.) Regional and private Organizations do, privately, the same.

The Spanish despotism-imperialism had been, at times, object of (measured) reprobation from Anglo-Saxon liberals and even from some French ones. There was a time when the revelations of a British correspondent about the torture of Montjuich raised the wrath of the masses of protesters showing their revulsion in Trafalgar Square. In Paris, Sartre made his own the principles of the struggle of Peoples for national freedom, which in the Basque case identified with the Eta group (whose propaganda he had adopted without the less precaution or critical reserve). Now instead, in Western Europe just as in the former Yugoslavia or Chechnya, global policy and ideology are organized according to a joint strategy based on the ruin of fundamental human rights and the repression of Peoples. Politicians, ideologues and mass-media of the United Kingdom and the USA have joined the german, Spanish and French National-socialism, and do conceal and idealize the imperialistic Nationalism and the State Terrorism.

Imperialism, repression and State Terrorism, murder and “torture: more than sporadic, occasional or incidental but not-systematic”, do count on the blind eye, the sympathetic solidarity and the resolute support of the United Nations, which have renounced the rules in this regard that they did adopt and develop but did not apply, and which now offer the spectacle of the rottenness of an Organization in which so many hopes had been placed, now disappointed by its very constituent vices and by half a century of capitulation and impotence.

The Spanish fascists: formerly undesirable and unpresentable, “walk like real cocky” – quoting their own way of speaking – in the same precincts in which the inalienable human rights and of self-determination of all Peoples were proclaimed. They have carried their monopoly on propaganda there, while the Peoples suffering from their imperialistic Aggression and Terrorism are deprived by the new world order of their most elementary and inalienable rights of expression, independence and legitimate self-defence.

The “international” Institutions, which – while hypocritically invoking Charters, Resolutions and Declarations on human rights – have been covering and supporting the imperialistic aggression and genocide throughout the world for fifty years, are not afraid to expose themselves when they register, endorse and redound without delay nor information the accusations, propaganda and dictates of the Spanish Francoist, Imperialistic and Terrorist Government against the Basque People. The European Imperialistic Union: self-proclaimed protector of human rights and of the “human dimension” of European Communities, does systematically adopt and disseminate the nationalist and xenophobic propaganda dictated to it by the agents of mass intoxication of French and Spanish fascism; and it hides and legitimises the violence, repression and terrorism that did found and do maintain the imperialistic oppression against the Basque People and State. For his part, Pope Wojtyla reproduced the dictates of the Spanish military Bishop Sebastian more quickly than Julius II did transcribe those of Ferdinand “the Catholic”.

In the democratic UK of Great Britain, the bands in support of the francoism and of the French and Spanish imperialism do practice the conditioning of “spontaneous” reflexes and associations through the montage of documentary Italian-Germanic Fascist and National-socialist images, mixed with similar ones referred to Basque or Corsican movements. Meanwhile, no English, French or German journalist would even think of publicly “reveal” banalities without interest about so current and honourable universal institutions such as are the violation of fundamental human rights, repression and torture, when he can sell his services and make himself financed and promoted by governmental propaganda agencies.

As for the “left-wing” French Nationalism, it no longer tries to play its traditional role of cover-up of the “right-wing” chauvinism: no sooner the corsican or Basque problems are manifested, than the psychological warfare, defamation and insults against the Peoples still resistant to the French “universal nation” – and to its Nationalism, xenophobia and denial of all fundamental rights – are its motor, motto and line of conduct. The journal “Les Temps Modernes”, where Sartre or Davant made the monopolist apology of the Eta group, is now loudspeaker and monopoly of the most aggressive and reactionary imperialistic and fascist Nationalism against the freedom of Peoples.

Press, radio and television professionals put lying and disinformation in the service of fascist propaganda. The Adler, Barbier, Calvi, Domenach, Kahn, Lanzmann, La Villardière or Taguieff do hide or idealize the crimes of French-Spanish imperialistic Nationalism, and spread and defend the lies, falsifications, slander and paralogisms which are the only argument of the Fascism. “Interviews, debates and reports of central, autonomous and regional televisions” are prefabricated and planned farces where – selected the rapporteurs and excluded the opponents – are being raised the questions that suit and serve the responses of the fascist agent on duty, and where the spokespersons of xenophobic and racist totalitarianism do find privileged and exclusive tribunes. The propaganda of the heroic times of international fascism did never reach so far. Even though General Franco called himself Caudillo of his organic-democratic rule of law State, the Tyrant himself did never call fascist-terrorists to the “treacherous Provinces that took up arms against the Government of the National Movement, totalitarian instrument at the service of the unity and the greatness of the Fatherland”.

(From: ‘Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism’.)