Evil Is Always Evil

Peter Hitchens writes:

There is nothing more dangerous in the world than a man who thinks he is doing good. Such men are capable of the most dreadful horrors.

And it was such men who allowed and carried out the shameful torture which we now know for certain was inflicted by ‘our’ side in the great unending battle against ‘Al Qaeda’ or ‘ISIS’ that we are constantly told we are fighting.

This is why – as a patriotic Christian conservative from a Service family – I strive so hard to puncture and mock the ridiculous rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’.

The truth remains that it is more likely that an eagle will drop a tortoise on your head from the sky than that you will be affected by terrorism in your entire life.

And in any case Mrs Theresa May and MI5, MI6, the CIA and GCHQ can’t protect you from either of these remote dangers.

If we continue to believe this self-righteous anti-terror rubbish, we will in the end be destroyed by our own hypocrisy.

If we, the self-proclaimed apostles of liberty and justice, freeze men to death, chained on concrete floors, or torment them into absurd confessions of non-existent crimes, or cram them without trial into maddening dungeons, then we will become the very thing we claim to fight.

And we will have been defeated by ourselves.

I know many do not like it when I say this. When, back in January 2002, I attacked the treatment of captives at Guantanamo on this page, my postbag and my email inbox seethed with angry denunciations.

I had written: ‘If you loathe terrorist murder and support the righteous use of force, then you ought also to feel queasy about the sight of a fellow creature grovelling in chains before his armed captors.’

The letters I received all said roughly the same. The shackled, kneeling prisoners ‘deserved everything they got’.

In vain I wrote back to point out that we had no idea if they had actually committed any crimes.

The righteous mood was so strong that revelations of torture – at the time – might well have met with cheers and applause.

But it’s at the time that you have to stand against these things.

That is why each of us needs to rediscover the idea of absolute rules, rules we have no power to change, which simply prohibit some actions.

We think of temptation in terms of too much chocolate, or sex, or whatever it is that most makes us want to stray.

But the temptation to do cruel things – or to witness them and approve – is in almost all of us, and has to be curbed.

Torture is not just invariably wrong, it is also useless and worse than useless. People will say anything to stop the pain and fear.

Waterboarding, as my late brother Christopher discovered for himself in a courageous experiment, is much worse than it sounds, much like drowning only with deliberate malice added on.

The ridiculous dispatch of troops in armoured vehicles to Heathrow in 2003 – militarily worthless posturing – followed the invention of a ‘plot to attack the airport’ by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who just wanted the agony and misery of waterboarding to stop.

He would have revealed a plot to blow up the Moon if he had been asked to.

But I’ll add this: as far as I’m concerned, even if the information was right, torture is never, ever justified.

It corrupts the society that allows it, and incidentally fosters endless hatred among the victims, which may return to harm or destroy us decades hence.

Evil is always evil, and always begets more evil.