This is the tweet in question:
Now, I realize that seems "harsh" and even, to some ears, very "unpatriotic". I'm certain there are other things I "could say" in potentially "better ways". But, that's what I said because that's what I meant.
There's a connection to be made here between the violence of yesterday's explosive revelation of exactly the type, means and ends of the American CIA's use of torture in the so-called "War on Terror". The demonic brutality depicted in that report is just that -- demonic brutality. CIA leadership and the political administrations that suppoted them are guilty of Nazi-style brutality (Verschärfte Vernehmung, anyone?). (If you think I'm exaggerating, that the logic and practices of American torture are substantially different from the Nazi practices, try a re-reading of Kogon's Theory and Practice of Hell.)
Make no doubt about it, this is news of how fallen and demonic the American political and military systems are.
I read Orwell's 1984 in high school. I know how "doublespeak" works. Doublespeak is any language that deliberately disguises, distorts or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak is most euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing), in which case it's primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It plays off the intentional ambiguity in language and engages in all sorts of actual inversions of meaning (for example, naming a state of war is "peace"). Doublespeak always disguises the nature of the truth.
"Enhanced interrogation" is Orwellian doublespeak.
And doublespeak is an essential tool of the powers and principalities used to engage in violence against the truth. To quote William Stringfellow here: "[E]ach and every stratagem and resort of the principalities seeks the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension which specifically distinguish human beings from all other creatures. Whatever form or appearance it make take, demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience".
The aim of demonic assault is to morally incapacitate human beings through the neutralization of the conscience. Stringfellow calls these assaults on truth babel. Babel, of which doublespeak Stringfellow explicitly names, does two things.
First, babel overwhelms and dumbfounds the conscience:
Graph of New York Times usage of the phrase "enhanced interrogation" over time:
Babel means the inversion of language, verbal inflation, libel, rumor, euphemism and coded phrases, rhetorical wantonness, redundancy, hyperbole, such profusion in speech and sound that comprehension is impaired, nonsense, sophistry, jargon, noise, incoherence, a chaos of voices and tongues, falsehood, blasphemy ...Next, babel then lays the foundation for violence. Stringfellow quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
Essentially, babel targets the faculties of comprehension -- sanity and conscience ...
Let us not forget that violence does not exist by itself and cannot do so; it is necessarily interwoven with lies. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.Example:
Graph of New York Times usage of the phrase "enhanced interrogation" over time:
I may not be a very patriotic man, but I know doublespeak when I hear it. I may be a little rough around the edges, but I know the powers and principalities at work when I see them.
Make no doubt about it: Yesterday's report about the CIA's torture activities reveals a demonic activity.