My China Star

More recent inquiries and studies behind the ineffectiveness of torture. But the worst thing is that torture is a nasty kick in the very slow path of humanization of our world, in the definitive conquest of civility. The Universal Declaration of human rights of 1948, which protects us against torture among many other things, signed and ratified by almost all States of the world, has been a major milestone in the advancement of civility. The Bush veto a law prohibiting torture is going backwards, a step toward the barbarism of incalculable consequences. It is open and one of the more perverse principles, legal consolidation which aims that the end justifies the means. Principle perverse, because it denies the collective ethics that humans give us with hesitant progress since for five millennia; because it denies the ethical principles that ensure the dignity of all and prevent that we desaparezcamos.

It’s worth thinking that this veto is not important, because, ultimately, those who suffer torture are few and are bad. Not better, because these years of alleged fight against terrorism have demonstrated by active and passive that many innocent people have been arrested, tortured and imprisoned by mere suspicions, his ethnic image or physical appearance. And they have shown that, in spite of all villanies committed, all violations of human rights perpetrated, the world has not won anything but security. I don’t know why comes me to mind a poem attributed to the playwright Bertol Brech, but that actually wrote Martin Niemuller, a courageous German Protestant pastor who faced nazi Germany: when the nazis imprisoned Socialist, /no said nothing, /pues I was not a Socialist. When detained trade unionists, /no said nothing, /porque was not a Union Member.