Once again -- to remain human means to say NO!

Once upon a time -- when the New York Times revealed America's Vietnamese "allies" were torturing their enemies in "tiger cages," when photos revealed what US soldiers in Iraq were doing to prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- Erudite Partner and I would mutter to each other, when are they going to bring it home?

Yes, we knew that torture was all too prevalent in US prisons and jails, for example by Chicago police in this century. 

But local police malpractice and terror seemed a different thing than torture practiced on people who had been declared "the other" by the powers that be. 

But now we have that. 

My Erudite Partner Rebecca Gordon returns to the topic of her academic research in a current article for TomDispatch.

Everything Old Is New Again: The Trump Administration Revives Institutionalized Torture 

... in the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is indeed willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land). 

Every torture regime will identify a group or groups of people as “legitimate” targets. In the United States today, immigrants form just such a group, characterized by the Trump administration as either superhuman (“terrorists,” “monsters”) or subhuman (“vermin”). Super- or sub-, they are deemed unworthy of ordinary human rights.

But the fear generated by such threats of torture penetrates beyond those most immediately threatened, encouraging everyone else to comply with and bow down before the regime. Trump has indeed claimed that “the homegrowns are next.”

 

We face a test. How do we choose to respond to the barbarism of our authorities rooted in the fears of our neighbor citizens? We are not helpless.

... Those of us living in the United States of 2025 are already being called on to resist the centrifugal forces of isolation and mistreatment in the age of Trump. In this time of torture redux, small efforts to maintain social connections become real acts of resistance. We have already seen whole neighborhoods spontaneously resist ICE raids by pouring into the streets. That is one crucial kind of solidarity.  

I’d argue that anything we do today to maintain human connections — that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters – is also an act of solidarity in such grim times. We will need them all in the days to come. 

Go read it all.