Every time we chat, and the discussion turns towards capitalism, she’s the one who without any hesitation just says we should kill them all. Now, though, it’s gone further to torture. And she names names. In addition to people like Bezos and Musk, she includes Ben Shapiro, Andrew Tate and others.
I say we should force them to work and maybe learn the error of their ways (After the revolution of course. During it many of these fucks will die and I’ll be glad).
Her current jobs is extremely horrible. She’s being massively overworked, verbally abused and, of course, underpaid. So I get her frustration. But it’s also scary. I don’t want her to get in any trouble.
I don’t know if I should be gently turning her away from imagining a slow and painful torture of capitalists or not. Am I being a lib or is she too extreme?
Generally speaking, torture is violence that is employed not to achieve some immediate benefit, like neutralizing a threat, but for the sake of pain itself. If you're hurting someone because someone else is in danger, whether that's shooting a soldier in war time or punching a fascist in the throat, that is justifiable. Hurting people for the sake of revenge, or sadistic pleasure, or to "make an example", is undesirable in all ways. As a means of coercion it is provably ineffective. People will say anything in hopes that their torturer will stop hurting them. Any attempt to gain actionable intelligence from torture is a fools errand, you will have great difficulty discerning useful information from the screams. A nice dinner and pleasant conversation with a sharp, observant, and clever interrogator is a reliable, consistent, and effective way of extracting actionable intelligence from a prisoner. A person treated with kindness and respect, no matter how little they deserve it, will often become a compliant snitch. They can even be turned in some cases and made in to an infiltrator, or an advisor. Whereas a person tortured becomes immediately unreliable and is unlikely to ever comply or provide assistance of their own free will.
Additionally, the knowledge that you torture prisoners will harden the resolve of their comrades to oppose you. Soldiers who are sure of torture will fight to the death, making every battle far more costly in lives and materiel. They will kill themselves rather than being taken alive and being tortured in to betraying their siblings in arms, depriving you of possible intelligence and of bargaining chips. Prisoners well fed, well treated, and healthy are a cheap and easy propaganda coup; You can demonstrate your magnanimity and good intentions to the world by showing them that even the most hated enemies are treated with dignity and respect, proving with your actions your belief that all humans deserve a decent and secure living, no matter how wretched they are. If they are to be eliminated do it quickly, quietly, and without fuss. If you intend to try them do it in an open court, with advocates given to them and a real process where they may legitimately defend themselves. People value honesty, fairness, and integrity, even if they don't always like the results.
I would invite you to consider the fate of UN soldiers captured by the Koreans during the Korean war. About 23 prisoners refused to return to the US and Britain during the exchange of prisoners at the end of the war, deciding to remain in the DPRK or PRC.. The US was so terrified of this that it invented the propaganda concept of "Brainwashing", convincing itself and it's citizens that the Koreans had used insidious mind control processes to overwrite the minds of the defecting soldiers and instill communist beliefs in them. When other soldiers confessed to biological warfare and other war crimes the US Government responded by asserting they have been "brainwashed" and made to say these things, going so far as expressing pity for the soldiers who had simply revealed the terrible crimes the US committed in Korea.
I don't know whether DPRK forces tortured UN prisoners, and I don't know what the actions described as torture were; I would readily believe that UN troops were made to listen to long lectures about their crimes and about communism, and that they faced deprivation and poor conditions while held by the logistically strained communist forces, but US sources are so full of lies and distortions I can't say anything reliably. But the soldiers who voluntarily defected shook the US establishment and resulted in a scramble to discredit them and prevent the US public from developing sympathy or asking dangerous questions.
Sun Tzu hammers on this constantly in the Art of the War. If armies engage in warfare then the land will be despoiled and your own armies ability to fight will be inevitably depleted. Whenever possible one should endeavor to defeat the enemy without ever firing a shot. Demoralized soldiers who believe that you treat prisoners well will find themselves wondering if surrendering is not preferable to dying miserably in a ditch. If your returning prisoners tell their comrades that they were treated with decency and honor then your enemies are more likely to view you favorably in future negotiations. In all ways restraint from the indulgence of sadism is desirable if ones wish is to preserve the lives of ones comrades, to reduce their suffering, and to bring war to a swift conclusion. When you engage in battle fight without mercy or remorse, but when you are victorious be magnanimous and fair, and the conflict will go easier for you.
That is not the purpose of torture. Torture has nothing to do with extracting information from prisoners. It is, after all, completely ineffective as you said. The real purpose of torture is to terrorize your target audience and it is completely effective, especially when used within the framework of counterinsurgency. If there's a village that's harboring insurgents, you torture select villagers (ideally insurgents instead of an innocent bystander) in order to make people afraid of harboring insurgents lest they be the next person to be waterboarded. The stick of torture is paired up with the carrot of rewarding villagers who hand over insurgents to the troops engaging in counterinsurgency. People who harbor insurgents get waterboarded while people who hand over insurgents get a year's worth of wages as a reward.
Of course, they are obvious problems with this approach to socialists, one enormous problem being able to find well-adjusted people who can sleep at night after spending the whole day burning cigarette butts into people's skins and hooking up electrodes onto people's genitals. There's a reason why DeSantis is incapable of acting like a normal human, and being a willing participant of torture is absolutely part of it.
Insurgents are generally quite good at ferreting out collaborators, or people they think are collaborators, and torturing them to death in very public ways. For this reason torturing suspected insurgents to coerce cooperation from the public is generally ineffective. People forced to choose between being murdered by the security forces and being murdered by the insurgency will do anything they can think of to escape. The only thing it accomplishes is increasing the torment and suffering of the population. Generally speaking occupying forces do not care and will continue to torture anyway, but the most effective method remains to treat your prisoners and intelligence sources with dignity. Insurgencies are generally impossible to combat with conventional forces because the occupying force is invariably made of up young people with no personal interest in the colonial project who are suffering constant trauma and alienation from their role as occupiers and oppressors. Inevitably some number of them will engage in atrocities of one sort or another and no matter how they try to engender good will they will lose support from the public.
The only successes in combating insurgencies have been accomplished with total merciless destruction. The US famously kills civilians in great numbers and designates any male between 16 and 60 as a combatant. The Boers were finally suppressed by concentrating them in camps to cut off the insurgents from all support. Many Boers died in those camps but the British were indifferent to human misery as they are in all cases. The Indigenous American nations were not completely subdued until the Bison were slaughtered almost to the point of extinction, denying the Indigenous plains people their key source of food and other essentials. The last revolts were finally suppressed when the surviving indigenous people were forcibly removed to some of the most marginal and inhospitable regions of the United States. In many other places the Indigenous people were simply exterminated. The Turks suppressed Armenian resistance by forcing a million people to walk through the desert with no food, water, or shelter, resulting in an incredible amount of death. The Prague Ghetto was razed to the ground. The Nazis never successfully ended Partisan activity across their territory, and in local areas where they were successful it was generally by cornering the partisans and exterminating them to the last fighter. In Algeria the increasing brutality of the French occupiers galvanized the Resistance and after years of fighting and an immense death toll the French occupiers were forced to retreat across the Mediterranean. The US utterly failed to suppress the Afghan resistance groups during it's 20 year long occupation, simply failing to realize that every person they killed was part of an extensive kinship network that was activated to seek revenge. The Houthis recently began peace talks with the Saudi/US coalition after enduring years of genocidal attacks on essential civilian food, water, and medical infrastructure, the Saudis having proven unable to subdue them and increasingly vulnerable to Houthi counter attacks. FARC was never defeated in the field and finally came out of the jungle after a negotiated surrender. The Mongols of the Great Khan's Horde famously suppressed rebellion by exterminating every single person in a city that rose up. There are still regions where they so thoroughly exterminated resisting populations that they remain unsettled to this day. Shining Path has operated for nearly thirty years before it's leaders were finally captured, and small successor groups are still active. In Vietnam the US routinely exterminated entire villages, flattened entire cities, and forced peasants in to concentration camps euphemistically referred to as "strategic hamlets", but still failed to completely suppress Viet Cong irregular fighters and ultimately lost the war. In Iraq the US's attempts to suppress Iraqi insurgencies were a decade long disaster. While the US had some successes the Iraqi civil war of 2006 saw sectarian death squads exterminating or forcibly displacing entire neighborhoods of their enemies. When the US did have real successes it was often in situations where they were able to draw insurgents in to hopeless pitched battles, then unleash heavy artillery and airstrikes while claiming civilians had left the area. In Fallujah the US notoriously used tanks to drop entire buildings with point blank HE rounds, while clearing alleys by firing nets of high explosives normally used for mine clearence then setting them off to frag the entire street. Despite murdering hundreds of thousands to over a million people in their occupation the US non-the-less failed entirely and ISIS arose to terrorize the region shortly after the majority of US troops were withdrawn
This is a consistent pattern with insurgencies against colonial occupiers - The occupying forces frequently fail to suppress the insurgency, and where they do it is only with tremendous violence and destruction, if not a campaign of total extermination. The COIN community generally regards extermination of the population to be the only reliable and effective method of counterinsurgency, but they are usually restricted from enacting it due to prevaricating leaders who need to disguise their brutality to retain public support. This often results in insurgencies that stretch on for years or decades until the occupying forces are so thoroughly demoralized and the occupying nation so sick of war that the occupiers withdraw.
I agree with your general points although I think there's a big difference between counterinsurgency waged by a foreign colonizing force and counterinsurgency waged by a domestic security apparatus. In a domestic context, you are far more likely to get willing collaborators and snitches, and the pigs are actually motivated to enact their particular brand of terror for the sake of upholding the status quo where they get paid +$150k/yr shoving donuts in their faces. Political prisoners like imprisoned Black Panthers are undergoing torture, whether through beatings, being intentionally infected with Covid, or solitary confinement. The pigs obviously aren't torturing them to extract information especially since the BPP is defunct anyways.
But the reverse is also true - In domestic situation the brutality of COIN will radicalize people when they see their own countrymen murdering their neighbors. I'm doxing myself, but I was real close to the place where George Floyd was murdered in 2020. The police terrorized the neighborhood for months afterwards. Parking helicopters low over houses all night. Running convoys of twenty cop cars with their sirens blaring through the neighborhood at 45mph in the middle of the night. They refused to come to any calls at all for months, and when they did come in to snatch someone they came in 40 deep with machine guns. Just months and months of terrorism and violence, right out in the open, mask fully off.
And when the referendum to dismantle the police department and build a new progressive lib whatever the fuck public safety organization forty six percent of the city voted yea. Minneapolis is super white. The Minnesotans are very racist in their superficially nice and polite way. The neighborhoods that the cops were terrorizing had large minority populations. And still 46 out of every 100 people who bothered to vote said shut the whole thing down and start over. The cops are hemorrhaging goons. People hate the MPD so much no one wants to join and they're down hundreds of officers last I checked with no way to replace them. It's putting enormous stress on the remaining pigs and forcing them to curtail their operations. The city wants to re-build the third precinct and that whole area of the city is coming together to say fuck no.
They murdered one innocent man and it sparked a global uprising of historic proportions.
Another thing to keep in mind - Foreign occupiers have one enormous advantage - They're not local. They're not being asked to suppress their own neighbors. They don't live in the community. They all hide in fortified military bases and only go out in heavily armed convoys. In a domestic situation, especially in the US, the security forces have huge disadvantages. They have homes in the community. People know their faces and names. People know where they live. Maybe the government can move all the cops and all the national guard and all the army and all the reservists and all of their millions of family members on to bases or something, but I don't think so. And they'll have to leave their homes behind, and most of their possession, and they won't like that. They're vulnerable. In an occupation you can't strike at the occupiers home turf. But if there's in insurgency in America there are going to be insurgents who live next door to the cops. They'll get doxxed and have their addresses and faces posted up. It'll be very, very dangerous for them to let things get to a point where people start to retaliate.
Minneapolis cops have said in interviews that they're afraid to live in the city because people will recognize them. It's one of the key reasons most cops live out in the burbs in a different city than the once they occupy. They don't want to be anywhere near the people they're oppressing.
Like there's a good chance you're right, they'll have tons of snitches and collaborators, any uprising will be dismantled. But on the other hand the contradictions are heightening, people are getting hungry and desperate, the cops are losing their veneer of legitimacy, the government is increasingly paralyzed, and there are a lot of guns in this country. We have to consider that side, too. Like I don't know what it was like in other places, but in Minneapolis everyone was strapped. I have never seen so many civilians with guns in one place before. That's not like previous protests or occupy camps. I've never seen it before. There was something different this time. People felt they needed to be strapped, they felt that a gun fight with cops or Nazis could happen at any time.
Idk, we're always on the cusp of those "Weeks where decades happens" days right now.
I'm not from Minneapolis, so I'll take your word about what's happening on the ground. I'll have to mull over what you've said.