Monday, April 03, 2006
Torture: as English as hypocrisy, maypole dancing and pederasty. posted by Richard Seymour
Jesus fucking Christ. I mean, seriously. Revealed: victims of UK's cold war torture camp.Photographs of victims of a secret torture programme operated by British authorities during the early days of the cold war are published for the first time today after being concealed for almost 60 years.
The pictures show men who had suffered months of starvation, sleep deprivation, beatings and extreme cold at one of a number of interrogation centres run by the War Office in postwar Germany.
A few were starved or beaten to death, while British soldiers are alleged to have tortured some victims with thumb screws and shin screws recovered from a gestapo prison. The men in the photographs are not Nazis, however, but suspected communists, arrested in 1946 because they were thought to support the Soviet Union, an ally 18 months earlier.
If I was cruel, and I could easily be that, I would blame this on the Enlightenment. As it is, I prefer to blame capitalism and imperialism, which are not unrelated matters.