December 2, 2006
Ion #8 (of 12) from DC Comics
As I read through this week's GL and GL-related books, I couldn't help but think, not for the first time, what a fascistic, authoritarian little myth it actually is. The idea of a cosmic police force is pretty good, heroic even. A super-powered group that protects everyone. How could that be bad? But then you start thinking to yourself, who, exactly, runs this little operation? What oversight is there? Which laws do they enforce? Most of the time, they talk in terms of a very abstract concept of 'justice,' which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence when it happens in the real world. Basically, for the whole 'Green Lantern' thing to not be horrifying, you have to have total faith in the judgement and righteousness of the Guardians. Okay, I says to myself, that's fine. Then I see this:
And then I says to myself, well that blows that theory out of the water.
I posted this message to a discussion forum (as always!) and it generated some interesting responses. You can check the forum here, but one of the possible objections to my objection is that the character in question, Nero, is an insane, cosmic-level villain who's responsible for the death's of entire worlds, so perhaps he deserves it, or at the least, it's no great injustice to torture someone who's that evil. Here's what I had to say about that:
Actually, I won't [agree] and I don't have to. Insanity is a great reason to not torture people since, by definition, they're not in control of their actions. That reason is, of course, in addition to all the other reasons why torture's an incredibly stupid way to extract information from people; chief among them is that a person will say anything to get the torture to stop. In this case, it's implicit that the torture is also some kind of psionic probing, which possibly makes lying a side issue, but also acts to obviate that very basic objection to torture itself, if even merely for practical reasons.
But that's all pretty obvious, really. The reasons to not torture are pretty solid, even setting ethics aside. There was another reading, which I encourage you to look at on the forum itself, that happened to invoke some rhetoric that I find particularly interesting (the emphasis is mine):
Rip van Mason: I think the Guardians are far less about justice, and far more about the continuation of galactic civilisation and sapience. Justice is just the most useful trait to have in the hired muscle if that is your goal. It acts as a check to prevent another multiverse creating event [i.e., a world-ending event, in the language of DC Comics' recent Infinite Crisis storyline], and generally earns your group the legitimacy needed to do what must be done. [...]
These statements are out of the context of a larger discussion, which is an interesting one, but I do want to focus on the rhetoric of "what must be done." We see it a lot, especially in action/adventure narratives, but also in politics. The phrase is a bit of a tautology. It can be applied to practically any situation in order to justify almost anything because it presupposes that what's "being done" is "necessary," thus greatly reducing the possibility of questioning the real issue at hand: does that act, in this case torture, actually 'need to be done' at all?
I'd also point out that the passive construction, "what must be done," effaces the identity of whomever is performing the act; it pushes the subject of the sentence aside, and can even remove the subject from a sentence entirely, though Rip hasn't quite done that, here. Thus, as well as presupposing that the act is necessary, it reduces, and could even removes, one's sense of responsibility for the act that "must be done," which again is torture. I don't mean any of that to be a personal attack on Rip, of course, and it should in no way be read as an accusation of anything. I think he echoes a rhetorical strategy that is very powerful and ought to be interrogated.
Posted by orion at December 2, 2006 11:33 PM