Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that. 

It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group.

I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful.

At the time I made a point of reading journalism, some of it citing sociological research, about what enabled torturers to torture. Was it innate? Was it developed, this capacity for specific, technical physical cruelty?

Two themes seemed constant to me as a layperson, untrained in psychology or social science in general. One key was to internalize a definition of person that excluded many humans, and only applied to your peer and aspirant group. You were not using a cattle prod on a human being; cattle prods are used for cattle and so the prisoners must be treated as animals.

The other key which I have seen ever since then is the momentum of cruelty. In for a penny, in for a pound. To admit that what you did before was wrong would make you a diseased, broken person, and so you go on to commit more and crueler violations of others.

Momentum: left as is the motion will continue, whether it be a physical object or sending folk to prisons in other countries because you don't like them. To admit error is to admit that the Trump officials giving those orders are broken people, which they resist with all their might.

As someone who opposes dictators, it falls on me and hopefully upon you dear reader to not let the motion toward totalitarianism continue. It will not stop on its own.