Torture is Hip With the In Crowd

"A new study by the American Red Cross obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable. More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans."

Go figure. Refusing to call torture "torture" results in children growing up believing that it's not.

Who could have predicted that?

I mean, it's not like this has ever happened in any other category, before. C'mon, now. "Date rape" isn't "rape rape," you know...

Anyhows -

Wrote this a while back. Bears some repeating, I guess: The point of seemingly pointless wars, beyond the material benefits which accrue to those who manage them, is a population which normalizes war. As always, I'm ambiguous about the Spartans (the historical ones, not the Hollywood masculine kewpie dolls who never, ever have gay sex or listen to their wives), but they are the occidental historical exemplars, alongside their Roman inheritors. A polity organized towards war produces warriors. A nation which normalizes torture will produce citizens who cannot define it as such, and who have no problem with its use.

It seems too simple to be overlooked, but I guess it is.

What else explains the shocked tones of surprise in the quoted original, above?

It's like the writer has never had access to the histories of the British, Roman or Hun empires, has never read up on Janissaries or Mamluks, studied the martial iterations of the Middle Kingdom, or taken stock of modern Japanese and West African history.