General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWithout torture, 17th-century Europeans would never have gotten all those witches to confess
Seriously. Think about that. Thousands of people confessed to things that all of us now agree are simply physically impossible (cats don't actually speak, people don't actually fly, there is no actual physical devil with horns and a bifurcated tail, etc.), because that was the only way to get people to stop pressing heavy stones on their chests and poking them with red-hot metal spikes.
Response to Recursion (Original post)
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Sunlei
(22,651 posts)PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)those folks had.
I'm sure a lot of them were working hard under enormous pressure and were real patriots.
ReRe
(10,597 posts)... they sure did get a lot of "actionable intelligence" out of those witches, didn't they? And further back in history the Catholic Church got allot of converts out of that Spanish Inquisition. which, if I'm not mistaken, the CIA torturers got many of their tactics.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)Though in fairness the Protestants were no slouches in torturing either (nor any other religion or ideology, for that matter).
cer7711
(502 posts). . . from otherwise innocent people.
History teaches us this lesson, over and over again.
The "ticking time bomb" scenario oft-cited by proponents of torture?
About as rare and fabled an occurrence as a Wall Street banker with a social conscience.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)"Would you torture someone to find out if there was a ticking time bomb or not?"
ProfessorPlum
(11,252 posts)anyone ever asks. The (correct in my view) answer is NO! Next question.