Torture tyrants

This is it.  I have had it with all the moral relativism discussing whether torture works and is admissible, why torture is bad, and under what circumstances torture is not torture.  All apologists for torture are going to hell- and I'm not even religious and I can say that.  Torturing is fundamentally incompatible with civilization, and so apologists for torture are not members of modern human civilization but another- and that is a good working definition for being in hell (in the theological framework of novelist Cormac McCarthy).  So, quite frankly, I don't give a shit about the opinions of torture apologists.

One fact that has come up lately is that the United States of America, as a victorious power, EXECUTED Japanese soldiers that followed orders to waterboard and otherwise torture our prisoners of war.  To the victor go the spoils, while the vanquished go to the gallows.  But when we conduct the same acts, as a superior power, this is acceptable behavior.  What this highlights is that our position as a country, in the name of sovereignty, is that we are fundamentally above international law.  Above meaning we do not recognize it.  Pragmatically speaking, this is a fine premise, so long as no one can enforce external views on our sovereign nation.  

When Britain ruled the waves, and the American colonists rebelled, I'm sure there was a great deal to be said about how wonderful British society was.  Such nice clothes and music and public schools they set up!  But they tortured and murdered and marauded the coastline and dogged the private affairs of the subjects, and these outweighed all the benefits of being British to a great many of the colonists. Supremacy, when used as a shield from culpability, is tyranny.  And no wonder why the people in the world suffering from our unstoppable foreign incursions, who see that people like them are being tortured without possibility of challenging their detainment, see the USA as a tyrannical and evil superpower (regardless of all the "good" things we do for the world).  No amount of civilized behavior can make recompense for a strategy that is anathema to civilization itself, and any country that does not recognize this will go to hell, and no one will mourn its passing.

Just ask yourself this: if there were a nation that could and would invade ours in order to capture our leaders and force them to stop torturing people, or to force our removal from foreign countries, or anything else, how do you think that would affect our actions?  What we are experiencing is the corruption of supremacy.  All empires crumble.