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End Torture


War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.
-- Alfred Adler

Torture -- the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical pain or suffering -- is a violation of the most basic of all human rights.
-- Robert Alan Silverstein

* "This is a day on which we pay our respects to those who have endured the unimaginable. This is an occasion for the world to speak up against the unspeakable. It is long overdue that a day be dedicated to remembering and supporting the many victims and survivors of torture around the world."
Kofi Annan

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.
-- Hannah Arendt

The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.
--Joan Baez

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world.
-- James Baldwin

* "Torture is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or "disappearance" to be carried out by their officials with impunity."
-- Peter Benenson

"Those who today still feel a sense of impotence can do something: they can support Amnesty International. They can help it to stand up for freedom and justice."
-- Peter Benenson

"It's the publicity function of Amnesty that I think has made its name so widely known, not only to readers in the world, but to governments - and that's what matters."
-- Peter Benenson

"Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government."
-- Peter Benenson

"The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who "disappeared". That's what the candle is for."
-- Peter Benenson

"Once the concentration camps and the hell-holes of the world were in darkness. Now they are lit by the light of the Amnesty candle; the candle in barbed wire. When I first lit the Amnesty candle, I had in mind the old Chinese proverb: 'Better light a candle than curse the darkness.'"
-- Peter Benenson

"The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare -- warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself."
~ Wendell Berry

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
-- Stephen Biko

 


They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay. They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages.
-- Richard Bourke

* “We are unalterably opposed to the presentation of the female body being stripped, bound, raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered in the name of commercial entertainment and free speech”
-- Susan Brownmiller

Susan Brownmiller - “We are unalterably opposed to the presentation of the female body being stripped, bound, raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered in the name of commercial entertainment and free speech”

 

"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children."
-- Albert Camus

If nations are allowed to commit genocide with impunity, to hide their guilt in a camouflage of lies and denials, there is a real danger that other brutal regimes will be encouraged to attempt genocides.
--Caroline, Baroness Cox, House of Lords

In considering how human rights might serve as a 'guiding value' in American foreign policy, one should not dismiss the historical record, which is ample. There is indeed a close relationship between human rights and American foreign policy. There is substantial evidence that American aid and diplomatic support increase as human rights violations increase, at least in the Third World. Extensive violations of human rights (torture, forced reduction of living standards for much of the population, police-sponsored death squads, destruction of representative institutions or of independent unions, etc.) are directly correlated with US government support. The linkage is not accidental; rather it is systematic. The reason is obvious enough. Client fascism often improves the business climate for American corporations, quite generally the guiding factor in foreign policy. It would be naïve indeed to think that this will change materially, given the realities of American social structure and the grip of the state ideological system.
-- Noam Chomsky

* "All human beings, whatever their cultural or historical background, suffer when they are intimidated, imprisoned or tortured . . . We must, therefore, insist on a global consensus, not only on the need to respect human rights worldwide, but also on the definition of these rights . . . for it is the inherent nature of all human beings to yearn for freedom, equality and dignity, and they have an equal right to achieve that."
-- 14th Dalai Lama

 

 

[torture] presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others' suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness...
-- Ariel Dorfman

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
- - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

* "The UN Declaration of Human Rights laid down what any person might reasonably expect, yet there are remarkably few people who enjoy these rights. With cameras in the hands of activists and meaningful distribution of those images, we will witness what really goes on in this world and hopefully want to change it." -- Peter Gabriel

Sometimes I have been very dispirited. But if we disappear, we leave the door open to all kinds of abuse. So I say to my colleagues, “Don’t be too ambitious. If you look at all the problems in Cambodia at once, you cannot work. Like you build a house, you build it brick by brick. If one day you save only one victim, be happy for a day. The next day, save two.” Some days we save 10, 20, 100 or 200.” So I say, “Don’t look for quantity, look for quality. It will take a long time to advance human rights, but keep moving.” When I save a child or a woman, I’m happy, because I remember the little girl of seven I was. It’s a reward for me to see the new generation of advocates. They are our future. I am very proud of them.
-- Kek Galabru

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.
-- Mohandas Gandhi

* "The aim of torture is to destroy a person as a human being, to destroy their identity and soul. It is more evil than murder... Today we know that survivors of torture can be helped to regain their health and strength, and in helping them we take the weapon from their torturers. They sought the destruction of other human beings. We have proved that they have not succeeded."
-- Inge Genefke


Victims should come first.”
-- Maria Julia Hernandez

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers”
-- Carl Gustav Jung

Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.
-- Edward Kennedy

All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.
-- John Locke

The right of an individual to refuse to kill, to torture, or to participate in the preparation for the nuclear destruction of humanity seems to me to be fundamental.
-- Sean MacBride

The cost in human lives and suffering is so high that we all have to work to end violence and oppression once and for all. We have to proclaim that every human being is equal, in dignity, in freedom —and, as the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, we have to live “in a spirit of brotherhood.”
-- Federico Mayor
If you don't want to be beaten, imprisoned, mutilated, killed or tortured then you shouldn't condone such behavior towards anyone, be they human or not.
-- Moby


An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.
-- Montesquieu

If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -- even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles.
- - Alberto J. Mora, former Navy General Counsel

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
-- Friedrich Nietzche

... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret.
-- Robert Parry

* Together we can prevent genocide from happening again. Together we can make a better future for our children.
-- Dith Pran

Land mines, torture equipment, cluster bombs, chemical weapons are weapons designed to inflict pain and death on human beings. Most victims are civilians, women and children. How can arms manufacturers, weapons designers, plant managers, politicians, who have families of their own whom they love, be so insensitive when it comes to the suffering of other human beings?
-- José Ramos-Horta

Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable to?
-- Arundhati Roy

The coward wretch whose hand and heart
Can bear to torture aught below,
Is ever first to quail and start
From the slightest pain or equal foe.
-- Bertrand Russell

“What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer”
-- Bertrand Russell

"torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers."
-- Jean Paul Sartre

"Strange how blind people are! They are horrified by the torture chambers of the Middle Ages, but their arsenals fill them with pride!"
-- Bertha Von Suttner

It's only when we imagine for ourselves what it would be like to run from state terror, torture, rape, the destruction of our homes and families that we can understand how vital it would be to find a place that welcomed us and tried to heal our wounds.
-- Emma Thompson

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
--United Nations Convention Against Torture

"I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
-- Elie Wiesel

“Human rights is the only ideology that deserves to survive”
-- Simon Wiesenthal

"When history looks back, I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it.”
-- Simon Wiesenthal

* "Chinese and Tibetan dissidents are either locked up in prison, forced into hiding, or silenced by fear of police retaliation against their families. All the happiness about China's economic growth has made many Americans forget that police clubs and guns and the Laogai system keep the Communist Party in power. Moreover, it is still little recognized how American resources help to sustain that power through trade, investments, and the transfer of technology... It is only when the Laogai is abolished in China that real change will come about."
-- Harry Wu

"...we should not give up and say that the situation is hopeless. There is still our conscience, there is still the memory of the victims of this war, there is still our duty to try and prevent further bloodshed. We have to prosecute all the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity."
-- Lida Yusupova

"...civil society has not lost the possibility to influence the government and force them to change their policy. That is why we believe in your voice and your help." -- Lida Yusupova

I love life and want to hold onto it. But my passion for justice for my tormented people, for their dignity and freedom, must be greater still. For of what value is a life of slavery, of humiliation and contempt for that which you hold most dear: Your identity! I will therefore not give in to the Turkish Inquisition.
-- Leyla Zana

END TORTURE
HERO PIX

Kofi Annan | Peter Benenson | Susan Brownmiller |
Dalai Lama | Inge Genefke

End Torture Day - June 26

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