Lane von Herzen: Why I Do Not Support Torture

My Third Novel's Conclusion, My Heartbreak

My heart begins to break when I think about completing this particular book -- because this narrative has sustained me like no other story I've known. It's both more personal and more universal than my other works. But beyond memory and archetype, it's a cri-de-coeur about needing to become the person one is destined to be. And in the writing, I have met my own life's work, my own fated journey -- having the sense all the while that the pages are suffused with a resonance, an energy, an electrified field that defies explanation. Writers hope and pray to be overtaken by a work in this way -- to be conscripted into passionate service of a profound story. To experience it even once in a lifetime seems a great privilege. I still have several months before this novel is complete, and this constitutes my reprieve. Because I'm not ready for the beauty to end.

Friday, April 5, 2024

Why I Do Not Support Torture

Torture is an inhuman initiative with inhuman objectives.

It is, further, a tool of totalitarianism, the intent of which is to deprive human beings of their inalienable rights to safety, dignity, honor and respect.

I do not support totalitarianism in any form.

Torture is not a negotiating tactic. To the contrary, it closes off all dialogue for the duration of time in which it is occurring.

Nor is it a substitute for professional communication, which adheres to standards of civility and the rule of law.

My ideas about torture have been developed by my lived experience of this barbaric practice, so they are well-informed and deeply grounded in direct understanding.

Torturers, it must be noted, always believe that torture should remain a secret, because they know quite well that the public will not approve of its deployment against law-abiding American citizens such as my family members and myself.

But there is a problem when torture is deployed against honorable members of the American public as a classified tool, one which is not to be discussed for fear of violating a gag order, for example. In that circumstance, to complain about one's own torture is deemed an act disloyal to the government. In other words, one is asked to die compliantly, silently, and on time, without words of alarm or warning that might notify the public at large of a pressing and imminent threat to their safety.

I disagree with these precepts.

Freedom means that American civilians retain the right to speak about their experience, and the Constitution grants them the full dispensation to articulate mistreatment, if and when it is occurring.

If American citizens are to retain human rights, human dignity, individual sovereignty, and the sanctity of the human spirit, they must also retain the right to speak about wrongful torture that is actively being deployed against them for coercive purposes.

This is the only manner in which their lives, their liberties, and their pursuits of happiness can be safeguarded, upheld, and honored as the heart of our democratic society.

Lane MacWilliams