Evil in Return

As you can see in comments to the previous post, the liberal supporters of state authority are eager to impute naïveté to our views. "Did you really expect Manning to walk?" They are astonished! He could be a flight risk, someone rather hilariously suggests. I want you to ponder the use of the word "risk" in that statement and explain to me how it isn't hilarious on its face.

Obviously I did not expect Manning to walk. I do not expect him to go free. He will be punished and tortured, with or without a trial, whether guilty or innocent of a particular crime, whether he did what he is claimed to have done or not, whether what he is alleged to have done is right and just or wrong and unjust. I just want to be clear here. The procedural questions are totally immaterial. They have no bearing on my position. That he will be punished, and brutally, has already been determined. He has already been punished, and brutally. The injustice perpetrated upon him precedes the ritualized pursuit of justice so fetishized and lionized by liberal authoritarians. No future trial or tribunal, no future process-verbal or court martial, no matter how "fair", no matter how "impartial", can ever do anything but compound the injustice already committed. Everything subsequent is tainted by the torture he has already undergone, is currently undergoing. Even should the heavens part and the angels deliver him to freedom tomorrow, with the Holy Word of Jesus, Allah, and the Brahmanic pantheon engraving his innocence and righteousness upon his forehead, it will only make what has already been done to him all the more reprehensible.

The question "what is to be done with Private Manning," posed to me as if it presents an imponderable moral and practical conundrum that I have never considered, is irrelevant. It is, to use a phrase one of my regular commenter-critics recently reminded me of while criticizing me in comments, not even wrong. I do not care about the state's dilemma in dealing with Private Manning. I don't care about the state's dilemmas at all. The state will dispose of Private Manning as it sees fit. My interest is in the attitudes people take toward that state. Those who begin with the question of what the government should do with its enemies, even if their conclusion is some banal exhortation somehow to treat them humanely and fairly as it helps itself to their lives, are on the wrong side.