UN kills 15 in Haiti raids this week — Canada’s support unchanged

““Those who, without outrightly advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of debate, are in a way more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It only thrives if it is sustained by what Hegel called ‘objective spirit,’ the set of unwritten rules which form the background of every individual’s activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. For example, a sign of progress in our societies is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is ‘dogmatically’ clear to everyone that rape is wrong, and we all feel that even arguing against it is too much. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, it would be a sad sign if one had to argue against him – he should simply appear ridiculous. And the same should hold for torture.

“This is why the greatest victims of publicly admitted torture are all of us, the public that is informed about it. We should all be aware that some precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.””
 Slavoj Žižek,  In Defense of Lost Causes