"On #InternationalDayAgainstTorture, we recognize the bravery and humanity of victims and survivors of torture around the world. We will not waver in our commitment to condemn and eliminate torture, promote accountability for perpetrators, and support victims in their healing." That's the statement from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken regarding the supposed stance of the Department of State on torture. Let's not kid ourselves, even without knowing the full extent of the US Empire's crimes one can tell that the statement is inherently surface level and shallow, and it has to be. A statement like that has to be nothing but platitudes, as US officials are incapable of taking active measures to mitigate the widespread occurrences of torture around the world for that would hinder their own activity. They can't bring attention to actual instances of torture for that would be the equivalent of holding a mirror to US policy and drawing the features of its reflection.
The instances of torture at the hands of the US Empire are so far and wide that the only possible time to go over all of it should be done as a punishment to the perpetrators of these crimes. There is for a start a whole trove of the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used on innocents at Guantánamo Bay and CIA torture prisons(https://wikileaks.org/gitmo/), the targeting and eventual torture of journalist Julian Assange (https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange), or even the torture committed by terrorist groups who received funding and training from the US (https://www.blackagendareport.com/stop-turkish-invasion-syria). The domestic side of torture isn't better either, as the Empire will always turn inwards and bring its foreign policy back home. The purely draconian conditions within the US prison system constitute enough instances of torture yet it does not stop there; the treatment of protestors at the hands of the police leaves scars, trauma, and survivor's guilt. The obstacles heaped upon unhoused people just so they can survive constitute a kind of cruelty that we unfortunately come to expect in the global superpower. The vast history of human experiments such as MK Ultra and the Tuskegee Study put on a clinic in how to honor the history of Josef Mengele. Need I go on? Where is the rush from the US and the West to stop all this?
Evidently these special days serve as no more than a propaganda front for the West, a grasp at maintaining the crumbling legitimacy they have only in the eyes of their bootlickers. We see the same thing on World Press Freedom Day, World Refugee Day, Human Rights Day; because what excites the West more than once again taking on the White Man's Burden? When a false image of "civility" is the Empire's tool, their mouthpieces love nothing more than to attempt to give directions to other nations based off a moral compass that they lack. Say what you want about other dictators and totalitarian regimes around the world, their levels of hypocrisy cannot match those of the US and its allies. And the despots themselves know this; they see right through the West's attempted white savior circle-jerk and immediately note their crimes as a green light for them to do the same to their own country. The hypocrisy inherent in these "holidays" knows no bounds, and it contributes to the overall decimation of human rights around the world.
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