hurts to see my liberalism close up like that
Naw, you were right. Torture is categorically evil, and solitary is a form of torture.
How about solidarity confinement and they get put with some comrades in a sort of NA kind of sponsor type thing. I think in the long term we should maybe look at it similarly to how we look at substance abuse, first you have to isolate someone from the substance in question, in this case being other reactionaries, and then over time possibly reeducate them. I don’t know what step 2 would be, but I think there could be a way of organizing a sort of reverse pipeline.
I suppose it really depends. Didn’t China reform its former emperor, turning him from a selfish and cruel man into a peaceful gardener?
The hard thing about doing that in the west is that cultural Christianity has insittled within many of us the idea the idea that punishment is moral, and it often places a higher value on making sure that bad people suffer than it does on making sure that bad people can’t do bad things.
Whatever works, honestly. If a former tyrant can be rehabilitated and the threat of their restoration be nullified for sure, then I’m all for that
Didn’t China reform its former emperor, turning him from a selfish and cruel man into a peaceful gardener?
not exactly. Puyi was 6 when he was overthrown so not a man and too young to be selfish or cruel, but they did make him a gardener
His vanity (fueled by a British orientalist who was often with him as a small child) then led to him accepting the Japenese offer to become the emperor of Manchukuo, the Japanese built a cult of personality around him to build loval loyalty to their satellite state. He was too privileged to dare escaping the gilded cage he had put himself in and was constantly paranoid about upsetting the Japanese, only escaping once the Red Army was coming. He then succesfully lied about not being complicit in Japanese war crimes, otherwise he would have been simply executed. He was also immature and an overall asshole in person.
It was a very big deal that the communist were able to successfully rehabilitate such a person.
