I watched The Mauritanian last night on Netflix and it’s worth a watch. For me, there wasn’t a lot of new information, but what did come to mind was the following. I’ll state I was opposed to enhanced interrogation techniques when it was determined they were being used.
In our current political environment what came to mind is the overall continuation of fearmongering of the American public by politicians and those in power. We justified the interrogation techniques solely based on fear, we had known for quite some time techniques like that don’t produce reliable information. In numerous areas we are continuing a similar approach:
- Banning books school-aged kids can access.
- Producing and passing legislation around medical treatment based solely on one religion’s moral beliefs and convictions.
- The boogieman that CRT and ESL have turned into.
- Rederick regarding grooming going on in our school districts.
- A couple of years ago it was debating and enacting legislation around bathrooms based on gender/biological sex assigned at birth.
Why did these come to mind while watching The Mauritanian last night? Because all these decisions are being presented as legitimate based mainly on fear. We had evidence that torture didn’t produce reliable intelligence, but we were scared and needed a boogieman (regardless of human rights). Has there been a time in history when banning books has advanced any specific society? At what point does a medical professional simply declare out because they’d need to be a constitutional lawyer to practice medicine? This isn’t just limited to abortion – there is fear pedaled around things such as basic and vaccines. The level of fear around CRT is ridiculous, so ridiculous people don’t realize it’s a college-level curriculum not something taught in grade school. Fear allows us to not let pesky little facts like that get in the way of “sky is falling cry”. Fear has gotten to the point of people pointing to school districts installing cat litter boxes for kids who identify as cats. Again, I have not been able to find any evidence of this actually being a fact.
I agree fear is a powerful tool, but I’d suggest we not allow it to outweigh the truth.