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Cruelty as policy

By Stuart Rees - posted Wednesday, 31 May 2017


Indifference to cruelty persists because the architects also put huge resources into demonstrating their virtues. Boasting about commitment to human rights, for example, can proceed behind Orwellian-like smokescreens which enable powerful people to hide or obscure what's going on, whether in Australian detention centres, in American prisons, in the flogging centres of Indonesian towns, the amputating squares of Saudi Arabia, or in Israeli jails.

Admitting that cruelty has been and is a feature of public policy would help to cease the practice. But such admission would require changes to the moral identity of leaders who prescribe cruelty or who collude with such behaviour by denial that it exists, or by pretending ignorance.

Policy textbooks have hitherto not acknowledged cruelty as a government objective, and if you looked in the index of such books, you could be forgiven for believing that cruelty as policy never existed.

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The cruelty traditions are carried across national and ideological frontiers. They can grow in democracies, though they flourish best in militaristic cultures where the ethics of what is happening can be easily brushed aside because might is right.

Speaking truth to power is important. So too is the will to establish truths. Even in the land of fair go, mateship and an allegedly fair budget, there's another story.

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About the Author

Stuart Rees is Professor Emeritus of the University of Sydney and Founder of the Sydney Peace Foundation. He is the former Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation (1998-2011) and of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (1988-2008), and a Professor of Social Work (1978-2000) at the University of Sydney.

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