Liberal-rationalist rhetoric can normalize torture as a managed procedure

Evidence

Richard Cody then argued for the necessity of torture, properly managed. Proper management, sensible policies, agreed procedures—it was possible, after all, to civilise something as barbaric as warfare with the Geneva Convention, and now we needed a Geneva Convention on how we might conduct torture in a civilised fashion. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 371

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ignatieff and Dershowitz’s infamous ‘ticking bomb’ torture defenses Morey echoes — useful against Hamid’s interrogation scenes. — connects to: Moral lines like ‘no torture’ hold only as impulse, not as rationalized principle — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2562; The rhetoric of shared sacrifice operates ideologically without requiring belief — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 726
• DEFINE: Illustrates the ‘civilizing barbarism’ rhetorical move — a vocabulary term for the argument, applicable to detecting liberal justifications of state violence in fiction.