All Republicans Hate Human Rights

They prefer it when people are tortured

Photo by James Kovin on Unsplash

This article was originally published on Medium.

“What percentage of getting abused as a child do you think was your fault?” my therapist asked me one session.

The question immediately embarrassed me.

If you’ve been reading my articles for awhile, you might know that my mother called me demon possessed, beat me regularly, tried to murder me, neglected me, emotionally abused me, abused prescription drugs, and more when I was a child.

“It’s like 50/50,” I told my therapist. “My mother shouldn’t have been doing those things to me, but I also shouldn’t have misbehaved so much or been so loud that I pushed her to do them.”

That’s what my Mom always told me, she didn’t want to hurt me, but I was so horrible that I was forcing her to do so.

“No,” my therapist argued. “Child abuse is 100% the parent’s fault. It wasn’t yours at all. It doesn’t matter how much you supposedly misbehaved or not, there’s better ways to handle it.”

Those words changed my life and my view of my entire childhood because I literally thought I had trapped my Mom into abusing me. I thought I had been such a burden, she had no other choice. Finding out she could have made other decisions was freeing.

Not only because it meant that I’d been a normal child whose mother had completely failed in every way, so I could let go of the guilt.

But also because it meant I didn’t have to become like my Mom. I’d developed a phobia that someone would trap me in a way that forced me to become abusive, too. I didn’t want to hurt anyone either, like my Mom insisted she didn’t, but this proved that I always had a choice. No matter what anyone did, I could choose to be a good person if I wanted to.

It was relieving.

Authority figures will always find excuses to abuse people if they want to abuse them. They’ll try to blame their victims for it, so they don’t have to take accountability for how monstrous they have been. That’s what my Mom was doing.

This applies to when the government abuses people as well.

I was reminded of my therapy session when I heard the story Kilmar Abrego Garcia revealed of what happened to him when they deported him to CECOT. The details are horrifying.

NBC News explains that his lawyers filed a complaint that says…

The complaint states that upon arrival at CECOT, Abrego was forced to strip, issued prison clothing, kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to change faster. His head was also allegedly shaved, and he was frog-marched to a cell while being hit with wooden batons.

The following day, he had “visible bruises and lumps all over his body,” the complaint said.

In that cell, he and 20 other Salvadorans “were forced to kneel from approximately 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion,” the filing said. During that time, Abrego was denied bathroom access and soiled himself, according to the complaint.

The inmates were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in overcrowded cells without windows and bright lights that stayed on 24 hours a day, the complaint says.

While there, prison officials repeatedly told Abrego that “they would transfer him to cells containing gang members who, they assured him, would ‘tear’ him apart,” the complaint says.

The attorneys said Abrego observed prisoners violently harm each other without staff intervention.

“Screams from nearby cells would similarly ring out throughout the night without any response from prison guards or personnel,” the complaint says.

In his first two weeks, he lost 31 pounds.

Now, I want you to think about this treatment. Republicans are calling him a terrorist and saying he deserves this, but no one should be treated this way.

We have serial killers in prison. Pedophiles in prison. People who tortured and molested multiple children and got sexual gratification from it.

We put them in prison because we can’t keep letting them be a menace to society and hurt people, not because, as a society, we enjoy torturing people.

So what do we do?

We feed these criminals. We give them a place to sleep. We let them rest and have the lights off. They get time to go outside. We provide showers and toilets for them. We let their family and friends visit them.

Not because they deserve special care (jail is not special or fun), but because we have humanity inside of us, unlike a lot of them.

So it really doesn’t matter what crime Kilmar Abrego Garcia committed (which is none, by the way.) It wouldn’t matter if he murdered people or raped children, none of which they are accusing him of.

Treating humans like this is wrong, no matter what they did. It isn’t 50% their fault for being supposed criminals and 50% the government’s fault for taking it too far. It’s 100% our government’s fault for deporting people there and their government’s fault for torturing him.

And as I was writing this, I found out from Aaron Parnas, that reports of similar things are coming from the American concentration camp, Alligator Alcatraz.

Detainees report severe human rights abuses at the facility, including lack of water, maggot-contaminated food, 24-hour lighting, mosquito infestations, confiscation of religious items, and denial of medical care — conditions some describe as psychological torture.

Fascism will tell you that it’s okay to torture human beings this way. Morality and logic will show you that this only hurts everyone and helps no one.