Previously secret military files reveal links between the use of torture by British forces in Oman and Northern Ireland during the 1970s.
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This isn’t a court of law and nobody is applying a new law to old crimes.
What we can do is recognise and condemn the inhumanity of what was done then with the moral clarity of today. Better yet, we can use the lessons of the past to recognise and condemn similar injustices happening today.
It’s literally in the quote. Now banned, meaning it wasn’t banned at the time.
Do you have difficulty reading? This is a historical recalling of a past event, not the opening statement of a legal case. The only judgement that is passed is a moral one, and those do not have an expirations date. We can and should condemn past wrongs on the basis of historical learning and more advanced ethics. This is the whole basis of progress.
Do I have difficulty? How ironic
The interrogations done by his men in Oman were more extensive than previously reported and would be considered illegal by today’s standards.
why are you stuck on the current illegality of this? you seem to think it’s not right to condemn their actions because they were legal at the time. extremely weird take.
but tell me, was it legal back then to do a coup and install a dictator and annex a bit of land?
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autism makes you rush to defend past torture done by the UK? weird.
The holocaust wasnt illegal when it happened either. What a stupid thing to say. This is a report about history, not a lawsuit.
What? Murdering people was legal in 1940 was it?
According to the Führerprinzip, anything Adolf Hitler ordered was perfectly legal. Here are some of his direct decrees, if you want to ignore the whole final solution thing.
How about Poland’s laws, where the crimes were committed?
You think the nazis only murdered people in Poland?
No
You can still make a moral judgement based on your own values.
That’s a subjective view, and it’s pretty stupid to apply that retrospectively. People are a product of their times.
I don’t see a problem with applying “modern” morality to people of the past. There’s nothing wrong with saying, for instance, “people in 1950 were widely homophobic”, or “pedophilia was rampant in medieval society”. Just because people back then wouldn’t have even identified homophobia or pedophilia as anything out of the ordinary doesn’t mean they are morally excused.
Someone who doesn’t know any better is still acting immorally even if they are oblivious or in complete denial about it. The victims of those “old fashioned” ideas suffered just as much anguish and trauma as they do today, and the people of the time knew that and simply accepted it.
The suits in government who authorised this torture and the men on the ground who carried it out knew full well that it caused real distress and suffering, and they simply didn’t care, or they decided that the economic and political advantage to their own countries justified it.
Are you morally excused for any of the moral transgressions you are currently committing based on standards 20, 50, 100, 500 years in the future?
Presentism evaluates historical actors solely through modern standards and it risks imposing contemporary concepts onto eras where those ideas did not exist, obscuring the actual motivations, constraints, and worldviews of the period.
