Summary Of The Poem Torture

After the ellipses, there is a shift back to the poetic “I”. The speaker states that while starring into the sockets of the victim’s skull, he becomes “frozen” with the “pity for the life that was gone”. This transitional sentence separates the scene of the already occurred murder from the present material world. The material world revives around the speaker in the next sentence of the poem. In this massive sentence, Wright dramatically personifies the nature in order to transform the cruel historical scene into the current time. However, the significant transformation of the poetic “I” to the “thing” starts when “the ground gripped” the poet’s feet. From that line, the personified ground captures the speaker, and from the observer of already happened images of the lynching, he revives as a participant in the present scene. In this scene, when the dry bones “melting themselves” into the poet’s bones, he becomes the victim of the lynching. The last minutes of the victim’s life are graphically presented in the third stanza of the poem. The first person’s perspective is a very powerful element, which Wright uses in order to put any reader into the African Americans unlawful suffering from the terror lynching. Furthermore, it is obvious that in the Richard

With his article “The Case for Torture” Levin has made his readers think over what the differences between the death penalty and torture. Levin provides evidences and asks questions to lead his readers into forming their own opinion on whether torture is totally unacceptable in any situation or not. But it is clear by the end of the article where Levin stands on the topic of

For this unit, I decided to read Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” The author, Franz Kafka, was an early 20th century middle-class Jew who lived in Prague and wrote mostly in German. The present short story, published in 1919, refers to an unnamed penal colony somewhere in the tropics and focuses on four characters: the commander of the camp, an invited foreign dignitary, a guard, and a victim. The story revolves a twisted idea of justice, where the punishment does not fit the crime, and the condemned does not know neither the charge nor the nature of his punishment. Indeed, justice seems completely irrelevant to the commander who is only fascinated with the torturing as an art and science; the apotheosis of the latter represented with the torturing machine that resembles a CNC router that inscribes the accusation on the skin of the condemned who then dies slowly from bleeding.

In the annals of history, the Holocaust registers as one of mankind’s most “unspeakable” offenses. And yet, over the past seventy years, survivors have strived nonetheless to transform torture into language—to verbalize the violence against man’s body and spirit that occurred at the hands of the Nazis.

In “The Torture Myth”, the author, Anne Applebaum successfully uses logos by including quotes from various sources to support her main claim. Her main claim is the following: “Perhaps it's reassuring to tell ourselves tales about the new forms of "toughness" we need, or to talk about the special rules we will create to defeat this special enemy. Unfortunately, that toughness is self-deceptive and self-destructive. Ultimately it will be self-defeating as well.”(Applebaum) Throughout the piece, she provides several expert testimonies to enforce her claim. The situation of this writing is to clarify what society thinks the effectiveness of torture is compared to the reality. The target audience of this piece is educated people that read the Washington Post, but more specifically law enforcement personnel and or agencies that can possibly use this information in the field. The purpose of this article is to inform society about the misconceptions regarding torture. Although people think that torture is an effective method, because of Applebaum's successful use of logos, diction, and repetition, it is understood that torture is ultimately self-defeating and self-destructive.

One of the many things that has been highly controversial and still is to this very day is how to properly punish and treat criminals. Here in America we now have the Eighth Amendment to protect us from cruel and unusual punishment. This was based off of a Parliament Act of 1689 that created England’s Bill of Rights. Before England had come up with the idea that humans should have guaranteed basic rights, it wasn’t a matter of whether or not a criminal would die, as much as it was a matter of how they would die. Torture devices such as the guillotine, the stake, the brazen bull, and the rack were used to spread the idea of fear and punishment that was ineffectually used by leaders to try and control their people throughout the history of Europe.

This also contrasts with humanity by comparing humans to animals, which further proves the miserable conditions in the mine. One last example in this passage is the selection of detail where it says, “Leather straps that cut deep into his flesh.” The violence and pain associated with piercing flesh show the suffering that the duo have to endure to their bodies, showing that not only are the mines psychologically displeasing, but also physically harmful.

The author believes that “The secret of torture, like the secret of French cuisine, is that nothing is unthinkable” (Rose 176) and to illustrate this she uses an analogy where a man is tortured with a wheel and a snail is baked in its own shell. There are no limits in the world of torture and this fact may be a reason to believe that humans use their imaginary to accomplish the most horrifying things, but “torture didn’t come into existence to give vent to human sadism. It is not always private and perverse but sometimes social and institutional, vetted by the government and, of course, the Church” (Rose 177).

Likewise, prisoners fail to show agony when they themselves are severely punished. After numerous amounts of whipping and slaughter from the guards, Wiesel mentions, “The Kapos beat us once more, but I ceased to feel any pain from their blows” (34). For these reasons, untamed torture becomes a daily routine in the lives of these bodies because they simply have no

of lives, and torture will be the only way to save them....." to let reader make a critical

Torture falls under the category of cruel and unusual punishment, however circumstance can sway the attitude towards the use of torture. The most prevalent example in society, as well as the one used in the article “The Torture Debate” by Philip Rumney and Martin O’Boyle is terrorism. Based on the information presented in the article I agree that a legalized torture system should be developed under specific

Crime and punishment was much different in medieval times than it is now. In today’s ages you may get sent to jail or prison, or have to do community services. While back then you may be put on the Catherine Wheel, be Drawn Hanged And Quartered, or even be put in the Scavenger's Daughter device. There were many other ways of brutal, diverse ways to make a point

The history of torture in Europe may seem at first to be a steady progression of barbarous tactics, leading from one social purge to the next, but this is not completely the case. Torture has been used in a progression from primitive methods to the present more modern styles. It has also developed extensively, both in severity and variety of methods used. But in the end, torture has gone full circle; modern forms of torture are more like those methods used by savages than anything in between. Overall, the severity of torture has fluctuated, growing and receding with the passing of each new time period, but eventually reverting to its original state.

"It [torture] assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal; in the same horror, the crime had to be manifested and annulled. It also made the body of the condemned man the place where the vengeance of the sovereign was applied, the anchoring point for a manifestation of power, an opportunity of affirming the dissymmetry of forces."[4]

The “dehumanization” of one’s victims does wonders to calm any qualms or misgivings an individual may experience about injuring another man. By evoking fear in the torturer and therefore, a sense of being threatened by a given enemy, the regime in power causes the torturer to feel obliged to defend against such a threat. Consequently, he will torture his fellow man to procure some valued piece of information and in doing so remove himself from a precarious position and subdue his enemies all at once. Such enemies are viewed as evil and little more than monsters. A victim is rarely referred to by his or her name or by any other humanizing characteristic, rather a victim is most often referred to as some base, nonhuman creature or beast.