Why do people torture other people?

Answer 1

Torture is inflicting pain on an enemy and is usually applied in order to obtain information from them. A firing squad or a guillotine is not really torture; but it could be considered as murder or as a war crime.

Occasionally it is applied as a demonstration to your enemy that you are willing to fight them. You torture one of them as an example to the rest. In other words, it is sometimes also used to terrify opponents, especially in dictatorships and to terrorize resistance organizations in occupied countries.

Sometimes torture is done as retribution for the acts committed against you or your countrymen.

The Holocaust was not considered torture for most of them. The German either killed their victims or made them work as slave labor with little food. That is not the same as torture.

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The whole subject is tricky and fraught. Since World War 2 there has been a growing tendency to distinguish between torture and violations of human rights. For example, European law on human rights distinguishes between:

1. Torture (the kinds of things the Inquisition used to do, or in modern contexts things like electric shocks to the genitals).
2. Inhuman and degrading treatment. (This would include things like transporting people in cattle trucks for long periods, without any food or drink and without adequate sanitation, also brutal interrogation that falls short of torture, for example, using stress positions and the like).
3. Degrading treatment (birching and whipping, systematic public humiliation).

Obviously, #2 is a broad category.

As for motives for inhuman treatment, Amnesty International and other charities have recently stressed the role of sheer hatred (of political opponents) in some countries - something that is often overlooked, and the desire of many dictatorships to terrorize real and imaginary opponents.

Answer 2

Because the people that torture stupis idiots.