Monsters, Inc.
Or: Reflections on moral absolutes and their consequences.
I came across a claim today so horrifying that my first reaction wasn’t outrage, it was refusal: this cannot be real. Sexual assault by dog as an instrument of torture is not merely criminal or depraved; it sits outside the range of acts I’m willing to believe another human being would even attempt.
My moral judgment against the alleged actor came hot on the heels of my disbelief, and it was absolute. Precisely because it was so absolute, every warning bell in my propaganda immune system went off all at once.
I would rather not have spent my morning trying to disprove the claim, but I could not simply move on. Either I was being manipulated in a way that would utterly destroy the credibility of the source, or I had found something I’d previously considered exceptionally rare: a moral absolute.
I wish I were here to write about propaganda.
Ingrid Olderöck1 was a major in the Carabineros de Chile who became an agent of the DINA, the Pinochet regime’s secret police, in the early 1970s. Survivors and researchers identify her as one of the officers in charge at the clandestine detention and torture center known as “Venda Sexy” in Santiago. Multiple testimonies collected in Chile’s post-dictatorship human-rights work, and summarized in later reporting and scholarship, state that Olderöck trained a German shepherd named Volodia to sexually assault detainees2 as part of systematic sexual torture at the site.
There it is: a dog trained to rape people. Only a monster is capable of this.
I’m not throwing around the term “monster” for dramatic effect. This is not a synonym for “bad guy” or villain. A monster is something narrower and more final: a human who has crossed a threshold so absolute that they are no longer defensible within any shared framework of dignity, context, necessity, or tragic justification. Monsterhood is a status change: a person who has given up all legitimate claim to being human in any moral or ethical sense.
A monster looks like a human. It may even have hopes and dreams like a human. But humanity without a moral community is just biology. A monster is a person who has voluntarily left their humanity behind.
Murder alone cannot bear that weight. The reality is that humans killing humans—in war, in fear, in jealousy, in rage—still sits inside the outer boundary of human behavior. If the capacity to murder was enough to make a monster, then the world would have no humans left.
Most harmful acts admit some story that tries to make them intelligible inside the human condition. Absolute moral judgments are rare precisely because human behavior is so easily folded back into context, motive, fear, necessity, or tragic error. Reasonable people will reserve moral monsterhood for some accumulation of harmful acts, and then proceed to disagree on the number and kind. But everyone can see that there’s a line that can only be crossed in one direction—even if it’s hard to draw.
And then there’s dog rape. No reasonable person will even attempt to justify this act by claims of defense, strategy, or proportional response. There is no version that can be claimed by war, desperation, love, or miscalculation. It is pure instrumentalized degradation, chosen as an end in itself. That is why it can serve as a singular moral absolute: not because it is uniquely cruel in degree, but because it is uniquely indefensible in kind.
Having at least one such absolute is a philosophical necessity. Without a fixed point beyond which no human story can reach, every line dissolves into argument, and the concept of monstrosity collapses into mere disagreement. Given this high bar for a singular act sufficient to pass moral judgment on a monster, an uncomfortable corollary follows: the bar for evidence must be low. Not careless, not credulous, but low in proportion to the moral stakes.
The severity of this moral judgment demands more than anonymous rumor, lest we fall prey to propaganda, hysteria, or old toxins like the antisemitic blood libel. But it cannot demand the kind of spectacle modern audiences have grown addicted to—video, virality, judicial theater—without courting a different and more dangerous failure. Ingrid Olderöck denied all allegations and was never subjected to a judicial process. Those facts did not cause the Chilean people to falter in their judgment. The atrocities of Venda Sexy are undisputed history.
Dismissing multiple good-faith testimonies to a monstrous act like dog rape because there is no TikTok runs the unacceptable risk of feeding the monster. Monsters thrive in the gap between what is unspeakable and what is provable. They rely on the fact that the act itself is so extreme that it triggers disbelief, then on the fact that disbelief hardens into procedural paralysis. If the rule becomes “no verdict, no judgment,” then the most absolute violations become the safest to commit. That is not caution. It is moral surrender disguised as rigor.
This is where the distinction between moral and ethical judgment matters. Moral judgment names what conscience can no longer abide. Ethical judgment names what a shared human world can no longer legitimize. The ethical demand that follows is not punishment, vengeance, or escalation—it is shunning. No succor. No defense. No normalization. No procedural laundering.
And once that threshold has been crossed, the distinction between attempt and completion collapses. Attempted dog rape is sufficient. Intent to train a dog to rape is sufficient. The monster is not created by success. It is created by its choice.
But individual monsters are not the deepest problem. A lone monster can be shunned, isolated, neutralized. The deeper, more dangerous question is what it means when a monster is not cast out, but instead absorbed into a role, a hierarchy, a uniform, a chain of command. When monstrosity is given salary, authority, cover, and procedure, the moral failure is no longer personal. It becomes structural.
It’s not enough to have moral and ethical certainty that monsters exist. We must also be clear about what it means when power structures absorb or protect those monsters.
Klaus Barbie3 was a senior officer in the Gestapo in German-occupied France during World War II, where he directed arrests, interrogations, deportations, and torture of civilians and resistance members in Lyon. After the war, he was protected by Western intelligence services and resettled in Bolivia, where he lived openly for decades before being extradited to France in the 1980s.
During his 1987 trial for crimes against humanity, multiple witnesses testified to his direct involvement in sadistic acts of torture. One witness, Mario Blardone, testified under oath that he saw Barbie attempt to have a young girl raped by a dog4 during an interrogation. Barbie denied the testimony, as he denied all accusations, and offered no explanation beyond repeated refusal to speak.
This is the pet monster: not the aberration the system fails to detect, but the asset it decides to keep. The monster is given a badge, a salary, procedural cover, and the power to command other humans. At that point the moral failure does not belong to the individual alone. It belongs to every structure that feeds, pays, shields, transports, promotes, or rationalizes the monster.
The moment a structure adopts a monster, it forfeits its claim to legitimacy. From that point forward, the institution is no longer merely compromised—it is morally contaminated. It is no longer sufficient to insist that “the system is bigger than one bad actor,” because the system has made that actor an asset. This is not passive failure; it is active incorporation.
Whatever else the institution claims to be—state, church, corporation, movement—it has become, in functional terms, a keeper of monsters. And the ethical demand to shun does not stop at the individual monster. It spreads to whatever feeds, protects, and deploys the monster in the world.
Taken together, this is the chain of reasoning that now binds me: some acts are so categorically indefensible that they allow no rehabilitation, no contextual rescue, no appeal to tragedy or necessity. Dog rape is one of those acts.
From that follows a moral judgment that is absolute, and from that, an ethical demand that is equally uncompromising: shun the monster without caveat or delay. When a system adopts such a figure, that system inherits the judgment. What began as an individual verdict becomes a structural one. At that point, disbelief is no longer prudence, and neutrality is no longer possible.
By now you may be wondering why I spent a quiet Sunday researching trained rape dogs and thinking about what makes a monster. The reading that kicked this whole spiral into motion was a piece on Palestinian detainees subjected to rape and sexual torture by a trained dog5 in the Israeli Sde Teiman camp, published by Caitlin Johnstone on December 3.
I encountered it the way most people encounter claims like this now: braced for exaggeration or manipulation. I shared my reaction at the start of this essay: disbelief first, judgment second. I did not assume truth. I resisted it. I tried to disprove it.
But the framework I’ve just laid out leaves very little room to hide once certain lines are named. If the claim is credible, the moral math is already done. And in this case, the claims do not come from the internet’s anonymous fog, but from three men who have attached their names to what they say was done to them or to others in their presence—specifically, attack by dogs trained to rape people.
Fadi Saif al‑Din Bakr, a Palestinian lawyer released in February 2025, says that while held at Sde Teiman detention camp, he witnessed soldiers unleash police dogs on naked detainees—one of whom, he claims, was raped by a dog.6
Adham Mansour, released in a prisoner-exchange deal, gave a sworn interview in February 2025 describing how detainees endured beatings, starvation, and “attacks of dogs,” and explicitly asserted that “there are prisoners who were raped by dogs.”7
Mohammed Arab, a Gaza correspondent formerly held at Sde Teiman, told a lawyer visiting him in detention that he had personally witnessed guards training dogs for sexual assault on prisoners.8
Sources matter. The human rights organizations sharing the unrelated reports of dog rape above lack the clout and perceived neutrality of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. But broader patterns of torture and sexual abuse have been well documented9 by both10 of those organizations. Taken together, this forms a contemporaneous pattern of claims that, under the standards of moral logic this essay has defined, deserve public and institutional recognition—not delay.
The false equivalency between critique of Israeli state actions and antisemitism is pervasive in American politics and media. Despite my deep conceptual objections to this framing, I have done my best to both-sides my way through the current war in Gaza until now. Trained rape dogs is my moral sticking point. Only a monster is capable of this.
And once a state becomes a keeper of monsters, the question of reform collapses into a narrower and more brutal one: can a structure that has crossed this line ever be redeemed without first rupturing itself? Redemption, if it exists at all, would require public expulsion of the monster, full institutional accountability for what was done under its authority, and material restitution to those harmed.
Until these conditions are met, I am ethically bound to deny the legitimacy of the current Israeli regime. Not merely this campaign, not merely these leaders, but the entire monster-keeping institution as it presently operates.
If this judgment sounds extreme, history offers a simple test of what happens when we refuse to make it in real time. Nazi Germany remains the cleanest historical lesson in how gradual knowledge clouds moral clarity. It took time for fragmentary reports from refugees, resistance networks, diplomatic cables, and intelligence intercepts to resolve into patterns: mass deportations, industrial camps, routine torture, and disappearances on a continental scale.
American soldiers fought the good fight in WWII, but prior to Pearl Harbor our government and corporations spent years in a posture of profitable distance. They sold oil, steel, and industrial equipment abroad, arming allies and adversaries alike while the machinery of atrocity accelerated.
Long before the full architecture of the Holocaust was known, it was already undeniable that Nazi Germany kept monsters as a matter of policy. Whatever geopolitical justifications once existed for that stance collapsed as the nature of the regime became clear. At that point, continued engagement became moral complicity in a system that had already forfeited its legitimacy by the monsters it employed.
Granted, Barbie was not publicly known as a rape-dog-level monster during the war itself. But from the moment the war ended, with respect to Barbie, the American state was ethically illegitimate in exactly the way the Nazi regime had been: it fed, shielded, and deployed a monster.
Redemption would have required public exposure of what had been done, institutional acknowledgment of wrongdoing, prosecution of those responsible, and restitution to victims. What actually happened is that Barbie was hidden for decades. Extradition came only under external pressure in the 1980s. There was no full public US judicial reckoning, no senior accountability, and no restitution process driven by the American state itself.
The monster was not expelled by conscience; it was abandoned by exposure.
We do not have the excuse of ignorance this time. We can shun the monster and the monster keepers alike. For my own government to maintain legitimacy in my eyes—and presumably in the eyes of anyone else who sees training dogs to rape people as a moral absolute—the call to action is clear: all aid to the Israeli regime must cease.
Author’s Note:
This essay applies a deliberately high bar for moral absolutes and a deliberately low bar for action once that bar is crossed. I am not weighing war policy, proportionality, or competing national narratives here. I am isolating a single category of act—rape by animal as an instrument of torture—and treating it as categorically indefensible by any human or institution. The call to shun that follows is not a demand for vengeance, erasure, or collective punishment. It is a refusal to materially, rhetorically, or diplomatically sustain any structure that keeps such a monster.
Ingrid Olderöck (Wikipedia)
Klaus Barbie (Wikipedia)
Six Witnesses Identify Barbie, Who Was Ordered Back to Court (Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
Sorry If This Is Antisemitic But I Think It’s Wrong To Train Dogs To Rape Prisoners (Caitlin’s Newsletter)
Gaza: Israeli army systematically uses police dogs to brutally attack Palestinian civilians, with at least one reported rape (Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor)
Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory 2024 (Amnesty International)
Israel: Detainees Face Inhumane Treatment (Human Rights Watch)