One of the things that has most annoyed the so-called “decent” left has been the use of hyperbolic comparisons between the US “war on terror” and barbaric systems like the Gulag. The Euston Manifesto expresses outrage that
officials speaking for Amnesty International, an organization which commands enormous, worldwide respect because of its invaluable work over several decades, can now make grotesque public comparison of Guantanamo with the Gulag.
Well I agree with the Eustonites that the Gulag was much much worse, partly because it extended over many decades, and partly because it involved the incarceration and deaths of an immensely greater number of human beings. But there’s another way to think about the comparison, and that’s to ask about how the daily life of a typical Guantanamo inmate compares with the life of the average “zek” as depicted by Solzhenitsyn. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that one life is similarly awful to the other. This conclusion, though, depends on the presumption that accounts of life in the Gulag (from former inmates) and in Guantanamo (from former inmates) are both accurate. And they may not be. But here, for comparative purposes, are links to the online text of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and a Guardian report about the experiences of Guantanamo detainees.
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It is just worth reminding everyone, btw, that the Euston Manifesto concedes merely that Guantanamo amounts to “a departure from universal principles”.
It is also worth reminding people that the Euston Manifesto quote says in full:
In short, the Euston Manifesto condemns violations of basic human rights at Guantanamo Bay on the basis that they are a departure from universal principles of human rights.
Any amount of textual analysis and selective quoting does not negate that.
I’m a good guy all ‘round; the fact that I murder and torture people every day is merely a departure from universal principles that I wholeheartedly support and helped to establish.
Thanks, but I think I really prefer a troglodyte.
The Gulag was worse. That said, I think we all expect more from the US than we did from the USSR. When the US begins to act, even to a small degree like the USSR, it begins to lose its moral authority and opens itself up to criticism. When you sell yourself as being better than the other guy (and the US has always, in truth, been better) and then you begin to act like that other guy you become a hypocrit. Guantanmo is turning into the US’s Gulag, and that is very bad.
‘X’ may ‘depart from universal principles’, but I’ll harshly attack any criticism of ‘X’ which doesn’t meet my analogical quality standards.
Surely what is morally relevantly different between them is not the conditions (though they may be better at Gitmo) but the intentions behind them. Right or wrong, Gitmo exists to try to protect Americans.
Yep, pretty much just like the Gulag. All that’s really missing is the small detail of 25-30% of the Gitmo detainees dying from overwork and exposure.
Yep, Gulag is worse.
Reading Richard J. Evans’ book, ‘The Third Reich in Power’ I was interested to see that survivors of the 1930s concentration camps (not the war war-time death-camps) generally agreed that the worst ‘torture’ was not knowing when they might be released, if at all. It’s worth recalling that Guantanamo’s legal limbo is itself a cruel and unusual form of psychological abuse.
to say that Gulag was worse and then to go on to explain that you mean that Gulag lasted longer and more people died is to accept that the US version is a gulag ( it is just smaller and less deadly ).
But this seems wrong because Gulags unlike Guantanamo interned people for criticising , for disagreeing with the Soviet government and its ideology. So the comparisons strike me as either stupid or evil.
Yep, pretty much just like the Gulag. All that’s really missing is the small detail of 25-30% of the Gitmo detainees dying from overwork and exposure.
A detail that’s also missing from Denisovich, a work that deals with the daily lived experience rather than the stats. Of course we don’t know how many have died of those who have disappeared into the secret and semi-secret prison system of which Guantanamo is just one part. But I’ll grant you that it is certain to be a much smaller proportion than those who died in the Gulag. If you can take comfort from that, you are truly pitiable.
Zdenek, all kinds of people were in the Gulag, including common criminals, and irrespective of why they were there, their lives were truly terrible. Many of those in Guantanamo are also guilty of no crime.
A departure from universal principles.
So is running a red light, failing to signal a turn and double parking, all of which should be roundly condemned as they endanger lives.
Bet they wouldn’t say that about Saddam.
They’re more troubled by abuse of metaphor than abuse at Gitmo.
So let me get this straight. We’re comparing the actions of the USSR, widely regarded as a truly evil political system, with the similar actions of the modern day USA, widely regarded as being a great (if sometimes flawed) political system. And yet somehow some of the commentators above are taking time to point out how the comparisons are not perfect. Shouldn’t the fact that there is any (flawed or not) comparison to be made at all be scaring the hell out of us about where U.S. policy is heading? Apparently not for many on the “decent left”. Which is to say, some of the comments are doing a good job of making Chris’s point, I think.
I don’t care if Gitmo is 1% or 100% like the Gulags. One guilty person being held by the USA in legal limbo is one too many; hundreds of quite possibly rather innocent people being held in legal limbo is an outrage. Why don’t people see this?
The Euston Manifesto is a perfect example of the kind of thing that only gets worse when you pay attention to it. Let it die, people! :-)
Gitmo exists to try to protect Americans.
You’ve got to be kidding, man. The GULAG protected peace-loving Soviet citizens against vicious class enemies – killers, spies, saboteurs; not to mention vicious spy nests of Trotskiist-Bukharinist agents and murdering physicians.
Perhaps the Eustonites think that by criticizing some of the actions perpetrated by democracies we make ourselves opponents of democracy. They can try to justify that assumption, but they will fail. Especially supporters of democracy (as, speaking only for myself, I have been for longer than I accurately know) might want to hold the West to its own best standards when it appears to slide into the contempt for human rights that is current in many totalitarian regimes.
The foregoing was inspired by this defence of that particular part of the EM:
So, if Geras likens Amnesty to George Galloway he is doing so out of love for Amnesty; but if Amnesty officials liken Gitmo to the gulags, they are succumbing to irrational hatred of America.
I hope that’s clear.
It might be good to take notice of the fact that a majority of US citizens ignore the left out of hand when it comes to criticisms of the US foreign policy. There are several reasons for this, a portion of which is a long tradition of unfavorable comparison and exaggeration to make a point.
Another reason might be relentless propaganda efforts by the right.
The lack of a moral compass on the American right is truly scary.
I’m curious – what does it even mean to say “most US citizens ignore the left out of hand when it comes to criticisms of US foreign policy”? What does ‘the left’ refer to in that sentence? The ISO? Amnesty? Michael Moore? It’s obviously untrue that most US citizens ignore the latter two.
Shorter James: The majority of my countrymen are unashamed bigots.
“Of course we don’t know how many have died of those who have disappeared into the secret and semi-secret prison system of which Guantanamo is just one part. But I’ll grant you that it is certain to be a much smaller proportion than those who died in the Gulag. If you can take comfort from that, you are truly pitiable.”
Posted by Chris Bertram
Chris, we don’t know that. The reason for putting somebody in the secret prison network is that they want to torture them, which makes that prisoner both more of a risk to release, and safter to kill. The fact that a prisoner is secretly moved into and around such a secret network means that there is no accountability.
There are two issues here: the living conditions and treatment of the detainees, and the way in which people become detainees in the first place. In terms of human rights, Gitmo and the Gulag are starkly different. In legal terms they are almost identical.
On the first, there is no real comparison to be made. Even the worst of the abusive treatment that has been alleged at Gitmo pales in comparison to the nightmare of the Soviet Gulag, and placing them side by side can only trivialize the (very real) human rights abuses that have taken place.
On the second, however, there is a much stronger parallel. In both cases people are apprehended and held indefinitely without due process or legal recourse. In both cases the standards of evidence that captors are required to meet are lax or nonexistent, and as a result the detainee population is a motley blend of the truly guilty, the completely innocent, and a blurry intermediate category of people who have believed the wrong things or associated with the wrong people or been on the wrong side of a conflict, but have not committed any well-defined crime.
Even the worst of the abusive treatment that has been alleged at Gitmo pales in comparison to the nightmare of the Soviet Gulag…
How come? Could you elaborate on this, please.
Hi,
The thing that is identical between Gulag and Gitmo, and the cause of the ensuing evil at whatever level, is the lack of due process that gets you there. That is what defines tyranny.
Have a nice day,
Antti
Matt Butler: you say there’s no comparison to be made between the living conditions and treatment of prisoners in the Gulag and at Guantanamo and that making such a comparison is to “trivialize”. I note that you don’t provide any actual evidence. I, on the contrary, invited you to compare Solzhenitsyn’s account of what it was like to live the daily life of a Gulag prisoner with some of the reports of life in Guantanamo. Perhaps you could explain exactly how the day of the typical Guantanamo detainee “pales in comparison” to the day that Solzhenitsyn tells us of.
You are being selective about the choice of Gulag prisoner, I could equally choose this “typical” day at Gitmo Bay in order to play this game, but as you would correctly point out this would be an intellectually dishonest argument.
Abuses at Guantanamo Bay can be criticised on the basis of known facts and universal principles. Why does one have to strive for some sort of moral equivalence with Gulags to make it wrong?
I think you’d be on stronger ground if you said that I had been selective in my choice of Guantanamo prisoner, Anthony. After all, nobody thinks that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was written in order to show the Soviet penal system in a favourable light.
Anthony,
Actually I think plain stupid is probably a better descriptor than intellectually dishonest.
I would guess that there are large similarities between most prison experiences. But beyond that I doubt Chris’s characterizations of Solzhenitsyn’s experiences are anymore accurate than his usual characterizations of this or that.
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-autobio.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/alesol.htm
Solzhenitsyn was in his own words a lucky prisoner(in his own words that means he got lucky and avoided a death sentence by getting better treatment for a portion of his stay) and I would guess the typical Guantanamo prisoner gets treated more or less like the old guy and those kids. And I doubt many Guantanamo prisoners are forced to work as bricklayers.
But admittedly I should read some of his works before definitively concluding.
But I think we fundamentally agree. Gitmo sux on it’s own no need to drag the Gulag into it.
Comparisons between the USSR in the 1930s and the USA today have to be made in context. Stalin’s prison camp system was constructed not because he was a bad guy (although he certainly was) but because the USSR rested on explosive contradictions. Peasant discontent threatened the socialist foundations of the economy. Given the stranglehold on the economy, the only way to modernize and industrialize the economy was through a “primitive accumulation” that involved bloody repression. If you think that it is possible to avoid violence, then you have not studied British or American history which rests on a mountain of skulls.
Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc. are far more extreme than anything that Stalin came up with if you factor in the low level of tensions and threats to American hegemony overseas and the economic system at home. There has not been any serious challenge to the US ruling class since the 1930s in fact.
Given the extremity of the response (kidnapping, torture, permanent imprisonment without trial, murder of civilians, etc.) to a relatively minor challenge (9/11), you’d have to wonder what the US ruling class would do if 3 or 4 countries in Latin America decided to adopt the Cuban economic model. I am sure that it would make Stalin blanch.
Not that I wish to be unduly pedantic, Louis, but the comparison was between one experience of the Soviet penal system around 1950 with the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo.
OK, so it’s an overstatement to talk about an “American Gulag.” But the term “mini-Gulag” would seem quite appropriate.
I find myself in the unenviable position of having to defend the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. For the record, I find it appalling and reprehensible. But I think it is important to avoid hyperbole.
There have been deaths at Gitmo, some of them almost certainly due to abusive treatment. But the overall mortality is in the ballpark of 1%. The documented mortality among the 18 million or so people who ended up in the Gulag system is just under 10%, and unofficial estimates range far higher.
Of course, mortality is only one measure of the human rights situation. But the conditions that killed so many people – extreme and prolonged malnutrition, cold, overcrowding, a truly sadistic labour regimen, and the constant threat of summary execution – also created human misery on an almost unimaginable scale. This is what makes Solzhenitsyn so harrowing to read.
I do not make this point to belittle what is happening at Guantanamo – quite the opposite. The beatings, shacklings, sleep deprivation, and other gross human rights abuses that are being committed there are crimes of the highest order. But it is not (yet at least) a place where people are sent to die en masse. And it seems to me that drawing comparisons with a system that did serve that function does nothing to strengthen the case of those of us who argue against Gitmo and demand to see it closed.
Actually I take that back. Completely.
If nothing else the arbitrary nature of both situations is a terrible similarity(really horrific and degrading) and is hopefully somewhat different from a normal prison experience.
Perhaps it’s time for an “Adopt a Gitmo Inmate” campaign. I’m sure most of you have a spare bedroom or at least could set up a cot in the rumpus room.
Shalom,
Bro. Bartleby
I am reminded for some reason of the apocryphal story of JP Morgan’s remarks when an office-boy was caught stealing the petty cash:
“don’t be too hard on the boy”, he said, “after all, we started small ourselves”.
I’m not sure it’s true that “the USSR rested on explosive contradictions” at the time when mass-repressions started there. I understand that the New Economic Policy mostly worked fine and could’ve continued. I think liquidation of kulaks as a class was pretty much an arbitrary action, not a result of contradictions – just like the WOT, for that matter.
…yeah, and what is this “serious challenge to the US ruling class” you speak of, Louis? It’s exactly the opposite – they never had it better. I think they are expanding, trying to find the new post-cold-war boundaries.
Like any war captives, the Gitmo inmates will be held until the war is over—in other words, when the Islamic umma renounces jihad. (Or, alternately, when America submits to Islam.)
Is it America’s fault that that day is rather far off?
The only deaths at GITMO were the suicides this weekend. Deaths have occurred at Bagram and at US prisons in Iraq, however, and several were declared homicides by US coroners, as this CBS report indicates.
What galls the “decent left” about the AI gulag reference was the clear hyperbole and the damage that it does to efforts to convince the as-yet unpersuaded that the treatment is unethical and a violation of our treaty commitments. The Bush administration has engaged in hyperbole too (e.g., “the worst of the worst” to describe all the detainees), but hyperbolic exchanges are unlikely to get the larger public and Congress to back reform. It is clear, however, from the context of the AI quote that it referred to the quasi-legal nature of the gulag—a remote, state-run prison where many people were detained who had committed no real crime. Many of the detainees at GITMO have been placed there based on accusations from less-than-credible sources (Pakistani and Afghan militias that seized them for cash bounties) and no effective means to challenge the factual basis for their detention.
It doesn’t help matters that the mantra from the close-GITMO crowd is that the uncertainty over their fate is one of the worst aspects of the detention. How would a German POW in 1940 have felt by early 1945? Wouldn’t he have faced uncertainty? Of course. What a German POW would not have faced is being stripped naked while interrogated for hours, had women’s underwear put on his head, splashed with water, seated naked and wet in front of an A/C, poked, forced to listen to loud music, deprived sleep for 4 days at a time, insulted and yelled at in order to make him talk. The US argues that it has the right to compel prisoners to provide “intelligence” and that they do not have a right to remain silent. Never mind that the intelligence being sought is not about troop movements, communication proceduces or battle readiness—legal activities in wartime—but about what are criminal acts—conspiracy to commit bombings, hijackings, aiding and abetting terrorists. In short, the US is coercing detainees at Guantanamo into confessing to crimes and then threatening or actually prosecuting them via military commissions that lack basic procedural safeguards. That is the HR issue.
“One Day in the Life…” is supposed to reflect a “good” day in the life of a Gulag inmate. A day when they’re not in solitary confinement, or being transported to a camp, or being questioned by investigators, or tortured, or beaten up by criminal thugs among the inmates, or losing their already inadequate food portion due on a guard’s whim, or any other of a few dozen much, much worse things that could happen to someone in a Gulag camp, or on their way to one. It’s a day when they’re merely hungry due to inadequate supply of food, and work at hard labor from sunrise to sundown.
In fact, Ivan Denisovitch even says as much right at the end of the novel, after hinting at some of the things that could happen – “The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one.”
Of course, anyone who’d actually read the novel would’ve realised that and not use it as a basis for comparison with an account by the Guantanamo inmates which, even if true, is wholly devoted to abuse they had undergone there during their three years.
“One Day…” was also substantially softened to make it even conceivable for it to be published in the Soviet Union in 1962 (which it was). A much better choice to compare the Guantanamo account to is Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”, in which he made no concessions to censors because he knew it’d be impossible to publish anyway, and which is devoted to recounting the different kinds of abuse, depravity, torture and death Gulag detainees had been subjected to.
But since Chris Bertram apparently never read “One Day…” (for reasons mentioned above), I don’t suppose it likely that he read “The Gulag Archipelago”, either.
The intelligence sought is about jihad, which is carried out through bombings, hijackings, etc. We cannot rely for our security on our justice system, characterized by farces like the Moussaoui trial and defense lawyers like Lynne Stewart.
Those who call for closing Gitmo and freeing Mumia are rightly ignored by the bulk of the American people.
Actually I think plain stupid is probably a better descriptor than intellectually dishonest.
If that is your preferred description for your post then who am I to argue.
The problem with such comparisons, to my mind, is two-fold. One is the assumption that moral indignation depends on some ideal case in the past. One can get morally indignant about Guantanamo without having to pump it up by way of the Gulag.
The second problem is more significant—analogy hides historic causes. Rather then comparison to the Gulag, the more causally interesting comparisons are to, say, Rikers in the nineties, or the imprisonment of the Cuban refugees in the eighties. In the later case, the systematic features of Guantanamo are already in place: the non-selectivity; the prospect of endless imprisonment; the use of devices, like solitary and darkness, that should be considered torture, especially as they extend into weeks.
Just as it was significant, in Abu Ghraib, that the chief torturers came from the American penal system— with all its implications for the way things are run in a system that is popularly considered to be full of sodomy/rape (a great source of jokes to the American public, just like Jews disappearing in smoke was to the German public in the Nazi years), so, too, the Guantanomo camp seems much more like Oakdale, or the Atlanta prison, where the U.S. dumped the undesirables from the Cuban boatlift, with the U.S. using deportation back to Cuba in the same way it now uses deportation to places that countenance extremer forms of torture.
The poison roots of this system aren’t found in Siberia. They are found in the U.S. itself.
1,606,748 deaths in the Gulags because the guards didn’t care who lived or died and actively killed them. 3 deaths at Guantanamo because the guards are only batting 99% in stopping suicides.
Unrestrained brutal abuse for the sake of abuse in the Gulag. Refined abuse for the specific purpose of collecting intelligence at Guantanamo.
Days spent slaving to death in coal mines, quarries, fields, or even sent into suicide battalions to stop German bullets for the Gulag. Days spent as inactive and bored as any US prison at Guantanamo.
Guantanamo can’t even come close to comparing to the Gulag
As it happens Anatoly, I’ve read both of them. (I’ve also read Henri Alleg’s La Question , if Soviet comparisons are too much for some people to take.)
Obviously there are big differences between the life of a Guantanamo inmate and the life of a typical Soviet prisoner (geography alone would see to that). But that both lives are comparably awful because of systematic abuse, deliberate cruelty, and the arbitrary use of power by guards etc etc etc is something no sensible person should deny.
(For the benefit of those who can’t read—such as the lamentable “jet”—let me iterate the point made clearly in the original post above, that the Soviet Gulag was clearly much much worse than anything the US has been up to recently, on grounds of numbers and duration alone.)
BTW, I had read the first of the two comments by John Bragg as ironic. Clearly, in the light of the second, I was wrong to do so.
John Bragg: “Like any war captives, the Gitmo inmates will be held until the war is over—in other words, when the Islamic umma renounces jihad. (Or, alternately, when America submits to Islam.)
Is it America’s fault that that day is rather far off?”
Actually, it’s Global War on Terror, now changed to war against Violence and Extremism. Sort of a open-ended war. This translates into the President of the USA having unchallengable authority to imprison anybody he feels, without hearing or trial, forever. And not just people seized ‘on the battlefield’, but those brought in by paying bounties, or due to Homeland ‘trust us, we’re doing a heckuva job’ Security’.
An excerpt on interrogation methods from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. This is not technically about GULag, though – they didn’t normally do interrogations in GULag. GULag was simply a bunch of forced labor camps: no interrogations, no breaking the will, no torture there. Just working and surviving. Certainly seems like a better place than Gitmo, if you ask me.
JESUS CHRIST NOT THIS AGAIN.
John Bragg: “….when the Islamic umma renounces jihad….”
The ‘Islamic umma’ had not declared jihad. Some individuals have. According to your theory, any milia members from the 1990’s could still be held, since ‘the right’ hasn’t ‘renounced war’.
I am amazed that an idea of comparing the two systems would seem valid to so many intelligent people
In fact German POWs were sprinkled across the American landscape in 300 camps at the beginning of the war, and over 600 camps at the end.
Like any war captives, the Gitmo inmates will be held until the war is over—in other words, when the Islamic umma renounces jihad. (Or, alternately, when America submits to Islam.)
Will every member of the Islamic umma become a war captive?
Why not compare the two systems? If history is supposed to teach us something, this would seem to be the only way to learn.
I don’t know about the ‘decent left’ that produced the Eusto Manifesto, but Andrew Sullivan is in a similar spot and he criticizes the comparison b/w the gulag and guantanamo, but he spends a lot more time criticizing guantanamo. So its a little harder to question his motives when he complains about overwrought comparisons.
The question you have to ask yourself is, why would he complain about those comparisons? I honestly think it has to do w/ what he perceives to be the most effective technique at persuading the public that guantanamo is a problem. Personally, I live in Austin, Texas. I’m not surrounded by eastern intellectuals anymore. I run into all sorts of average conservative americans. And for better or for worse, the only way to prevent guantanamo type abuses is to convince at least some of them that they’re a real problem.
Now, I can’t say for sure what the best technique for persuading these people would be. But I don’t think they respond too well to comparisons to the gulag- I think they just reject the possibility implicitly. But a lot of these people are reasonable in other kinds of ways, so I imagine they are capable of forming reasonable political views under the right influence. And maybe sullivan is right, that focusing relentlessly on the specific abuses at guantanamo, instead of making politically loaded comparisons, is the right approach.
You can’t dispute the claim by arguing that, no, from the right perspective guantanamo and the gulag are similar. That’s just not really the point!
Barry: Since the militia movement largely evaporated after the Oklahoma City bombing, we can pretty well say that “the right” has, in fact, renounced armed resistance to the American government.
Cryptic Ned: Those members of the umma who practice jihad will have to be dealt with, by combat, imprisonment, or surrender. The problem will continue until the umma renounces jihad, as Christendom gave up on crusades and sectarian warfare after the Thirty Years War.
Persuading people is not possible. They can be shocked, though.
Why not compare the two systems? If history is supposed to teach us something, this would seem to be the only way to learn.
It’s just that comparing genocide in concentration camp and conditions in US military prison seems beyond any apples and oranges…
Abb1,
Really great link. Thanks. I really like all 3 links, Chris’s and yours together.
John Bragg, it sounds like you’re the one practicing jihad here. Go fight your Good Fight, fella, recruiters are waiting.
What about Chris’ claim that the fact that the experience i.e. suffering is same ( this is anyway highly questionable on its own )shows that the institutions that cause the pain must be same ? This seems to be a non sequitur. To see this consider the following example. Suppose that I have my appendix removed without anasthetic which is performed on me in an emergency ; there is no anasthetic available. And suppose that the amount of pain I experience is equal to the amount of pain I would experience if I was tortured for 15 minutes . Does it follow that the operation is morally equal to the torture ? Obviously not but this is how Chris is reasoning when he wants to show that camp X-ray must be a Gulag.
Chris wants to say that both are torture even if one was not so bad but this is confused because the apendix procedure is not even a tiny bit of a torture ; it doesnt count as a torture. It seems to me that same thing is going on when you compare a system of forced slave labour which sometimes involved scientific experiments on the prisoners with the goings on in camp X ray.
Groups tend to be tarred with statements made by members. After 9/11 some members of right called for blood, war, revenge, etc. After 9/11 some members of the lefts said the US had it coming, the hijackers where justified. Then there are inaccurate the comparisons of Gitmo to a Soviet gulag. People on this site spend so much effort trying to understand the motivations of people from diverse and foreign cultures and then completely ignore their neighbors and countrymen. It is not hard to see why your views are being ignored.
Now when there is a real issue that needs attention, your message is only reaching the converted. The danger of Gitmo is the possibility that the government will lock up its citizenry without due process of the law. Hurt feelings and lack of sleep sound like football practice. You may view them as torture. There may even be a treaty on it. Like the call for payment of POWs in Swiss currency (Geneva Conventions), it has no place in reality for most people.
Sovet,
Sure but comparing Guantanamo iterogation techniques to those listed by Solzhenitsyn in abb1’s link doesn’t seem completely like comparing apples to oranges.
And as Chris has actually pointed out the deliberate cruelty and arbitrary nature of both systems are at least somewhat similar.
Zdenek and James,
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9236.htm
Great so we all agree! The Gulag was bad but apparently many of the people who confessed and were sent to the Gulag were quite guilty.
I mean only guilty people confess when deprived of a little sleep and given a strip tease.
But wait. If the folks sent to the Gulag were guilty what was so bad about the Gulag? I mean treason, communicating with the Japanese and crimes against the state, is forced labor really an unfair punishment for such crimes?
I remember reading a chunk of ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, on how the NKVD (or whatever it was named at the time) extracted confessions. They seemed to have a fetish on getting confessions, and being able to deny torturing people. Lack of sleep seemed to be a core method, and Solzhenitsyn regarded it as very effective at producing whatever statements were desired.
Euston Manifesto is very concerned ( as many people on the left are ) with hard Left’s softness ( excuse making etc. )with fscists of all sorts ( especially Islamofascists ) and the criticism of the comparisons that people like Chris ( and Pilger , Fisk , Moore etc. )make when they say that Quantanamo is a Gulag falls out of that concern.
It’s amateur intellectual history hour! Please John Bragg, let’s have some more cretinous generalisations about the clash of “Christendom” and the “Umma”. Be aware, though, that pontificating about large historical trends and dressing up banalities in pretentious language does not convey the impression that you have a clue what you are talking about. Rather, your claim that there has been no Christian sectarian warfare since the 30 Years War and your use of the word “jihad” in obvious ignorance of its meaning would appear to suggest the reverse.
Zdenek – You are completely missing the point with your thought experiment. Chris does not say that the morality of an action is determined by how it is experienced by its victim, nor does he need to.
If you talk in this loose way you are either just agit proping ( and then you dont have to be taken seriously ) or you are a moral lunatic .
engel – Isnt Chris saying ‘look those guys there are having hard time and those guys there are having hard time so the places that give them hard time are same ’ ?
It is principally a way of suppressing political decent this is what the term ‘Gulag’ means .
I always knew the Decents were persecuted visionaries, but I didn’t know that.
Zdenek,
No. I think I get the differences. Millions vs hundreds. Millions dead vs handfuls. Political dissenters vs maybe jihadists.
I don’t think you get the similarities. The use cruel methods to extract confessions. Being crushed by arbitrary power. Etc.
Engels: There was an editing error. I meant to write that Christendom has “pretty much” given up on sectarian warfare. There is still Belfast and Bosnia. However, after 1700, stamping out heresy ceases to be a plausible reason for a war in the rest of Europe or in European offshoot societies.
And one of us is ignorant or deluded about the meaning of jihad.
here we go again with the moral equivalence : head hackers of innocent civilians whose crime is that they are infidels occupy same moral space as Solzenitzin
At least one of the three recent suicides at Guantanamo was slated to be released. I think it’s safe to assume he wasn’t a “head hacker.”
Talk about moral lunacy.
And one of us is ignorant or deluded about the meaning of jihad.
Well, check it out and then come back and tell us whether it is really reasonable to demand that every Muslim should renounce jihad.
Zdenek – It is not the point being made in this particular post, but the fact is that there are non-experential similarities between the two systems as well, eg. the lack of due process, and this is partly what gives the comparison weight. And no, I don’t think #70 is a fair summary of anything Chris has said.
engels- what is Chris’ argument ?
Well, Solzenitzin was an enemy of the people, foreign spy and saboteur, you know.
Zdenek, I think BMA used the phrase “maybe jihadists” advisedly…i.e., emphasizing the fact that the inmates at Guantanamo may in fact be guilty of nothing whatsoever. There’s ample evidence that many of them were just hapless souls caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. That hasn’t stopped the US government from consistently referring to them as “the worst of the worst,” even as it has quietly released hundreds of them with no charges.
Your reference to “head hackers” completely obscured that “maybe” part. If you weren’t “claiming that captives in camp X ray are head hackers,” I’d like to know just what the hell you were claiming, and how it constituted a “specific reply” to BMA.
As far as I’m concerned, some poor bastard from Afghanistan who committed no wrongdoing, who was turned in by a neighbor seeking a nice cash reward, and who has been left to rot in G’mo indefinitely, occupies the exact same “moral space” as a Solzhenitsyn. Where exactly do you see a distinction?
abb1 – Solzhenitsyn’s crime was similar to Michael Moore’s . He criticised Stalin in a letter to a friend .
Zdenek,
Ohh you are playfull.
Again, no. Of course head hackers of innocent civilians don’t occupy the same moral space as Solzhenitsyn.
But many of these techniques –
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9236.htm
are similar to techniques used at Guantanamo.
How do you feel about confessions and imprisonments based on such techniques?
Are you ok with the folks sent to the Gulag based on confessions extracted with such techniques as sleep deprivation, sexual humilation, and being made to stand for hours?
And the arbitrary nature of the imprisonments is similar. No, not the death rates, I didn’t say that, I said the arbitrary nature of both imprisonments was somewhat similar and in both cases would be to some extent degrading and horrific.
I’m not sure I would hang too much of the analysis on the “fewer people died” hat. We have better medical technology and could in theory put people through much more extreme torture without killing them than the 1950s Soviets could.
Bottom line for me is that the dangers of Gitmo are lack of process and possibly torture. We shouldn’t torture, and we should have better process. Do the specifics of Gitmo look a lot like the Gulag? Not particularly. Are the specifics of Gitmo bad? Yes. Should try to change things? Yes. Is comparing it to the gulag going to help that? I seriously doubt it.
83—you are missing my point, similarities to which you draw attention are not enough to groung the claim that Quantanamo is a Gulag because you need to show that Quantanamo involves total lack of transparancy ( which labour camp in Siberia was visited by Red cross ? ) and that the function the purpose of US facilities is suppresion of desent. This is the qualitative difference which you are trying to obscure for agit prop purposes ; I have a problem with this lack of moral seriousness.
You don’t believe NKVD’s claim that Solzhenitsyn was a spy, but have absolutely no problem believing Pentagon that people at gitmo are hacking heads for sport. This is your problem right there. Both claims are equally valuable.
84, Sebastian Holsclaw
thank you, your post was needed a lot earlier in this thread
84—exactly there is clearly a qualitative difference between Gitmo and Gulag system ( anyway I cant take seriously the suggestion that smart people cannt see the difference )
abb1- get a life
Should try to change things? Yes. Is comparing it to the gulag going to help that? I seriously doubt it.
A nontrolling, unloaded, perfectly sincere question, Sebastian: What is going to help?
Zdenek, get a brain.
zdenek, maybe you should take your own advice.
Zdenek,
But I didn’t say Guantanamo is a Gulag. Why do you keep insisting I did? How many times must I point out the differences between the Gulag and Guantanamo before you will acknowledge that I do not think Guantanamo is a Gulag? Will you ever supply a quote to back up your imaginary claim that I called Guantanamo a Gulag?
One more time Guantanamo is not a Gulag.
Now, I want to hear the thoughts of a throughly serious moral fellow like yourself on the similarities between many of these techniques
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9236.htm
and the techniques used at Guantanamo.
Specifically lets say the sleep deprivation, forced standing, and tempature extremes. I want to hear your thoughts regarding the validity of confessions extracted from both sets of prisoners using these techniques.
I want to hear your thoughts regarding the arbitrary nature of both sets of imprisonments.
engels- what is Chris’ argument ?
I don’t know zdenek, maybe you should ask him. Or else read his post. Starting with these words:
John Bragg wrote: “Engels: There was an editing error. I meant to write that Christendom has “pretty much” given up on sectarian warfare. There is still Belfast and Bosnia. However, after 1700, stamping out heresy ceases to be a plausible reason for a war in the rest of Europe or in European offshoot societies.”
This is just wrong as a matter of historical fact. There were endless sectarian conflicts in the in Europe into the 18th century. In at least one case, the destruction of the Calvinist cathedral in Heidelberg by a Catholic Paltinate duke very nearly led to war, but instead stop short with Prussia, England and others engaging in open assault on Roman Catholics. When Fredrick the Great attacked Silesia in 1740 it was greeted with loud and long Hosanas by right thinking Protestants across Europe because of the long attack on Protestants there and elsewhere under Hapsburg control.
There are more examples. Many more examples. The idea that religious reasons for warfare or other forms of state sponsored violence evaporated on or about 1700 is historical inaccurate.
Folks, a gulag requires ice and snow. Barbed wire and guards are insufficient; iron bars do not a prison make. Life on a tropical island is always a vacation no matter how sadistic the room service.
I really can’t be arsed to argue with Zdenek, since I’ve experienced his peculiar blend of obtuseness and woodedheadedness in too many threads already. But I will take note of this, in one of his comments:
that people like Chris ( and Pilger , Fisk , Moore etc. )make
It is a rather unpleasant characteristic of the Eustonites to seek to pigeonhole all of those who disagree with them in this way. Zdenek may not know this, but I was a supporter of the Afghan war (and of Kosovo), but became persuaded that a war in Iraq would end in tears. (Incidentally, leading Eustonites like Nick Cohen took a rather different view on each of those events.) Nevertheless, an “official history” has been retrospectively composed according to which “everything changed” on 9/11 and the world was instantly neatlt divided into Pilgerites (or Stoppers)/moral relativists/etc on the one side and the shining Decent Eustonite left on the other. I’m afraid, Zdenek, that this on-message/off-message/us-or-them stuff reeks badly of Stalinism.
First of all, “gulags” is a collective term for an entire network of soviet secret prisons. America has now a secret prison network and “Gitmo” is but one of its nodes. So the comparison is intrinsically biased towards the US by comparing a single element on the US side to the Soviet totality. This is, of course, particularly relevant when speaking of scale.
And we must recognize that we are only 5 years in. Comparing durations is ridiculous. We have no idea what the US duration will be, and the current duration represents only the lower bound of possibilities (somewhat less, since we all know they won’t be closed tomorrow). A relevant comparison would be how many people had been in the Soviet gulags in their first five years of operations? In a previous discussion here, I heard a figure cited from Britannica of about 100,000 for the first ten years or so, so it seems unlikely the 5 year figure is more than half that. I’m not sure whether that figure is cumulative or a snapshot, however. At five years, what is the US figure for the entire network? 83,000, cumulative, has been admitted by the mainstream press. On scale, they do seem comparable at this point in time. I think the prospects of the US system growing to the Soviet scale are slight, but that is speculation.
For pity’s sake, folks—we went through this all at least once before, and I dealt with the issue in my comments there, and at greater length here.
Please, please, read the founding document of Amnesty International, a 1961 newspaper column by Peter Benenson. It’s not really about the general issue of ill-treatment of prisoners at all. Rather, it’s about the phenomenon of “prisoners of conscience”, defined as “Any person who is physically restrained (by imprisonment or otherwise) from expressing (in any form of words or symbols) any opinion which he honestly holds and which does not advocate or condone personal violence.”
In effect, this article was the Euston Manifesto of its day—a call for political freedom on behalf of the Decent Left, directed equally against hardline leftists who were willing to subordinate political rights to Marxist goals, and against hardline Western Cold Warriors who were willing to indulge repression among allies for the sake of geopolitical advantage.
Now, I’ve heard lots of claims about American misbehavior with respect to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the rest—people tortured, people imprisoned without trial, innocents unable to defend themselves against various charges, etc., etc. But I have yet to hear anyone accuse the US of doing any of these things for the purpose of suppressing dissent in Afghanistan—let alone in the US. On the contrary, few deny that Afghanistan is more free and democratic today than five years ago, thanks to American and Coalition intervention there. And as for America itself—well, as the latest polls demonstrate, dissent from the ruling party there is alive and thriving.
The left has a long, ugly history of downplaying the importance of political freedom in the name of goals such as material equality and socialism. The end of the Cold War was supposed to have remedied that problem—or so I thought. Yet here we are, fifteen years later, and leftists are once again treating political repression as a minor detail about Stalin’s Gulag, not even worth mentioning when comparing it with, say, George W. Bush’s Guantanamo. Plus ca change…
Tom Bach writes”
When Fredrick the Great attacked Silesia in 1740 it was greeted with loud and long Hosanas by right thinking Protestants across Europe because of the long attack on Protestants there and elsewhere under Hapsburg control.
I’m genuinely puzzled here. What role, if any, did those “right-thinking Protestants” play when Protestant Britain allied with CAtholic Hapsburg Austria to fight Protestant Prussia and France?
I’m not saying that there wasn’t religious violence after 1700. I’m saying warfare—interstate conflict carried out by means of armies.
There are more examples. Many more examples.
Could we start with one example of sectarian warfare between Christians after 1700?
The idea that religious reasons for warfare or other forms of state sponsored violence evaporated on or about 1700 is historical inaccurate.
Are we conflating “warfare” with any form of state-sponsored/tolerated violence?
“A nontrolling, unloaded, perfectly sincere question, Sebastian: What is going to help?”
I’m not sure. I would think that publicizing the details and stressing (repeatedly) that some caught in the web are almost certainly not terrorists could help. I think part of the problem is that those who want to oppose the Iraq war in general are mixing the issue and those who want to support the Iraq war in general are mixing the issue. Taking a stand against Gitmo because it isn’t nice to terrorists isn’t likely to be helpful. Taking a stand specifically because it seems to have lots of non-terrorists is another thing entirely. I think the anti-Gitmo voices that tend to be heard tend to have too broad a focus. Using Gitmo to fight the war in general is a good way to make sure you lose on the issue of Gitmo.
The left has a long, ugly history of downplaying the importance of political freedom in the name of goals such as material equality and socialism.
It may well have Dan, but I think you’ll find that neither I nor anyone else in the thread downplayed the importance of political freedom in the name of material equality or socialism. I could go back and check carefully, but I’m pretty sure of that. Anyway, I’m glad to learn that people freezing to death, being worked until they dropped, being tortured etc weren’t what was really bad about the Gulag. Mind you, I think we should now revise those figures for victims of Stalinism down a bit, since only those who died whilst imprisoned for delit d’opinion should be counted. Silly me.
On the contrary, few deny that Afghanistan is more free and democratic today than five years ago, thanks to American and Coalition intervention there.
Actually, plenty of people deny it, starting with virtually all of the women…
John Bragg,
“I’m genuinely puzzled here. What role, if any, did those “right-thinking Protestants” play when Protestant Britain allied with CAtholic Hapsburg Austria to fight Protestant Prussia and France?”
This has nothing to do with Silesia, does it? In the TYW France, that most Catholic of nations, supported the Protestants. This did not occur with the the universal support of Catholics inside or outside France. Many, in fact, denounced the policy. Ditto this casse. States sometimes go to war for ideological reasons and sometimes, hard though it might be to credit, for material. Go figure.
“I’m saying warfare—interstate conflict carried out by means of armies. . . . Could we start with one example of sectarian warfare between Christians after 1700?
Silesia 1740. Not only was it greeted with hosanas and shouts of joy but German Protestants had been beating the drum for war there under Fred Bill and their desires were met in Fred the G’s attack. Indeed, Protestant activists had tried to forced Fred Bill to take a much more agressive stance toward Silesia and Austria throughout his reign. Is this a sufficient example?
And no, I wasn’t conflating I was suggesting two different kinds of state sponsored violence springing from the same source: religious beliefs, or more precisely differing beliefs. States continued to use the notion of “heresy” to harrass, imprison, and exile their subjects, for example the Salzburgers.
The militia movement got diluted in 1994 with Gingrich’s take-over of the Congress, and finally evaporated with the selection of George W. Bush as president in 2000. They have not gone away, but merely been integrated into the system. Nowadays they are prowling up and down the Texas border, taking aim at wayward Mexicans.
The day after the next Democrat is elected President—and especially if it happens to be Senator Clinton—the militia movement will be back with a level of explosive violence that I predict will be as close to civil war as they can manage.
I hope I’m wrong, but that’s my wager.
Finally, why does everyone have their panties up in a knot about this?
Allow me to attempt to summarise and cut through the B.S.:
GITMO GULAG——— ——-
Secret detention Yes Yes
“Archipelago” of secret prison locations Yes Yes
Torture Yes Yes
No legal recourse Yes Yes
Orwellian double-speak justification Yes Yes
“Enemy of the state” prisoners Yes Yes
“Guilty” and innocent jumbled in dragnet Yes Yes
Contravenes human rights standards Yes Yes
OK, people, can we please cut the crap then? YES, Gitmo is like the GULag, in several ways: in the purpose, nature of detention, and type of treatment of prisoners. NOT in the scope or duration, of course, nor even in their lethality, which I think was the point of the original poster, and which is plainly and inarguably true.
My point being, the similarities are sufficient to make the analogy valid. I see nothing wrong with the “decent” left saying that—provided they’re precise about it. Analogies aren’t exact; otherwise they wouldn’t be analogies, would they?
Anyway, I’m glad to learn that people freezing to death, being worked until they dropped, being tortured etc weren’t what was really bad about the Gulag.
You’re missing the point, Chris. The reason that millions of people could be shipped off to the Soviet Gulag to be worked, tortured and frozen to death was that anyone who was suspected of even potentially being willing to raise so much as a peep of protest against the whole system was shipped off to the Gulag to be worked, tortured, etc.
Guantanamo’s relative tininess, the relatively narrow class of prisoners it houses, and the relatively benign treatment they receive, aren’t simply incidental traits that happen to distinguish it quantitatively from the Soviet Gulag. They’re direct consequences of the most important underlying distinction: that because it operates in a society that permits political dissent and protest, the US government is constrained to behave in a manner that won’t raise outrage among its population.
(That’s no absolute guarantee of perfect behavior, of course—democratic populations aren’t always utterly devoid of sin. But their record on moral matters so far outshines that of the world’s tyrannies as to make the causal connection undeniable.)
“On the contrary, few deny that Afghanistan is more free and democratic today than five years ago, thanks to American and Coalition intervention there.”
Actually, plenty of people deny it, starting with virtually all of the women…
Really? Virtually all the women of Afghanistan consider themselves to have had more freedom and democracy under Taliban rule than today?
Tom Bach, If your example of a sectarian war in post-Westphalia Europe is the War of the Austrian Succession, then you’re holding a pretty weak hand. Frederick II was barely a Christian, never mind which stripe, and his grab of Silesia was a pure land-grab.
Sectarian wars look like the Wars of Religion in France, the century of off-and-on warfare from the Peasants’ War through the Thirty Years War in Germany, the crusade against the Albigensians, or Cromwell’s campaigns in Ireland. Not every case of Catholics and Protestants fighting is a sectarian war, an attempt to spread the True Faith (or get rid of the Wrong Faith) by the sword.
The dream of imposing the One True Faith worldwide, in part by force of arms, is alive in the dar-al-Islam. Christianity hasn’t been imposed by the sword in centuries. As an atheist, therefore, I prefer Christianity.
The left has a long, ugly history of downplaying the importance of political freedom in the name of goals such as material equality and socialism.
And the right has a history of supporting brutal torturers and murderers who also suppressed political freedom like Pinochet, Videla, Banzer, Rios Montt, Suharto, the Shah of Iran, Mobutu, apartheid era South Africa in the name of fighting communism. Only in these cases it was done with far more than lip service on far right magazines. It was done with the active
Not to mention, by the way an act of state-sponsored terrorism that one of the right’s darlings, Pinochet, had his secret police commit in Washington, DC.
Pot kettle black
The only thing that prevented George W. Bush’s prison camps from being an exact duplicate of Stalin’s was the knowledge that the press would be watching, and that much of the truth would swiftly get out to his nation and the world. If Stalin had this knowledge, the Gulags would have been far more humane, and mistreatment of prisoners would have been rare and vigorously punished.
Stalin’s malignant personality and contempt for human life—whether that of his enemies, his friends, or people of whom he knew nothing—did not compel him to monstrous evil; rather, the knowledge that he could get away with it allowed him monstrous evil as a convenient option. If Bush and those around him truly felt that they could keep their actions secret and never be called to account for them, we would have mass arrests and concentration camps in America today.
The difference between the two systems has nothing to do with the creeds they profess. It has everything to do with the environment within which they operate.
Failure to understand and acknowledge this is a failure to learn the lesson of millenia of human history: every age and every nation has people willing to commit any atrocity to seize and retain power, and restrained only by the action of, or fear of, a stronger power or combination of powers, whether foreign or domestic.
I would think that publicizing the details and stressing (repeatedly) that some caught in the web are almost certainly not terrorists could help.
see, the problem here is that amnesty does this pretty much every day of the week, and has done so since details of conditions at gitmo first became known. and yet, no one particularly pays much attention to what they say. but in may 2005, its secretary-general happens to call gitmo “the gulag of our times”, all of a sudden it’s all over the news and the ensuing shit-storm is such a big deal that the president and the secretary of defence are forced to address it in public statements.
based solely on the criteria of arousing public interest, what are we to conclude from this?
and that’s not to mention that we’re still talking about it a year later.
…that because it operates in a society that permits political dissent and protest, the US government is constrained to behave in a manner that won’t raise outrage among its population.
You’re wrong, Dan, any government is constrained to behave in a manner etc.
That is true about any government – Bush’s America, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Neron’s Rome.
Permitting political dissent and protest is a way to calm the population down, not to constrain government’s behavior.
And the right has a history of supporting brutal torturers and murderers who also suppressed political freedom like Pinochet, Videla, Banzer, Rios Montt, Suharto, the Shah of Iran, Mobutu, apartheid era South Africa in the name of fighting communism.
That’s quite true—and I even mentioned it in my first comment. What’s interesting is that since the fall of Communism, that justification has effectively disappeared, and even (since 9/11, at least) been replaced with a surprising fervor for democratization. (Of course, whether the latter will survive America’s current round of activist foreign entanglements remains to be seen.)
In short, the right has—momentarily, perhaps accidentally—learned its lesson. Would that the same could be said of the (non-decent) left.
“based solely on the criteria of arousing public interest, what are we to conclude from this?”
If the way AI arouses public interest makes it less likely that Gitmo will be dealt with appropriately I would suggest they should try another tactic. I think AI has a problem of a focus that doesn’t reasonate well with the US public. Instead of arguing that terrorists shouldn’t be tortured (true but I don’t think most in the US give a damn) they should be focusing on the innocent people swept up in the web. Focus on government incompetence. Conservatives eat that up. Mixing the moral crusades together make it much less likely that any ground will be taken. Along the way at least we would get a more transparent process. (I know that AI doesn’t see it that way, but that is why it isn’t being effective.)
…been replaced with a surprising fervor for democratization…
This is, of course, bullshit. Same policies, different pretext. And the ‘decent left’ is, of course, nothing more than a bunch of useful idiots.
I’m touched by Dan Simon’s view that a penal system under which vast numbers of people were imprisoned under dehumanizing conditions for petty offences, conditions which radically shorten the lives of many of them, would be impossible in a free society, because public opinion wouldn’t tolerate such a thing.
“In short, the right has—momentarily, perhaps accidentally—learned its lesson.”
WTF? The Right certainly approves of American support of any number of awful regimes because they are useful to the U.S. in the so-called war on terror.
“If the way AI arouses public interest makes it less likely that Gitmo will be dealt with appropriately I would suggest they should try another tactic. I think AI has a problem of a focus that doesn’t reasonate well with the US public. Instead of arguing that terrorists shouldn’t be tortured (true but I don’t think most in the US give a damn) they should be focusing on the innocent people swept up in the web. Focus on government incompetence. Conservatives eat that up.”
Sorry Seb, but you’re dreaming. There was ample evidence of government incompetence in Iraq for Bush to go down to history’s worst defeat in 2004 and it didn’t happen. So basically you object to calling Gitmo a gulag because it is counter-productive to obtaining the desired objectives (e.g. having the U.S. stop torturing people) yet your own plan is pie-in-the-sky.
Myself I think the “Gitmo is a gulag” slogan is a good one. It isn’t going to appeal to Mom and Pop America, but it resonates with the elite, and this issue is going to be decided by the elite, not by some mass movement by middle America (unless by some unlucky stroke, an Anglo-Saxon middle American is sent to Gitmo).
re 119, much further up, james was troubled “the possibility that the government will lock up its citizenry without due process of the law”.
also, sebastian, i take your point and it makes sense, that amnesty’s cause could be helped by emphasising different aspects of the story [wrongful detentions in the sense of innocence, rather than in the sense of mistreatment] to different audiences [government incompetence to tories, rather than human rights to effete east coast intellectuals].
but still. amnesty international is a human rights organisation, which is a different thing to, say, the cato institute. for amnesty to pitch things in the way you suggest is going to seem false to a bunch of the people it seeks to persuade [tories], alienating to people who would otherwise support it [effete east coast intellectuals], and possibly contrary to amnesty’s own understanding of itself [as non-political].
so it’s risky.
…same moral space as Solzenitzin…
Btw, Mr. Solzhenitsyn is, frankly, a crank. He’s a reactionary Russian nationalist and pretty much a Christian fundamentalist. Not that anything’s wrong with that, but if this guy represents some kind of moral authority to you and your comrades, I have to wonder how the word ‘left’ got there into “decent left” in the first place.
Must say not much of a difference between Lenin Tomb and Crooked Timber over issue like this . When people ask why Eustonites have beef with hard left I now say if you want to know what Shalom Lapin or Norman Geras are fussing about go and check out Crooked Timber to see this sort of sentiment in action .
re 122—yes Solzhenitsyn was not nice but as you seem to half grasp that is not the issue . The comment involving ‘moral space’ was to point out that critics of the system ended in Gulags unlike the critics of US government. Is this too contraversial ?
Dan Simon: “What’s interesting is that since the fall of Communism, that justification has effectively disappeared, and even (since 9/11, at least) been replaced with a surprising fervor for democratization. ”
Just to pile on, you’re lying. The Bush administration is notable for its loathing of democracy in the US, let alone in other countries. They operate in secrecy, without checks and balances, to an extent not seen in decades, at least. Their original plan for Iraq was to install Chalabi; when that failed, they decided to run it as a military dictatorship for a number of years. The only reason that any elections were conducted was that Sistani wanted them, and threatened to slip loose the Shiites.
‘re 122—yes Solzhenitsyn was not nice but as you seem to half grasp that is not the issue . The comment involving ‘moral space’ was to point out that critics of the system ended in Gulags unlike the critics of US government. Is this too contraversial ’
Literally every aspect of the second sentence in this statement is false. If you are claiming that it was ONLY critics of the Soviet government that ended up in the gulags then that is false, as has been pointed out. (many prisoners in the gulags were rapists, murderers and paedophiles…which doesn’t justify the gulags but which does show that not all of the prisoners were lily white angels). Critics of the US government certainly DO end up in the US’ system of ‘extraordinary rendition’, torture etc. (especially when you consider that prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq were and are part of this system).
You even, implicitly, get wrong what was so bad about the Gulags. As a very quick perusal of 1984 will show you, the real horror of the gulag/ingsoc system was that you might get arrested for having done absolutely nothing: but you would get tortured (or otherwise ‘persuaded’) to confess anyway. This is why (as the law lords pointed out some time ago) having a system where people simply disappear and are never heard of again is so morally disgusting and psychologically damaging, whether that be in Argentina or the USSR or anywhere in the world where people can be snatched by the US and then vanish (cf the notorious ‘ghost prisoners’).
Incidentally there seems to be a strange belief that the ‘abuse’ in Gitmo and other, even more secret jails, stops at rape and murder. But we know for a fact this isn’t true.
brendan—could you expand your suggestion that critics of US government end up being tortured etc. could you just ellaborate a bit ?
…to point out that critics of the system ended in Gulags unlike the critics of US government…
Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to 8 years for anti-Soviet activities. Interesting that some critics of the US government got exactly the same treatment at the time:
Regrettable deviation from the principles.
abb1—how many of these critics ended in slave labour camps in which they were worked to death ?
Again I am not claiming that US behaviour is above approach and your examples work only against such rediculous view ( no one holds such a view as far as I can tell ).
My point is that this Gulag talk involves a category mistake.
All right, all right. Down with Gulags. Peace, man.
That “departure from universal principles” line is truly fafblogesque.
‘brendan—could you expand your suggestion that critics of US government end up being tortured etc. could you just ellaborate a bit ?’
Sure. Dunno why you want the details but if you insist….
‘Karim R (3), a 47-year old imam and preacher (khatib), was detained and tortured by US forces in 2003 and then by Iraqi forces in 2005. On each occasion, he was subsequently released uncharged. He told Amnesty International that he was first detained in October 2003 by US forces in Baghdad, where he lives and is head of a charity. He was insulted, blindfolded, beaten and subjected to electric shocks from a stun gun (taser) by US troops at a detention facility in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad. After seven days of detention, he was released without charges.
Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 tens of thousands of people have been detained by foreign forces, mainly the US forces, without being charged or tried and without the right to challenge their detention before a judicial body. Between August 2004 and November 2005 an administrative review board (the Combined Review and Release Board),(43) composed of representatives of the MNF and the Iraqi government, examined the files of almost 22,000 internees and recommended about 12,000 for release and another 10,000 for continued detention….Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 tens of thousands of people have been detained by foreign forces, mainly the US forces, without being charged or tried and without the right to challenge their detention before a judicial body. Between August 2004 and November 2005 an administrative review board (the Combined Review and Release Board),(43) composed of representatives of the MNF and the Iraqi government, examined the files of almost 22,000 internees and recommended about 12,000 for release and another 10,000 for continued detention…..’