One Day in the Life of Abdul ibn Denis

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.

‘X’ may ‘depart from universal principles’, but I’ll harshly attack any criticism of ‘X’ which doesn’t meet my analogical quality standards.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The lack of a moral compass on the American right is truly scary.

Shorter James: The majority of my countrymen are unashamed bigots.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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’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.

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?

“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.

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.

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

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’.

JESUS CHRIST NOT THIS AGAIN.

I am amazed that an idea of comparing the two systems would seem valid to so many intelligent people

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?

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!

Persuading people is not possible. They can be shocked, though.

Abb1,

Really great link. Thanks. I really like all 3 links, Chris’s and yours together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

# 64 you dont seem to understand what Gulags were . it is not just the cruelty such as transportation in cattle trucks without heat through Siberia in winter and that some camps experimented ( radiation experiments 1949 ) on the prisoners . It is principally a way of suppressing political decent this is what the term ‘Gulag’ means . If you want to use it you need to show me where are the American camps in which people like Michael Moore sit ?
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 .

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.

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.

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 ?

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?

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.

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.

84, Sebastian Holsclaw
thank you, your post was needed a lot earlier in this thread

abb1- get a life

Zdenek, get a brain.

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.

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.

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…

“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.

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…

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.

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.)

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.

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

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?

…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.

“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.)

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.

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 .

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.

brendan — could you expand your suggestion that critics of US government end up being tortured etc. could you just ellaborate a bit ?

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.

That “departure from universal principles” line is truly fafblogesque.

Prisoner: You bastard! You’re torturing me!
Torturer: Please don’t overreact. My torturing you is a departure from universal principles for which I bear the greater part of the historical credit.
Prisoner: I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, it’s just that… Arrrrrrrgh!
Torturer: You might even say that if it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t even mind being tortured in the first place.
Prisoner: I didn’t… Thanks a lot. Aieeeeeeeeeeee!
etc

brendan- thanks, but your examples, as far as I can tell dont show critics being arrested. What about some journalists who criticise US foreign policy , or generally cases where someone gets arrested , tortured etc because and only because he says Bush is an idiot in public or writes an analysis showing that the war in Iraq is wrong etc.

The problem with the comparison is exemplified in this thread. Instead of the comparison throwing a light on the conditions at Guantanamo so that those conditions become politically impossible to sustain, the comparison itself becomes the issue. In other words, it is the usual, depressing movement from arguing about reality to arguing about the rhetoric representing reality — the hallmark of the Bush era.

If I’m right, then the comparison fails — since its whole purpose isn’t to give us an historical assessment, but to motivate political action.

the argument above against the idea that Gitmo is a Gulag properly speaking was roughly that we should find there as was the case in the Soviet case ( which serves as a paridigm example of gulag ) inmates who were :

1)sentenced to slave labour and worked to death

2) some inmates who were there only and only because they criticised the US government.

The argument was unless you can show that 1 & 2 are true it is false that Gitmo = Gulag.( follows by modus tolens ).
This is where my question put to you comes in and as I suspected you come up with irrelevant examples i.e. your examples do not show that 1&2 are true. Anyway this is what is going on which I thought was obvious.

Er no Zdenek, as a very quick look at the original post will show, the argument was, and I quote: ‘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.’

If you want to argue against someone else, who, perhaps on some other blog, argued in Gitmo there was forced labour, then be our guest. No one is stopping you. But no one argued that here, and, again, it is completely irrelevant to the key point about how awful both expeiences are/were.

The argument about why the prisoners are there, apart from being irrelevant, is of course even more vapid, as the whole point is that NOBODY (no, not even you zdenek) knows why they are there, as the US won’t charge them. The same goes for the tens of thousands of people arrested without charge in Iraq. Perhaps they are being held for criticising the US, perhaps not, who knows? Again, not even you Zdenek.

If you have some exciting new piece of evidence that demonstrates that on a day to day basis life in Gitmo is fundamentally less ‘awful’ than life in the gulag then please share it with us. If not, then you are coming up with…what’s the phrase? oh yes…’irrelevant examples’.

That they typically aren’t doing it to their own citizens is only a manifestation of the fact that their grip on power is firm internally. Just a couple decades ago they were shooting students at the Kent state, firebombing Philadelphia, assassinating black activists and so on. There is no magic here; there’s only one overriding principle: those who have the power will try to exercise it and hold on to it by any and all means. They don’t care about any human rights and stuff like that; if they did they wouldn’t have the power in the first place. Such is life, unfortunately.

Dan Simon,

You ignore the fact that the right supported dictators with the full force of military arms sales, economic aid and training of military personnel.

As for your claim that “that justification has effectively disappeared” for the right since the end of the Cold War, that’s poppycock. You need look no further than Azerbaijan,Kazakhstan, Euitorial Guinea and Somalia to see how wrong you are.

For some reason, you want to paint Guantanamo in as bad a light as possible, and a comparison with the Gulag is just a means to that end.

Dan doesn’t seem impressed by “…rat, snake and scorpion-infested cages in which the men lived, exposed to blistering daytime temperatures, freezing nights and torrential rain” the way Chris is.

Well, it’s plainly obvious that democratic rats, snakes and scorpions can’t seriously be compared to tyrannical ones. There must be a hidden agenda here somewhere.

“Guantanamo is a Gulag”
This is poetry.
Metaphor.
A way of naming something new and unfamiliar using the known and familiar.
Not equivalence.
Nothing equals anything else, but the evocation of already-in-place imagery communicates, brings home the news.
Another problem is in the abstraction of these places – Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo – because they’re not abstract things at all, not principles or examples of theory but real physical loci, open wounds in the present. They fester.
And it’s of paramount importance that the victims are distinguishable from us ethnically and culturally – the not-us, them.
That makes the images much easier to tolerate.

“Guantanamo is a Gulag”
This is poetry.
Metaphor.
A way of naming something new and unfamiliar using the known and familiar.
Not equivalence.

“Rollo is an idiot”

This is poetry.
Metaphor.
A way of naming something new and unfamiliar using the known and familiar.
And about as enlightening as, “Guantanamo is a Gulag.”

The injustice is being committed in our name, and we can do something about it.

Fair enough–if you’re an American, go ahead and raise a stink. You don’t even need bogus analogies to the Gulag to justify your anger–concern about one’s own government’s actions is natural and understandable.

But I’m not an American, and as far as I know, neither is Chris. What’s his excuse?

Steve Bell…

It’s not cool being anti-American any more, too crowded. We gotta find some other shtick.

“I don’t know about the ‘decent left’ that produced the Euston 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.”

Sullivan recently wrote an essay in the London Sunday Times, (The Horrors Really Are Your America, Mr Bush June 4, 2006) which in my view is relevant to this discussion, although there is no mention of the “gulag” metaphor.

“This is not America.” Those words were President George W Bush’s attempt to explain the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-language network Alhurra in 2004. He spoke the words as if they were an empirical matter, but a cognitive dissonance could be sensed through them.

If th[ose]…who tortured and abused and murdered at Abu Ghraib did not represent America, what did they represent? They wore the uniforms[, and] …were under the command[,] of the American military. In the grotesque, grinning photographs they clearly seemed to believe that what they were doing was routine and approved…Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary,…authorised the use of unmuzzled dogs to terrify detainees long before Abu Ghraib occurred, exactly as we saw in those photos. Does the secretary of defence not represent America?

Almost two years after the torture story broke Congress finally roused itself and passed [legislation] … that forbade the use of any “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of detainees… Bush signed it. But he appended a “signing statement” insisting that, as commander-in-chief, he retained the right to order torture if he saw fit.

[The] nominee for CIA director, Michael Hayden,…asked…by Senator Dianne Feinstein whether he regarded “waterboarding” as a legitimate interrogation technique. Hayden replied: “Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail.”

Huh? Why a closed session? Isn’t the law crystal clear? Isn’t strapping a person to a board, tilting him so that his head is below his feet, and pouring water through a cloth into his mouth to simulate drowning a form of “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment? And isn’t that illegal? In America? Or is that not America either?

I ask these questions because so few in power in Washington want to go there. When I[ve raised]…these atrocities[with]…senators and senior administration officials in private, I have noticed something. Their eyes flicker down or away. Some refuse to discuss the matter, as if it is too much to contemplate that the US has become a country that detains people without trial or due process, and reserves the right to torture them… “This is not who American servicemen are,” Richard Armitage, the then deputy secretary of state, insisted after Abu Ghraib. … Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, in an interview with Al Arabiya: “Americans do not do this to other people.”
[…]
But this much must also be said: the words of Bush and Rice and Armitage are still untruths. That much we know. And last week, we had to absorb another dark truth: that in a town called Haditha, US Marines appear to have murdered women and children in cold blood and covered it up.

There is also a new claim of a similar kind of massacre at a place called Ishaqi. Last week the American military issued fresh ethical guidelines for soldiers in Iraq. One marine commander told Time magazine: “If 24 innocent civilians were killed by marines, this will put a hole in the heart of every single marine.” I believe him. But I do not believe that this president has ever acknowledged his own responsibility for the atrocities committed by Americans on his watch and under his command.
[…]
His obdurate refusal to change course, to provide sufficient troops, to fire his defence secretary, to embrace, rather than evade, the McCain amendment has robbed him of any excuse, any evasion of responsibility.

And yet he still evades it. Last week he spoke of Abu Ghraib as something that had somehow happened to him and to his country, almost as if he were not the commander-in-chief or president of the country that had committed such abuse. When the evidence is presented to him, he displaces it. He puts it to one side. In his mind America is a force for good. And so it cannot commit evil. And if he says that often enough it will somehow become true. In this way his powers of denial kick in like a forcefield against reality.
[…]
[Bush] forgets that what is noble about America is not that Americans are somehow morally better than anyone else. But that it is a country with a democratic system that helps expose the constancy of human evil, and minimise its power through the rule of law, democratic accountability and constitutional checks. That system was devised by men who assumed the worst of people, not the best, who expected Americans not to be better than any other people, but the same. It was the wisdom of the system that would save America, not the moral superiority of its people.

What is so tragic about this presidency is that it has simultaneously proclaimed American goodness while dismantling the constitutional protections and laws that guard against American evil. The good intention has overwhelmed the fact of human fallibility. But reality — human reality — eventually intrudes. Denial breaks down. The physical evidence of torture, of murder, of atrocity, slowly overwhelms the will to disbelieve in it.

I am sorry, Mr President. This is America. And you have helped make it so.

“Normally, Chris, I’d completely agree with you that one is entitled to focus one’s attention on whatever one likes. But …” = You do not want this society to be self critical. You are like a German at Hitler rises, nothing he did was worse than the GULAG, that is at the beginning.
As a child I wondered at how could anyone agree with nazism, I still do not understand it, what has changed is that now I am aware that whenever wherever there will be some one that acquiesce without criticism.

DSW

‘After all, if being like the Gulag makes Guantanamo more worthy of condemnation, then why aren’t places that are far, far more like the Gulag—the North Korean prison camp system, for instance, or the Burmese one—worth far, far more attention still?’

And if this was a North Korean or Burmese blog, that would be a perfectly good question.

Why, then, is it not a perfectly good question for a British blog?

Who, but Dan Simon, said it would not be a good question?

Now we live, still, in a democracy so we have a little input on our rulers, an input you gladly discard as I see, by the device of setting us to protest against governments on which we do not even legal input.

DSW

Uncle Kvetch,

You are the man!

Talking about North Korea: we don’t really know that the North Korean prison camp system is bad. It’s a secret system, nobody knows for sure what’s going on there. We can only suspect it’s very bad. Just like the US system of secret prisons. In this respect the US is exactly like N.Korea.

This is, btw, an undeniable proof that democratic political system (or at least the US form of it) is not incompatible with a secret prison camp system.

‘Why, then, is it not a perfectly good question for a British blog?’

Well here’s part of the explanation: the ‘torture planes’ allegedly stop off at an airport 40 miles from where I live. Moreover, people I actually meet and talk to end up going to Iraq and Afghanistan…. and come back in boxes. (And please don’t tell me that that has ‘nothing’ to do with Guantanamo: it has everything to do with it).

I might also add that the mention of Burma is an act of gross hypocricy (Instapundit et al do occasionally mention North Korea, although NK has attracted little of the hysterical opprobrium that Iran does……According to Bob Woodward, NK was simply thrown into the ‘axis of evil’ as an afterthought to make it sound less anti-Islamic).

One can search through LGF, Harry’s Place, Instapundit, Vodkapundit, et al for many hours and still see no calls for an attack on Burma, or sanctions, or in fact any mention of its existence.

John Pilger, on the other hand, has written extensively on the subject. North Korea’s gulag system has also been the subject of numerous articles in the Guardian and other ‘liberal’ newspapers and magazines in recent years.

Zdenek, there is no difference between, say, a burd and an airplane in one respect and there is a huge difference in many other respects.

Sorry, but you statement

commenters like abb1 who think that ‘Gitmo is a Gulag’ is literally true . This group also thinks that there is no difference between US and Nazi Germany and in particular that US is worse than the former Soviet Union anytime.

is just pure nonsense, my friend.

Indeed, there is no difference between contemporary US and, say 1939 Nazi Germany (or 1939 Soviet Union for that matter) in some respects: they are both states, both populated by human beings, both have predominantly western culture, both very powerful, both very militaristic, both have messianic leaders, both started a war of aggression, etc. Yet in other respects they are very much different: different languages, different political system, different flavours of messianism and so on. Do you have a problem with this?

But we are discussing a particular aspect here: specifics of the system of repression. Some say there are more similarities there than they are comfortable with, others say it’s Okay, yet others argue that any attempt to compare is illegitimate. This last argument strikes me as highly irrational.

just on this thread in # 37 you defend Soviet Union by saying that murder of Kulaks was an acception an aberation .# 48 defence of Soviet Union # 80 accepts at face value the NKVD take on Solzhenitsyn . # 81 says that Pentagon is as believable as NKVD. and so on . And then look at # 173 just above where we see the typical sentiment ( I have been seeing this same outlook for past 2 years ) totalitarian regime of the worst kind is very much like US ( as far as prison sysstem is concerned ) but wait for it ” we dont know its so bad because it is secret” ( similar to your Kulaks comment.

This is probably not proof of what I say in # 176 but it shifts the burden of proof to you ( that you hold the view I ascribe to you ).:)

Same is the case with the secret prisons – what’s your basis for believing that, say, totally innocent people are not being skinned alive there?

You have no rational case to make here, just your blind faith that N.Korean secret prisons are evil and US secret prisons are good (or much better).

Well, I’m an agnostic. Does it make more sense to be an agnostic or a true believer?

Woo hoo! I think I am the hippest! But also, the Eustonites don’t have any problems with me. Because I am too incoherent admittedly, but that’s the price you pay for being the hippest. At least I THINK I am the hippest. But if you think something is true, in many ways, doesn’t that prove it is?

I will mull this point over after I take this monster bong hit. Luckily I have just bought a box CD set of the greatest hits of Jerry Garcia: these will provide the ideal conditions in which to work out the cosmic meaning of Zdenek’s opaque ramblings.

Peace, love and hot knives, man.

There have been long periods when the US political system – the same exactly political system – was equally or more oppressive: slavery, civil war, perhaps reconstruction, racial policies in the first half of the 20th century.

Enjoy this good period while it lasts.

re 187– I think this is a shallow view of liberal democracy like US because it glosses over what is an essential element : that it can reform itself through sort of self reflection because the public space i.e. its laws and procedures for resolving conflict are not driven by any specific conception of good but only by a political conception.
So you can get move from gender opresion or slavery to a more just set up much quicker then in any other political set up. This is a virtue of the system and you dont register it. If it is a virtue we should cherish it .

Observe though the stability of US ( 200 years + ) which means it endures and that tells us something about its political health ; that the system gets something right (what this is is an interesting question : one atractive /pesuasive suggestion from Rawls is roughly that US gets the balance between liberty and equality right ). Compare the short life of Soviet Union and other totalitarian set ups.

The Soviet Union, the Nazis, Tamerlane, Attila, Nebuchadnezzer – these are all fixed quantities, relatively known, entirely done.
They can be compared to each other, but not to this, to whatever Zdenek means by “the US”.
This thing here is in process, still forming and incomplete. And we have some say in how that goes.
Pointing out disturbing parallels, and condemning them, seems unimpeachably appropriate, but it won’t be possible to truly compare the reign of whoever and whatever has created Guantanamo Bay et al. with the Soviets or the Nazis until that reign is over.
Which it is not, yet.
So we must perforce speak to it, each in our way.
And sophomoric joking to the contrary, Diego Garcia is far darker than Guantanamo, in every sense but the meteorological.