What's In A Name...
...when the name is "Gulag"?
I was listening to Hugh Hewitt on the way home from work. He was interviewing a high school teacher who claimed to believe that the American POW camp system (including Guantanamo) is the equivalent of the Gulag.
It may have been the most depressing thing I've ever heard.
The Gulag, of course, was a system of camps set up by Lenin and Stalin. Over the course of forty years, between twenty and forty million people died in the Gulag.
Two dozen have died in American POW camps - not bad, considering they're full of people whose mission is to die for Allah.
The people in the American "gulag" were captured on the field of battle, fighting the US.
The inmates of the real gulag were taken from their homes in the middle of the night, or their jobs during the middle of the day. They were hauled away in Black Marias. They were interrogated, usually using means of torture that'd make an Amnesty activist or a Howard Dean fan yakk up their supper; beatings, dehydration, starvation, sleep deprivation, mock executions, smashing of hands with hammers - read Solzhenitzyn. They were packed two dozen at a time into cells built for six people. When the "interrogation" - meaningless, since so few of the inmates actually knew anything - was over, they were "sentenced", packed into boxcars and sent thousands of miles across the Soviet Union, to the frozen taiga or the desert wastes of Kazakhstan. And there, they were almost always worked to death; "Sentencing" was a formality; few ever came home.
And why were they arrested? In chronological order: For being socialists, Mensheviks, or Royalists; for being engineers; for being professors, authors and intellectuals; for being military officers, especially competent ones; for being a member of any social or professional group that Stalin felt would betray him; for having a job that a local party boss wanted for someone else; for being a member of an ethnic group Stalin felt would betray him (like the Volgadeutch whose cousins made up most of the people in my hometown, deported to Siberia in their hundreds of thousands for being ethnic Germans, mostly never to return); for your kids telling their teacher that you'd snarked about Stalin over dinner; for being a solder that had surrendered to the Nazis; for saying anything that any party apparatchik felt was a "crime against the people", a clause in the Soviet constitution that made virtually anything potentially a capital crime.
Don't know anything? Here's a good start...
The worst thing about this whole cynical enterprise (Claudia Rosett, also on Hewitt, called it a marketing exercise, for lack of a better term) is that it devalues the term "Gulag". It's a term that should rank next to Lynch Mob, Kristallnacht and Vernichtungslager as terms of existential horror and warning. In the hands of Howard Dean and Al Sharpton and Democrat Underground, I expect no better.
From Amnesty, at one point, I did.
Posted by Mitch at
June 8, 2005 06:49 PM
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The "history teacher" belongs to that group that believes that if you pet the wild tiger, the wild tiger won't eat you. In other words, he belongs to the group that doesn't understand wild tigers (or terrorists.)
Pet the wild tiger and he won't eat you, till he gets hungry.
Posted by: RBMN at June 8, 2005 07:54 PMI'm listening to it on Replay Radio right now. If "Jason" was teaching in a private school, he'd be looking for work tomorrow.
While he's unemployed, he should read The Black Book of Communism.
Posted by: kb at June 8, 2005 10:40 PMI'm listening to it on Replay Radio right now. If "Jason" was teaching in a private school, he'd be looking for work tomorrow.
While he's unemployed, he should read The Black Book of Communism.
Posted by: kb at June 8, 2005 10:42 PMBe prepared to be more depressed in the coming years. This stuff has been steadily building for years.
It's exacerbated by our prevailing culture, with so much effort and attention devoted to the cult of the Self. When ideology = self and self = the universe ... well, you can see where it will be tough to crack that particular shell. A universe crashing around you sucks much more than, say, some measly little skyscrapers.
Posted by: Steve in Houston at June 8, 2005 10:58 PMI just visited the Amnesty Int'l web site. Roughly half of the home page links to stories about human rights abuses focus on the UK and the US. This is another examples of what Steven Den Beste (man, do we need his voice and commentary back on the web!) called 'searching under the street light.' It is much easier to investigate and publicize the slightest 'abuses' of human 'rights' in free countries than it is to do the hard work of documenting and publicizing abuses in countries where doing so could get you killed.
Posted by: chriss at June 9, 2005 10:39 AMAI and the whole human rights community are therefore completely counter productive to their own stated cause; by focusing on the small number of (debatable) abuses in free countries, resorting to hyperbole and devaluing words like gulag and genocide, and ignoring abuses where they happen on a truly grand scale... they make action in places like Zimbabwe and Sudan more difficult. They give EU wienies cover to say, 'Yes, Sudan is bad, but Gitmo! Abu Graib! Everyone is bad so let's not do anything.'
Yes, I am saying that the human rights community's behavior robs millions where abuses are wholesale of their basic human rights. It's cynical and sickening.
On a happier note, I have now moved back to Minnesota for the 4th and (I hope) final time. Woohoo! Now, can someone please do something about the 'skeeters so my wife can enjoy it too?
I couldn't let this one pass, so I have to ask: Which is worse, that (a) someone called the prison a Gulag, (b) that people can believe it, (c) we created an incarceration system which ignores both American and international law (specifically the Geneva POW accords), (d) our elected officials have so little faith in the law that they think this is a good idea, or (e) Americans accept and even defend this?
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