Dean's World

Writing for the Washington Post, Pavel Litvinov--a former resident of a Soviet gulag, was recently asked by Amnesty International to endorse the description of US prison camps as "the gulag of our time." His response is below--and I must say, when he reached the "Fahrenheit 451" part, I nearly lost it:

Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time."

"Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?" I asked him.

"Sure," he said, "but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees."

The word "gulag" was a bureaucratic acronym for the main prison administration in Stalin's Soviet Union. After publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," it became a symbol for the system of forced-labor camps that have been an integral feature of communist countries. Millions of prisoners confined in the gulag had not been involved in violence or committed any crime — they were there because they belonged to a "wrong" social, national or political group or expressed a "wrong" opinion.

The cruelty and scale of the gulag system are described in numerous books, so there is no need to recount them here. By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble, in their conditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system.

For example, incidents of desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo by U.S. personnel have been widely reported. But those Korans were surely not brought to Guantanamo by the prisoners themselves from Afghanistan. They were supplied by the U.S. administration — in spite of the obvious fact that most of the prisoners misguidedly found in the Koran the inspiration for their violent hatred of the United States.

By contrast, Russian author Andrei Sinyavsky, who was sentenced in 1966 to seven years' forced labor for his writing, was approached one evening soon after his arrival in a labor camp by a prisoner who quietly asked Sinyavsky whether he wanted to listen to a recital of the biblical account of the apocalypse. (Possession of a Bible was strictly prohibited in the gulag.) The man took Sinyavsky to the furnace room, where a group of people were squatting in the dark recesses. In the light of the furnace flame, one of the men got up and started to recite the biblical passages by heart. When he stopped, the stoker, an old man, said: "And now you, Fyodor, continue." Fyodor got up and recited from the next chapter. The whole text of the Bible was distributed among these prisoners, ordinary Russians who were spending 10 to 25 years in the gulag for their religious beliefs. They knew the texts by heart and met regularly to repeat them so that they would not forget. And this happened in 1967, when the gulag had become smaller and the Soviet regime milder than it had been under Stalin.

They almost certainly would have been shot in the neck if caught.

More:

....There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain U.S. actions. But by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesmen put its authority at risk. U.S. human rights violations seem almost trifling in comparison with those committed by Cuba, South Korea, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

Although I'm pretty sure he means North Korea there (South Korea's hardly perfect but they actually do have civil rights there), the point is well-taken.

You can read the rest by clicking here.

We have systematically inflated our rhetoric to the point where we now consider chaining a guy to a floor and making him listen to rap music to be "torture," to where a few hundred people in clean, air-conditioned and heated cells, with television, books, clean and regular food and water, flush toilets, and exercise facilities are in a "gulag" because once in a while during interrogations we let a dog bark at some of them, and a few times some copies of their holy books may (or may not) have been mishandled.

I ask again: if this is our rhetoric today, what will we say when real fascists, real communists, real torture artists, come along? Will we treat them as "equally bad?"

Apparently the question is moot: we already do.

By the way, Bill McCabe is clearly a Nazi. So is Little Hitler John Cole. (Yes, that's a joke, but read the links anyway and you'll see just how big a joke it is.)

I confess that I certainly have used terms like "Nazi" or "Communist" as a joke or when I was a little hot under the collar. But I always thought it was obvious from context that I was kidding, just as above. But increasingly, many people seem to, in all seriousness, confuse US military operations with Soviet, Nazi, and/or Baathist death-camps and torture chambers--leading me to wonder if I shouldn't completely stop with such comparisons even as jokes.