Historical Perspective
Maybe Buckethead doesn't like it when uncomfortable comparisons emerge.
Rather than pluck words, let's look at it.
The apology came a week after Durbin, the Senate minority whip, quoted from an FBI agent's report describing detainees at the Naval base in a U.S.-controlled portion of Cuba as being chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures.
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings," the senator said June 14.
If I read or heard about prisoners "chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures" I too would assume that it referred to prisoners of some repressive regime.
If I read your comments correctly, you all are telling me that you would not make this assumption, and that you acknowledge such activities occurring in US prisons. You then neatly "cover your asses" with finger-wagging about how you don't approve of such measures, but comparing us to really bad guys just isn't fair.
All the guy said is that these are practices that Joe Average, who believes that we're the good guys, would attribute to some of the repressive regimes that are commonly known. That sounds pretty damn fair to me.
But you want to generalize the statement, and to achieve that generalization you invoke logic that can be used to stifle, eliminate, and declare treasonous any criticism. This has distressing parallels to the politics of the moment.
We have some very solid knowledge in history present on this blog.
If those regimes were the wrong ones to compare these particular actions to, please tell us the right ones. Which governments or regimes chained up prisoners, denied them food or water, and subjected them to extreme temperatures?
Or would you prefer that we simply engaged in comparison-free dialog, arguing all of this from relativist positions, without reference points?
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Perhaps a more appropriate
Perhaps a more appropriate comparison for Durbin to have made was to the British, and their treatment of Irish terrorists. I think we can all agree that the UK is generally on the side of the good guys, but made some appalling moral lapses with regard to the Irish. And not just in the last couple decades, but going back centuries.
When you have a system that is mostly good - like ours, or the British - you can still point to things that are bad without condemning the whole thing. Making comparisons to three of the most brutal regimes ever does not help matters in the least. It isn't a fair comparison, because those regimes were inherently evil, and not just in how they treated prisoners. And comparing the US to them implies more than just that we have treated prisoners poorly.
Statements like Durbin's give ammunition to our enemies. Statements like Durbin's do nothing to help reasoned debate over the real issue, which is the fact that there are some serious problems with how we treat prisoners. It was a bad idea to say things like that.
The guys over at Q and O have been posting a lot on this issue, calling the administration to task over our treatment of prisoners in Gitmo, and elsewhere. They managed to make a quite damning critique without resorting to the sort of infantile rhetoric used by Durbin and others. (We should send fliers on Godwin's law to every congressman.)
I can say that mistreatment of prisoners is flat out wrong, and that the non-status and indefinite holding of said prisoners is wrong, and that we need to change the way we do things. I can also say that Durbin was an ass to make the comparison that he did. These are not mutually incompatible.
As a side note, what really motivated my post was not so much that he said some stupid things. I kind of expect that kind of rhetoric nowadays, and probably would have let the whole thing slide. What got me was the half-assed, sort-of apology.
Ace said something similar:
Ace said something similar:
Witness Dick Durbin. Durbin could have made his point using language that left little doubt about his love for America -- he could have simply said that America is the greatest moral force in the world, and that we should not taint ourselves by being anything less than that, even dealing with those who frankly deserve it -- but he didn't. He compared our troops to the Nazis, Soviets, and the Khmer Rouge.
feh. I think ppl are making
feh. I think ppl are making political hay out of some stupid senatorial posturing in the Congressional Record.
As we all know from various mailing lists, the N-word, is a loaded word. So don't use it unless you are referring the National Socialist Party in Germany circa 1936. m'kay?
Good points, Ross, and I'd be
Good points, Ross, and I'd be shocked to find anyone here or on the other thread who felt that comparisons were simply not allowed in polite discussion.
The two words that Durbin should have apologized for, if any at all, were “most certainly”. That's the only factually incorrect thing he said - the rest is just a mixture of opinion and rhetoric. I do tend to draw the line at people telling me what I most certainly think, as a way of camouflaging what Maps rightly points out was simply a bang-the-drum moment.
I also tend to give the sort of "good guys" Buckethead referred to above the benefit of the doubt. As such, it never occurred to me that our official policy was to chain detainees to the floor without food and water until they'd expired, any more than it occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld had a microtransmitter in Lynndie England's brain. And not just because they don't make microtransmitters small enough to fit there, either.
I'm of a mind these days to ignore most heated rhetoric I hear, from all sides. When a nasally lady with the RNC called me today and started reading off some silly-ass script about how they need my money because "we" really need to do something about that wacky Nancy Pelosi, I hung up on her, too.
Pelosi used to be my senator.
Pelosi used to be my senator. I even voted for her. Just remember, she's just a wacky representative to a lot of wacky people. *winky*
Just take it all with a grain of salt. Having done debate, there's a lot of grandstanding in the fine oral tradition. Go to a Baptist service one day, it's one of the best places to hear a stirring oration. If you deconstruct oration and argument techniques, outlandish comparisons are the norm. This takes me back to 10th grade Latin when I read the First Catalinarian and learned what 'praeterition' meant. Good good stuff.
FWIW, reading great speeches is a wonderful thing to do. I always read out loud the Gettysburg address when I'm at the Lincoln Memorial. It's moving and elegant.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/gadd/