Durbin's Comments About Detainees Treatment At Gitmo

[adios]

FWIW IMO Durbin remarks were political pandering but to be fair he cited an FBI report that I'm sure is one of many reports by the U.S. on Gitmo. I'm fairly certain that Durbin was practicing political demagoguery by citing one report that he could use to misleed in order to gain political points but I could be convinced otherwise. Anybody want to try and support the notion that the detainees treatment is how the Nazis, the Soviets, and/or Pol Pot treated their enemies in their detention facilities?

Gitmo Death Camp

About 9 million persons, including 6 million Jews, died in Hitler's death camps, 2.7 million persons died in Stalin's gulags and 1.7 million Cambodians died in Pol Pot's scourge of his country.
No prisoners have died at Guantanamo, and the Pentagon has acknowledged five instances of abuse or irreverent handling of the Koran, the holy book of Muslims.
After reading the e-mail, Mr. Durbin said, "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. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."




We Are Our History -- Don't Forget It

Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot — an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag. Historian Robert Conquest gives some facts. A prisoner at the Kholodnaya Gora prison had to stuff his ears with bread before sleeping on account of the shrieks of women being interrogated. At the Kolyma in Siberia, inmates labored through 12-hour days in cheap canvas shoes, on almost no food, in temperatures that could go to minus-58. At one camp, 1,300 of 3,000 inmates died in one year.

"Gulag" must not go the way of "Nazi" and become virtually meaningless. Europeans love calling Israelis "Nazis" — a transparent attempt to slough off their guilt like rattlesnakes shedding skin. ("See, the Jews are as bad as we were!") I'd like to ban the word "Nazi" except when applied to … Nazis. Lawbreakers would be ordered to learn what Nazi actually means.

[kurto]

Did you watch the Daily Show last night? They did a piece on how everyone is comparing everyone else to Nazis. Both sides do it constantly. Rick Santorum and Pat Buchanan off the top of my head were shown from the right.

Both sides are way over the top.

That being said, people seem to think that showing that things happened on different scales means you can't make analogies. That's simply wrong.

If someone committed acts that were 'Nazi-like' or 'Hitleresque', one can say so and be correct even if they weren't on the same scale.

My last thought... I've said this weeks ago and, to no surprise, things haven't changed. The fact that someone compared Gitmo to a Gulag is irrelevent. When you hear that people are being denied rights, people are being tortured, an innocent man presumeably was tortured to death, etc. AND someone compared it to a "Gulag"... I have to wonder what's wrong with people when they they're confronted with all of that information; they think the appalling part that deserves the most attention was that they think someone made an inappropriate analogy.

[MMMMMM]

Just a general remark for the moment:

It's really incredible to me how common this sort erroneous thinking and speech seems to have become. In making comparisons, people with agendas seem all-too-ready to bandy about comparisons or metaphors that are extremely inappropriate and conceptually flawed in the extreme. If any of these people tried to answer the analogy section of a SAT or any other important exam, with the same lack of care they use when discussing politically-related issues, they would get an abysmally low score (or fail on pass/fail type exams).

Of course some people have always said ridiculous things along such lines, but it seems to me that it has reached a crescendo of sorts recently, after building over the last few years.

It's not innocuous because discussions hinge to a significant degree on the accuracy of the terms used. If you are discussing how to remove actual molehills from your backyard, and you refer to them as mountains, well, a logical follow-up question might be be: where are we going to get the earth-moving machinery and how much will it cost to transport it? Misuse of terms can have a way of seriously derailing the discussion from its proper focus. Improperly using emotionally charged terms can also help polarize people and shift the emphasis from analysis to emotion.

It is especially disappointing to see elected officials either: A) being this stupid or ignorant, or B) being this propagandistic. This ties in with Zeno's recent post on the propagandistic language used by the ACLU in the recent fund-raising direct mail solicitation.

Everyone should stop and and think about just how destructive to rationality, AND THEREFORE TO RATIONAL SOLUTIONS, such deceptive hyperbole can be.

I know I'm preaching to the choir with you Adios, and Zeno, and a good number of others. But a lot of people in this country (including some posters on this forum) need to understand that hyperbole (especially truly bad comparisons) is genuinely destructive to rational discussions and to deriving good solutions.

What is the point of having logic as a tool, and an enormous number of widely descriptive terms in the English language, if we ignore logic, and deliberately choose to use ill-fitted terms when discussing important matters? Discussing things in such a manner is an insult to rationality and to the history of human progress.

[MMMMMM]

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That being said, people seem to think that showing that things happened on different scales means you can't make analogies. That's simply wrong.

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Depending on the particular analogy and context in which it is used, differences of scale or degree can mean a great deal or mean little.

The key is knowing which is which (that is, what is the main point intended to be illustrated by the analogy, and do the primary qualities of the object of its comparison fit well or conflict with this point. Note that if one primary quality fits well yet another primary quality fits terribly, it might be a poor or misleading analogy).

[kurto]

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Depending on the particular analogy and context in which it is used, differences of scale or degree can mean a great deal or mean little.


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I agree. But I think often people ignore the root reason why someone makes an analogy and focuses on what they perceive are the other associated connotations.

With this particular issue... I think the people are jumping on what they see as inflammatory rhetoric to divert attention away from/avoid confronting the reasons WHY the person made the criticism.

Like I said.. the appalling thing isn't that someone compared Gitmo to a Gulag. The appalling thing is some of the things that have been happening that led someone to compare it to a Gulag.

[kurto]

I think you're right. The hyperbole is ridiculous.

That being said, I think the use of the term 'Gulag' was a valid analogy.

"likened to the atmosphere in a prison system or a forced labor camp. "

If people were tortured in Gulags... and people are being tortured at Gitmo, then it is an appropriate analogy. It doesn't matter if Gulags had a longer range or held held and killed millions of people. The analogy is saying that this particular place has the same atmosphere.

I'd argue most of the Nazi/Hitler references (from both sides) are over the top.

[MMMMMM]

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Like I said.. the appalling thing isn't that someone compared Gitmo to a Gulag. The appalling thing is some of the things that have been happening that led someone to compare it to a Gulag.

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Drawing an equivalence between Gitmo, in which nobody has died, and a prison system in which millions were killed, implicitly trivializes the deaths and sufferings of those persons--and thereby makes a lousy analogy (and to some, undoubtedly an offensive analogy).

[MMMMMM]

Analogies aren't as simple as you think.

[trippin bily]

" turning the air conditioner down so low the naked prisoner was shivering"
" turned the air conditioner off so it was close to 100 degrees "
" plyed loud rap music "
" used sleep deprivation "
these things were actually done at gitmo
Durbin is dispicable.
I find it hard to take that a member of out senate would smear men and women in uniform as nazis or torturers of any sort.
These are tried and true methods of gathering information WITHOUT torturing them
An example of torture would be...
cutting off a finger...
maybe burning with a hot iron...
shooting another terrorist in front of you..
things that actually cause permanent harm and damage.
Can you honestly say that turning up the AC is torture ?
Of course not.
Durbin should resign in shame.

[kurto]

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Drawing an equivalence between Gitmo, in which nobody has died

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Wasn't it at Gitmo where we tortured the innocent man to death? (or am I confusing which US torture site has had several deaths at our hands?)

And this demonstrates the problems with language. A Gulag has a broad range of meanings and implications.

Right out of Dictionary.com:
"A place or situation of great suffering and hardship, likened to the atmosphere in a prison system or a forced labor camp."

You are stating specific traits about the Russian Gulag that isn't the same and deciding that no analogies can be drawn. That simply isn't right. There are specific reasons to draw a parallel.

And I still say you're missing my point... even if we all agreed that Gulag was inappropriate... that pales in comparison to the fact that the US is torturing people.

As I said... I don't get and think something's wrong with people who think their outrage should be focused on the use of the word Gulag. Its ridiculously shallow. (Though I suspect its how one must be to be a Bush apologist.)