Monday, June 27, 2005

Historical Perspective

Partisan Politics

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?


Posted by Ross on 06/27/05 at 12:30 PM
Partisan Politics • Permalink