In response to Amnesty International’s recent characterization of the detention facility at Guantanamo as a “gulag of our times” there’s been quite a bit of useful commentary in the blogosphere. Rusty Shackleford has a magnificent comparison of the Gulag Archipelago with the Guantanamo Gulag. Bill Roggio of Winds of Change has his own comparison of the Soviet gulag system with the Guantanamo detention facility (which I linked to yesterday). Don’t miss Val Prieto of Babalu’s rant on the real gulags in Cuba (they’re not run by the United States).
In my Catching my eye feature yesterday I wrote:
I can understand that Amnesty International doesn’t like war. I can understand that AI doesn’t like imprisonment. I can even understand that AI doesn’t like the Bush Administration or even the United States very much. I can’t understand why they’d equate incredible atrocities with small, probably necessary evils especially when such equivalencing strengthens the hand of people who have no problem perpetrating genuine atrocities at large scale. The inability to distinguish between categories of evil is the inability to distinguish between good and evil.
It’s pretty obvious that AI’s comparison is hyperbolic. So, why? I suspect that there are a variety of reasons.
First, I wonder if this might be a case of “picking the low-hanging fruit”—apply your attentions where you might actually get a response. Since the prisons in China and Cuba and many, many other places don’t seem to be any less full of political prisoners than they were 40 years ago when AI started operations, I could understand how frustration could lead one to search for easy (and meaningless) victories. It sounds like a form of sloth to me.
Is it possible that they’re actually holding the U. S. to a higher standard? I see few ways to support such an idea other than a “what can you expect from the wogs?” point-of-view.
Could it be an attempt to appear to be impartial? There’s a distinction between being neutral and treating all countries equally. Neutrality requires one to turn a blind eye to the misdeeds of all countries impartially and, clearly, if they do that Amnesty International will cease to exist. Proportion, on the other hand, would suggest that if you submitted a 500 page report on human
rights violations 499 pages could be devoted to China and, possibly, a footnote to the United States.
Some have suggested that it’s a fund-raising device. Criticize the United States and you won’t do the U. S. any real harm and you’ll please your America-hating donors. Pretty cynical, if you ask me.
I sincerely hope that the people of AI don’t really believe that the United States is worse than China, Cuba, Iran, or Zimbabwe since that’s a position that clearly lacks all sense of proportion and reason. I suppose it’s possible for organizations to have a death-wish as well as individuals. For if the United States is demoralized or immobilized by disproportionate criticism, that can only result in victories for the real thugs, autocrats, and fanatics of the world. And in a world dominated by such an organization like Amnesty International wouldn’t last for a day.
When this story was breaking, I read a post on Eamonn Fitzgerald’s blog, Rainy Day (the name is an Irish joke, I think). At any rate, he dubbed them Animosity International…so if the Europeans are making fun of it, things must be bad?
THanks for the links. Here’s one you might find interesting:
“Some have suggested that it’s a fund-raising device”
In fact, the President of AI in America appeared on Fox News and bragged that hits to their website had tripled as had their donations.
It is an absurd comparison. Of course we would prefer the perfect world in which we are sinless and/or blameless, but such a place is difficult to achieve. It reminds me of the scripture about pointing out the splinter in your neighbor’s eye and ignoring the plank in your own. In other words, many of those who want to complain about the “splinter” (i.e., the “descretion” of a book, albeit one considered holy) will essentially ignore the very real evils going on around the world which largely dwarf the few hundred people housed in what I would actually agree is probably illegitimate conditions in Guantanmo. Or they can’t comprehend how to make a distinction between them.
Two other thoughts. First, I am reminded of the leftist mantra, frequently repeated, in which they will ask (rhetorically, of course): “We always talk about how many people communism has killed. How many people has capitalism killed?” This largely ignores that capitalism itself hasn’t killed anybody (at best, industrialization may have, but even there it may also have saved and/or extended the lives of many people), whereas the totalitarian regimes operating in the name of communism have killed millions.
Second: in the book Nation of Rebels, there is an excellent critique of contemporary counterculture and leftist thought. In general, they operate under the mistaken belief that the “system” must be destroyed; that nothing short of radical alteration of the present system (which is by definition evil) is enough. As such, they routinely reject incremental steps that might actually make things better and use inflamed rhetoric (as here) to demonize the “system” and blame capitalism, especially as represented by the U.S., as the root of all evil.