Give It Time

Matt Yglesias wades into the whole question of the gulag reference in the Amnesty International report and moral equivalency and so on. He makes a very good point when he says:

"Indeed, one might say that the clearest signpost that a truly noxious rot has taken root in our culture is that it even occurs to people to argue in this manner. Can you imagine Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all sitting in a dock somewhere in hell pointing fingers at each other and maintaining that they should be let off because the others were worse? 'Stalin killed the most!' 'But Pol Pot killed the most percentagewise!' 'But just think what Adolf here would have done if he'd won the war!' I like to think we wouldn't take such statements very seriously. And, no, George W. Bush is not as bad as Pol Pot. Good for him -- mom and dad must be proud. He even compares favorably to Richard Nixon in most respects (albeit not in his attitude toward very poor Americans). Let's give him a medal."

But for me, it goes beyond this. When people compare Gitmo and the other prisons in our new system to the gulag, they compare it to the gulag at its height, when our system is still fairly young and still developing. A more appropriate point of comparion would probably be to the Gulag system of 1922 or the concentration camp system in 1936. Both systems were in their infancy then, but they share features with our current system that should chill any sensible person looking at our system of suspected-terrorist confinement.

1. Secrecy: Inmates are confined without due process of law, or through a process whose methods are secret and beyond the ken of the prisoner. Families and lawyers are not allowed access to the prisoner. Prisoners can be moved without notifying relatives and with no records kept of their transfer. (In other words, they disappear).

2. Torture: Inmates are subjected to physical and psychological torture both as a means of punishment, of extracting infomation, or of amusing their captors.

3. Deceit: Government officials willfully misinform the public about the actions taking place at these prisons, or, in some cases, pretend such facilities don't exist.

Both the Gulag and the concentration camp system started small. As time passed and circumstances changed, the governments administering these programs expanded their prison programs and, to a degree, changed their purpose to fit new priorities. As the Germans captured large swaths of Eastern territories, and the Einsatzgruppen proved inefficient at disposing of Russian Jewry, the Germans expanded already existing camps and built new ones to absorb the larger populations and modified their concentration camps for the purpose of holding mass executions. They built the genocide on their already extant prison structure.

What scares me is that there are people, both in and out of our government, willing to justify the abuses of the current system and to see it as a success. When people see these kinds of tactics as a legitimate tool, they feel the temptation to apply that tool to ever wider populations of victims. Once you decide that some people deserve this treatment, it becomes easier to think that other people--ordinary criminals, political opponents, homosexuals, unpopular minorities--deserve it too. These places, and these tactics, look like the beginning of something awful, something we kept telling ourselves couldn't happen here. We may not be at the Stalinist gulag yet, but it's become a lot easier to see since we started moving toward it.