Amnesty International's irresponsible charges
Dennis Byrne, a Chicago-area writer and consultant
Published May 30, 2005
By labeling the U.S. anti-terrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our times," the people of Amnesty International must think we're stupid or ignorant.
Stupid or ignorant enough to fall for the assertion that whatever is happening at Guantanamo is the legal and moral equivalent of what happened in the hundreds of slave labor and concentration camps scattered throughout the former communist Soviet Union. Equivalent to a system that brutalized tens of millions, of which untold millions died of starvation, exposure, exhaustion, torture, illness or execution.
OK, maybe in light of this generation's dismal ignorance of history, we deserve to be treated like dummies. But Amnesty International, which purports to speak on behalf of human rights everywhere, ought to know better. And if we let it get away with this historical obscenity, then we are stupid.
Amnesty International might as well have compared the treatment of a few hundred detainees at Guantanamo to the Holocaust. To review the gulag's history: Millions of political dissenters, victims of police state terror, assorted "undesirables," ethnic minorities (e.g. Chechens and Crimean Tartars) and others guilty of doing nothing wrong were shipped to the gulag to mine, build railroads, dig canals, toil in factories, clear forests and perform other slave labor. Until they were too sick to continue or just dropped dead, left to become a part of the permafrost. Millions more were shot or died in Holocaust-style cattle cars before getting there.
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, in her Pulitzer-Prize winning book, "Gulag: A History," figures that from 1928 through 1953, about 24 million people passed through the various camps, many in brutal Siberia or other remote regions. That's more than twice Cuba's entire population. Among them were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of prisoners of World War II. She estimated that 600,000 were Japanese, who were kept in the slave camps for years after the end of the war. Few ever made it home.
Either Amnesty International isn't aware of this history, or it knows of it but is lying for the sake of a good sound bite. In either case, the group has lost credibility to speak on behalf of the victims of human-rights violations. Moreover, Amnesty International has dishonored millions of gulag victims.
Of course, the media took the bait. Mindlessly and without hesitation, they repeated the gulag charge, as if Amnesty International says it is so, it must be so. If the media felt compelled to report that kind of remark, at least in the interests of balance and accuracy, they should have added a brief sentence noting that the gulag was a network of old Soviet concentration camps to which millions were sent to suffer and die. An Associated Press report, found on The New York Times Web site, took that course, but only made matters worse by asserting that "thousands," not millions, died in the gulag. Haven't Times editors read the newspaper's own review of Applebaum's book? No wonder the media deserve such public contempt.
Amnesty International's reckless use of such a loaded word and the media's unquestioning acceptance of group's assertion as fact prove to be a useful insight into the warped mindset of the political left, and its compulsion to believe that the United States and President Bush are everywhere the enemies of compassion, justice, freedom and the good. For the political left, the causing of "offense" is the highest of all civic sins, yet the offense of equating the treatment of Guantanamo detainees with the gulag millions passed virtually unnoticed by them. No doubt about the reason: It serves the left's agenda to discredit an administration and its policies--policies that have brought to millions of people the prospects of democracy.
Am I making too much of the misuse of a single word? First, the group's use of gulag wasn't a casual slip of the tongue; it was calculated. As the left is pleased to often remind everyone, "words have consequences." And the unacceptable consequence of the gulag comparison is the debasement of the word "atrocity" and a general desensitizing of moral outrage.
On this Memorial Day, it might be worth a moment to remember that Guantanamo Bay is run by Americans who do not deserve to be lumped together with a mass slaughter of historic proportions. Certainly, we must be vigilant to prevent any human-rights violations committed by all nations, including ours. But, we need not tolerate this slander against the men and women of the American military and the citizens who support them. |
