Amnesty International - Guantanamo is the new 'gulag'

UPDATE: Good thoughts and a good link to a damning Chicago Tribune editorial from Austin Bay.  Also two good posts here and here from the excellent Babalu Blog, which covers Cuban affairs.

Drudge links to a Washington Times report that both the executive director and chairman of the board of Amnesty International USA personally gave $2,000 presidential campaign donations to ... John F. Kerry.

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Amnesty International, who made a name for themselves as advocates of political prisoners but who now seem to be exclusively obsessed with anti-Americanism, released this report Monday, which concludes:

“Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time,” Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said."

The reason?  Among other things, Amnesty sites:

“Attempts to dilute the absolute ban on torture through new policies and quasi-management speak, such as ‘environmental manipulation, stress positions and sensory manipulation,’ was one of the most damaging assaults on global values...”

"Global values."  Now there's an interesting concept.  Are those the same "global values" that turned a blind eye to Castro, Mugabe, Assad, Kim Jung-Il, Saddam, Arafat, and dozens of Islamist, fascist, and communist despots who have tortured and killed hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of civilians during the last 25 years?

In order to understand why the word "gulag" is such outrageous slander, you must first understand what the gulag was.

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks took control of the Russian government in 1917, they embarked on a nationwide program of arrests, kangaroo-court trials, and executions for thousands of political activists that they deemed threatening.  Lenin preferred public mass-executions as the best way to deal with civil disobedience.

But when Stalin came to power, he had different ideas.  He actively expanded the Russian prison system into a new Soviet system designed to provide labor for the grandiose Soviet work projects he envisioned, and as a method of keeping Russian citizens loyal to the Soviet government.  Thus the "gulag" was born.

In order to implement his vision, millions of Russians were arrested directly off the streets, taken out of Soviet factories, or seized from their homes in midnight raids.  Only a small fraction of the gulag population were actual criminals; most were citizens arrested at the whim of the Soviets.  Few were ever informed of their "crimes" or allowed to see family members again.  Having a family member arrested doomed the rest of the family with the stigma of "traitor."

Since the Soviet economy never generated enough wealth to make relocating and employing its citizens a possibility, the gulag system provided a cheap and effective method of acquiring laborers.  Professionals such as engineers were arrested on the flimsiest of charges when gulag administrators needed more of them to manage work projects.  But the majority of those arrested were forced to work back-breaking manual labor, usually 14 to 18 hours a day.  Guards were brutal to prisoners, subjecting them to rape, beatings, and psychological abuse.  Prisoners were given starvation rations and medical care was virtually nonexistent.  They were forced to work in the extreme cold of Russian winters without adequate clothing or rest.  Of the estimated 9 million Russians who were exiled to the gulags, about 5 million perished, either due to starvation, exposure, or disease.  Of course these are only estimates; the actual number of deaths will always remain unknown.  (Anne Applebaum puts the figure of those imprisoned by the Soviets at 24 million.)

In short, the gulag system was designed around the central principle of communism, which is the dehumanization of its citizens.  In communism there is no such thing has human rights; there is only the good of the state.  Citizens are the property of the state, and are expendable as the state wishes.  There is no such thing as the individual.  Anyone who puts his individuality ahead of the good of the state is a criminal and is summarily dehumanized.

The only actual comparison that can be made within the realm of The War on Terror is a comparison between the Stalinist Soviets and Islamofascist terrorists.  Both see their enemies as less than human and worthy of slaughter like animals.

There is nothing like the gulag that formally exists anywhere within the control of the United States.  To even suggest that treatment of terrorists and enemy combatants even remotely resembles the horrors of the gulag is ignorance and slander of the highest order.  The inmates of the Soviet gulag would probably have willingly accepted interrogation by US officials in return for warm, clean living quarters, clean clothes, a healthy diet, cable TV, daily exercise and recreation, medical treatment, and an entire network of legal watchdogs keeping an eye on them.

And the horror of the real gulag continues to this day.  The Soviets actually had it a lot better than the North Koreans today under the despotic rule of Kim Jung-Il.  What's your response here, Amnesty International?

I cannot recommend Anne Applebaum's monumental work "Gulag" highly enough.  Applebaum is a died-in-the-wool Washington Post liberal writer, but she approaches the horrors of Communism with clarity and purpose, and has dedicated herself to exposing the inconceivable cruelty of the Soviet system.  And of course Alexander Solzhenitsyn's three-volume epic "The Gulag Archipelago" is a 20th century literary and political landmark.  Both take a strong stomach to read.

Comments

[laura]

i think you need to have more information that includess why gulags were an effective method of controlling post revolution in russia!!!!