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Amnesia Seeking Gualg Survivors to Endorse Insane Analogy
(Hat tip: LGF). EFLNo American 'Gulag' By Pavel Litvinov Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time." "Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?" I asked him. "Sure," he said, "but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees." Not even "fake but accurate," just "fake but useful. It is also called "hyperbole" "propaganda" and "bullshit." In short, it is a classic Big Lie, a technique made famous by a chap whose bosses ran some serious concentration camps. The word "gulag" was a bureaucratic acronym for the main prison administration in Stalin's Soviet Union. After publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," it became a symbol for the system of forced-labor camps that have been an integral feature of communist countries. Millions of prisoners confined in the gulag had not been involved in violence or committed any crime -- they were there because they belonged to a "wrong" social, national or political group or expressed a "wrong" opinion. The cruelty and scale of the gulag system are described in numerous books, so there is no need to recount them here. By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble, in their conditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system. In a notable flying pig moment, even Al Guardian has run a piece denouncing Amnesty's loathesome analogy. AI remains oblivious to this, proving once again that it is simply a media-cult corporate fund raising operation with no real concern at all for human rights. Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-06-18 |
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