Andrew Sullivan's Moral Equivalence Problem
Let me state this plainly and unequivocally at the outset: I'm opposed to torture. I think it's disgraceful that my government has sanctioned and then euphemized practices that a) cause lasting bodily harm to prisoners not even declared as such under a pretext of war-time executive privilege, b) simulate death in order provoke terrified and unreliable confessions, c) may cause actual death if administered crudely or excessively.
However, it's also a disgrace to history to draw moral equivalence between a totalitarian nightmare regime and the current American administration, if for no other reason than the act itself would be impossible under the former.
Here is Andrew Sullivan on his blog:
["Long Time Standing"] is the term used by the CIA to describe one of the "alternative methods" that this president has authorized with respect to military detainees. The CIA's description is this:Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.
Here's another description of the technique:
Then there is the method of simply compelling a prisoner to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands only while being interrogated - because that, too, exhausts and breaks a person down. It can be set up in another way - so that the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the guards see to it that he doesn't lean against the wall, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all.
Here's another:
"They would not let you rest, day or night. Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down. Don't sleep. Don't lie on the floor," one prisoner said through a translator.
The second description is from "The Gulag Archipelago." The third is from Guantanamo Bay. One detainee at Gitmo, closely monitored by the administration, was chained to a chair and not allowed to move even while medics had to pump three bags of saline into him to prevent him from passing out.
Andrew makes it pretty clear that he's hasn't bothered to revisit Solzhenitsyn's chilling masterpiece first hand but rather relies on another blog to perform these Column A/Column B comparisons. I'll concede that, so far as this goes, it does leave the reader feeling queasy and disgusted. But how necessary was it to resort to the Soviet "sewer system" of slave labor to feel queasy and disgusted about what has been undertaken at Guantanamo Bay and in gothic chambers in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in Eastern Europe?
Sullivan might do well to look up Solzehenitsyn in the original and see what else is imparted about life in the gulag, or life in general under a fog of state repression, where keeping a journal or calling out a venal and corrupt politician was punishable by death. (And where no Supreme Court could be anything other than a rubber-stamping arm of the dictator and his cronies.)
I'll never forget the following paragraphs from The Gulag Archipelago because they almost encapsulate everything one needs to know about Stalinism -- from the physical brutality, to the farcical denial of fact, to the self-deception of so-called intellectuals high on the idea of a proletarian providence being beaten out of the black earth of the steppes, as well as her sons and daughters. This is a description of Maxim Gorky's visit to the Solovetsky Islands' (Solovki) labor camp. Note especially the existence of a "Children's Colony" and the care taken to keep a well-fed visitor's imagination untroubled by unpleasant details... Moral equivalence would mean that we would not know what we do know about Camp Delta because there'd be no detainees on record to talk about it.
No one, after reading this, should be deluded into applying the singularity of the gulag experience to current events:
The chiefs were alarmed too: as best they could, they hid the monstrosities and polished things up for show. Transports of prisoners were sent form the kremlin to distant work parties so that fewer would remain there; many patients were discharged from the Medical Section and the whole thing was cleaned up. And they set up a “boulevard” of fir trees without roots, which were simply pushed down into the ground. (They only had to last a few days before withering.) It led to the Children’s Colony, opened just three months previously and the pride of USLON, where everyone had clothes and where there were no socially hostile children, and where, of course, Gorky would very interested in seeing how juveniles were being re-educated and saved for a future life under socialism.Only in Kem was there an oversight. On Popov Island the ship Gleb Boky was being loaded by prisoners in underwear and sacks, when Gorky’s retinue appeared out of nowhere to embark on that steamer! You inventors and thinkers! Here is a worthy problem for you, given that, as the saying goes, every wise man enough of the fool in him: a barren island, not one bush, no possible cover—and right there at a distance of three hundred yards, Gorky’s retinue has shown up. Your solution? Where can this disgraceful spectacle—these men dressed in sacks—be hidden? The entire journey of the great Humanist will have been for naught if he sees them now. Well, of course, he will try hard not to notice them, but help him! Drown them in the sea? They will wall and flounder. Bury them in the earth? There’s no time. No, only a worthy son of the Archipelago could find a way out of this one. The work assigner ordered, “Stop work! Close ranks! Still closer! Sit down on the ground! Sit still!” And a tarpaulin was thrown over them. “Anyone who moves will be shot!”
[...] They went to the Children’s Colony. How decent everything was there. Each was on a separate cot, with a mattress. They all crowded around in a group and all of them were happy. And all of a sudden, a fourteen-year-old boy said: “Listen here, Gorky! Everything you see there is false. Do you want to know the truth? Shall I tell you?” Yes, nodded the writer. Yes, he wanted to know the truth. (Oh, you bad boy, why do you want to spoil the just recently arranged prosperity of the literary patriarch? A palace in Moscow, an estate outside Moscow…) And so everyone was ordered to leave—and the boy spent an hour and a half telling the whole story to the lanky old man. Gorky left the barracks, streaming tears. He was given a carriage to go to dinner at the villa of the camp chief. And the boys rushed back into the barracks. “Did you tell him about the mosquito treatment?” “Yes.” “Did you tell him about the pole torture?” “Yes.” “Did you tell him about the prisoners hitched up instead of horses?” “Yes.” “And how they roll them down the stairs? And about the sacks? And about being made to spend the night in the snow?” And it turned out that the truth-loving boy had told all…all…all!!!
But we don’t even know his name.
On June 22, in other words after his chat with the boy, Gorky left the following inscription in the “Visitors’ Book” which had been specially made for this visit:
“I am not in a state of mind to express my impressions in just a few words. I wouldn’t want, yes, an d I would likewise be ashamed [!], to permit myself banal praise of the remarkable energy of people who, while remaining vigilant and tireless sentinels of the Revolution, are able, at the same time, to be remarkably bold creators of culture.”
On June 23 Gorky left Solovki. Hardly had his steamer pulled away from the pier than they shot the boy.
