SIVACRACY.NET

Sal Weir, one of our fine Sivacracy readers, took issue with my use of "Gulag" to describe US torture prisons. Here is his thoughtful response:

I have VERY serious problems accepting that the U.S. runs a gulag. Let's consider the term: Alexander Solzhenitsyn coined the term The Gulag Archipelago, as I recall, to describe the system of prisons that Josef Stalin's empire ran internally. It was a system based on slave labor which ensnared hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Soviet citizens (and in many cases non-Soviets) for imagined crimes, for crimes as innocuous as criticizing the Red Army for being underarmed (which it sure as hell was, for Stalin had liquidated quartermasters galore, suspecting them along with everyone else of being capitalist conspirators, rightist plotters, Trotskyist deviationists, Bukharinists, Zinovievist imperialist sympathizers, and so on). Stalin killed millions of victims, then killed the executioners, so they would have nothing on him. It was a wicked, endless cycle of massive murder on his own people, based on his paranoiac delusions, on his pathological need to justify his usurpation of Lenin's mantle (itself of rather questionable pedigree).

As disagreeable and objectionable as Bush's and Cheney's behaviour can be and has been, they are hardly presiding over a system of prisons that ensnare hundreds of thousands of prisoners then forced into slave labour. Four years ago the U.S. was attacked. President Cheney overreacted, sure, but the fact of the attack is undeniable. The U.S. is not occupying Arabia. The U.S. is not bleeding Iraq of its petroleum. The Saudi monarchy is exploiting its population more than is the U.S.
I would rather see a different person in the White House, and will work actively to change this nation's outlook and values, but to charge it with administering a gulag of prisons is inaccurate, disrespectful, and propagandistic, as well as insulting.
Let us be honest in every discussion. I want to defeat President Cheney at every turn, but my weapons of choice are truth, intellectual vigor and an unerring bullshit detector. Right now, the BSD needle is in the red zone.

Sal is basically right. We do risk our credibility when we lurch into overstatement. But I am more worried that our torture policies suffer from understatement. Our crimes are getting lost in the haze of too many lies and outrages. Someone must make some noise about this stuff. Someone must speak the truth. Amnesty International has the credibility and the truth on its side. So a little overstatement may be appropriate here.

Granted, on a matter of scale, the US is not near the Soviet Union.

But we do contract out torture and murder to an archipelago of camps and prisons around the world (most in places like Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan) in which many thousands of people are held on US orders without charge, due process, or hope of any kind.

We have the same kind of system that many thuggish authoritarian regimes run. We just outsource most of it.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people are held without due process or even public information about their imprisonment in prisons in New Jersey. And many more are mistreated in Gitmo, the capital of our Gulag system.

Anything close to such a system is untenable and indefensible. If these are not Gulags, they sure are Gulagesque. Should we really rest on arguements like "we are not nearly as brutal as Stalin was?" Our standards should be much higher than this, no?

Even though I am doing it, arguing over the use of the term misses the issue entirely: We are not the country we profess to be. We hold people in secret for years without allowing them to defend or explain themselves. We torture people to death. It is our policy.

And it is shameful and criminal.

I don't regret using the term. I don't regret that Amnesty International used it in their press conference about their annual report (which is unassailable in its reporting, as always).

I just wish people would be more outraged about what our government is doing to people than the vocabulary used to describe it.