All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke (maybe)
Andrew Sullivan. Please read before commenting.
Excerpt:
Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.
10 comments:
I have to say, if you ever catch me pulling that daft rhetorical dodge, spank me soundly. That is say loudly "I am definitely not making comparison X ... and then proceeding to do exactly that".
There's a difference between calling someone Hitler and pointing out a dangerous similarity. Sullivan isn't claiming that Bush's policies are going to lead to genocide or a world war -- he's just pointing out that when the same actions were taken by people we believe were evil, we saw the actions as unquestionably evil.
It's just a way of shifting your perspective.
Lots of links to Sullivan lately JA. Or maybe I'm just now noticing it since I've only recently become aware of him?
I need to get his new book.
scott:
I've been linking to him for a while now. He quite often has something interesting to say (or simply links to something) about torture, the war, gay rights, the nexus of religion and politics, and other subjects I'm interested in. His blog is a must-read.
Yeah, I got turned on to him after the last Republican debate after he was one of the few people on the Right who didn’t treat Paul as if he was crazy. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but listened to this the other day and I think he’s dead on as to what happened to conservatism.
a) What Mark said.
b) Let's look at the first quote. Then let's note what the terrorists are doing right now in Iraq in terms of torture... but those stories get buried in the 22nd paragraph on Page 8. So should we do nothing? That seems to be the suggestion of the left.
Torture is always effective at eliciting the required response. People will say what is needed to make the torture stop.
Waterboard me for a few days and I figure I would tell you that I was one of the lizard people from Mars, if that was what you wanted to hear and if it would make the torture stop.
Why is it that almost everybody uses Hitler as a scapegoat- when others, including Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc etc were arguably just as despicable and
tortured, maimed, and killed many millions more than Hitler ever did? Seems the universal scapegoat meme has run wild for too long.
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