← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · albion
Thread ID: 18947 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2005-07-02
2005-07-02 05:04 | User Profile
[font=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica][size=3]Never say Nazi: Durbin's message lost in manufactured outrage[/size][/font] [font=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica][size=2]A Register-Guard Editorial [/size][/font] [font=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica][size=2]Internet culture is way ahead of Washington in its understanding of the radioactive conversation-killing power of comparing anything to Nazis, Hitler or the Holocaust.
Godwin's (Internet) Law holds that the likelihood that someone will compare something being discussed with Hitler or the Nazis increases the longer the discussion lasts.
A corollary to Godwin's Law is the well-known tradition in the Internet's Usenet newsgroups that once a person in a discussion thread invokes the comparison to Hitler or the Nazis, the thread is ended and the person who made the comparison has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.
Internet wags learned early on that such comparisons hand righteously indignant critics a free pass to dismiss all factual assertions that can be even remotely connected to the transgression.
Too bad Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin didn't realize he was swallowing a poison pill when he uttered the N-word on the Senate floor during a June 14 speech about - what was that speech about, anyway? It had something to do with the American military, because Sen. John Warner, R-Va., demanded that Durbin apologize to every member of the U.S. armed forces.
Whatever Durbin said must have been worse than Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott's praise of the late Strom Thurmond's racist 1948 presidential campaign, because former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called for Durbin to be censured by the Senate, something that didn't happen in Lott's case.
It must have been much worse for Durbin to link the actions of some U.S. prison guards to Nazi-like behavior than whatever outrage prompted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to compare the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo. But perhaps Republicans such as Delay believe there's a difference between the brutal secret police and the Nazi party they served.
It's all coming back now. Durbin read aloud from an FBI agent's e-mail about treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo that said, "On a couple of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."
That sounds like reprehensible U.S. treatment of detainees, but Durbin made the terrible mistake of adding on the Senate floor, "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime ... that had no concern for human beings."
It was a terrible mistake because it allowed the White House and its Republican cohorts to bury the ugly truth Durbin revealed under an avalanche of distortion, deflection and manufactured outrage. Let's hope Senator Durbin's public apology on Tuesday means he has learned an important lesson about criticizing the Bush administration's deplorable record of prisoner abuse: It's not what you say, it's how you say it that's important. [url="http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/06/23/ed.edit.nazi.0623.html"]http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/06/23/ed.edit.nazi.0623.html[/url] [/size][/font]
2005-07-02 05:17 | User Profile
albion,
This was a sick Neocon attack. Durbin was right.
[QUOTE]It must have been much worse for Durbin to link the actions of some U.S. prison guards to Nazi-like behavior than whatever outrage prompted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to compare the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo. But perhaps Republicans such as Delay believe there's a difference between the brutal secret police and the Nazi party they served.
It's all coming back now. Durbin read aloud from an FBI agent's e-mail about treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo that said, "On a couple of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."
That sounds like reprehensible U.S. treatment of detainees, but Durbin made the terrible mistake of adding on the Senate floor, "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime ... that had no concern for human beings."[/QUOTE]
2005-07-02 16:06 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Faust]albion, This was a sick Neocon attack. [/QUOTE] No argument there.
Durbin, however, was not "right." Had he just come back from a personal inspection tour (with all the caveats on having to see through any smokescreens that might pop up) his remarks would have held real weight. He was out to score political points, and chose his language accordingly. Had he stuck to facts, issues -- why aren't people being formally charged, for example -- and laid off the emotional hyperbole, he would have been hard to attack.
Summary: Had Senator Durbin been smarter in how he presented his objections, maybe his message would have come across better. Being stupid allows people to shoot the messenger. He was stupid, not "right."