AFTER THE 2004 election, many political analysts blamed the failure of the Democrats on the lack of a single clear, consistent message. But, after their choice of Howard Dean as leader, the Democrats seem to be concentrating on just one. The message: "We're crazy!"
The party's latest push towards the political deep end comes from Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. Last week on the Senate floor, Durbin compared the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay to camps run by the Nazis, Stalin and Pol Pot.
After quoting from a report, Durbin said "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 -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."
Given that fewer people have died at Guantanamo Bay than in the passenger seat of Ted Kennedy's car, Durbin's hyperbole was a bit overstated. Even if we believe the report Durbin read on the Senate floor, The "atrocities" he noted were prisoners going for 18 to 24 hours without food or water, the air conditioning turned down so low that the a detainee was shivering, or turned off so that it "was well over 100 degrees." Durbin topped everything off with a charge that "extremely loud rap music was being played in the room." Certainly not ideal if you're a Taliban detainee, but the situation is closer to MTV's "Spring Break Guantanamo" than a gulag.
The day after Durbin's remarks, Al Jazeera spread the word: "U.S. Senator Dick Durbin on Wednesday refused to apologize for comments he made on the Senate floor referring to Nazis, Soviet gulags, and a 'mad regime' like Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia."
And refuse he did until Tuesday, before which he had only issued cynical excuses such as like, "Now sadly, we have a situation here, where some in the right wing media have said that I have been insulting men and women in uniform." If Durbin wasn't referring to American troops, then to what Americans at Guantanamo was he referring -- unless comparing American soldiers to Nazis isn't an insult?
Sadly, Durbin is not alone in his use of unfortunate Nazi comparisons. Earlier this month, speaking in a radio interview, leading House Democrat Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said of the Iraq war: "It's the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country. This is just as bad as six million Jews being killed. The whole world knew it and they were quiet about it, because it wasn't their ox that was being gored."Just as bad?
In Washington, D.C., several blocks from the capital is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Democratic congressional delegation should take a field trip to find out what "Nazi" really means. American troops aren't responsible for piles of emaciated corpses from innocent captives forced to dig their own mass graves. The millions of Holocaust victims weren't people who could complain about the state of their air conditioners. There's not even a remote comparison.
Comparisons between American troops and genocidal tyrants like Stalin and Hitler cross a dangerous line, not only because these comparisons embolden our enemies and weaken troop morale. Holocaust memorials like the ones in Washington and across Europe exist so that no one can forget how evil the Nazis actually were. If invoking such cheap analogies becomes part of routine political discourse, it diminishes the significance and uniqueness of genocide and may lead future generations to mistake Nazis for being no worse than American troops with their music too loud. Unless liberal politicians actually think American servicemen are committing genocide -- in which case it's clear that they've lost their collective marbles -- they should save the N-word for actual Nazis, because the actual Nazis deserve no better.
Herb Ladley is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at hladley@cavalierdaily.com.
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