A Word About Senator Durbin

Lots of bloggers are way ahead of me on Sen. Dick Durbin's reckless  comments comparing Guantanamo to Nazi death camps, the Soviet Gulag, and the Khmer Rouge. And yes, of course, his remarks are not being covered adequately by mainstream media, including the Post, whose first mention of it is today's short A11 story, Durbin Defends Guantanamo Comments. (There is at least one online account, an AP story story located by Michelle Malkin). What strikes me is Durbin's weak attempt to kind of walk it back. The Post:

Durbin said his comments had been misinterpreted as an attack on the U.S. military, adding he did not even know who was in charge of the particular interrogation cited in the FBI agent's account. "Sadly, we have a situation here where some in the right-wing media say I've been insulting men and women in uniform," he said. "Nothing could be farther from the truth."

Durbin conceded that the regimes he had cited had committed horrors far beyond the techniques he had condemned at Guantanamo. But he said it was "no exaggeration" to suggest that the techniques cited by the FBI agent were not acceptable in a democracy. "This is the kind of thing you expect from repressive regimes but not from the United States," he said.

But that's not what he said. He didn't compare subjecting a prisoner to a very cold room, a very hot room and unending rap music to "the kind of thing you expect from repressive regimes;" he compared it to the icons of ultimate human depravity. As an old Marine friend once told me, words have meaning. Durbin's performance reminds me of this one by Bernard Weiner at Democratic Underground:

Not just because many of my relatives got wiped out in the Holocaust, or because my wife is Bavarian, but, like so many others around the world, I am ineluctably drawn to the Hitler period in Germany. How could this have happened - 6 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others herded into camps and slaughtered? More than 50 million killed on all sides in World War II? It's too much for the mind to comprehend. And yet, I know that given the right set of circumstances, shameful episodes could, and in many instances did, happen in our own country...

The author recounts examples of successful non-violent movements from Gandhi's to Martin Luther King's, then adds:

And could it work today in our own country, given the regime and problems we face as we slide more and more into a unique kind of American fascism under Bush & Co., where government works in concert with corporations and a non-rational, mostly religious, fundamentalism?

COULD HITLER HAVE BEEN STOPPED EARLY?

We will never know how successful a massive non-violent civil disobedience movement might have been in stopping Hitler in his tracks if it had confronted him early and often in the early '30s, led by prestigious church and civil leaders. But, as we know now, if political demagogues are not confronted wisely and in time to slow down or block their violent plans, social and military and ethical disaster is often the result. Within a few years in Germany, for example, the Nazis were rounding up the few outspoken religious and political figures and throwing them into concentration camps...

But Weiner doesn't want us to get the wrong idea:

Please don't misunderstand. I am not saying that America in 2005 is Germany in 1933, or that Bush is Hitler....

Oh no! Whysoever would any honest observer make that kind of connection?

Hitler? Who was that again?