QandO

June 23, 2004

Hyperbole, Fiction and the Left, Part III
Posted by McQ

One of the greatest problems I have today with leftist critics of the Bush administration is the lack of proportion in their critiques (and to be fair the right isn't exactly blameless in this regard either).

In today's WSJ, Bret Stephens takes a good look at this phenomenon and makes some great points as to the effect of such criticism:

Care for language is more than a concern for purity. When one describes President Bush as a fascist, what words remain for real fascists? When one describes Fallujah as Stalingrad-like, how can we express, in the words that remain to the language, what Stalingrad was like?

George Orwell wrote that the English language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." In taking care with language, we take care of ourselves.

Precisely ... if you call Bush "Hitler", how in the world do you then describe Hitler? Haven't you now diminished the horror of the real Hitler?

What brought this to Stephens' attention was a couple of columns by Sidney Blumenthal:

According to Sidney Blumenthal, a onetime adviser to president Bill Clinton who now writes a column for Britain's Guardian newspaper, President Bush today runs "what is in effect a gulag," stretching "from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantanamo to secret CIA prisons around the world." Mr. Blumenthal says "there has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union."

In another column, Mr. Blumenthal compares the April death toll for American soldiers in Iraq to the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Mr. Bush's "splendid little war," he writes, "has entered a Stalingrad-like phase of urban siege and house-to-house combat."

Anyone at all familiar with Stalingrad, the Soviet Gulag system and combat on the Eastern Front in WWII is immediatly struck by the lack of proportion in Blumenthal's argument. There is no comparison, in reality, of the death toll on the eastern front and US losses in Iraq. Its not even close. In fact, it might be difficult to find days in that theater in which the losses were less than our total losses in Iraq for a year.

Where's the proportion to the argument that claims this ...

The war on the Eastern Front was unparalleled for its ferocity, intensity, and brutality. By most estimates some 4 million Axis troops and 11 million Soviet troops fell in battle or died as POWs. Another 15–17 million Soviet civilians fell victim to massacres, disease, and starvation during the war.

... is comparable to a war that has to this point cost us 800 casualties. How does one disproportionately compare the deaths of 30,000,000 with 800 and expect to be considered credible? If the April death toll for soldiers in Iraq is like the Eastern Front in WWII, how does one then describe the Eastern Front anymore?

And to attempt to compare Stalingrad to the bits of urban combat our forces have been subjected to in Iraq completely diminishes that battle's magnitude. The Soviet's casualties at Stalingrad numbered 1.1 million (and 100,000 civilians) while the Germans lost about 500,000. Where, in reality, is this Stalingrad in Iraq?

It doesn't exist. Again, this sort of disproportionate rhetoric is used to persuade the uninformed that Iraq is much worse than it is simply for political purposes. But in so doing, Blumenthal diminishes the real Stalingrad. If Iraq is like Stalingrad, then how does one describe Stalingrad?

And the "gulag" reference? The Soviet gulag system was in established for the imprisonment of internal dissenters. Established in 1930 under the Cheka or Internal Security Directorate (later KGB)these were forced labor camps, or slave labor camps established for political enemies and dissenters.

The Gulag is most widely associated with Stalin 's Great Purges which led to a significant increase of the proportion of political prisoners in the camps. In 1931-32, there were approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps, in 1935 approximately 1 million (including colonies) and in 1938 nearly 2 million people. During World War II , the camp population declined sharply due to mass releases of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, who were sent directly to the front, but also due to a steep rise in mortality in 1942-43. After WWII the number of inmates in prison camps and colonies rose again and reached a number of approximately 2.5 million people in the early 1950s

The Communist leadership continued to sponsor Gulag for a while after Stalin's death, and it is estimated that a total of 1.5 to 2 million people have died in the camps and colonies. Large numbers of non-political prisoners were released in 1953 during the months after the dictator's death.

The enormity of and the difference in purpose of the Gulag when compared to the terrorists now held in US detention is evident to those with a sense of historical proportion. But that doesn't keep Blumenthal from attempting the comparison, again for no other purpose than cheap, rhetorical political points.

If the US detention camps are comparable to the Gulag, then how does one ever again describe the Gulag? How does one then make the point that the Gulag was a inhuman slave labor system used by a state to destroy political dissidence and took the lives of untold millions if what the US is doing now is "like" that?

My guess is that this makes no difference at all to Sidney Blumenthal or other political operatives on the left.

They have no use for proportion just as they really have no use for the truth.

This is all about winning ... politically.

And it is evident they have no problem using any means necessary to accomplish that goal.

ADDENDUM (Dale):

Stephens says that either George W. Bush is the worst historical disaster of a president to come along in 150 years, or his critics have begun a harrowing descent into madness. Stephens picks the latter.

The point here is not that Mr. Bush has a flawless or even a good record or that his critics don't have their points. The point is that, at this stage in his presidency, Mr. Bush cannot credibly be described as some kind of world-historical disaster on a par with James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover, nor can he credibly be accused of the things of which he is accused.
This brings us to our second hypothesis, which is that his critics are insane.

This is an easier case to make. Mr. Blumenthal, for instance, is the man who described Bill Clinton's presidency as the most consequential, the most inspiring and the most moral of the 20th century, only possibly excepting FDR's. Mr. Krugman spent his first couple of years as a columnist writing tirades about how the U.S. economy was on the point of Argentina-style collapse.

What makes these arguments insane--I use the word advisedly--isn't that they don't contain some possible germ of truth. One can argue that Mr. Clinton was a reasonably good president. And one can argue that Bush economic policy has not been a success. But you have to be insane to argue that Mr. Clinton was FDR incarnate, and you have to be insane to argue Mr. Bush has brought the U.S. to its lowest economic point since 1932. This style of hyperbole is a symptom of madness, because it displays such palpable disconnect from observable reality.

If you have to go looking for outrage, the outrage probably isn't there. That which is truly outrageous tends to have the quality of obviousness.

So here is one aspect of this insanity: no sense of proportion. For Mr. Blumenthal, Fallujah isn't merely like Stalingrad. It may as well be Stalingrad, just as Guantanamo may as well be Lefertovo and Abu Ghraib may as well be Buchenwald, and Mr. Bush may as well be Hitler and Hoover combined, and Iraq may as well be Vietnam and Bill Clinton may as well be Franklin Roosevelt.

The absence of proportion stems, in turn, from a problem of perspective. If you have no idea where you stand in relation to certain objects, then an elephant may seem as small as a fly and a fly may seem as large as an elephant. Similarly, Mr. Blumenthal can compare the American detention infrastructure to the Gulag archipelago only if he has no concept of the actual size of things. And he can have no concept of the size of things because he neither knows enough about them nor where he stands in relation to them. What is the vantage point from which Mr. Blumenthal observes the world? It is one where Fallujah is "Stalingrad-like." How does one manage to see the world this way? By standing too close to Fallujah and too far from Stalingrad. By being consumed by the present. By losing not just the sense, but the possibility, of judgment.

Sydney Blumenthal is shrieking that the campaign in Iraq is a Brutal Urban Siege (not to be confused with the Brutal Afghan Winter), where our troops are dying like flies, just like the Germans at Stalingrad.

You remember, Stalingrad, right? Where 100,000 German soldiers were killed in 6 months? Yeah, well, Iraq, according to Blumenthal, is just like that.

John Kerry has compared the Bush Administration's performance on job creation as the worst since Herbert Hoover. I'm sure we all remember how in 2003, just like in 1933, 25% of Americans had been put out of work in the previous three years.

Paul Krugman has been predicting for years that the economic policies of George W. Bush would send the economy into an Argentina sized tank of depression, hyperinflation, and, for all we know, flesh-eating zombies unless he's stopped right now. Well, I just looked, and the economy's growing at 4.5%, we've created 1 million jobs in the last 3 months, and the office corridor seems remarkably empty of the rotting undead.

This doesn't mean that W is perfect, or that his performance can't be criticized, but a lot of this stuff is just completely wacko. If you think Iraq is like the Eastern Front, Abu Ghraib is like the gulag, and our recent economic performance mirrors the that of The Great Depression, then you are freakishly clueless.

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