Over at The Corner, one of Jonah Goldberg's emailers responds to Goldberg's latest iteration of his argument that torture is no big deal by suggesting that Jonah "go read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It will tell you all you need to know about torture." Jonah fires back:
I've read the Gulag Archipelago. It didn't tell me everything I needed to know about torture, it told me almost everything I needed to know about the evil of the Soviet Union. And, guess what? The comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union is idiotic and slanderous.
Now, obviously, one doesn't have to believe that the U.S. and the USSR were morally equivalent in order to be deeply troubled now by the U.S.'s operating a global network of secret prisons wherein suspects are held indefinitely without charge and tortured. One just has to be decent. What brings Jonah's sanctimonious response to the level of farce, however, (or, as Frank Zappa used to say, "out of the realm of mere mumbo-jumbo and into the world of mumbo-pocus") is the fact that Goldberg, as you may know, recently published a book in which he compared American liberalism to fascism, spending over 200 pages arguing that liberals are the political heirs of Naziism. So, while he considers it reprehensible, unacceptable, out-of-bounds to compare the Soviets' use of secret prisons and torture to the U.S.'s use of secret prisons and torture, he thinks the contention that Adolf Hitler was a non-smoking vegetarian who believed in unity just like liberals who support national health care, shop at Whole Foods, and also believe in unity is not only permissible, but compelling enough to justify an entire book. The sad thing is, I really doubt Goldberg would admit any inconsistency here.
--Matthew Duss
