Purposeful Moral Confusion and Relativism

George C. Landrith

For over 225 years, Americans have valued the rights spoken of in the Declaration of Independence - Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Americans have spilt their blood and spent their treasure to protect these basic rights for themselves and others. Amnesty International's stated purpose is to prevent human rights violations. Thus, one might expect the United States and Amnesty International to be allies. However, they are not because Amnesty International's stated purpose and its actual purpose are very different. Whatever its claimed purpose, Amnesty International has become just another extreme Left anti-American organization.

Amnesty International's secretary general, Irene Khan, recently claimed the U.S. prison camp for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay is "the Gulag of our times." She and her organization defend her obviously false comparison. Here are the facts.

Gulags were a series of more than 475 prison labor camps in the Soviet Union where about ten percent of the general populace where deemed political dissidents and were starved and tortured. An estimated 20 million people were killed in the Gulags. Two of the primary purposes of the Gulags were to repress political opposition and create fear and terror among the populace. Gulags were highly effective in achieving these goals. Nazi concentration camps were modeled after the Gulags.

Gulag forced labor was used to build roads, canals, railroads, and hydroelectric power stations; mine coal, copper, and gold; and perform nuclear tests and clean up nuclear contamination areas. Prisoners in Gulags were expendable. They received no medical care, limited clothing to protect them from the harsh elements of Siberia, and were given less than half the calories required to sustain life.

Some prisoners were not even accused of crimes, they were simply needed for their slave labor and that was enough to justify their imprisonment. Some prisoners were accused of crimes, including: being Jewish, being Christian, being Finnish, being German, being Polish, being Romanian, speaking with foreigners, being middle-class, having too many cows, hiding grain so that the government wouldn't confiscate it and force the family's starvation, telling jokes about the government, and refusing to provide sexual favors to government officials and bureaucrats.

Now let's compare that information with the facts surrounding Guantanamo. There have been a total of 750 detainees at Guantanamo, not 30 million. Each of the detainees was captured while fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan or is believed to be a part of Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. During a war, those captured and believed to fight for the enemy are detained until the war is over. No trial is held and no term is imposed. The detention lasts as long as the hostilities exist. Guantanamo has regular Red Cross visits, and the media and press widely cover Guantanamo. The Gulags had no Red Cross visits or media access. There is no report of even one prisoner mistreatment death at Guantanamo, compared to millions in the Gulags. Detainees at Guantanamo are fed nutritious meals that even meet their cultural and religious requirements. They are allowed to worship.

It takes no great intelligence or moral clarity to see the rather stark differences between a Soviet Gulag and the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Yet, to the morally and intellectually challenged folks at Amnesty International and the rest of the "blame-America-First" crowd, the differences are minimal - only a question of degree. To these morally bankrupt people, America is the problem.

But these folks are dead wrong. And their "mistake" is not the result of honest or reasonable disagreement. The differences are obvious and unmistakable. It is simply intellectually and morally dishonest to compare the two. Calling Guantanamo a "Gulag" is absurd. It falsely and unfairly labels America as a force for evil rather than the force for good that it is. And it trivializes the horror, suffering, and death of millions of people who suffered under the iron-fisted rule of Soviet communism.

The power of moral relativism - calling good bad and bad good - is that once you have obscured the difference between good and evil, evil becomes more acceptable. Whatever the stated purpose of Amnesty International, it is plainly clear that they are now in the business of moral obfuscation, which means they cannot reasonably expect to reduce evil in the world.

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Mr. Landrith is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was Business Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Politics. He had a successful law practice in business and litigation. In 1994 and 1996, Mr. Landrith was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia's Fifth Congressional District. He served on the Albemarle County School Board. Mr. Landrith is an adjunct professor at the George Mason School of Law. He is recognized as an authority on constitutional law and jurisprudence, federalism, global warming, and property rights.

george@ff.org