Zorning in on the Durbin Fallacy

The heated rhetoric with our friends at CC (obviously, all in good fun) has produced some serious differences of opinions on Dick Durbin's comments this past week regarding the treatment of prisoners at Camp X-ray in Guantameno Bay Cuba. Both 2GL and CC are guilty of extreme posturing, one side calling the other unpatriotic and the other side calling the other torture advocates.

Although I feel Senator Durbin's comments were accurate in some respects because they outlined the problem our military's policies and actions has created, I long have felt that historical references in political debate are per se problematic, especially when they invoke images of Nazi Germany. Both Democrat and Republican pols have been guilty of such references. Durbin and the Dems most recently in regard to torture and the GOP most notably when it used words like 'appeasement" in justifying the war to unseat Saddam Hussein.

With this in mind, I suggest reading Eric Zorn's post on this very issue, as he eloquently sums up the real problem here:

This is why I’ve always said that, whenever anyone plays the Hitler card in a debate, the debate is over for all practical purposes.

Even though, in fact, we can learn things and recognize cautionary signs by studying depraved and totalitarian regimes, pointing this out in all but the vaguest way invites just the sort of hyperventilated, beside-the-point rhetoric we’ve seen in response to Durbin’s criticism of torture techniques at Guantanamo Bay...

To say that one of the hallmark distinctions between the ideals of Americans and the ideals of the vicious, murderous dictators of history has been our treatment of prisoners and the safeguards of our justice system and that we blur that distinction at our moral and practical peril is one thing.

But to cite the Nazis, the Soviet gulags and Pol Pot -- even for a very limited purpose -- is another.

Not because the analogy is wholly inapt and not illustrative.

But because it’s so easily twisted into a patently illogical and hysterical argument by opportunistic critics who seem deliberately obtuse when it comes to simple logic.

Well said indeed.