First of all, Andrew Sullivan
can't read. I assumed he could, but he can't.
Billmon, as he's wont to do, nails it:
If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on the hill, why shouldn't we expect most Americans to ignore what's going on in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib -- or any of the other islands in the archipelago?
Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin's reference to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a vein over Amnesty International's use of a Russian word for forced labor camp.
Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American archipelago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 2.5 million prisoners. The number of deaths -- by torture, execution, disease or deliberate starvation -- has to be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don't think has been matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam.
As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.
I guess that's enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they should print up some bumper stickers: "America: Still better than Stalin.") But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy.
Is this really such a hard point to understand?