A METHOD TO THE MADNESS?:

Just Like Stalingrad: If Bush is another Hitler, what words are left to describe Hitler? (BRET STEPHENS, June 23, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

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."

The factual bases for these claims are, first, that the U.S. holds some 10,000 "enemy combatants" prisoner; and second, that 122 U.S. soldiers were killed in action in April.

As I write, I have before me a copy of "The Black Book of Communism," which relates that on "1 January 1940 some 1,670,000 prisoners were being held in the 53 groups of corrective work camps and 425 collective work colonies. In addition, the prisons held 200,000 people awaiting trial or a transfer to camp. Finally, the NKVD komandatury were in charge of approximately 1.2 million 'specially displaced people.' "

As for Stalingrad, German deaths between Jan. 10 and Feb. 2, 1943, numbered 100,000, according to British historian John Keegan. And those were just the final agonizing days of a battle that had raged since the previous August.

Mr. Stephens goes on to argue that, while it is possible that these critics are simply reflecting reality, the more plausible explanation is that they are insane. But there's a third explanation that seems even more likely--the intent is not to explain the truth of what is happening nor to demonize George Bush but to minimize the Gulag and the Holocaust and the evil of Stalin and Hitler. The Left has plenty of reason to rehabilitate the Soviet Union, having been complicit in its crimes and has become so anti-Zionist, if not outright anti-Semitic, in recent years that they may subconsciously (hopefully not consciously) wish to remove the moral authority that has attached to Judaism and the state of Israel since the Holocaust was revealed.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 23, 2004 2:18 PM