Great post at slacktivist on the chorus of torture "we're Not As Bad As the gulags and it's unpatriotic to suggest otherwise" we've been hearing lately. The excerpts below (reordered for sense due to length) show that it is worth reading the entire post and the comments.
"In an earlier post, I described this as the “NABA defense” -- Not As Bad As...The American prison camps...are, in fact, not as vast or as brutal as Stalin’s gulags.
The United States of America -- as a matter of official policy conducted with our money, in our name -- tortures and abuses prisoners and detains people indefinitely without charge or due process.
The point here is that once you get beyond a certain threshhold, relative comparisons don’t really matter.
The only relevant and meaningful comparison is between those regimes that countenance torture and those that do not. Once a nation crosses that line any difference between it and other torture regimes is inconsequential in comparison to the difference between it and those nations which have refused to cross that threshhold."
A commenter quoted Avi Schlaim, an Israeli historian, "The issue isn't whether or not we are the same as the Nazis, the issue is that we aren't different enough"
