It's time for: Who Wants to Be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?

Orcinus returns from a sojourn in the red states with some discouraging news:

My very clear impression of the rank-and-file American right is that many if not most of them, at the behest of their leaders, now believe that opposing George W. Bush and the Iraq War, as well as his handling of the War on Terror, is an act of genuine treason worthy of the ultimate social condemnation, including incarceration and execution. They feel not only vindicated but profoundly empowered by the election result, empowered to silence their opposition, by force if need be.

He goes on to review Michelle Malkin's rewriting of the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans, discussions now underway about permanent internment of parties the government deems dangerous, and some Bush nominee named Daniel Pipes who recently had this to say, in writing, about the place of internment in the WOT:

:Leftist and Islamist organizations have so successfully intimidated public opinion that polite society shies away from endorsing a focus on Muslims. In America, this intimidation results in large part from a revisionist interpretation of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II. Although more than 60 years past, these events matter yet deeply today, permitting the victimization lobby, in compensation for the supposed horrors of internment, to condemn in advance any use of ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion in formulating domestic security policy.

[ via IsThatLega? ]

It is very clear where this is all going. First they come for the Islamists, and then for the Leftists. If you're not with 'em, you're against them.

The important thing to understand is that they are not planning to open camps tomorrow. There will probably not be acts of semi-organized mob violence against 'liberals and leftists' for a while yet. So it's very easy to say "well, people wouldn't stand for that." Well, now, no, people wouldn't stand for it. They send out trial balloons (Example: hey, can we just make a save-Delay's-ass-ethics-rule? Hmm, no, people noticed that, it looked bad. We'll sort of take it back, and get around his indictment problems some other way.) They issue memos and then override them. They see how far they can go, and if the people make a stink, they retreat a little. So we feel like maybe we have some influence. But the movement is always in the same direction. Here's Milton Mayer, again, on how it worked for Hitler:

What the Nazis had to gauge was the point at which atrocity would awaken the community to the consciousness of its moral habits. This point may be moved forward as the national emergency, or cold war, is moved forward, and still further forward in hot war. But it remains the point which the tyrant must always approach and never pass...It is in this nonlitigable sense, at least, that the Germans as a whole were guilty: nothing was done, or attempted, that they would not stand for.

As for the retreat on torture the administration appeared to make when it released its new, narrower definition of "torture", I refer you to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, p.99 in my edition (Harper and Row, 1973):

There were never any spiritual or moral barriers which could have held the Organs back from torture. In the early postwar years..., the admissibility of torture from a Marxist point of view was openly debated. Judging by the subsequent course of events, the answer deduced was positive, though not universally so.

It is more accurage to say that if before 1938 some kind of formal documentation was required as a preliminary to torture, as well as specific permission for each case under investigation (even though such permission was easy to obtain), then, in the years 1937-1938, in view of the extraordinary situation prevailing ..., interrogators were allowed to use violence and torture on an unlimited basis, at their own discretion, and in accordance with the demands of their work quotas and the amount of time they were given. The types of torture used were not regulated and every kind of ingenuity was permitted, no matter what.

In 1939 such indiscriminate authorization was withdrawn, and once again written permission was required for torture, and perhaps it may not have been so easily granted. (Of course, simple threats, blackmail, deception, exhaustion through enforced sleeplessness, and punishment cells were never prohibited.) Then, from the end of the war and throughout the postwar years, certain categories of prisoners were established by decree for whom a broad range of torture was automatically permitted.

This has all happened before, people. The definitions, procedures, and practices may fluctuate over time, but over the long term, unless something significant changes -- unless large numbers of Americans can be convinced that shooting terrorists and leftists is morally suspect -- one of us, one of the dissidents, will have to compile the secret history of the American gulag, just as Solzhenitsyn did for the original.

I wish I could be more hopeful today. Which brings me to another topic I have not yet discussed up on Biscuit, and which it is now time to write about: emigration.