VDH Watch 2: VDH shows us his sense of humor

When we last tuned in on Victor Davis Hanson, Vic was making an historical analogy about Hitler Germany that kind of makes your head dizzy. In fact, bad historical analogies are one of Vic's specialties. If his columns are any measure, he reels off bad historical analogies faster that Scott McClellan evades questions at the White House press gaggles.

But Vic clearly has a sense of humor, as he shows us in Hitler, Hitler Everywhere Jewish World Review 06/23/05. This column is about ... how Democrats make too many bad historical analogies! Specifically, about Hitler. (Also available at VDH's Web site.)

Was it just my imagination, or was there a period of, oh, about 20 years or so where conservatives ridiculed liberals for insisting on "political correctness"? Or has the Republican Party Politburo now written that out of history? Because it's kind of odd to see Republicans now fretting all over the place about how hurt their feelings are about all this naughty words that Democrats use now. Oops! Did I say "Politburo"? I hope that doesn't offend any tender Republican souls who might read this.

That whole Republican concept about "political correctness" always seemed a little daft to me. That's partially because I'm around a fair number of people for whom English is not their first language. And I found it well nigh impossible to explain to someone that when a person says something is "politically correct," it means that the speaker thinks it's politically incorrect. And even more specifically, politically incorrect in being too liberal. Or politically incorrect, in that sense. Whatever. I never could quite keep it straight.

Now, the examples he gives are not entirely clear to me. There's poor Dick Durbin, of course, who referred to Nazis in crticizing the Bush torture policy. Actually, Vic says that that Durbin "recently compared American behavior at Guantanamo Bay to that of "Nazis, ..." etc. And that was really naughty, accordint to VDH, because:

Time Magazine recently reported that when the suspected 20th Sept. 11 hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was in distress, he was given a CAT scan and put on a heart monitor, while a radiologist was flown to Cuba for consultation.

Golly, I thought Durbin was reading from an eyewitness report by an FBI agent about torture there. But now that I've read Vic's column, I can see that he was criticizing the fine health care being provided to Guantanmo prisoners when they are in "distress."

I guess the doctors do that in breaks between assisting in the torture. No, wait! The only mention of torture in Vic's column is one about Saddam Hussein's regime torturing prisoners. I hear they did a lot of that at Abu Ghuraib in Saddam's time. I mean, if Dick Durbin had been criticizing sick, sadistic criminal torture, VDH would surely have mentioned that in telling us about it, wouldn't he?

Apparently he thinks Dick Durbin is a Holocaust denier, too. That Vic, he's pretty creative with these things.

But Vic is a fair guy. He mentions the "occasional conservative" who makes a Hitler reference. Marcia Ellen just posted about this a couple of entries back. Maybe we should e-mail VDH some of Pat Robertson's imaginative comparisons about the Holocaust, one of which Marcia Ellen quotes. Because Vic seems to think that "most of the offenders ... are on the left, furious over their inability to affect the course of events."

Then there's some hand-wringing worry about how such rhetoric as Al Gore referring to "Digital brownshirts" (caution: there's is very sparse context to any of VDH's examples) could lead to violence. Gosh, Vic must be rending his clothing over Karl Rove trying to paint the entire Democratic Party as anti-American supporters of The Terrorists.

For a guy who's so finicky about history, its surprising to see this paragraph from him:

In contrast, is Sen. Durbin aware that the Nazis laid railroad tracks to the very gates of Auschwitz to facilitate its engine of mass death, an industry that would take over 6 million people? Or can he grasp the idea of 25 million perishing in the gulag — the population of Durbin's home state of Illinois being exterminated twice over?

It's not really clear exactly what the railroad tracks have to do with Durbin objecting to criminal torture being conducted by American officials. But I get the point that torture in the Bush Gulag is not nearly as extensive as the crimes of Hitler Germany or Stalinist Russia, which seems to be a good enough standard for Republican polemicists these days.

What surprises me is the, at best, carelessness with wording in laying out those facts. The six million number is certainly right for the number of Jews killed in the Shoah (Holocaust). But they weren't all killed at Auschwitz. It's not just a pedantic point. If you've had the dubious pleasure of trying to refute Holocaust deniers' arguments, you probably know this is one that can easily trip you up, as this Nizkor page explains: How many people died at Auschwitz?

Body counts are a grim part of history, and I must say that I have not followed this research on deaths in the Soviet gulag nearly as closely as the discussion over the Holocaust. But I'm pretty sure 25 million is on the high side of the estimates of deaths. But again, anyone who's poked around the gutter of far-right polemics will know to be one guard when you see a polemical point in the form of "the Nazis killed this many, the Commies killed so many more."

But since VDH thinks that he is refuting Durbin's (now tearfully retracted) criticism of torture in the Bush Gulag, the following is worth checking out. The great Maverick McCain suggested that Sen. Durbin be required to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago as a punishment for criticizing torture in the Bush Gulag. This blog provides some excerpts from that work: From Solzhenitsyn's Gulag: The Simplest Methods which Break the Will (via Tom Tomorrow). You may notice that some of the methods that he describes that as nasty torture don't sound as drastic as some of the "stress positions" that our torture advocates defend as relatively benign.

Now that VDH has seen the light on bad historical analogies, we'll be watching to see if our man Vic can stay away from them. Can he kick the habit? Or is he hopelessly hooked? For the answers, keep tuning in to the VDH Watch!

[Note: This post has been edited to correct the phrase "I have not followed".]

[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]

Tags: vdh watch, victor davis hanson