An academically-trained mouthpiece for the right, Victor Davis Hanson, with whom I sometimes agree, has penned the most incredibly obnoxious and hypocritical column about the re-emergence of the Russian bear. He is right, I think, in pointing to the troubling aggression and expansionism evident in Russian policy. We (as a nation) and as global citizens should be alarmed, indeed. And, yet, he makes the most pious of statements about how ordinary Russians don’t demonstrate against this expansion (while noting Americans are allowed to and do demonstrate against government policy) and how Russians don’t “resent” a supposed return to the era of “gulags” long symbolic of Soviet-era policies.

What is pathetic about Hanson’s piety is that in his other writings he criticizes progressive challenges to American foreign policy and defends Guantanamo. Indeed, he condemns progressives as naive and finds fault with anyone who questions the wisdom of the neo-cons, repeatedly. For examples, read here or here, where he rails against the “crying game” of protesters.  Worse yet, he defends our own American Gulag at Guantanamo (here, here, and here, for examples) seeing our illegal and unconstitutional prisons as necessary in the context of the excesses of our enemies–enemies that he finds everywhere. And, worse, his evidence for their enemy status is drawn only from the most extreme examples, used to classify whole populations, making brilliant use of basic logic fallacies used by demagogues, such as creating straw men, over generalizing, or making ad hominem claims. But, that is of course, his style–one that obscures more than it illuminates. On the one hand, in one essay he creates protesters as straw men for naivete, which casts American progressives as threats to America, and then in the next using those same folks as agents of democracy (ignoring just how significantly the American public looks like the Russian public when it comes to empire building and expansion–doesn’t he remember Bush’s 90% approval ratings or the overwhelming public and media support of the Iraq war?). Surely you can have it both ways, but intellectually it is disingenuous to make such sweeping claims.

My favorite of his arguments for its sheer insidiousness, though, is his celebration of Guantanamo by contrasting it with a European war-crimes tribunal in which one a Croatian Serb leader committed suicide. How much superior our prisons are, he notes, despite the protestations of weak-minded Europeans. He writes: “Few in Europe said much about the deaths of such high-profile prisoners, whose barbarity differed from that of many of the killers in Guantanamo mostly in order of magnitude. If American Rambos can keep alive Muslim jihadists, with their radically different customs, religion, languages, and diets, why cannot the more sensitive Europeans ensure that fellow Europeans don’t drop dead in their jails?”

Really? What about those prisoners who have been killed in US secret prisons located across the globe, which by the way has been documented by CNN (so they’re not that much of a secret anymore)? And, keeping prisoners alive, although we might torture them, is legitimate? And, don’t let me get started in discussing, more broadly, how much of penal state our nation has become (meaning that Guantanamo might not be as much an exception as we like to think.)

Indeed, Hanson’s rhetoric about evil of Gulags offers the perfect case for why we should close Guantanamo and end secret detentions. We have made ourselves into Stalinists and harmed the US constitution. We have given enemies of the United States and petty despots everywhere a huge rhetorical space in which to operate. If only right-wing hacks like Hanson would fess up to how much their heroic neo-con President has harmed America. Once you’ve given away the moral high ground it is difficult to reclaim it, and you certainly can’t do so selectively (i.e. Russian Gulags bad, American gulags good.)  It simply does not work to support secret prisons one day and condemn them the next, much less make ridiculous claims that US secret prisons, tribunals, and extra-constitutional torture is more humane. Attempts to morally justify such behavior smacks of Orwellian lunacy.