A reader e-mails:
In the piece "Why Do Commies Get Such Good Press?" there seems to be an implicit analogy that Stalin is to CCCP as Hitler is to 3rd Reich/Swastika. I do not believe this is a good analogy as the CCCP pre- and post-dated Stalin whereas the 3rd Reich certainly did not post-date Hitler and, it could reasonably be argued, didn't pre-date him either.
You are right about the difference. But if every analogy could be refuted by pointing to one point of difference, then no analogy could count as good. Of course, evaluating analogies is a tricky business, and in the political sphere the problem is exacerbated by the contentious and polemical nature of the subject matter.
I'll say this about analogies. An analogy is a comparison. To have a comparison, you have to have two things. (One cannot compare a thing to itself). Given that there are two things being compared, there must be one or more properties in respect of which the two things differ. It follows that there is no such thing as a perfect analogy. A perfect analogy would be an identity, hence not an analogy. And since there will always be points of difference, one can always object to an analogy with some show of plausibility. You find a point of difference and claim that that is where the analogy 'limps.'
The title is, of course, not just exaggeration but an ugly spinning of a single observation that had nothing to do with "the press." Tis quite possible that the wearer and most of the people who saw the shirt were unaware of its meaning and, in fact, tis also possible that the letters meant something else.
Here we are going to disagree seriously. Was the author hasty-generalizing from a single observation, or was he pointing out yet another confirming instance of a general truth? I say the latter. As for 'spinning,' that is a word I avoid because it is now a buzzword that means almost nothing.
What offends conservatives is the leftist double-standard. The Nazi regime is depicted again and again in movies and books as evil to the core -- which it was. But comparatively little attention is paid to the crimes perpetrated in the USSR. This is a large topic and I don't have the time to trot out the readily available evidence.
But here is a little indication. Most people educated people can name two or more Nazi death camps such as Dachau or Auschwitz. But how many of these same people could list two or more of the camps in the Gulag Archipelago?
The book to read on this topic is Anne Applebaum, Gulag. I also recommend this book for those who are eager to compare Guantanamo Bay with a gulag.
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3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.