> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Gautam Mukunda
> Yes, I am familiar with the history of Latin America. But the
> extraordinary
> level of 20/20 hindsight you're displaying here is, well, remarkable.
What hindsight? I was there in 1985 and it was going on then.
You said that Alberto was buying communist propaganda and claimed that
political freedom in Latin America was greater than in Eastern Europe.
That's what I was responding to, which isn't the same as second-guessing the
decisions that Eisenhower or anyone else made. There has been very, very
little political freedom in much of Latin America. That's not hindsight,
that's history, which continues today.
> Politics is hard. Those of us who don't have to make decisions involving
> the fate of the world might be well served by a small degree of humility.
> Just once in a while, you might want to think that people like Eisenhower,
> for example, were doing the best they could. They didn't choose the way
> they did because they were evil, or corrupt, or malicious, or
> anything like
> that. But because they had a hard choice, and they did the best
> they could.
Maybe so, but that doesn't mean that we weren't supporting horribly
repressive governments.
> Are you familiar with the history of Eastern Europe? To flip
> your question
> on its head. How about Russia? China? Cambodia? North Korea?
> Cuba under
> Castro? If you are, then you shouldn't say something so
> historically blind
> as "the lame excuse of fighting communism."
Perhaps you misunderstood. It was a lame excuse in Latin America, where
teaching school or organizing labor is labeled communism. It was not a lame
excuse in the other places you mentioned, but that's not what we were
discussing, was it?
> There was _nothing_ more
> important than that over the second half of the twentieth century and for
> you now, enjoying the fruits of that epic triumph, to say that the whole
> effort was "lame" is no better than saying that beating the Nazis wasn't
> worth the effort.
Feh. You're putting words in my mouth, applying what I said about Latin
America to other parts of the world. At the risk of repeating myself, in
Latin America, the battle against communism has been used as an excuse for
all sorts of human rights abuses and tyranny. And it *still* is, though it
doesn't carry as much weight in Washington except with Jesse Helms and his
ilk.
Helms invited Robert D'Aubisson, head of the Salvadoran death squads to this
country and tried to hail him as an anti-communist hero, which -- thank
goodness -- few people were willing to swallow. Yeah, murdering the
archbishop of the church was stomping out communism. And why? Because
Romero told the soldiers that they were not obligated to follow immoral
orders to kill their brothers and sisters. That's the sort of crime against
humanity that was labeled "fighting communism." We funded it.
We overthrew a democratically elected government in Guatemala and excused
our behavior by saying that it was too friendly to the communists. That's a
lame excuse if ever there was one. It was McCarthyism with torture and a
death penalty instead of a blacklist.
Nick
