Gautam insists that the United States' support for repressive regimes in Latin America was justified by the "real" communist insurgencies, rejecting the idea that there may have been other, greater motivations. This followed his suggestion that Alberto (and I suppose me, by extension) has been duped by communist propaganda. To which I say, baloney.
The right-wing propaganda that Gautam has bought into continues today. For example, look at the New American's commentary on the Elian Gonsalez affair, in which they denounce the National Council of Churches as a communist organization: 'Founded in 1950 as the successor organization to the Federal Council of Churches, the NCC claims to be the ecumenical voice of "mainline" - that is, leftist - American Protestant denominations. The NCC's agenda has always been to promote Marxism in the latest fashionable theological guise - as "social gospel," "social justice," or "liberation theology."' That is exactly the sort of justification that led U.S. dollars to be spent on religious and political persecution throughout Latin America. I fear that soon, perhaps already, leaders will make the same justifications but substitute "terrorism" for "communism." That concern does not mean that I am saying we should sit on our hands. It means that we should be very wary of governments that seek U.S. aid by mislabeling legitimate efforts at education and betterment as activities that directly connected to terrorism, even if their politics are aligned. Persecuting religious, educational and labor leaders is not fighting terrorism, any more than it was fighting communism. Nick
