Amerikai Magyar Értesítő, 1985 (21. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1985-06-01 / 6. szám
l6.oldal Amerikai Magyar Értesítő' 1985. június If Nicaragua’s Ortega wore a swastika on his sleeve M y COLLEAGUE the syndicated columnist Joseph Sob ran remarked, apropos the whole Bitburg business, “What if Daniel Ortega and his Sandinistas were Nazis?” It is a riveting observation. It informs us deeply about the moral scramble of our time, in which as we struggle to remember how hideous was Hitler, we struggle equally to forget how hideous is communism. Consider, for instance, the calm revelations of the past few years concerning the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China. When 80 top journalists went into Shanghai in 1972 with President Nixon, there was something on the order of elation: Here, finally, we all were. In the Great Kingdom. Mao Tse-tung was a hero. True, he was a tough man, but you needed a tough man to create Mao men. En route to China we all read the glowing accounts of Mao’s accomplishments, written by Roes Terrill of Harvard and published in The Atlantic Monthly. Theodore White, the distinguished American journalist and sinologist who was an early enthusiast for Mao, shakes nowadays his head and says, “We did not recognize just how bad it was.” Yes, it was that bad. Brutal killings, torture, categorical imprisonments of everyone associated with the old Communist Party, a despoliation of college life, burned books, anti-intellectual- ism rife. All the details are painstakingly W.F.B. collected in the meticulous, resourceful book of Fox Butterfield, “China: Alive in the Bitter Sea.” We welcome, of course, the regime of Deng Xiao-ping, who has studiedly attempted to institute reforms, economic and political: without, however, altering the totalitarian nature of life in China. But there is no sepse of horror, detectable among Americans who visit there, either at what happened in China under the banner of Deng's old boss and mentor Mao Tse-tung, or of Deng’s other boss, Chou En-lai. We treat it as, merely, an unpleasant episode, about which we do not choose to dwell. It is inconceivable that any American traveling in China would exhibit moral hesitation at fraternizing with surviving members of the Old Guard, those who had a hand in implementing the Bolshevik Revolution. All but inconceivable that any American staying at home would loudly protest such fraternization as a betrayal of the victims of the regime of Mao Tse-tung, the Great Helmsman. But all this is also true, though perhaps a little less so, of the Soviet Union, is it not? Two rulers back, less than two years ago, the head of the Soviet Union had been the counterpart of Himmler in Nazi Germany. But about Mr. Andropov we were all tacitly urged to speak in civil accents, and of course there was considerable dismay when President Reagan elected not to attend his funeral, although he did drop by the Soviet Embassy to write his signature into the'official book of condolences. How come this disparity in how we feel about evil regimes indistinguishable from one another? Probably the difference is not much more complicated than that the Soviet Union has The Bomb. If the Soviet Union elected to do so, there would be a world war, conceivably the terminal experience of the planet Earth. Well now, suppose that Hitler had got himself a bomb, which as a matter of fact he came very close to doing. Imagine that that bomb had exploded over Liverpool in the early spring of 1945: Exit Liverpool and, by the way, four little baby Beatles. Suppose Hitler had then said that the next bomb would fall on London, and the third on Paris unless we came to terms with him. What would have happened? Yes, precisely that. Just as Japan reacted to Hiroshima, so would London have reacted to Liverpool. So Hitler lived on — in 1945 he was only 56 years old. Say that he lived on to approximately the same age as Churchill, and Mao, and Adenauer, dying a natural death in 1975. There were 300,000 Jews left in the concentration camps when Hitler’s bomb ended World War II, so he polished them off, and of course continued to torture and kill and otherwise persecute any dissidents, even as Stalin did. But before he died, he had amassed in Germany the equivalent nuclear throw-weight amassed by the Soviet Union. Wouldn’t our diplomats be attending anniversaries of Hitler’s rise to power, even as they attend, in Moscow, anniversaries of the October Revolution? One fears that that is the case. That considerations of self-concern govern our moral attitudes. Evidently we need to defeat a totalitarian power before we can settle down to despising it If Daniel Ortega wore a swastika on his sleeve, the liberals in Congress would be calling for an American Expeditionary Force to crush him. As it stands, he is relatively safe.- B.W.Moral Equivalence T HE subject of “moral equivalence” has moved center stage. Hard-liners have been frustrated in recent years by a point of view that can best be abbreviated as, "So’s my old man.” Thus, if hard-liners should condemn the Soviets for brutalizing Afghanistan, the rebuttal is offered that Afghanistan is really only the “Soviet Vietnam." They're just doing what we did: moral equivalence (M.E.). If it’s said that Communists are attempting to undermine El Salvador, it is countered that America is doing the same thing in Nicaragua. And so on. The M.E.s, of course, ignore facts. The South Vietnamese asked us in, and fought with us. The Afghanis, on the other hand, were Invaded and fight the Russians. The Communist guerrillas in El Salvador are trying to destroy a freely elected government. Contrariwise, we are pushing a Nicaraguan government to hold free elections. But, it’s not just facts that are ignored by the M.E.s, say the hard-liners, it’s morality. We are the good guys. If we do some unpleasant things in this harsh world, it may well be all right; we do them for a noble cause. But the Communist cause is malign. That’s the big difference; there is no moral equivalence. All this came to a boil in Washington when the conservative Shavano Institute held a conference about M E. Predictably, liberals boycotted it. In subsequent writing, however, the liberal view surfaced. It’s a straw man, they said. No one who's serious says that the Soviets or the Communists are our moral equivalents; of course they are not. But, as free people, we still have to point out our own shortcomings with vigor. Fair enough. That is the wise rebuttal. It represents an important strain of liberal thought. It makes some sense. But that begs the question; Is the hard-liner argument really built on straw? Isn't M.E. too frequently part of the liberal arsenal these days? Consider the film, "The Killing Fields.” It is a powerful movie; mostly an adventure story about a New York Times reporter and his Cambodian aide. They are caught up in the Cambodian holocaust that was unleashed by the Communist Khmer Rouge. Ultimately a third of the Cambodian civilian population was purposefully murdered. But the film isn't only about horrific events. It deeds with causation. What was the cause of this great massacre? Well, brace yourself, the answer is delivered clearly in a speech by the reporter in the movie. It was America! We did it! How? By playing geopolitics in Southeast Asia. That, we are told, triggered the whole mess. This happens to be wrongheaded and convoluted history. But it is moral equivalence with a vengeance. We act militarily in good faith to help defend an ally in South Vietnam; the Communists slaughter their own people in Cambodia; we are both equally guilty! Or, for another example of moral equivalence run amok, note what the Rev. Jesse Jackson said on "Nightline" about- those friendly folks from the "Islamic Jihad” who are threatening to butcher four American hos- tages. Are these Jihad-niks terrorists? Well, not really, says Mr. Jackson. You see, he says, terrorism is relative. We're as bad as they are - for example, he says, we trade with an ugly regime in South Africa, and we set up a “bombing expedition” in Lebanon. Now, there is a bad situation in South Af rica - but it is perpetrated by South Africans, not us. And we had little to do with the Lebanese bombing. But whatever we tried to do was designed to prevent terrorism. No matter to Jesse Jackson. To him there is little difference between Ayatollah-backed murderers and those who try to stop them. Mora! equivalence. I have a word of advice to those on the liberal side of the debate. If you really want to claim that no one who’s serious touts moral equivalency, you might show good faith by unmasking those who do. You could start with the producers of “The Killing Fields" and Jesse Jackson.
