Eminentoes/We're All Moderates Now
Muravchik, Joshua
...
...Bello said he was about to enter the Lafayette Grill for a pack of cigarettes when two black men rushed out with guns...
...Questioned separately at the police station, Carter and Artis gave conflicting accounts of what they had done that evening, and how they had ended up driving through Paterson at two in the morning...
...Former Secretary of State Stettinius recorded in his diary in late 1945 that after Potsdam Truman fretted over Stalin's health...
...This is the true extent of their moderation...
...But for Lenin and Stalin, it signified no such thing...
...We'll never know what would have happened had Trotsky prevailed, but who in the West will argue now that Stalin was the more desirable foe...
...They were split into three factions, one led by the Ortega brothers, one by Tomas Borge, and one by Jaime Wheelock...
...We use the term loosely, often speaking of liberalism and conservatism as "ideologies...
...As a moderate, Stalin stood on firm Leninist ground...
...Because the officer hadn't yet heard the full description of the getaway car—and because Carter was well known and highly respected in Paterson—the car was not detained...
...and Latin American officials and journalists...
...EMINENTOES...
...The Borge and Wheelock factions favored patient organizing until the Sandinistas grew strong enough to seize power all on their own, while the Ortegas wanted to forge a popular front to overthrow Somoza immediately, and then consolidate Sandinista supremacy over the other anti-Somoza forces...
...At first he thought they were police detectives...
...This, say the radicals, constitutes capitulation to Zionism's claim to a share of historic Palestine...
...Not so, say members of Arafat's group, theirs is a policy of "stages...
...When he realized they had just shot up the bar, he turned and ran...
...Inside were Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the pride of Paterson's black community and the nation's numbertwo-ranked middleweight boxer, and a 19-year-old named John Artis...
...The inventor of Communism had written in his classic pamphlet, "Left Wing" Communism An Infantile Disorder, that those Communist purists who would "not permit tacking, conciliatory maneuvers, or compromising," were guilty of a "mistake that . . . is causing great prejudice to Communism...
...From an alleyway he watched them get into a "highly polished" white car and drive away...
...She saw two black men climb into a distinctive late-model white car with "butterfly" taillights and New York license plates...
...A few months later, the same Washington Post correspondent who had characterized the Ortegas as "moderates" and Borge as a "pragmatist" wrote of Jaime Wheelock, the leader of the third Sandinista faction: "Outsiders tend to consider Wheelock the most `intellectual' and `reasonable' of the Sandinistas...
...Ambassador Cleo Noel, and other atrocities, had already been acknowledged to have been a covert arm of Arafat's Fatah, not the PFLP—a fact known to everyone who followed Middle East affairs but apparently one Newsweek found unassimilable...
...He was a good speaker and was well known for not being one of the radicals of that movement...
...Cruising back through the streets of Paterson a few minutes later, he spotted a white car traveling William Tucker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent and author of the new book, Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America (Stein and Day...
...Also identifying the car was anotherwitness, 22-year-old Alfred Bello, a reform-school veteran whom police had discovered inside in the bar when they arrived...
...And as the Almarales case reminds us, the same flexibility that allows them to talk so reasonably at one moment also allows them to act with utmost ruthlessness when they judge that their cause demands it...
...Rather than alter their estimation, these people simply refuse to absorb the contradictory evidence...
...dailies reported optimistically that Borge "is considered a pragmatist" and that he would now be "in a position to control the most radical elements among the rebels...
...A Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, says the Palestinian National Council (the PLO's "parliament"), "will fight . . . to complete the liberation of all the Palestinian land...
...What makes Arafat's faction more "moderate" than the PLO "radicals" is its policy of combining "armed struggle" with "political struggle," and its professed willingness to set up a Palestinian state on the territories Israel occupied in 1967...
...Our yearning to discover moderates is of course not unknown to the likes of M-19, the Sandinistas, and the PLO...
...Joshua Muravchik is Fellow in Residence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy...
...Bello, it eventually emerged, had been acting as a lookout for another ex-offender, Dexter Bradley, who was burglarizing a factory next door...
...No guns were ever found...
...In searching the car, police turned up a shotgun shell and a handgun bullet of the same caliber as the ammunition used in the shooting...
...You might call him a moderate terrorist revolutionary...
...He said he thought that Stalin was a moderating influence in the present Russian government...
...Because its popular front strategy entailed alliance with "bourgeois" op-position groups, the Ortega faction was labeled "moderate" by many U.S...
...They deliberately cultivate it, as did their forebears...
...Stalin did not believe in restricting socialism to one country forever, but only until circumstances were auspicious for its expansion...
...Minutes later, a patrol car that had already heard a radio report of the shooting saw two cars—a white one followed by a dark one—speeding down one of Paterson's main avenues...
...The President said, of course, it would be a real catastrophe if Stalin should die at the present time...
...In this case, the Colombian government paid a tragic price for a weakness it shares with other people of democratic temper: Reasonableness and compromise seem to us so natural that we find it difficult to believe any foe could be unreasonable and implacable...
...Trotsky wanted to push the revolution onward and outward without respite, while Stalin wanted first to consolidate...
...In the Middle East, the main beneficiary of our indefatigable quest for moderates has been Yasir Arafat...
...The implicit assumption of our quest for moderates is that tactical flexibility signifies a willingness to compromise about ultimate objectives...
...When this question was put to the Colombian Minister of Justice in an interview after the bloody episode, he replied: You remember in M-19 there were groups called hard-line and soft-line...
...and when they exhibit tactical flexibility, we take it as proof that they, too, are reasonable...
...But as government forces moved in, so the New York Times reported, "Almarales sprayed many of the hostages with automatic-rifle fire...
...Lenin added, "Left doctrinairism persists in . . . failing to see . . . that it is our duty as Communists to master all forms .. . and to adapt our tactics...
...Carter and Artis were stopped a second time and taken to the Lafayette Grill...
...Borge, it seemed, was now the moderate...
...Nothing happened for a while...
...If this happened, there would be no telling what might happen inside Russia...
...If the goal itself is threatening, those who are more flexible in their choice of tactics may well be the more dangerous foes...
...Stalin himself sought to convey such an image and succeeded in misleading even the hard-headed Truman...
...The irony here was that Black September, the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre, the murder of U.S...
...we make much of insignificant differences among them...
...Thinking the cars were headed for New York, the patrolman took a shortcut to the entrance to Route 4, but the cars never arrived...
...Then he went back into the bar to rob the cash register...
...Stalin, of course, was pulling Truman's leg, but, ironically, Stalin's effort to present himself as a "moderate" had at least a strand of historic truth...
...In sum, none of the Sandinistas' three factions missed its turn as the embodiment of our imperishable hopes that there were moderates among them...
...When the incoming revolutionary junta announced the ominous appointment of Borge as Minister of the Interior, the major U.S...
...For some, the image of Arafat as a moderate is so firmly embedded that evidence to the contrary only produces an effect psychologists call "cognitive dissonance...
...Thus, for days after the Achille Lauro hijacking began, we found it hard to believe that a wing of a Palestinian group close to Arafat was responsible, just as for days after the murder of three Israelis on a yacht off Larnaca, we found it hard to believe that the assassins came from Force 17, Arafat's bodyguard...
...THE NATION'S PULSE HURRICANE CARTER'S COMEBACK by William Tucker No fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any courtroom of the United States, than according to the rules of common law...
...The justification for this oxymoron is that there are other factions of the PLO more radical than Arafat's...
...This was not the only indication of the fatuousness of the rush to discover which of the Sandinista fac-tions was moderate...
...We wax hopeful over any sign of moderation among our adversaries...
...The latter are nothing more than attitudes or predispositions with which various issues are approached...
...Thus, Newsweek magazine predicted a few years ago that Arafat's Fatah wouldlose ground to more radical factions, saying "the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine . . . is likely to gain recruits attracted to its infamous Black September past...
...He came to Congress to have meetings...
...He was always here in the city...
...He was not visibly armed at the time—the weapons were carried in by subordinates who at-tacked the building shortly after his entry—but still, why was he not stopped...
...WE'RE ALL MODERATES NOW by Joshua Muravchik Andres Almarales, the leader of the group of M-19 guerrillas whose seizure of Colombia's Palace of Justice last November resulted in one hundred or so deaths, apparently began the operation by walking into the building right past guards who recognized him but did not try to keep him out...
...However, some journalists (in the Los Angeles Times and the Economist), focusing on the Ortegas' call for immediate insurrection rather than on their quest for allies, inferred that theirs was the "most militant" faction...
...The Bill of Rights, Amendment VII On June 17, 1966, at two in the morning, someone burst into the Lafayette Grill, in Paterson, New Jersey, and shot four people, killing two men, mortally wounding a woman, and critically wounding another man...
...Bello had once seen Carter box in reform school, and—according to his later account—had recognized him as one of the men getting into the car...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 31...
...Because we believe, as Barry Goldwater learned the hard way in 1964, that even good causes should, except in extreme circumstances, be pursued by moderate means, we mistakenly infer that bad causes are improved if pursued by moderate means...
...For they were ideologues, as wasas was Almarales, as are the Ortegas, and as is, in a somewhat different way, Arafat...
...Almarales's "moderation" seemed to have been reconfirmed during the early part of the episode when his behavior toward his hostages was, according to some survivors, "gentlemanly...
...When Pat Valentine saw the car she not only identified it, but became hysterical and tried to run away...
...But there is an essential difference between ideologies like Marxism or revolutionary nationalism and "ideologies" like liberalism or conservatism...
...But Bello wasn't the type to cooperate with police and said nothing...
...A woman named Pat Valentine, living directly upstairs, heard the shots and ran to the window...
...Although Arafat calls himself a revolutionary and has long headed the world's premier terrorist organization, he is widely regarded as a "moderate...
...at a normal rate of speed...
...That is why when confronted with ideological groups, the key question we need to ask is what is their goal, not who among them are the moderates...
...These illusions were much in evidence when the Sandinistas were fighting for power in Nicaragua...
...But a true ideology elevates one single issue—be it the struggle for socialism or for Palestine—to a place of overarching importance and judges all other issuesonly in terms of their impact on it., Tactical flexibility may actually come easier for ideologues than for others because the goal is firmly fixed, but compromise about the goal itself is unlikely...
...We Americans have little under-standing of ideology...
...A iq,111Nilip:.jP.11l~~ii l i: 1411iIN 4' i lli:iIII ! 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 In the great battle twenty odd years earlier for Lenin's mantle, Stalin was the moderate and Trotsky the radical...
...When the officer went to the scene a few minutes later and heard Valentine's description, however, he realized it matched Carter's brand new Manhattan-rented Dodge...
...The split was over strategies for reaching power, not over ultimate goals...
...Carter and Artis were summoned to testify before a grand jury two weeks later...
...Almarales was one of those persons who always wanted a dialogue...
...This fact alone seems to weigh more heavily in many assessments of Arafat than his own deeds...
...Another witness down the street saw the same thing and called police...
...He stopped it...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
