Editorials
commonweal A BAD CASE OF NERVE GAS CHEMICAL warfare was one of the ghastliest features of that evil war we call—prophetically?—World War I. (How many more can mankind survive? III, IV, V? It...
...Professor Wilson sees in the New Right a genuine social movement expressing ' 'popular instincts as to what is worth preserving'' in America...
...This judgment is both astute and unduly benign, just as the earlier judgment on the New Right of the fifties may have been too glib and condescending...
...What is now proposed is a gas that would be "binary"—that is, it would consist of two separate chemicals which are individually non-lethal and hence safe until joined together...
...As Central American moderates frequently observe, our State Department takes notice only when Latin Americans start killing each other...
...DOUBLE STANDARD One of the more curious phenomena of this presidential year has been the degree of political support Mr...
...writes Wilson, "and I disagree with many of its views...
...Indeed, the West Germans find the use of nerve gas so 7 November 1980: 611 repugnant and unacceptable that they have stated they will refuse to train their troops in the use of this weapon in any way...
...Unless there is real public protest, the likelihood now is for renewed production of nerve gas—a profound switch in national policy without extended debate or recorded vote in Congress...
...To protest against such weapons is to carry on an age-old Christian tradition in which the church always drew a sharp line between combatant and non-combatant, in which the church constantly tried to "civilize" violence, to lessen its impact, to ease the cruelty of war—even to the point of winning a' 'truce of God" in which fighting ceased for religious seasons and holy days...
...III, IV, V? It does not seem very likely...
...The New Right of Commonweal: 612 two decades ago was viewed by these same observers as largely constituted of primitives, yahoos, moralizers, terribles simplificateurs, etc., etc...
...And again, during the Vietnam war years, the same observers kept cautioning the left to damp its protests, lest it stir up those New Right sentiments into a dangerous backlash...
...Funny how one's standards change...
...This he has not done, and the secretaries of state and defense have publicly opposed such a step at this time...
...to consider cooling its commitment to the ruling junta—and perhaps gaining some credibility with those who may guide the nation's future...
...Mexico has withdrawn its ambassador...
...Increasingly, it would seem, U.S...
...What made the neoconservatives abandon their earlier fear and loathing...
...We just quit manufacturing more of it...
...in this instance we need a truce of God when it comes to nerve gas...
...policy is based on fictions—of a center that isn't there, of crazy leftists (there are some, no doubt), and of a land reform that serves well to target peasant leaders for assassination...
...A long-term program for the region, one which takes full account of its socially revolutionary temper, is urgent...
...The fact is that many of today's neoconservatives made their reputations as political analysts by criticizing the New Right of the 1950s, of which the current Reaganite New Right is a direct descendant...
...The Army says we need nerve gas for our allies in Europe, but as Senator David Pryor of Arkansas pointed out in the Washington Post, our allies will not even let us store nerve gas stockpiles on their soil...
...Secondly, there is no provision for situations where the fascist right seizes control, as it apparently has or is doing in El Salvador, and inaugurates a reign of terror that liquidates popular support and drives the moderate center to the barricades...
...To dismiss the movement by disparaging the more vocal elements...
...On the other side lies the fear of "another Cuba...
...With the collapse last January of the first junta, and with the removal in September of the surviving moderate colonel, Adolfo Amoldo Majano, it seems fairly clear that all real power is held by the extremist right—and the swelling reign of terror by police and army tends to confirm this...
...But what is particularly interesting is the standard that the Commentary article advances for evaluating this social movement: ' 'I confess to finding some of the arguments and activities of the New Right a bit unnerving...
...For this reason the Army has been trying for some time to build a binary production plant, up to now without success, with each attempt defeated by a large margin in Congress...
...Reagan received from the intellectual faction known as neo-conservatives...
...The U.S...
...The revolutionary movement of the 1770s the anti-slavery movement of the 1830s, the trade-union movement of the 1880s, the progressive movement of the 1900s, and the feminist movement of the 1910s all had elements that would not bear scrutiny today...
...is to turn one's back on history...
...has stumbled into backing a right-wing reign of terror, lightly disguised by the fact that it is slow and drawn out...
...With few exceptions, the center has not held, but moved left to join the revolution...
...All the new production project would give us would be a safer horrible means of killing thousands of people— probably civilian men, women, and children, sinccboth Soviet and allied troops have masks and protective clothing to guard them against such gas...
...This is a tradition we need to continue...
...In 1975 Congress went further and prohibited the use of federal funds for the production of lethal binary weapons unless the president first explicitly certified that this was essential to the national security...
...Zealotry is the cutting edge of change...
...We do not...
...it would mean the elimination of most of the present disadvantages of chemical weapons, since binary weapons would be more easy to store and transport and eventually dispose of than ordinary chemical weapons...
...The pertinent question is whether the rightist coup hasn't already happened, and whether the fear of a left-wing revolution isn't in great part a phantom...
...That reaction neglects a well-known chapter in recent intellectual history...
...The Army likes the new proposal...
...human rights foreign policy that labors with a.legacy of marketeering blindness to injustice, and which helped create a Frankenstein military monster now So visibly out of control...
...For over a decade now, the ordinary fare of neoconservatism has been attacks on the left in America, on the ecology movement, feminism, and various other social movements as though they consisted almost entirely of dangerous eccentrics, attacks emphasizing, at every turn, these movements' zealots and most vocal elements...
...What is curious about that, one might well ask...
...Ambassador Robert White's nightmare is that cooling it would unleash a civil war in which 200,000 or more would die...
...last summer representing the united Democratic Revolutionary Front, are hardly cast in the mold of Pol Pot or Castro...
...U.S...
...It would seem, however, that this nightmare has already begun...
...Should Americans feel less strongly...
...Some may regard efforts to restrict the horrors of modern weapons as a quixotic effort...
...It is a study in the paranoid style of politics...
...Remember that we already have an enormous supply of chemical weapons on hand, including thousands of tons of nerve gas...
...when the shell was fired or the bomb dropped, the barrier dividing the two would rupture and the resulting mixture would be lethal nerve gas...
...Nonetheless, the House Armed Services Committee recently took the peculiar position that the prohibition on the production of nerve gas "does not apply to the development of a production facility," and the entire House went along with this piece of sophistry without debate, followed in turn by the Senate, probably because of unsubstantiated rumors that the Russians were using poison gas in Afghanistan...
...After that war civilized nations united in their horror at the way gas was used in Europe...
...First, as articles in the summer issues of both Foreign Affairs (by William LeoGrande and Carla Anne Robbins) and Foreign Policy (by Richard Millett) showed, an individualistic and crisis-oriented human rights policy for this region—and the Third World in general—suffers from the absence of any long-range planning and support for basic economic, political, and social reconstruction...
...West Germany has been visibly cool to the junta—in effect, showing willingness to credit the possibility that liberal capitalists can learn to live with flexible and pragmatic socialist programs modeled, as the Salvadorean Revolutionary Front's manifestly is, on Nicaragua's...
...People like Roman Mayorga, former rector of the Central American (Catholic) University, and Ruben Zamora, a leader of the Social Christian Movement, both of whom were in the U.S...
...policy in El Salvador is predicated on the existence of a moderate center...
...and, as in Nicaragua during the last days of Somoza, the U.S...
...Now there is a plan to reverse that decision and resume the manufacture of deadly nerve gas...
...Now that the backlash is apparently here, the warners are riding the welcome wagon...
...But to write of these movements as if they were entirely composed of dangerous eccentrics is to miss the point...
...On the one hand, it is governed by the fear of a right-wing coup and a total massacre of the opposition...
...never destroyed the nerve gas it had on hand, you understand...
...7 November 1980: 613...
...Such an approach to social movements is certainly sound, but is it unfair to ask why it should be reserved for the New Right...
...For the moment, it is time for the U.S...
...The cathedral and seminary in San Salvador are filled with refugees—refugees from the "land reform," and, according to our informants, they stink, not of excrement, but of fear...
...These chemicals would be housed in separate compartments of a shell or bomb...
...The situation points up the inevitable dilemma of a U.S...
...HOOKED ON JUNTAS Current U.S...
...Shouldn't conservatives, neo or otherwise, be expected to support the conservative candidate...
...Nonetheless, chemical weapons were produced in this country beginning in the early fifties and continuing until ten years ago, when the United States declared a moratorium on their production...
...Other nations have already done so...
...Part of the answer is provided in an article by James Q. Wilson in the October issue of Commentary...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 20
