Editorials

...So we know that the Salvadoran guerrillas oppose the military and paramilitary terror...

...And what someone like the agnostic Eiseley episodically recovers in his meditations upon fossil and lichen, his meetings with muskrats and foxes, is Aquinas's figural 'nature,' the pre-Newtonian common sense that teemed with the protean One in the Many...

...Even now memories of the horrors of chemical warfare in World War I are still very vivid there, and recent anti-nuclear protests would pale into insignificance when compared to the reaction if the U.S...

...Its goals were freedom to organize, freedom from censorship, workers' control over the conditions of work and, to some extent, over fee direction of the economy...

...The only argument for producing nerver gas that has any persuasiveness at all is that such a move might serve to deter the Soviet Union from the use of chemical warfare...

...There is not one good socialism and another bad," wrote the Salvadoran guerrilla intellectual, Roque Dalton, "There is a historical, dialectical continuity, upward and positive, which displays many errors along the way...

...Both are varieties of pseudo-science, an ideology that destroys kinship with the apes and fish for secular humanist and fundamentalist alike - and gives us, in the religious case, the thinnest abstraction of a 'God.' For the cruel irony here is that to conceive God as parallel to the world, not figurally sensed in the midst of it, betrays Protestantism's historic rediscovery of the inwardness of the Word of God...

...budget for chemical and biological weapons and equipment was $ 111 million...

...Now the Reagan administration wants to begin to produce deadly nerve gas in a new form...

...Ironically, the closest Guiilermo Ungo ever came to a popular success is Salvadoran politics was as Duarte's running mate in 1972...

...The parallel is not complete...

...There are dissimilarities, some of which teli in favor of the Soviet Union...

...This did not mean that the United States disposed of the thousands of tons of nerve gas it already had...

...SCOPES REVISITED "How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it...

...Originally written for the Mexican monthly edited by Octavio Paz, Zaid's article sketches a guerrilla leadership that chillingly mirrors its military adversaries, both sociologically and in its willingness to employ and tolerate assassination and terror for the Cause...

...and (4) taking a cautious but measured stance toward the Nicaraguan revolution, the outcome of which could yet be influenced by U.S...

...And what about the political opposition, the Democratic Revolutionary Front and its leaders like Guiilermo Ungo and Ruben Zamora, who were once part of tie military junta...

...That's as good a way as any to put the existential question underlying the latest replay of the Scopes trial which took place in mid-January in Little Rock, Arkansas...

...The creationists do not take data, weigh it, and thereafter reach conclusions," wrote Overton...

...Karl Rahner, we think, is a better spokesman for this woman than Jerry Falwell...

...For neither of these men forgot that natural science operates by selective precisions, by abstracting from a greater whole - and hence they were aware that the bleak 'nature' of science represents an artful slice of reality, a deliberate one-eyedness...

...The Arkansas "balanced treatment" law, ruled Federal Judge William Overton, violated the First Amendment establishment-of-religion clause...

...The ACLU had challenged an Arkansas statute mandating equal school time for biblically based "creation science" and Darwin's evolutionary theory...

...Indeed, if nerve gas were to be stored in various spots around the world, quantities of it might well fall into the hands of terrorists...

...The U.S...

...The guerrillas need them in exactly the same way that the military leaders need Jose Napoleon Duarte...

...the point they are making, and the experience they would interpret, is not...

...Would it make any difference to point out that the Sandinist revolution in Nicaragua represented a majority reaction against the violent Somoza minority that had long enjoyed Washington's backing...

...The Pentagon says it wants the nerve gas in its new handy form primarily for European defense, but our allies strenuously object to having any of the deadly stuff on their soil...

...Each kills by paralyzing the muscles that control breathing and other bodily processes...

...The relatively small amounts of money allotted for chemical warfare (small at least by Pentagon standards) have been devoted to research and development...

...leave the impression of a simple conflict between the military leaders and "the people...

...women raped, children beaten - with the ferocity of die Salvadoran military...

...We cannot, without . . . impotence, assume the defeat of Nazism, for example, and not assume the Stalin of the concentraction camps...

...That would be a terrible shame, because El Salvador needs elections...

...One is colorless and odorless and is lethal within a minute when inhaled...

...The reality is that a genuine election is simply impossible in today's El Salvador, where people argue whether seven hundred villagers were killed in an armed forces raid - or was it only a hundred and fifty...

...In effect, given the method of fundamentalist proof-texting and dualism, the judge ruled there could be no accommodation between science and religion, faith and reason...

...stocks of nerve gas can last indefinitely, contrary to Pentagon claims...

...imagine the blackmail possibilities then...

...Other nations (in the Middle East, for example) might well take a cue from our lead and go into similar production, with horrible consequences...

...support rather than hostility...

...Everything suggests mat neither negotiations nor such a balanced policy are on the administration's agenda...

...The Reagan administration's response is to supply more guns...

...should welcome negotiations with whatever Salvadoran factions are willing to accept some such regimen...

...Like the Soviet Union, Washington has decided that the long-term risk to its own security is such (bat a straggle among Salvadorans cannot be allowed to topple a friendly government...

...Such a theology does an injustice to the people it would represent...

...The other is much the same but hangs in the atmosphere for days...

...A nice idea in some State Department memo...

...Enders who, if not a violent minority, is now governing El Salvador...

...It was demonstrably representative of the Polish people...

...When the administration certifies the Salvadoran government, with its thousands upon thousands of civilian victims, as making progress on human rights and simultaneously characterizes the Nicaraguan regime, which for ail its ominous aspects remains remarkably free of bloodshed, as "totalitarian...

...Roque Dalton, for whom Stalin and his concentration camps were a necessary part (though perhaps an "error") of history's upward and positive dialectical continuity, did not survive that dialectic himself...

...This time Darwin won the round...

...The language of these theologians may appear formidably abstruse...

...Projected for next year: $1.4 billion...

...The press has provided little information on the Salvadoran guerrillas' beliefs and aims, perhaps reflecting a "practical" American disdain for ideas and ideology...

...Why do we need more...

...Nerve gas comes in two forms...

...Their case depends on "supernatural intervention, which is not guided by natural law...

...Chesterton in Orthodoxy...

...Would it be profitable to ask Mr...

...It will simply request more military aid for El Salvador...

...Geopoliti-cally, Poland is far more crucial to Soviet security than El Salvador to America's...

...The goal: binary chemical weapons, so called because the two major elements in the gas would be kept separate in artillery shells or aerial bombs and lethally joined only when the shell was fired or the bomb dropped...

...They are, in many ways, exactly what Solidarity was struggling against, and what b oppressing it today...

...And their power is approximately as real as Duarte's, probably less so...

...3) disavowing all support for a regime as brutal and deadly as the Guatemalan...

...Both this fundamental literalism and vulgar scientism are guilty of what Whitehead called the fallacy of "misplaced concretion...

...All this for a weapon that experts say is less effective than high explosives against troops able to protect themselves...

...The guerrillas, then, are not Solidarity...

...Even a tiny drop can be fatal...

...Further, such a decision might well lead to the discovery and production of even more horrible chemical or biological weapons than are now available...

...In 1969 Mr...

...must modernize its capabilities for chemical warfare as a deterrent to the Soviet Union, especially in light of claims that the Russians and their clients have used chemical weapons in Afghanistan and Asia...

...Berryman obviously means to counter the administration's vision of Salvadoran revolutionaries as merely on assignment from Moscow by way of Havana...

...We also note, however, that it has been the whole thrust of contemporary mainstream Catholic and Protestant theology, of thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner, David Tracy, John Cobb, Langdon Gilkey, and others, to reconceive Christian faith as no less experiential than science, and to reconceive the order of grace, not as parallel to, but as interpenetrating nature...

...There is another dissimilarity, however...

...It is a move that should be vigorously resisted in and out of Congress...

...Given those dubious terms, we agree...

...In El Salvador it is the men with the guns, and with the philosophy of guns, who hold power...

...The White House, no less than the Kremlin, fears a loss of confidence in its * "system," a collapse of neighboring regimes that lack political legitimacy, and an unfavorable drift in world affairs...

...Hardly had President Reagan, last December 17, condemned (he "violation of human rights on a massive scale" perpetrated by a military junta with the "knowledge and support" of a certain nearby superpower, than the unavoidable comparisons began to be made...

...But would the guerrillas substitute their own regime of terror, or as a veteran socialist dissident in Poland expressed it, "a socialism of prisons, censorship, and police...

...Presentations like the widely shown television documentary "El Salvador: Another Vietnam...

...The internal life of Solidarity was democratic, almost to a fault...

...tries to stockpile nerve gas in Europe for use in that theater...

...Is this a demonstration of democracy...

...For many a Salvadoran, living under the gun, that is probably enough...

...then Doublethink reigns...

...AMERICA'S POLAND Poland and El Salvador...

...As these dicta tacitly suggest, howevef, the problem is as much one of theological method (the way the human mind ethically reaches a conclusion) and a particular theological model (how the (Continued on page 104)(Continued from page 102) relationship of nature and grace, and thus faith and reason, is to be understood...

...Pumping money into chemical warfare would certainly start a new round of weapons competition with Moscow, ending any possible hope of a permanent treaty to ban such weapons entirely and contributing still further to the international arms race...

...Last year the amount rose to $455 million...

...He was assassinated by another guerrilla chief...

...Possibly, but for American, not Salvadoran, consumption...

...To be sure, scientific abstractions like the mindlessly running atoms have deluded many "educated" people into imagining themselves hollow instruments in an antiseptic cosmos - and fundamentalists rightly object to this legacy for their children - but Eiseley's "musements" (what the great American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce called the "neglected argument'' for God) retrieve that astonishing communion with nature which Bonaventure tells us is the first step toward union with God...

...In Poland, the insurgent force was Solidarity...

...If after Nicaragua, El Salvador is captured by a violent minority, who in Central America would not live in fear...

...this socialism that is antisocialist and antirevohrtionary...

...What about the opposition in El Salvador...

...Experts say that with proper care present U.S...

...Not if one follows the account by Gabriel Zaid in the latest issue (Winter 1982) of the democratic socialist quarterly Dissent...

...But is there anything more reassuring in knowing that die guerrillas' Marxism is "homegrown" man in knowing that the fascism of the right-wing death squads is also "home*, grown...

...And to add fiscal insult to moral injury, it would take hundreds of millions of dollars simply to dispose of the nerve gas now on hand...

...The fact is that fundamentalist literalism which, unlike medieval common sense, puts the supernatural alongside nature rather than through and within it, is the product of the same Scientific Revolution that produced a "nothing but" reductionist scientww which mocks the lived experience of rural, still largely oral, people...

...Enders not know that fear is the air millions of Central Americans breathe daily, thanks, in significant measure, to the policies he urges...

...The revolutionary's support of a revolution is, in essence, unconditional...

...The main result of this performance may be to discredit the idea of elections even more...

...But in March of last year the Reagan administration asked and received a $20 million allotment to build a binary nerve gas production plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, without actually producing the lethal product...

...the answer should be equally simple...

...Both the United States and the Soviet Union are signatories to a 1925 pact that forbids the use but not the possession of chemical weapons...

...Instead, they take the literal wording of Genesis and attempt to find scientific support for it...

...The rationale was provided by Assistant Secretory of State Thomas O. Enders...

...Now a determined push has begun to go all-out in actual production...

...Is this a means to lend the civilians like Duarte some legitimacy and political base of their own...

...Washington's calculated .hints about using force against Nicaragua, its legal hairsplitting over the training of Somozan guerrillas on American soil, its sancrimonious protests against "outside meddling" are shamefully similar to Moscow's displays of brutal pressure cum protests of innocence...

...This is what President Nixon decided in 1969 - a decision in which President Ford later concurred...

...Gas masks and special clothing can protect soldiers very effectively against gas...

...Does Mr...

...Unfortunately, reality is contorted in the administration's statements about Central America as badly as in Soviet statements about Eastern Europe...

...There are, in short, many reasons for not undertaking further production of nerve gas and no good reasons for doing it...

...American reporters have demonstrated once more that they would rather risk their lives than read a printed source...

...If the question is framed that way...

...It needs internationally supervised ones, with an international peacekeeping force present in the country long enough beforehand to assure safe and open campaigning, long enough afterwards to offer some protection against sabotage, mutiny, and vengeance...

...asked G.K...

...Overtly, the decision hinged on whether creation science was a legitimate "science...

...It is absolutely true, as the Catholic bishops and former Ambassador Robert E. White have said repeatedly, that the source of Central America's turmoil is local injustice and not outside scheming...

...Do what you will with arguments about the Panama Canal and the Mexican oil fields, no one has invaded the United States twice in this century (or in any century) through El Salvador...

...The reason is simple...

...Nixon solemnly renounced any first use of chemical and biological weapons and ordered a halt to their production...

...The repression in Poland has been less arbitrary and less brutal (although probably more thorough) than in El Salvador, The relatively bloodless efficiency of the Polish apparatus of repression may only be the legacy of post- war Stalinist terror, yet it remains the case that Jaruzelski's troops are not massacring Polish bystanders - a dozen or two here, a hundred there...

...In fact, the sense of the sacred they appeal to is common enough among great scientists, like Einstein, and resonates throughout the meditative essays of a naturalist like the late Loren Eiseley...

...Or governing its neighbor Guatemala, where the administration has repeatedly tried to funnel millions of dollars in aid to one of the world's bloodiest governments...

...The answer was no...

...The army says the new binary form of nerve gas would be safer and handier, but in fact over a thirty-year period there has never been a casualty from the huge quantity of non-binary nerve gas we now have on hand The Pentagon rationale for resuming production of nerve gas, of course, is the claim that the U.S...

...Over a decade ago, Robert Coles reported in these pages (December 12, 1969) the religious outlook of a sharecropper woman, for lack of a better term a fundamentalist, whose sense of the holy interwoven in the profane was as discriminating as anything you might find in Mircea Eliade...

...One does not meet oneself," says Eiseley after rollicking with a fox pup, "until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human...

...In the post-Nixon years, several Congresses and administrations denied Pentagon requests for resumption of the production of chemical weapons, especially nerve gas in the new binary form...

...A balanced American policy toward Central America would include: (1) maintaining pressure against arms deliveries to the Salvadoran guerrillas...

...But that deterrent effect, if it is truly necessary, can be quite effectively achieved by our present possession of three million gas artillery shells and our large gas reserves in bulk form...

...its principal victims would be defenseless noncombatants, men, women, and children...

...Philip Berryman, whose views on a negotiated settlement in 0 Salvador were published here last December, recently assured the readers of the New York Tones that the Salvadoran guerrillas are Marxist "but their Marxism is homegrown...

...It's a matter of geography, but not only geography...

...Barely one step closer to reality is the election scheduled for March 28...

...If President Reagan does not have second and better thoughts, Congress should reject his nerve gas request out of hand...

...2) refusing further arms and military training to the Salvadoran government until it eliminates the terror that makes a mockery of democratic claims and economic reforms...

...Thus in 1978 the U.S...