Die or say goodbye
Bernstein, Dennis & Blitt, Connie
Harper's forum on terrorism, reminds us that "the worst atrocities committed by the Soviet government against its own people, including the genocide during Stalin's regime, have been for the most...
...She described the conditions of her imprisonmen t. Torture was an everyday occurenqe: "They dripped acid on our hands...
...That's your opinion...
...Butbefore long, the INS discovered Walter and sent him back to El Salvador...
...Jack Elder is one of an estimated 50,000 Americans who are risking felony charges in order to provide shelter for a small portion of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central Americans now living in the United States...
...Similarly, The New Republic envisions an alliance of nations that would sign a Terror Defense Treaty which, when violated, would merit "stiff and joint sanctions...
...Responding to Shultz, the New York Times suggested that countries be willing to "close embassies, deny landing rights, freeze assets, or impose any other concerted sanctions," when assaulted by terrorists...
...Her fears are not unfounded...
...Yet there are real difficulties in attributing legitimacy to numerous governments...
...At the airport, he or she is taken to a special registration with officials...
...Without prayer there is only madness and horror...
...her head was barely hanging on by the threads...
...We began to talk...
...you're entitled to it," says our secular society...
...How are we to respond, for instance, to the CIA training manual for anti-Sandinista guerrillas...
...Indiscriminate violence is not justified even against terrorists, let alone those who might be supposed to be their sympathizers...
...Christianity's loss of power must not be seen as a punishment for past sins, as if good deeds would have been rewarded with more power, but as a part of the Christian vocation...
...Harper's forum on terrorism, reminds us that "the worst atrocities committed by the Soviet government against its own people, including the genocide during Stalin's regime, have been for the most part entirely legal...
...Of several minds: John Garvey THE PLURALISM PUZZLE WHEN OUR DEEPEST BELIEFS HAVE TO SURFACE JB / HERE IS NO LIFE without I prayer," says the Russian philosopher Vasilii Rozan0v...
...Secular humanism is a Promethean religion in which the human control of the universe and the ultimate value of human choice are affirmed as the highest goods...
...Secularism has at one and the same time freed belief, and limited its shared meaning...
...Again and again, terrorists strike in situations where the political realm, however recalcitrant, does offer possibilities - - which the terrorists, damning such political efforts as illusion and betrayal, want to foreclose...
...President Duarte himself became the object of renewed death threats by the Secret Anti-Communist League upon announcing his intentions to hold talks with the guerrillas...
...Santacruz's grandmother, in a letter to the Salvadoran Minister of Justice and Public Safety, asserts that her grandson was deported from the United States, and Customs records show that he arrived in San Salvador, but he has not been seen since...
...Several days after they let us go, two of my friends were found dead...
...Although secularism has freed Christianity, it contains partially realized and as yet unrealized dangers...
...He was trained and sent into military duty...
...Luis and his brother Walter were able to escape from the army and find their way north to the United States...
...We must, he says, distinguish between what is a violent struggle against despotism and what is terrorism "aimed at the destruction of democratic institutions...
...Attorney Carol Wolchok of the American Civil Liberties Union's Political Asylum Project has documented a number of cases in which Salvadorans who were for to return to their homeland have disappeared or been killed outright...
...The world does need an alliance against terrorism, and we are compelled by the ever-lengthening litany of victims not to practice ourselves what we deplore in others...
...The insidiousness of terrorism lies equally in the fact that it is an attack on politics - - on the whole process of public mobilization, deliberation, appeals to reason and affection, and in many cases resort to the ballot, that allows the messy but peaceful resolution of differences...
...We were given electric shocks on our stomachs, behind our ears, and everywhere else imaginable...
...Although newly elected President Napoleon Duarte has made a genuine effort to meet with the families of the disappeared, and death squad activity has to some degree been curtailed, the violence in El Salvador continues...
...Where it attempts to gain power or to make good things happen through force it moves away from the possibility of this learning...
...And this freedom has forced Christians to see the dark side of much Christian history...
...Many Americans have voiced concern over the amount of violence children witness daily on television...
...The stories which Elder and others hear regularly from these refugees are ones of horror and loss...
...Despite this and other cases well-documented by the ACLU, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams continues to assure members of Congress that Salvadorans who are deported have nothing to fear...
...And obviously such an initiative would be most effective primarily against state-sponsored or state-assisted terrorism...
...it breeds suspicion...
...Instead of punishing further the peasants who have already suffered great trauma, as well as those good Americans willing to risk their security and comfort for others in desperate need, why not grant the Salvadorans and other Central American refugees Extended Voluntary Departure status...
...His "The Road from Hiroshima" on National Public Radio was recently awarded the Colorado Art of Peace Award...
...This gesture would support the recent call by both sides of the conflict in E1 Salvador to "humanize the war" and would fulfill our country's obligations under the Geneva Convention, as well as our duty as a spiritual and moral people to protect those fleeing war and persecution...
...How do we view the production by our government of instructions on assassination, the use of criminals as mercenaries, and the murder of other guerrillas to create martyrs...
...At age fourteen Maria witnessed the brutal murder of her parents by unidentified men who broke into the family's home in the middle of the night...
...Elder contends that these people fleeing an armed conflict must be considered "refugees," and hence entitled to shelter...
...Someone who tries to base his or her life on the conviction that we are called into being by what Dante called "the love which moves the sun and other stars" is faced with a system which necessarily regards this as one of many opinions, and can regard it as no more than that...
...But what, outside of tightened security, can in truth be done...
...Presently enjoyed by Ethiopians, Poles, Lebanese, Ugandans, and Afghanis, this status grants refugees permission to stay in the United States until such time as it is safe to return to their homeland...
...Secretive and choosing its targets virtually anywhere, it creates not only the need for embassies t o " hunker down" defensively all over the world, but for open societies to sap their own civil liberties through extensive security measures, or even to undermine their own moral credibility by adopting the terrorists' standards...
...In the event that economic sanctions prove insufficient, military retaliation might be necessary...
...According to Wolchok, a deportee who reenters El Salvador is a marked person...
...Secularism was in part a reaction against religion's dark side, the equation of Christianity with citizenship, and it freed Christianity...
...Many of the returning young men are considered to be deserters since they have fled the forced recruitment of the Salvadoran army or, in some cases, the guerrillas...
...So are the Basque ETA killings in Spain, and the silencing of voices for moderation in the PLO...
...The affirmation of the importance of human freedom has been a good thing, and the Enlightenment ideal of the "rights of man" is one of the finest things which has happened to the human race...
...The problem a believer faces is that belief has been made a subjective thing in a pluralistic society...
...Connie Blitt is an independent film and video producer...
...Some returning Commonweal: 676 refugees, such as Jose Humberto Santacruz, never get beyond the airport...
...In its loss of power this form of Christianity has learned something about what really sustains human beings...
...Two years later she was in a public bathroom in San Salvador when security police arrested her...
...It is a good thing that the only good reason to be a believer today is because you believe...
...Military intelligence should pinpoint guilty parites...
...I was released with a group of friends and we were immediately hunted by the death squads...
...I f our government denies the refugees this protection, then I have the right as a civilian to step in...
...That was the drop of poison in the heart of Secretary of State Shultz's trial balloon about counter-terrorist retaliation...
...bullet wounds and signs of strangulation...
...The IRA attempt to murder Margaret Thatcher is a case in point...
...Maria fled the country soon afterwards for fear she would be next...
...Soon after his return, his body was discovered by the side of the road, marked by...
...But 14 December 1984:677...
...But what about the youth of E1 Salvador...
...DENNIS BERNSTEIN AND CONNIE BLITI" (Dennis Bernstein is a free-lance writer and radio journalist...
...Terrorism threatens chaos...
...The dark side of the form of Christianity which allied itself with power was what happened to Jews and heretics and those whose politics or religion (sometimes the two were inextricably bound together) conflicted with the politics of the empire or the "Christian nation...
...An eleven-year-old boy came over to tl~e house one day," Elder recalled, "and sat down next to me...
...Belief is no longer attached to respectability, or to political power, and this is as it should be...
...The Salvadorans are rapidly becoming a people without a homeland...
...Luis Antonio Garcia was walking out of a movie theater one Sunday afternoon when government soldiers pulled him and a random assortment of other passers:by into a waiting pick-up truck...
...Elder, who now directs Casa Oscar Romero in southern Texas, is facing a prison term of up to fifteen years and a fine of six thousand dollars on charges of aiding "illegal aliens," mostly Salvadorans...
...Even those not specifically targeted for death, live amid great risks...
...After nearly three years in captivity, Maria was freed during a Salvadoran government amnesty program...
...He calmly told me that his teacher had been decapitated outside the schoolhouse...
...Refugees DIE OR SAY GOODBYE SALVADORANS ON THE RUN KB I , , W HAT I HAVE DONE is completely legal under the W terms of the Geneva Convention," remarked Jack Elder, Vietnam veteran and former Peace Corps volunteer...
...Now in the United States, Maria is afraid she will be discovered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and deported to E1 Salvador...
...The most moving accounts of modern Christianity have come not from places of power but rather from places where power has been stripped from people, from poor nations where some Christians have thrown in their lot with the poor, or from Soviet labor camps where people suffer for their beliefs, or from Nazi concentration camps...
...Terrorism is an attack on politics in another sense...
...Unfortunately, such terrorism is often not as clearcut as some pretend: Here we enter the murky waters of intelligence and covert operations, which seem naturally to foster a mentality disdainful of the moral distinctions that have been maintained even by warfare, and which spawn activities they cannot control...
...Obviously, such an initiative would have to rest on an international consensus...
Vol. 111 • December 1984 • No. 22
