Our Terrorists and Theirs
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Our Terrorists and Theirs Nobody likes "terrorists," so we all make sure to employ the word in a way that spares our friends. The same people who see in the Irish...
...And how were the French supposed to respond...
...Characterizations of the Palestine Liberation Organization cover the adjectival spectrum: For admirers of the PLO, the only terrorists in the neighborhood are the Israelis...
...The insistence of Administration spokesmen that world terrorism is being orchestrated by the Soviets is the kind of obsession that brings nonofficials to mental hospitals...
...everyone should have the right to starve or hang or immolate himself for whatever cause moves him, even it the sacrifice is more impressive than the cause...
...I would make an exception for suicide...
...What the Secretary means, as everyone understands, is that we will be harder on attacks against friendly regimes than on those regimes' attacks against their own people...
...Kirkpatrick's Poli Sci I lesson about the prospects for change in an "authoritarian" regime (read "Right") vs...
...What of the more or less legitimate government that finds itself beset by terrorists who can be counted on, should they succeed, in establishing their own forms of repression...
...We may have to sup with the devil, but do we have to lick the spoon...
...Even the CIA backs off from these crackpot effusions...
...Any taking of life as a political gesture, symbol or lesson is flat-out terrorism, and it does not matter at all whether the murderers' motives are noble or base...
...And what act ions are permissible for the opponents of a regime when offered a legal choice between silence and obliteralion...
...In furtherance of that policy, it made sense to attempt to install at the human rights desk a man with a nicely selective conscience, whosegospel would require the pouring of prodigious quantities of arms at discount prices into bastions of benightment like Guatemala...
...The same people who see in the Irish Republican Army the highest expression of Western civilization are outraged at the shooting of the Pope...
...And if a noncombatant gets in the way, so sorry...
...Under the circumstances, the nation was privileged to see Mr...
...The world, alas, is not so constructed that any government can pursue the straight and narrow on any issue...
...Haig in perfect control...
...All right????but what if Washington is more comfortable with the repressors than with the repressed...
...But what can be the meaning of Secretary Haig's pronouncement that it is now U.S...
...In their quarter, every anti-American anthem, however out of tune, gets an ovation...
...We may be certain that the young Turk who pulled the trigger in Vatican City suffers from nodoubtsabout the justice of his act and the approval of his gods...
...Unedifying questions...
...From this need springs a White Paper on El Salvador that is a form of romantic fiction...
...It is unacceptable even if Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr...
...It is unacceptable whether the destabilizing forces are of the Right or the Left or freelance idealists...
...Questions like these admit of no general answers...
...Does it matter to Secretary Haig that the Argentine regime is brutish...
...It's as though a student of arithmetic were to decide that hereafter he will concentrate on subtraction and never mind addition...
...and there is no action Israel can take, retaliatory or pre-emptive, that will evoke a word of criticism from zealous Zionists...
...But once we get caught up in the means-ends equation, we find ourselves winking at some varieties of terrorism, a wink that may blind us to the victims...
...The rebuff to Emest Le-fever may be taken as a sign of national grace...
...Not much, for the Secretary sees Buenos Aires as a Christian bastion against atheistic Havana...
...Our Secretary is not incapable of indignation, he merely applies it selectively...
...to pretend otherwise is to invite catastrophe...
...Random violence is always unacceptable, whether in the form of setting off explosions in a marketplace as a gesture or machine gunning a busload of people as a symbol or leveling a peasant village as a lesson...
...Those of us happily unburdened by power are privileged to keep our outrage alive, to force it upon the interests, if not the consciences of the mighty, to compel t he decision makers to hear and never stop hearing the cries of the silenced...
...Is prolonged imprisonment for the crime of disagreeing with a government line more bearable in a country that Washington is attempting to court than in one that has nothing to offer us...
...Administration spokesmen used to call the Shah "progressive," and today enemies of the Shah still call the Ayatollah Khomeini's troopers "revolutionary...
...All parties are mired in tendentious-ness...
...Is it worse to hold a man's head in a bucket of water or to deliver electric shocks to his testicles...
...This is so well known by now that the presence of the likes of Bella Abzug, William Sloane Coffin and Ramsey Clark at a rally is enough to discredit for many or most Americans even a necessary protest against the frantic escalation of expenditures on weapons...
...America does not have the wisdom, the will or the wherewithal to combat despotisms around the world...
...Our present Administration, which would view any uprising against Fidel Castro as an epic event in the march of hemispheric liberty, takes a contrary attitude toward commotions in El Salvador, Argentina, Guatemala...
...to ask them is already to give away too much...
...Game Without Rules Oh, life is hard for officialdom everywhere, whatever its coloration...
...Does it matter at all to the friends of North Vietnam that its victory has not advanced the cause of liberty in that part of the world by a millimeter...
...That is not an easy job, and one must resist the temptation to oversimplify the problem...
...when a Secretary of State hauls in the name of God, get the kids off the streets...
...Is it possible to make a modicum of sense from this mass of conflicting interests, emotions, ideals...
...The terrorism of revolutionaries which consists of bombing or kneecapping politicians, policemen, editors, and passers-by in order to "destabilize" a legitimately elected regime is unacceptable...
...It gives reassuring shape to a confused phenomenon-only the shape bears but a distant relation to reality...
...What actions are permissible in self-defense...
...Only the powerless have the luxury of being able to see through the smoke of exigency and speak from the heart...
...How pure must a victim be before he earns the right not to be victimized...
...It is a touch easy, after all, for outsiders to set limits to resistance for those who already feel themselves to be shackled and suffocating...
...Kirkpatrick can find worse acts than these elsewhere as she surveys the dark world we have made...
...The best thing these people can do these days is preach strictly to the persuaded and keep their names out of the papers, if they can bear it...
...Whether I he case involves El Salvador or South Africa, Cambodia or China, the sides line up in familiar ranks-friends of Liberation over there, exponents of American power over here-And in the ensuing slanging match actual events are invariably overdrawn or understated depending on what suits the greater cause...
...Will there be a squeak of protest from their vociferous friends in this country...
...Will any regime in El Salvador that does not speak with a strong anti-American accent satisfy them...
...Ah, if only we had given the Shah an atomic bomb...
...How can these be separated...
...Both words are meant to be complimentary...
...It is unacceptable even if Mrs...
...Croatian nationalists and Basque nationalists and Puerto Rican nationalists, Moslem sectarians and African tribesmen-all see themselves in the heroic mold, suffused in righteousness as they do holy battle against usurpers, occupiers, misbelievers...
...First, give people no breathing space, then stifle them on the grounds that drawing breath is betrayal...
...What is terrorism but a subtraction of human rights...
...Will Mrs...
...On the other hand, the right hand, will Mrs...
...Taking hostages, too, is distinctly unacceptable...
...Does the answer to the last depend on who is doing the shocking...
...a "totalitarian" regime(read"Left") be revised to take into account the developments in Poland...
...For these partisans remain enchanted by the music of Liberation...
...Let the ideologues and the practitioners of the practical draw their distinctions among terrorists, sort out favorites, rationalize atrocities, turn away from embarrassing reality...
...scales, and where necessary rectified by an ideologically weighted thumb (pardon the unbalanced metaphor...
...The argument has been made that only by cozying up to a repressive regime can Washington hope to soften the repression...
...sees Marx behind every ski mask...
...Would the Algerians ever have gotten the French out of the country without random killings...
...policy to concentrate on the war against terrorism rather than on the campaign for human rights...
...For the sake of that cause, the partisans find themselves forced to make sickening distinctions...
...If only those nuns in El Salvador had been abducted, raped and murdered by Red troops, he would have roared and wept and put on a really swell show...
...It must pretend to be dimmer than the citizenry must hope that it is...
...Well, for the liberally inclined observer who does not make distinctions among torture chambers by the flags they fly, the sorting-out job can begin with some relatively simple guidelines, no more complex than assessing the quality of the air in New York City...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick, our Ambassador to the United Nations, teaches that other people's woes are to be weighed on U.S...
...The Sandinistas may never find the moment right to let political un reliables out of jail...
...It is unacceptable even if Irving Kristol, writing about Jacobo Timerman in the Hall Street Journal, takes the shabby old line that the persecuted has invited his own persecution...
...The good liberal who undertakes to sort out one form of terrorism from another may find himself becoming a party to barbarism: Is it more benign to terrorize peasants because they are cooperating in a land reform program directed by a military regime or to terrorize them because they are demanding land reform from a military regime...
...We might as well ask Soviet officials to admit that Solidarity is not being run by the CIA...
...But let liberals-A word connected with liberty-stand with the victims...
...Kirkpatrick announce one of these days that the chances for wholesome change are as great in some parts of Eastern Europe as in our half of Korea...
...Rules of the Game The terrorism of a government, or its security forces, which consists of abducting political opponents and torturing or killing them is unacceptable...
...There is something frivolous about instructing the blacks of South Africa to lift themselves out of durance in a democratic manner when the tools of democracy are denied them...
...The question often comes down to one of means and ends...
...In such wars, there are no noncombatants...
...For the Soviet bosses, the Polish union movement is a form of terrorism, just like the Afghan resistance, just like the Czechs and the Hungarians in another time...
...Yet not everyone finds them all that difficult...
...Such gestalt-mongering aside, though, our leaders must in fact weigh all manner of interests in determining which terrorists deserve what degree of support...
...And how liberated are the postliberation Algerians...
...But having set down these elementary rules, we have scarcely scotched the snake of terrorism...
...But when people rise up for a greater portion of liberty, whether against commissars or colonels, there ought to be no question of where we stand, even though, for reasons of prudence or policy, we can risk little to help them...
Vol. 64 • June 1981 • No. 12
