trb@drutx.UUCP (BuckleyTR) (03/10/85)
Hypocrisy In Action: Last month, then Attorney General William French Smith announced that a special unit of the Justice Department was joining with the Canadian Government and several private groups in a worldwide hunt for Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor who carried out Nazi policies at the Auschwitz concentration camp. I applaud this effort, as it shows that a civilized world community will not let inhumanity of grotesque proportions as the brutal Nazi rulers of Germany go unpunished, even after the defeat of this criminal regime 40 years ago. Or does it? On July 16, 1971, the US Senate Internal Security Subcommittee published "The Human Cost of Soviet Communism," a study authored by Britain's Robert Conquest. Its estimate of the the toll of lives terminated during the first fifty years of Soviet rule approaches 45 million, virtually all killed or executed by deliberate cold-blooded design. Many of the Communists who rule the Soviet Union today are directly responsible for this incredible slaughter. All are responsible for a continuation of the butchery and oppression that is still Kremlin policy. Yet, leaders of our nation treat Communists with fawning respect while they now chase furiously all over the globe for a few Nazi war criminals. On July 27, 1971, the same Senate Subcommittee published "The Human Cost of Communism in China," a completely separate study authored by China scholar Richard L. Walker of the University of South Carolina. Estimates of extermination carried out by Chinese Communists in their first twenty-two years of rule, which began in 1949, run from a low of 34 million victims to a high of over 60 million. The smiling leaders of today's Peoples Republic helped to bring about this staggering human carnage, a feat that even earned them a place in the "Guiness Book of World Records" as the greatest mass murderers in all history. Yet the top leaders of America - from the worlds of government, press, business, education, etc. - fall all over each other in the rush to befriend Peking's bloody tyrants. Meanwhile, the same breast-beating paragons of virtue save their voices of condemnation for a handful of old Nazis who have been hiding somewhere for forty years. As horrible as Nazi Germany was, it was defeated in 1945 and has not murdered anyone in the forty years since. During the past four decades, Communists have slaughtered tens of millions and are still at it. Where their victims have been Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, Hungarians, Tibetans, Algerians, Cubans, Vietnamese, and others, their newer targets include Afghanis, Ethiopians, Miskito Indians, Soviet Jews and Christians, and many more. Are victims of Communist brutality less worthy of concern than those slaughtered by Mengele and the Nazis? Shouldn't current atrocities receive more attention than those of a bygone regime which is no longer a threat to anyone? Right now, tens of thousands of Jews are prisoners in Soviet Camps, and millions of Christians suffer alongside them. In China, besides forced abortion and infanticide, more millions suffer and die in labor camps. Yet, officials of this nation regularly treat the leaders of these regimes as equals and even supply them with the wherewithal to maintain their tyrannies. Such hypocrisy, to me, is unprecedented in all of mankind's history. Evil unopposed is evil that triumphs. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Tom Buckley AT&T Information Systems ihnp4!drutx!trb (303) 538-3442
barry@ames.UUCP (Kenn Barry) (03/14/85)
From drutx!trb (T.R. Buckley): > ...Yet, leaders of our nation treat Communists with fawning > respect while they now chase furiously all over the globe for a few > Nazi war criminals. > > ...Yet the top leaders of America - from the worlds of > government, press, business, education, etc. - fall all over each > other in the rush to befriend Peking's bloody tyrants. Meanwhile, the > same breast-beating paragons of virtue save their voices of > condemnation for a handful of old Nazis who have been hiding somewhere > for forty years. > > ...Are victims of Communist > brutality less worthy of concern than those slaughtered by Mengele and > the Nazis? Shouldn't current atrocities receive more attention than > those of a bygone regime which is no longer a threat to anyone? In a word, no. There are issues other than those of principle involved. It is precisely *because* the Nazis no longer hold political power that we are free to hunt them down as criminals. Our situation vis-a-vis the Communists is analogous to our situation with the Nazis before WWII was fought. We could choose to go to war with the Communists, or we could choose to take a moralistic stance of refusing to deal with them because of our disapproval of their actions, but our present policy of attempting to get along with them arises from a belief that it is in our own best interest to do so, rather than from approval of what they do. War is unthinkable in this nuclear age; withholding of diplomatic recognition and trade was used against both the USSR and China for decades before being abandoned as ineffective. What, exactly, would you have us do differently? Moreover, I would say that Communist aggression in places like Afghanistan and Cambodia do receive a lot of attention. The practical difficulties of getting reporters and camera crews into such places results in less coverage than we might like, but I don't think this implies either ignorance or approval of what is going on. If we refused to have dealings with any country whose policies were less than entirely moral, I doubt there would be any countries at all that we could have relations with - including ourselves. While I often find myself wishing that we paid *more* attention to questions of morality in our foreign policy, we cannot, as a practical matter, let this be our sole consideration in our dealings with other countries. - From the Crow's Nest - Kenn Barry NASA-Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- USENET: {ihnp4,vortex,dual,hao,menlo70,hplabs}!ames!barry