Tuesday, July 16, 1985
The Nebraskan
Page 5
U.S. sponsored terrorism reveals hypocrisy
Hold the policy papers and sus
pend all meetings on terrorism.
What this administration needs
is not a new policy, not better intelli
gence and certainly not more street-
Richard
Cohen
corner rhetoric, but a good full-length
mirror. It should just stand back and
look at the situation from the point of
view of the other guy. It just might see a
hypocrite.
Take the way we look at Cuba. It was
cited by President Reagan as one of the
five key exporters of terrorism, the new
"Murder Incorporated." That was quite
a speech the President gave, replete
with the full-throated self-righteous
indignation of a world leader who does
not play at terrorism and is appalled
that others do. Fidel Castro, take that!
But what about what the United
States has done to Cuba? Ours is the
government, after all, that in 1961 pro
duced the Bay of Pigs fiasco an
invasion of Cuba. Following that, the
United States attempted to assassinate
Castro, tried to slip a mickey into his
cigars so his beard would fall out and
even asked members of the Mafia to see
if they could not, in their parlance, get
the Cuban leader to sleep with the
fishes. If this is not terrorism state
supported terrorism at that then
Jesse Helms and Liberace are the same
person.
How about Nicaragua? It, too, was on
the President's list. This is not mere
hypocrisy, but elephantine chutzpah.
The Reagan administration, after all,
has been funding for years an attempt
to topple the Sandinista regime by
among other things brace yourself
terrorism. The contras, with the aid
of the CIA, have mined harbors, assas
sinated officials, killed Sandinista sup
porters and blown up an occasional
building. The administration, using
that all-purpose word "linkage," links
Nicaragua to the murder of Marines in
El Salvador, but fails to link that atroc
ity to the murder of Nicaraguans by the
CIA-sponsored contras.
Third on the President's list was
Iran. Unlike Cuba and Nicaragua,
there is little doubt that Iran is in
the terrorism business in a serious,
methodical way. But even so, the Aya
tollah must have gasped at the epic
gall of the United States to point a
finger in the direction of his country
after the CIA, in 1953, toppled the
government of Mohammed Mossadegh
and restored the Shah to power. That
coup might seem almost pre-history
and of no importance now but you can
bet it's not pre-history to the Ayatollah.
He was a spry 52 years old at the time.
None of this history excuses Nicara
guan, Cuban or Iranian terrorism
and says nothing, of course, about the
other two nations on the list, Libya and
North Korea. And, at least to us, it has
to make some difference that the Uni
ted States really does represent some-'
thing good in the world and that the
other nations on the list are non
democratic regimes of varying degrees
of loathsomeness. .
But in Iran in 1953, we did not use
terror to make life better for the aver
age Iranian or to restore nonexistent
democracy, but to keep that country
and its oil safe for the Western democ
racies and, of course, the oil compan
ies. The same thing holds for Nicaragua
now. We did not, for example, use ter
ror to topple the truly brutal Somaza
regime. We reserve it for regimes with
which we have ideological differences.
The political right, of which this
administration is a part, loathes
what it calls "moral equivalency"
and even sponsors seminars to de
nounce it. Okay but moral equival
ency is really a straw man. The real
danger in Washington was never that
brutal regimes would be seen as our
moral equivalent, but that self-righteousness
would blind us to the conse
quences of our own actions. Little
wonder that America's stirring calls to
action against terrorism get shrugged
off by some other governments as
nothing more than posturing. Moral
obtuseness, not moral equivalency, is
the real danger.
No one is suggesting that the United
States uses terrorism more than any
other country or that if we renounced
it, so would everyone else. That's not
the way the world works. But we would
understand terrorism better and maybe
diminish it if we appreciated that the
terrorist is not always a lunatic or a
fanatic and not always linked to Mos
cow or Havana. On occasion, he can
look distressingly familiar.
The mirror, please.
1985, Washington Post Writers Group
'Post'-cerebral era marked
by new linguistic meanin
A friend of mine, a man who chases the cut
ting edge of change the way his Gallic
ancestors once pursued the holy grail, tells
me that he is now "post-Yuppie." This isn't a
formal announcement, mind you. That isn't
necessary.
Ellen
Goodman
I already knew that Yuppiedom was passe. In
selected urban areas, women have burned their
bow ties, begun leaving their running shoes at
home and grown defensive about ordering white
wine spritzers. Men are increasingly secretive
about owning VCRs and embarrassed to have the
espresso machine right out there on the kitchen
counter.
It was inevitable that my friend, who along
with two others are probably the reigning troika
of trends (I suspect they have a New York Maga
zine reporter permanently assigned), would be
early in and early out of Yuppiedom.
So what struck me was not the fact that he
was in post-Yuppie phase. It was the fact that he
was using a post-Yuppie phrase.
With nary a warning from the traditional trend
spotters, it appears that the post-war babies of
the post-industrial society have begun placing
their favorite prefix all over the American scene;
These are the four little letters p, o, s, t
which once meant "after," as in post-operative.
But now they are being used to write premature
political post-mortums.
Consider the academic who recently drew a
profile of middle-class young American voters.
They were, he told a reporter, "post-ideological."
The implication was that these voters had
already been through the heavy philosophi
cal stuff. They were not hostile to ideology,
they were beyond it. Perhaps they'd taken it
freshman year. Now, ideology was a bit like a
Beta-Max. U was okay, but they wouldn't want to
get stuck with it when something better came
along.
Last year, the big phrase was post-feminist.
Any young woman who had not personally signed
up for Radical Feminist Cell 16 was called a
member of the post-feminist generation. The
label managed to weardate the women's move
ment so that it seemed unfashionable. Feminism
itself was described as something the country
had outgrown, like a singed training bra.
Putting the four-letter "post" before the right
sort of word is the kiss of datedness. The word
becomes a Perrier gone flat in the marketplace.
But it does this in the most apparently benign,
nonjudgmental, neutral sort of way.
Consider the man I heard on the radio talking
about the needs of Americans in the post-civil-rights
era. The what? Separation of church and
state, and free speech, he went on flatly, were all
splendid ideas, but well, what do we need now,
for the 1980s?
Then there are the commentators who talk
about the Reagan post-welfare state, instead
of what they mean: the- anti-welfaretate.
There are even sociologists talking calmly about
a post-literate world and a post-verbal genera
tion. Once a 35-year-old described himself to me
as a post-peacenik. I did not at that moment
have the nerve to ask him whether he currently
was "into" war.
I suppose there might be some modest value
in this post-age. I think it would be amusing to
be post-young instead of middle-aged. Reformed
smokers could become post-smokers. Atheists
could choose to be post-theists. Vegetarians
could be post-carnivores. Retired citizens, post
workers. Divorce, post-marriage. The rest I would
leave to post erity.
But I am wary of linguistic tricks. "Post" is
being sprinkled through the political language
more generously than the dreaded "neo" ever
was.
If my friend wants to be post-Yuppie, good
luck to him. In his trendy troika the Yuppie has
gone the way of the Babbitt and the Preppie. I
don't care if he stops serving shitake mushrooms
the way he once quit on kiwis. There is hardly
any social judgment to be made between shi
takes and chanterelles. No one really cares if we
live in a post-kiwi world (except, 1 suppose, the
kiwi grower).
But I get uncomfortable when we turn ideas
into trends, when we trivialize concepts and
values intd games of "ins" and "outs." When
ideology, literacy and civil rights are treated like
racquetball, nouvelle cuisine and new-wave
music, it's time to write a post-script to the era:
Lable it post-cerebral.
1SS5, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company
Washington Post Writers Group
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