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Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!utcsstat!laura
From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Basis for legislation
Message-ID: <840@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 10-Aug-83 02:07:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.840
Posted: Wed Aug 10 02:07:59 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 10-Aug-83 03:00:50 EDT
References: <548@grkermit.UUCP>, <275@dciem.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 60

A reply to Martin Taylor:

I don't partition freedom off into 3 packages. Life, Liberty and
Pursuit of Happiness are all aspects of Freedom. If a "Liberty based"
society is ever realised, i expect it will have a substantially
different constitution than either the American Declaration of
Independence or our own Canadian horror.

I have a worse problem with your statement though. You seem to believe
that governments first must be some sort of totalitarian monster in
order to let their society survive. In any case, you think that
considerations of survival have some natural presidence over other
considerations of freedom. Why? When I was in Honduras, 5 years ago,
relations were very bad with San Salvador. San Salvadorians were going
to isolated villages and practicing guerrilla tactics by slaughtering
all the villagers. Or trying to. Some survivors made it to the hospital
for the poor where I was translating for a group of North American
doctors who were providing free medical care to children with cleft
palates and other physical disorders that could be corrected with
minimal plastic surgery. The refugees from the
villages had definitely suffered machine gun wounds. Some of them were
less than 5 years old. They claimed that San Salvadorians with Cuban
assistance had done this to their villages. I was told that this was
not rare. The San Salvadorians justified their actions by saying that
they were killing 'enemy spies' who fled to Honduras. Since some of
these villages had been in the same location for more than 40 years,
this seemed false. The local explanation was that it was part of
guerrilla training.

At the same time, a large number of people were starving to death. the
wards were full of people suffering from malnutrition. Disease was
common, since drugs were not free (nor readily available) and the water
supply was used for washing and drinking and waste disposal
indescriminantly.  I would gather that this society would fit your
description of one where a totalitarian government was necessary to
maintain survival, and one where little consideration could be paid to
'Pursuit of Happiness'.  This did not seem to be the case. People were
still struggling to be happy, and although Communism was the most
commonly believed solution to the problem (at least in San Pedro Sula)
there were many other solutions proposed -- which is why for at least
10 years the average span of government was less than 3 months. Most
political coups were bloodless. A new group would receive sufficient
support to try their idea of the 'ideal government'.

It would appear that the Hondurans (?) (I only know the Spanish word)
see Freedom not as a partitionable collection of Rights, but as an
ideal. That their attempts at furthering freedom do not lead to
Democracy is irrelevant.

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura

ps. "communist" is a magic word in Honduras. It means everything from
	Marxism	to Stalinism, to the social policies of some (most?) Democrats.
	The only consistent platform in all 'communist' parties is the
	eventual nationalisation of the foreign controlled and owned
	companies in Honduras. It is wrong to use the Russian model to
	describe Communism when you are dealing with Honduras. the word
	has the same sort of watered down meaning that 'liberal' or
	'moderate' has in North American politics.