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From: barry@ames.UUCP (Kenn Barry)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Dr. Josef Mengele, Nazis, and grotesque hypocrisy
Message-ID: <870@ames.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 13-Mar-85 19:54:13 EST
Article-I.D.: ames.870
Posted: Wed Mar 13 19:54:13 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 16-Mar-85 03:52:23 EST
References: <2198@drutx.UUCP>
Organization: NASA-Ames Research Center, Mtn. View, CA
Lines: 47

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
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