Lenin once diagnosed his opponents as suffering from an infantile disorder. Who could blame President Uribe of Colombia if he came to the same conclusion about the other presidents of the South American republics? The disorder is characterized by revolutionary romanticism, the view that anyone who takes up arms against an established government in the name of social justice must be motivated by a deep love of humanity. To believe this, it is necessary to understand neither history nor human nature. To pretend to believe it requires considerable cynicism and moral turpitude. Colombian forces recently attacked an encampment of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) a mile on the other side of the Ecuadorian border, and in the process killed the second in command, the notorious Raul Reyes. Technically, the Colombian forces had violated Ecuadorian territory, and Colombia issued a pro forma apology in an attempt to smooth ruffled feathers. The apology, initially, was not accepted. The strength of the condemnation of the Colombian military action by the governments of several South American countries must have surprised and alarmed the Colombian president, suggesting a high level of sympathy for the FARC, similar in form and nature to that for al-Qaeda among certain Muslim populations. Of course, most, though not all, of this sympathy is passive rather than active, but passivity is the soil in which activity ultimately grows. The Ecuadorian president, Rafael Correa, a more dignified left-wing figure than his equivalent on the other side of Colombia, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, displayed his underlying sympathies by his reaction to the Colombian raid. For him, the incursion of the forces of the government of Colombia was an infringement of national sovereignty in a way in which the FARC encampment was not. Raul Reyes and his men were not claiming asylum in Ecuador (if they had been, there might have been some substance to Correa’s complaint). On the contrary, they were using Ecuadorian territory as a military base from which to conduct operations in Colombia. Ecuador’s unwillingness or inability to expel the FARC from its territory, and its protest when Colombia did so in its place, therefore amounts to active support for the FARC. Far from Colombia having committed an aggression against Ecuador, the latter had committed an aggression against Colombia, sufficient even to constitute a casus belli — not that it would have been wise of Colombia to use it as such. Perhaps realizing the weakness of his moral, intellectual, legal, economic, and military position, Correa has since, very sensibly, decided to make up with Uribe. He is no Chavez. The general condemnation of Colombia demonstrates the continuing emotional attachment to guerrilla activity of left-wing and populist politicians throughout South America (with Nicaragua thrown in for bad measure), despite all the disasters that such activity has brought about. One might have thought that Argentina, for example, had had enough of guerrilla activity and its consequences for the time being: but its present rulers are Peronists whose guerrilla movement in the 1970s provoked the horrible repression of the military junta, an obvious fact that is often lost sight of in accounts of that repression, which is described as if it had emerged from a clear blue sky. By tacitly supporting the guerrilla movement of another land, therefore, Peronists are absolving themselves of part of their own history. For if the FARC are noble and legitimate, then the Peronists’ own guerrilla activity was noble and legitimate, rather than criminal and stupid. The moral rather than the legal assessment of Colombia’s action in destroying the FARC encampment in Ecuador depends upon the moral assessment of the FARC itself, the oldest rebel group in Latin America, if not the world. And, on any reasonable view, that assessment must be wholly negative; for by now we know enough about the kind of Marxist regime that FARC wanted to install to know that any group that is trying to bring one about is utterly reprehensible. They are not freedom-fighters, they are power-grabbers, and power of a totalitarian kind at that. Indeed, enough was known of the nature of communist regimes back in the 1960s, when the FARC began its activities, for us to say with certainty that it was the very totalitarian nature of those regimes that attracted the guerrilla leaders in the first place. No one took to the hills and jungles of Latin America in order to fight for the right to contest and lose next year’s parliamentary elections; and thinking that they had the absolute solutions to all the difficult problems of their society, those leaders believed that they needed, and merited, absolute power to put them into practice. This was never noble or generous; on the contrary, it was always arrogant and egotistical, and this is so even though it might be granted that the governments of countries such as Colombia were very far from ideal, to put it mildly. All is not philanthropic that speaks of utopia. Of course, the FARC’s aims have become considerably less ambitious since the movement was founded. Survival for its own sake is now its aim, together with raising money from drug-trafficking and kidnapping. The FARC has the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest, as well as most sophisticated, band of kidnappers, using information technology to extract as much as possible from its large number of hostages. Hacking into computer systems, it discovers the assets of its hostages, and shakes them down accordingly, or pro rata. But its criminality is beginning to take its toll: a third of its recruits have deserted in the last few years. Colombian public opinion has hardened against the FARC recently, and there have been huge demonstrations against its activities. None of this has deterred the populist mountebank Hugo Chavez, who has managed that economic miracle of the command economy — the transformation of huge oil receipts into food shortages — from recognizing the FARC as bona fide belligerents rather than outlaws. But, at bottom, Chavez is only a naughty adolescent, anxious to test the limits. Sixty percent of Venezuela’s food comes from Colombia, and alternative sources of supply cannot be found in a trice. He will always prefer a war of postures to a war of position. Much of the commentary on the Colombian action in the press claimed that it would make the negotiations for the release of hostages held by the FARC more difficult, and was therefore not in the interest of the hostages. Raul Reyes, after all, was the FARC’s chief negotiator and media figure, and now he’s dead. If the hostages remain in captivity, therefore, it will be the Colombian government’s fault. This is a very contorted way of thinking, though not untypical of our time. In the first place, the policy and actions of a country such as Colombia cannot be made entirely to hinge on the fate of hostages. To say that its policy should do so is to deliver a huge amount of power into the hands of the kidnappers, indeed of kidnappers in general. In the second place, it is to mistake on whom the overwhelming moral responsibility to and for the kidnapped lies: that is to say, the kidnappers themselves. To suggest that there is any kind of moral equivalence between the responsibility of the FARC and that of the Colombian government for their fate is to suggest that the kidnapping was a legitimate activity in the first place, and a proper instrument to be used in the achievement of a political goal. I doubt that anyone would accept this with regard to his own country; why, then, should this view have been expressed so often with regard to Colombia? It is worth remembering that the FARC has kept some people hostage for more than ten years, and the prominent Franco-Colombian politician and presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, for six years. No one who has seen a picture of how she looked when she was kidnapped, and how she looks now, separated from her children who have had to grow up without her, could possibly doubt the suffering she has endured. How many years does it take to negotiate the release of a hostage? At what point do you conclude that the very notion of negotiation is itself a stimulus to further kidnapping? There is only one proper course for the FARC, and that is to dissolve itself, under a morally undeserved but pragmatically necessary amnesty. – Anthony Daniels a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.