Cry El Salvador

At the beginning of Book III of War and Peace, Tolstoy describes Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 as “an event . . . counter to human reason and all human nature.” What followed was “such an innumerable quantity of crimes, frauds, treacheries, robberies, forgeries, issues of counterfeit money, depredations, incendiarisms, and murders, as are not recorded in the annals of all the courts of justice in the world, but which, at the time, the men who were committing them did not regard as crimes.” Tolstoy devoted the rest of that chapter and, for that matter, War and Peace in its entirety to answering the question why so many civilized men simultaneously took up so terrible a work of destruction. Indeed, the question should be asked about any war, particularly by peace-loving men before a conflagration actually begins.

The war raging in El Salvador is at least as mystifying as the invasion of Russia in its sheer unrelatedness to the humanitarian goals proclaimed by all involved. The Left, filled with indignation over what it considers the “immoral” distribution of El Salvador’s wealth and power, conclude that force alone will make the rich share, and so they fight. That such prescriptions as the “expropriation without right to indemnization [sic] of all properties in the hands of the oligarchy,” their “subsequent redistribution as collective, communal, or state properties,” and “management of the national economy on the basis of a system of national planning” embracing “all branches, sectors, and regions”—all demanded by El Salvador’s guerrillas have nowhere led to justice, morality, or peace can be confirmed by asking, among others, the nearest Pole. So why do the guerrillas continue to fight for an all-embracing socialism? It is not because the arguments in their favor have been irresistibly articulated. Rather, it is because the alternatives, freedom and democracy, have been defended so poorly, when they’ve been defended at all.

JK

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John Kurzweil

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At the beginning of Book III of War and Peace, Tolstoy describes Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 as “an event . . . counter to human reason and all human nature.” What followed was “such an innumerable quantity of crimes, frauds, treacheries, robberies, forgeries, issues of counterfeit money, depredations, incendiarisms, and murders, as are not recorded in the annals of all the courts of justice in the world, but which, at the time, the men who were committing them did not regard as crimes.” Tolstoy devoted the rest of that chapter and, for that matter, War and Peace in its entirety to answering the question why so many civilized men simultaneously took up so terrible a work of destruction. Indeed, the question should be asked about any war, particularly by peace-loving men before a conflagration actually begins.

The war raging in El Salvador is at least as mystifying as the invasion of Russia in its sheer unrelatedness to the humanitarian goals proclaimed by all involved. The Left, filled with indignation over what it considers the “immoral” distribution of El Salvador’s wealth and power, conclude that force alone will make the rich share, and so they fight. That such prescriptions as the “expropriation without right to indemnization [sic] of all properties in the hands of the oligarchy,” their “subsequent redistribution as collective, communal, or state properties,” and “management of the national economy on the basis of a system of national planning” embracing “all branches, sectors, and regions”—all demanded by El Salvador’s guerrillas have nowhere led to justice, morality, or peace can be confirmed by asking, among others, the nearest Pole. So why do the guerrillas continue to fight for an all-embracing socialism? It is not because the arguments in their favor have been irresistibly articulated. Rather, it is because the alternatives, freedom and democracy, have been defended so poorly, when they’ve been defended at all.