Beyond El Salvador

This is the second of two articles. The first appeared Monday.

IN SOME WAYS they were the glory years of the left, of Democrats, of liberals. Thousands--hundreds of thousands--marched at a time. Millions came to care passionately for a cause; a majority of this nation was convinced that the war in Vietnam was a disgrace. But, and it is the but that haunts American progressives--the anti-war movement was ultimately a failure. Even after it reached immense proportions, it failed to end the war for years; more bombs were dropped after the emergence of the New Left than during any war in history. And worse, though the national mood on a single issue--the war in Indochina--changed, and changed abruptly, the country's heart and soul were not moved. Or they were not moved enough. The proof is in El Salvador, and Guatemala, and Honduras.

A movement larger and deeper than the one that challenged Vietnam must be built. Probably it is an impossible goal, at least for this country in the nasty years left in this century. But we must try. If it is to mean somthing-if it is to save our souls and substantially change the world-then this movement must be larger than a single case, it must be capable of applying the lessons of a Vietnam to a world full of people with the same yearnings and rights. But it needs to be grounded in a specific example, needs to be born and take its early nourishment from some instance of knowable oppression. Latin America, especially El Salvador, offers the perfect vehicle for the attempt.

Perfect because the oppression in El Salvador is so obvious, the regime so gross and unsophisticated. Three U.S. Congressmen visited the country to see for themselves; their conversations with Salvadoran refugees were reported to the House in March of last year. One transcript read like this: "If people were caught in the village, they (the Salvadoran army) would kill them. Women and children alike. She said that with pregnant women they would cut open the stomachs and take the babies out...She said they would flee and they would give their children cold tortillas and a little bit of sugar so they would not cry because they were afraid that if they cried the Army would find them and if they found them they would kill all of them." They feared with reason. May 14, 1981, on the Sumpul River near the Honduran border, the Salvadoran National Guard, the paramilitary ORDEN group, and at least two military helicopters massacred as many as 600 women and children. According to a Brooklyn-born priest who witnessed the one-sided fighting, women were "tortured before the finishing shot, infants thrown into the air for target practice...A Honduran fisherman found five small bodies of children in his fishtrap." Make no mistake; American guns, American ammunition, American helicopters, and on occasion even American personnel are involved: the Washington Post reported less than two months ago the confirmation from State Department sources that U.S. military advisers were riding in an American helicopter when the pilot opened fire on " a group of Salvadoran peasants herding their cattle."

Perfect because the right has staked out an indefensible ground, because the forces of respectability, order and capital look sillier than usual. Jeane Kirkpatrick, current ambassador to the United Nations, began to outline the current ideological position of the right in her 1979 Commentary article, which included these lines: "The relative lack of concern of rich comfortable rulers for the poverty, ignorance, and disease of 'their' people is likely to be interpreted by Americans as moral dereliction pure and simple...Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope.." Read it a hundred times; wince a hundred times. In the specific case of El Salvador, and Latin America, the Reagan administration argues that the fight against the people is actually a duel with Communism, with Moscow and Havana. The current issue of U.S. News and World Report, (with the bright red headline "Is Central America Going Communist?") features an interview with Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr. "What is at stake is the radicalization of the Western Hemisphere by foreign powers and by interests that are being manipulated from Moscow and Cuba." The contention rests largely on stacks of "captured documents," unlabelled, vague and contradictory papers allegedly seized by the Salvadoran military; believe these few hundred sheets of paper, which have been picked apart by even the Wall Street Journal, or believe the backgrounds of the men who have declared their membership in El Salvador's Democratic Revolutionary Front-There's Guillermo Ungo, a prominent Social Democrat, and member of the first (U.S. supported) junta. Colonel Adolfo Majano, a former military officer. Francisco Diaz, Alberto Arene, Hector Dada Hirezi, Ruben Zamora, Roberto Lara Velado, Oscar Menjivar, Julietta De Colinderes, all of them former leaders of the Christian Democratic Party. Undoubtedly there are some arms coming from Nicaragua, perhaps by way of Cuba and Moscow. Which only goes to prove that sometimes the worst governments are on the right side. And that America is a very hard enemy to beat, that victory over a country of 250 million demands greater resources than the El Salvadorans have on hand.

PERFECT BECAUSE Latin America really is strategically important. If we succeed, through prolonged and ultimately futile resistance, in driving the region into the arms of Moscow (see "Cuba, Revolution," "Vietnam, Civil War," and "Nicaragua, Rebellion"), we will have lost not only the moral battle but the potential friendship of an important neigh-boring area. Withdrawal of U.S. support will guarantee a popular victory; disinterested and genuine American support for the regime established in the wake of revolution will help assure not only that these nations develop democratically, but that they reject the obligation-laden entreaties of the Russians.

And perfect because the events of last winter and spring proved that our immorality in Latin America can stir the indignation of the U.S. public. On May 3, 1981, 100,000 Americans rallied outside the Pentagon to protest our involvement in El Salvador; it took years before one-tenth that number bothered to cry out against the war in Indochina. The combination of fairly aggressive media coverage, the involvement of the Catholic church, and the degeneracy of the Salvadoran status quo was enough to focus attention for a few months on the nation, and enough to check our government's action to some extent. But it was a very few months, and the popular indignation never transcended the case of El Salvador. Once again the left had failed, won a skirmish or two but resoundingly lost the war.

Victory over the entrenched forces of American prejudice, ignorance, and unthinking anti-communism-and especially over the entreaties of our nation's corporate interests-will require an enormous and continuing national crusade. Perhaps there are two chances: creating an overpowering sense of American shame, or creating an awesome committment by millions of individuals to something vaguely labelled human progress. They are deeply contradictory goals-guilt and messianic drive. For that reason, deep changes in Americans are necessary.

The chances for political change unfortunately also make clear the need for a thorough going transformation. Of course, there can be no stinting of political effort on foreign policy issues like El Salvador. All the traditional methods will have some effect; grass roots mobilization, so effectively achieved in the last two years by opponents of nuclear weaponry; intimidating of the Democratic Party into steadfast support of a strong human rights posture; and marches and sit-ins and slogan changing. But at best that will not be enough to do more than change policy as it regards El Salvador. It will not change the basis of our oppressive international rule.

No--what we need is a change in people. Some method to galvanize Americans, to melt down our passions and prejudices, remove our impurities, and re-shape us as caring men and women. First there must be something to challenge people's assurances that all is right with our country and our world. Vietnam did that on a massive scale, but what Vietnam produced was confusion, alienating people from an evil government but not replacing government policies with anything really different. We don't need confusion, though it is an intermediate step, but a new clarity, a new and hundredfold more energetic vision.

FIRST THERE MUST come the recognition that movements like the one in El Salvador closely resemble movements like the one in Poland. Harvard leftists who organized yesterday's rally in support of Solidarity are on the right track, for if people begin to draw the connections between different examples of oppression they will begin to sense their kinship with these people. Salvador and Poland are both examples of movements that include the vast majority of the people, that are the result of institutionalized opression, and that have faced bloody suppression. Both attempt to move their nations towards the same goal-an economy and a political democracy controlled by the people. Both must contend not only with repressive domestic regimes, but with big brother governments willing to support the repression for their own ends. If the parallels between foreign policies of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. are recognized, it could erode some of the consensus for our actions abroad.

But what will replace it? Not, assuredly, some new political ideology. Americans are more resistant to this long list of "isms" that compete with capitalism than any people on earth; after all, the flexibility of our system has served us well, both materially and politically, even if it has been at great cost to others elsewhere. There is no sight sorrier than a doctrinaire American leftist, bellowing bellicosities, handing out leaflets, lifting high the red flag of revolution, and getting nothing but scowls. We need a much more flexible value to instill, some sort of humanist concern that will allow us eventually to see the shortcomings of our own nation and to identify with the oppressed in the rest of the world.

Beginning to figure out where those new values might come from requires some demographic analysis. For most Americans there is only one identity that competes for primacy with their loyalty to the nation, and that is religious affiliation. Ask the man who passes you in the street to tell you what he is; most likely he won't bother to say either American or Christian, for both are ingrained--the stripes on our zebra. If what must be overcome, then, are the prejudices and loyalties that traditionally go along with "American," perhaps the feelings that accompany "Christian" could be useful.

Christianity--by an enormous margin--outnumbers all other U.S. religious groups. Discussing the uses of American religion for social change, therefore, is almost synonymous with discussing the uses of Protestantism and Catholicism. Jews are the most active and humanist group in this country; diehard atheists, too, have a pretty good record of social concern. It is among devoted and casual Christians-especially Protestants-that there are the vast numbers who could form new majorities, new sentiments. At least for the moment, though the bulk of organized American Christianity supports the very worst political tendencies, confusing, making synonymous, the identities of Americans and Christians. Jerry Falwell and his ilk do command an enormous following, and anyone with a feel for statistics can prove the existence of the overwhelmingly conservative Bible Belt with the results of a single election. Anyone with eyes and ears can prove its existence with a three-day car trip. Even in liberal America, religion is comfortable and unchallenging. As in so much of the world, organized Christianity here has not been a force for humanity. Instead, it has served the extant social order and the political and economic status quo.

SO IT WILL do no good to convert more people to a wrongheaded Christianity; it is the Church itself that must be converted, or perhaps rejuvenated, till it resembles the early, activist, Christian church. There is a single American precedent-the civil rights movements of the 1960s was born in the Black Christian church, and there found its greatest source of strength. Rev. Martin Luther King, writing in 1963 from a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, expressed the central theme of his wing of the civil rights movement: "Jesus Christ was an extremist for love, truth and goodness and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists." But the church of Martin Luther King was the church of an oppressed people. The church of the majority of Americans is the church of comfortable people, and, in some sense, of oppressors. It will be much more difficult to move this church to moral action, for doing so will not be in its material interest; if anything, it will be to its material detriment. A new theology will come to the white American church, if it comes at all, not because the people need it, but because it is right. Some moral revelation, some moral passion, must somehow gain acceptance, not just in the organized church but among a great many-among most-Americans.

How this will happen I do not know. This discussion began with the statement that the goal of changing American outlooks might well be impossible. But hope. For two reasons hope. The first is because true change is not going to come through other means: the envelope-stuffing, placard-carrying, doorbell-ringing, lever-pulling and influence-peddling will not alone, as the anti-war movement proved, accomplish true reform. So if there is to be hope, and there must always be, it will have to rest on something else. And hope also because there are examples, not only in the Black American church, but in the emergent Christianity of the rest of the world.

For nearly two thousand years Catholicism was a rigidly repressive force in this world, acting to preserve, not to change. As Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino, a professor of theology at a Salvadoran university, says in the preface to his Christology at the Crossroads. "For some reason it has been possible for Christians, in the name of Christ, to ignore or even contradict fundamental principles and values that were preached and acted upon by Jesus of Nazareth." You have your Inquisition and your Crusades and your indulgence-selling and your papal imperialism, and in some ways you have a pretty grim picture. But from that legacy of dogma and rigidity, new ideas are emerging.

Since Pope Leo XIII wrote his Rerum Novarum in the late 1800s, the Church has been looking at the world around it. And though the view of the Catholic bureaucracy is still often regressive and dogmatic, the theology and the political practices of many Catholic priests becomes more human, more revolutionary, more Christlike with each passing year. It is no accident that Poland and El Salvador share an active, powerful, and near universally respected Catholic Church; in both cases, organized religion has been empowering, emboldening. In both cases, it has been instrumental in the decision of the people to cast off the oppressive weight they had borne so long. The theology of liberation will continue to gain popular support in the Third World and in stifling countries like Poland, where its moral rightness is combined with its practical appeal. In other words, it is a tool to fight the exploiters. What American progressive Christians must figure out how to do is to spread a liberation theology to exploiters, and that will be much harder.

Born in eastern El Salvador to a middle-class family, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was by his own admission a conservative. In the months after his appointment as archbishop of the church in El Salvador, though, Romero watched the right kill several of his priests. And he read his Bible again. And soon he was speaking out so loud that the pathetic "men" running his nation had not choice but to kill him. The day before he died, Romero said this from the pulpit--"It is time that you come to your senses and obey your conscience...."