Morally Equivalent

Ben Wattenberg’s article (Editorial Pages, May 28) on “moral equivalence” uses sophomoric debating techniques to equate criticism of immoral actions by our government with calling the United States and the Soviet Union morally equivalent societies.

His “facts” are ingenuous. All we are doing in Nicaragua is “pushing a Nicaraguan government to hold free elections,” he says. Not funding and arming terrorists to murder doctors, nurses, teachers and farmers in a country with which we are supposed to be at peace. (Or ignoring the result when the Sandinistas did hold the freest election in modern Nicaraguan history).

As for the film, “The Killing Fields,” it was, if anything, too easy on our (read Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s) role in Cambodia’s agony. They ordered the secret carpet-bombing of a small, neutral land, dropping tonnage equal to that dropped on Germany in World War II. After this dislocation of the social fabric of an ancient civilization, they professed shock at the Pol Pot mutation that emerged from the ashes.

If one wanted to descend to his debating level, one could say it is Wattenberg who seems to prefer the Soviet system, which rewrites history and forbids criticism of governmental actions.

Of course our open society is vastly preferable and more moral than that of the Soviet Union or any other closed society, left or right. But unlike Wattenberg, there are those of us who think patriotism is not defined by Stephen Decatur’s “My country, right or wrong.” We prefer the credo as amended by Carl Schurz, Civil War general and U.S. senator: “When right to keep her right, when wrong to set her right.”

LES RODNEY

Torrance