U.S. Authority on Foreign Shores

I have read the editorial with a very great interest and with one reservation: The editorial could have added one exception to the treatment of the issue. The editorial rightly supports the principle of the prohibition of unilateral intervention in violation of the sovereignty of other nations.

Certainly, to intervene militarily in the affairs of another nation is against international law and common sense, as in the case of the U.S. in Panama. But to intervene in the affairs of another nation whose leaders order the slaughter of millions of their own people, as in the case of Cambodia, should not be against international law. It is against international law because we are very selfish: Really we don’t want “to rock the boat.”

Giuseppe Mazzini expresses this idea better than I. In speaking of nonintervention before the genocide of a nation, he said: “Neutrality is the willingness to give up every sense of human mission; it is passive existence; the neglect of what makes a people sacred; it is the negation of the Universal Right of Nations; it is egoism erected to a principle; it is a political atheism.”

It is a view to be considered very carefully if we want to continue to be human beings and not robots completely insensitive to the suffering of others.

ANGELO A. DE GENNARO

Los Angeles