Suchergebnisse

Last January we published 'Solentiname – the end' by the Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal (Index on Censorship 1/1979), a personal statement by a Catholic priest who, faced with the violence offered to the people of his country by the Somoza regime, had come to the conclusion that violent struggle was the only way for an oppressed people to overthrow tyranny and create a juster society. Shortly before this, Cardenal had gone into exile in neighbouring Costa Rica and joined the Frente Sandinista, conducting a thanksgiving service on Nicaraguan soil when Somoza fell. His American friend, Daniel Berrigan – also a priest, poet and human rights campaigner – was unable to contact Cardenal directly at the time, and so replied to his statement in an open letter, expressing his belief that Catholics must reject violent forms of political and social change which require them to kill their fellow men. Below, we print a slightly abbreviated version of the letter.

Sunday, February 11th. The whole day was passed in the company of a certain Colonel Lao, spit and polish, genial, a little self-conscious in his well-cut uniform. He was a Vietnamese representative on the war crimes tribunal and had worked for almost a year on the commission in Vietnam and had attended the Stockholm tribunal.One six-hour exchange. Perhaps one should not dignify it by a word which does not express what we endured at ten-thousand miles remove from the military mind. Colonel Lao began by expressing, with typical Asian tentativeness, his understanding that we were perhaps quite well-acquainted with the history of his country leading up to the American invasion.

I am setting this down on February 26th as the reverberations of our trip seem to be subsiding. I want also to pay a certain ironic tribute to the visit and presence of a State Department official who arrived here this afternoon and treated me to an hour and a half of small talk and double talk. He is so young, and so completely cut to the bureaucratic cloth, that I found him excelling beyond praise in the old game of which Socrates spoke. That is to say, he is skilled at making the worse cause appear the better.