Of course, our definition of "communist" has been amazingly broad. It includes any government that seems concerned with economic reform. It also includes bishops. The late Dom Helder Camara, a widely known and respected bishop in Brazil, liked to say: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
My father was a staunch anti-communist. Calling someone a communist was about the worst insult he could utter. As a result, one of his great heroes was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the now-disgraced communist-hunter. When I was a teenager, some sense of McCarthy's dangerousness managed to penetrate through the murk of my thinking, and I argued with my father about the senator.
What I have come to see now, but didn't understood during my Army days, is that anti-communism was nearly as destructive a force in the twentieth century as communism was. In the name of beating back the red menace, the government of the United States put its money and military might behind some hideously repressive governments. Supported by our taxpayer dollars, these regimes made enemies of priests and nuns who were simply trying to obey the command of Jesus to feed the poor, clothe the naked, and give shelter to the homeless. Instead of seeing these priests and nuns as faithful to the Gospel, these regimes saw them as dangerous subversives. That attitude gave rise to the slogan I mentioned earlier: "Be a patriot. Kill a priest."
In El Salvador, during the bloody 1980s, the poor endured the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the rape and murder of three nuns and a lay missionary, and the slaughter of six Jesuits, along with their housekeeper and her daughter. Many of the perpetrators were trained in Georgia, at the United States Army School of the Americas. After tens of thousands of demonstrators protested the school over the years, the government attempted to deflect criticism by changing the name of the school to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Different name, same shame.
In these days of concern about terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism, we need to remember that the United States has helped to develop state-sponsored terrorism in Latin America by training its armies. Since most of those states don't have exterior enemies, the bulk of what their armies do is called FID (foreign interior defense) in Pentagon-speak. That means defending against their own people--torturing them and disappearing them. Our tax dollars at work.
Not surprisingly, once people have been victimized by repressive regimes supported by the United States, those people tend to view this nation as hypocritical. They think America has a nasty double-standard: preaching democracy, but supporting dictatorship, so long as the dictator does what America wants.
In the aftermath of September 11, one of the central questions has been, "Why do they hate us?" The most popular answer is that they hate us because we are good, because we are free, because we have a high standard of living. If that were the case, any intelligent person has to ask: Why aren't they bombing Canada or Italy or Norway? All those nations have democratic governments, a good measure of freedom, and a high standard of living.
The difference is that they do not have a military that projects itself around the world, and they do not have a global reputation for supporting repressive regimes. Some people doubtless hate the United States because of its culture and its wealth, but many hate this nation because of specific acts of foreign policy. For more on this theme, I strongly recommend a book by Chalmers Johnson, called Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.
Now that I have finally awakened and seen our nation's many pathologies, I have come to detest the we're-number-one, love-it-or-leave-it brand of patriotism that is so visible right now. My favorite definition of patriotism is the one that the Rev. Jesse Jackson offered years ago: loyalty to the highest ideals of the nation, not to the person who happens to occupy the White House at the moment.
Asking sharp questions about the nation's foreign policy does not make anyone unpatriotic. Exercising the freedom to criticize does not endanger the nation, but strengthens the great and fragile muscle of freedom itself. True patriotism surely includes a willingness to criticize the government to make sure it remains worthy of the nation's highest ideals.
I fail to be a good patriot