"Child of war learns father a terrorist who murdered her parents and kidnapped her as an infant" is the message of a front page article in NYT today about a now adult mother of three who has learned that she is this Argentine woman. DNA testing confirmed the account; she has testified against her father and visited him in prison until his death. He confirmed her account, she says.
That's just the basic facts. It gets more interesting to read that the Roman Catholic clergy in Argentina knew and supported the taking of the infants.
Wait a second...priests supporting kidnaping?
Well, you see, it's like this.
Argentina at the time was rent by discord, the archconservative right, supported by the army and the priests, versus the left, the people who had little and wanted a better deal in a country where there was no new deal.
So the right had to eliminate the left to save their soul and the nation's. That left the babies. Who was going to take care of them after the parents, the left-wing parents, were firsts tortured to make them confess and name names, presumably, and then murdered.
No problem there; we have plenty of righties who'd like nothing better than to adopt an innocent child and bring her up to think correctly instead of as another stinkin' Commie bastard who we'll only need to shoot when she grows up, anyway. So let's just adopt her now. We LOVE children! Gott mit uns!
Those nasty Argentinians. That's what we think, right?
Well, yes, but then there's that incident with young Elian Gonzales, the boy whose mother drowned bringing him on a leaky boat or raft from Fidel's Cuba to Miami some years back. The boy's father, separated from the mom, had remained in Cuba. He wanted his son returned, ASAP. Not so fast, buster, we're not returning this nice young refugee boy to Commie-land, our sworn enemy, the place where they had those Soviet missiles that almost burned us to a crisp.
Eventually we returned the boy to his father and fatherland, but not until a lot of anguished handwringing over what to do.
And what do we make of this sort of thing?
We make of it that we fall in love with our own ideology to the exclusion of deeper values; as a result, we think that the rest of the world needs rescuing from foreign belief systems that will only lead them astray.
The truth of the matter is that people like us who hold value systems that justify with-holding children from their parents in order that they be raised correctly are likely to be the incorrect ones. It is no doubt very difficult to see this from within one's own value system.
C'est la guerre as might say the French in refusing to repatriate a British orphan of dual parentage to Englad.
"What? And raise this beautiful French baby as British? Are you out of your mind?"
I could be wrong...
Comments