The media liberals have been descending like a flock of hungry vultures on the Hasenfus incident. Eugene Hasenfus is the American who was captured by the Communist Sandinistas after they shot down his cargo supply plane over Nicaragua. From CBS 60 MINUTES through the nightly TV newscasts on all the networks, Big Media is trying to make villains out of any Americans who dare to aid the Nicaraguan Contras who are trying to liberate themselves and their country from the Communist Sandinistas. Many news reports are actually advocacy editorials with dark innuendos that these Americans might be violating some U.S. law that prohibits individuals from interfering with U.S. foreign policy. To borrow the favorite expression of a previous President, let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Aid to the Contras IS U.S. policy. The President makes U.S. foreign policy, and Ronald Reagan has made it U.S. policy to support the Contras. But aid to the Contras is not a President-only policy. Reagan took his case to Congress and, in a dramatic battle earlier this year, persuaded both Houses of Congress (one of which has a decisive majority of the opposition party) to make aid to the Contras Congressional policy also. Congress voted in June to send $100 million in aid to the Contras. This included $50 million for arms and ammunition, $20 million for military training, and $30 million for supplies. The Senate passed the same package in mid-August. But the Contras have not yet received a penny of the money. House Speaker Tip O’Neill has held it up in the budget process.
So who is interfering with U.S. foreign policy? Not Eugene Hasenfus, but Speaker O’Neill.
Some Americans have been trying to send supplies to the Contras in order to sustain them until the U.S. government aid arrives. The $27 million in U.S. assistance which Congress voted last year ran out on March 31.
When individual men, who enjoy American freedom, security and comforts, voluntarily risk their lives and fortunes to help some valiant Freedom Fighters in a foreign country to win their freedom, those Americans should be honored for their sacrificial efforts. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
The United States won its freedom in our seven-year Revolutionary War in significant part because valiant men from other countries (notably Lafayette) were noble and generous enough to travel across the Atlantic and risk their lives fighting with the colonial Freedom Fighters.
When the Communists were trying to capture Spain in the 1930s, some Americans voluntarily joined what they called the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade” in order to fight and die for Communism in Spain. Most of us would judge their goals as wrong, but their motives were sincere and they certainly placed their lives on the line to prove it.
We don’t hear any more about American citizens joining Communist military operations abroad. The evidence of Communist inhumanity to man, from the U.S.S.R. to Poland to Afghanistan to Cambodia, is too massive.
But there are valiant Americans who, from our abundance of freedom and plenty, voluntarily undertake dangerous missions to try to light the lamp of freedom in other lands. Americans have helped in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique and Ethiopia. That role is too risky and too costly for most of us, but we can salute the few who show such courage.
Others manifest their concern and caring in smaller ways. Across America, small groups have gathered in homes to stuff and ship “Freedom Fighter Friendship Kits” to the Nicaraguan Contras. These are small pouches that contain a dozen or so items that we would consider necessities of life, but which to the Contras, fighting under primitive jungle conditions, are otherwise unavailable luxuries. These include soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, shaving cream, razors, aspirin, insect repellent, comb, candy bar, handkerchief, and a Spanish-language Bible.
One of the leaders of the Contras said, “You can’t imagine how much these little necessities mean to men who haven’t had them in many months and have now hope of getting them.”
About 8,000 of these Freedom Fighter Friendship Kits have been made, filled and shipped by individual Americans as a tangible gesture of caring for the Contras and support of their struggle for freedom. The American people, officially and unofficially, want to roll back the tide of Communism in the Western Hemisphere.
