From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (Harel Barzilai)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: Nicaragua Series -- comments and replies (2/4 ; the "condemnation")
Date: 12 Sep 92 02:16:01 GMT
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Organization: ?
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu


Nicaragua Series -- comments and replies (2/4 ; the "condemnation")

A documentation of Scherzer's positions during Washington's war on
Nicaragua via its "proxy army" as internal memos refer to the
"contras" as would be useful, but his own words provide enough
evidence to address the so-called "condemnation."

What we find is not a condemnation of the terrorist war against
Nicaragua but support for Washington's "proxy" and illegal aggression.
Scherzer writes that he would have liked "more [human rights
"training"] for the contras" by the power that created this proxy army
from the remnants of Somoza's infamous National Guard, and into a
proxy force whose documented and stated aims were terror against the
Nicaraguan population.

Unravelling this "condemnation" we immediately note several of its
features:

*** U.S. aggression towards Nicaragua is perfectly acceptable. Support
for the use of violence to achieve Washington's aims is on the surface
"inconsistent" because Washington's apologists do not support Kremlin
aggression, but is in fact consistent and principled support for the
disregard of the rule of law and the use of force by the powerful as
the means for the powerful to achieve their aims.

*** Note that this principle stands independent of the human rights
record in Nicaragua: Postulate a world in which Nicaragua had
organized its security forces in a planned and deliberate "Death Squad
Strategy" to kidnap, murder, rape, and torture it own population
focusing on those organizing for human rights and land reform and
justice for the impoverished majority of Nicaraguans, namely peasants,
church lay-workers and Jesuits and priests, students, trade-unionists,
human-rights workers, members of cooperatives, teachers and
professors, and anyone else presenting a perceived threat to the
status quo of exploitation and starvation for the majority and extreme
privilege for the elites -- in short, a Nicaragua modeled after
present-day El Salvador and Guatemala; in fact there was such a
Nicaragua, with somewhat less extreme terror and mass-slaughter than
the cases of El Salvador and Guatemala, namely, Nicaragua under the
U.S.-backed 45-year Somoza family dictatorship; Honduras is another
such example.

Scherzer and his ilk do not and have never to my knowledge advocated
that the CIA organize a proxy army to attack Guatemala or Honduras or
El Salvador for precisely the same reason Washington has been
supporting these horror chambers of human rights incomparably worse
than those of many targeted "enemy" countries, such as Nicaragua under
the FSLN; unlike the targeted "enemies" these states remained loyal
satellites to Washington, repressing the peasants and labor in general
and not providing a model which threatens U.S. access to raw materials
and cheap labor such as environmental and labor protections, land
reform, or meaningful welfare measures; the population can starve or
be "disappeared" on a routine basis, so long as Business Is Good, as
the historical documentary record reveals time and again.

Nor has such terrorism been advocated by U.S. dissidents, needless to
say, who do not call on Washington to organize, train, and fund bands
of terrorists to murder, rape, and torture health workers and teachers
and peasants cooperating with the government in El Salvador or
Honduras or elsewhere, or indeed carry out a war "even" if *without* a
planned terrorist strategy (targeting deliberately civilians and
"soft targets") against these regimes. Or break international and U.S.
law. Nor do most even call on Washington to arm genuine, home-grown,
popularly-supported peasant revolutionaries such as the FMLN in El
Salvador (use GET with FMLN BACKGRND) although such a position could
hardly be more fully rejected by Washington than the actual,
consistent positions of the dissidents, who call for a cut off of arms
to the government which has been documented to be involved in the
deliberate "Death Squad Strategy" against its population and
responsible, by far, for the majority of the killings according to
human rights and church based groups (for a sampling, see FMLN
BACKGRND), with documentation of even more direct involvement by the
U.S. in the work of the "Death Squads"  [Use GET command on e.g.
  JOYA     BACKGRND  Salvadoran `Death Squad' deserter: US involved
  JOYA     MARTINEZ  Followup, incl. US efforts to deport Martinez
  DEATHSQD ES_US     ES Death Squads: a pattern of US complicity
  BEHIND   DEATHSQD  Behind The Death Squads in ES (frm _Progressive_)
  GRNBERET TORTURE   Two accounts of US 'aid' to El Salvador (1980/82)
]

Nor do dissidents call on Washington to withhold infant-care
technology from these regimes as Washington has done against Cuba,
which is a human rights paradise next to the likes of Guatemala, or El
Salvador, or states in which police extra-judicially execute street
children at the rate of one a day during as reported by Amnesty in
LAT-AMER HMNRTS90, namely Brazil. U.S. dissidents do not call for a
U.S. embargo against these countries and economic strangulation
including the blocking of development loans from international
sources; nor do the apologists for the Washington Party Line and U.S.
state terrorism, who are selective enough, not because of the
surface-level inconsistency thus demonstrated, but because of
*consistent* support for U.S. aggression to achieve its means (see
below, regarding U.S. violence and aggression in order maintain the
repressive U.S.-style "Democracy" model as in El Salvador, Guatemala,
Honduras, Brazil, Nicaragua under the Somoza dictatorship, Cuba under
U.S.-backed right-wing dictator Batista, or to punish those who would
deviate from the model (Cuba under Castro; Nicaragua under the
Sandinista (FSLN) government, and now somewhat against the Chamorro
government, which is "[the UNO government] being nowhere near harsh
and brutal enough for Washington's tastes" as Chomsky writes in _The
Victors, II_ by which is meant insufficient dedication to putting
Washington's geopolitical and corporate business interests first,
second, and third, and the needs of the poverty-stricken population
last)).

As I have been stressing, these are not "contradictions" and
"inconsistencies" except on the surface level; the paradoxes and
confusing webs of foreign policies at once become far more ordered
once we recognize that Human Rights, Democracy, Peace, etc, are merely
terms used in ideological warfare and control of the domestic
population (control by force being largely limited) by Washington,
which is shown by the documentary historical record to be *remarkably
consistent*, in following the policy of supporting regimes which
follow the model dictated, and summarized above, in which the lives
and living conditions of the population are subservient to the
geopolitical and corporate interests of the North American superpower.

These regimes are often the worst human rights offenders, not because
of sadistic *preference* for human rights abusers by Washington, but
because of the connections, far too clear if we view them honestly,
between this subservience to Washington's interests and profits over
the human needs of the population, and the need to repress the
inevitable resistance of the model country's population. Similarly in
the case of Democracy, elections are not hated by Washington *so long*
as they are in the context of a civilian facade behind which the army,
the local elites, and U.S. business interests control enough of the
social and economic levers and the instruments having monopoly on
force (the security forces, army, police) to prevent any meaningful
change in the directions of land reform, resources allocated to the
impoverished majority, and so in, in short, to prevent any
*meaningful* democracy. As cited in _The Decline of the Democratic
Ideal_: 

    Robert Pastor comments that "The United States did not want to
    control Nicaragua or the other nations in the region, but it also
    did not want to allow developments to get out of control.  It
    wanted Nicaraguans to act independently, _except_ when doing so
    would affect U.S. interests adversely."  Nicaraguans, in short,
    should have complete freedom to do what we want them to do, and
    need not be controlled unless they are out of control. {note:
    Pastor, _op. cit._, 32 (his emphasis).}

[Use GET command with DEMOCRAT DECLINE ; Pastor was Director of Latin
American and Caribbean Affairs on the National Security Council]

So long as the threat of meaningful democracy is so checked,
Washington does not oppose this sort of "democracy" in principle, but
again other factors come into play -- it is far easier to check
popular efforts for reform, to negotiate business deals which benefit
only a tiny elite while further disenfranchising the majority, and so
on, if a right-wing dictator rather than a president and legislature,
no matter how symbolic their power, are in office.

So there are real parallels between Cuba and El Salvador, as I've
noted: whether supporting the military carrying out the program of
repression and "Death Squad Strategy" in El Salvador in order to
further "democracy", U.S.-style and that above model in that country,
or whether withholding infant-saving technology from Cuba and
embarking on economic strangulation, in both cases Washington's
consistent policy is its willingness to torture the countries'
populations to either maintain the established Order of the Washington
Model regardless of the starvation and slaughter of the population;
and to torture the population in the latter case to punish it,
regardless of the positive achievements in literacy, health care etc
(in fact, precisely *because* of these policies which mean less
opportunities for exploitation) and the fact that human rights there
are no where *near* as abused as in the U.S.-backed dungeon
"democracies", in order to induce a switch to the Washington Model of
"democracy" as exemplified in Honduras [See Oxfam America's report
_Honduras: Why Farmers Go Hungry_ (while multinational corporations do
brisk business); use GET with OXFAM HONDURAS], in Guatemala, in El
Salvador, in Nicaragua under the 45-year U.S.-backed dictatorship, and
wherever Washington has been in the position to impose its Model.

Again, the real parallels can be seen by observing the means employed
by Washington to achieve its end in it's "back yard" -- e.g. the
striking parallels between Somoza's bombing of schools and hospitals
on the one hand [use GET with OXFAM84 NICARAG for example] and the
contra policy of murder and kidnapping/torture/terror against health
care workers and teachers and the blowing up of schools and hospitals
again, about which I have remarked previously.



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