From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (misc.activism.progressive co-moderator)
Subject: Nicaragua Series: A pause for some comments (II)
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 17:00:09 GMT

Nicaragua Series: A pause for some comments (II)

[...]

Correspondingly, those governments which have policies which displease
the corporate/economic-elite interests, will suffer the wrath of the
"North American colossus" -- to be sure, under the cloud of rhetoric
about human rights, democracy, or terms like "communism"
"stability", or the "war on drugs" and other constructions -- but in
fact the record reveals these proclamations cannot be taken seriously.

So for example Washington does all within it's power to destroy Cuba
with economic strangulation, covert terrorism, etc, while supporting
regimes with *incomparably* worse human rights records than Cuba like
El Salvador and Guatemala where over a hundred thousand have been
exterminated in a war against any internal dissent; and regimes like
Colombia and Brazil there similarly "death-squads" extra-judicially
murder opposition leaders, workers trying to unionize, and homeless
streetchildren -- these are basically decent folks, unlike Cuba. Why?
The official reasons being absurd, we must look elsewhere -- and the
Free Press which loyally suppressed the record of our state-sponsored
terror from us and continues to do so, will not point the way -- for
reasons which are again institutional, and cannot be fixed by putting
"good people" there -- there are good people who are forced by the
institutional constraints to either adopt to the mental mode and
functions of the "Free Press" or else find employment elsewhere, in
the marginal alternative press for example. These constraints relate
among other things to the fact that the "Free Press" is not in the
"newspaper business" but in the business of selling advertising space.

Regarding the first type of (subservient) governments in our
"back-yard," certainly Washington would prefer (albeit for less than
noble reasons) a democracy to a dictatorship *all other things being
equal* -- that is, if guaranteed the pleasant investment climate
without repression, they would take that -- but Washington will not
hesitate to use repression if necessary.

And most often it will be necessary. The vast majority of our "little
brown brothers" in "our backyard"  live in miserable poverty.
Governments which, like Arbentz in Guatemala in 1954 or the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979, which employ the country's resources
for the benefit of their own population necessarily are cutting into
immediate profits of the corporate interests. Repression is similarly
necessary to maintain the slave-labor conditions which allow the
multi-nationals to enjoy their profits, with repression used to
prevent labor from organizing unions and worker-run cooperatives, etc.

In Nicaragua, as we saw in the series, not only was the wrath of
Washington upon a government whose human rights record was a vast
improvement over the previous 40+ years of U.S.-backed Somoza family
line of dictatorships (when Washington's fabled love for human rights
and democracies was, due to the usual "pragmatism" (a convenient
construct) was mysteriously on hold as it bankrolled the good-for-
business right-wing dictators), but incomparably better than the
"flegling democracies" enjoying Washington's backing at the very same
time. Needless to say "elections" are not very significant under a
regime employing a "death squad strategy" against any and all
dissidents (primarily the victims are "students, members of
cooperatives, human rights groups members, trade unionists, and church
workers" to paraphrase Amnesty International), as practiced in El
Salvador and Guatemala and, with less extreme ferocity, in Honduras
and elsewhere, but not under the evil Sandinistas, Americas Watch
tells us, who are similarly different in that human rights abuses are
seriously investigated, the human rights groups added, under this evil
regime which "for the first time" was actually working "for the
people" as described by the Unived Nations development, Oxfam,
church-based, and other obserbers.

It is important to add that beyond debunking the lies about Nicaragua,
one should avoid dwelling on the specifics; that is, after debunking
lies about the "genocide" against the Miskitos and about "mass graves"
one should not merely document the falsity of these charges, and
document the existence of precisely mass-graves and a genocidal policy
(well over 100,000 slaughtered in Guatemala alone) in the U.S.-style
democracies; these atrocities are carried our for a purpose, not for
the mere fun of it. So in reading the posts debunking a particular
"mass grave" story, it is important to note that *had* some real
multiple killing been revealed in the case,  the issues in question
would have been of abuses by particular Sandinista soldiers (or
campesinos), not part of a systematic regime of terrorizing the
population with "death-squads" as *necessitated* to maintain the U.S.
systems in which "free-enterprise" (profits for multinationals and
investors) determine national policy, not feeding and clothing and
generally caring for the population supposedly represented by the
government -- as Amnesty International, Americas Watch, Oxfam America,
and others make so clear.

Shortly before the CIA coup, crushing Guatemala's first and last
democracy [capitalist democracy, incidentally], which threatened the
interests of US corporations, in particular the United Fruit Company,
Guatemalan Foreign Minister Toriello commented that U.S.  policy
amounts to:

	cataloguing as `Communism' every manifestation of
	nationalism or economic independence, any desire for social
	progress, any intellectual curiosity, and any interest in
	progressive or liberal reforms... any Latin American
	government that exerts itself to bring about a truly national
	program which affects the interests of the powerful foreign
	companies, in whose hands the wealth and the basic resources
	in large part repose in Latin America, will be pointed out as
	Communist; it will be accused of being a threat to continental
	security and making a breach in continental solidarity, and so
	will be threatened with foreign intervention.

[Quoted in Noam Chomsky, _Turning the Tide_, page 52. Footnote [21]
cites Connell-Smith, _Inter-American System_, 161f]

So we see that, beyond the fact that "democracy" and "human rights"
etc are used by politicians for domestic propaganda purposes, and are
not, in fact, the driving forces behind U.S. policy, that actually the
driving forces behind this policy are in many deep ways such that by
their nature they are anti-democracy, anti-human-rights, and
anti-peace and development.

In the later case of the non-subservient countries like Cuba, where
human rights are far better than in so many U.S.-style "democracies",
and Nicaragua under the Sadinistas those war-time record was better
than that of the very superpower attacking the country -- this is
putting aside non "human-rights" considerations such as a government
starving its people versus one providing universal access to education,
health care and so on -- we see aggression, subversion, terrorism, in
the usual pattern from Washington, as expected.

Deviating from the "central america mode" subservient role of a source
of ultra-cheap labor and of natural resources to be "harvested" by big
business, these were the crimes of Guatemala under Arbentz, due to
which the CIA-overthrow and subsequent U.S. support for a string of
murderous dictatorships, more recently the same with a civilian
facade; and these are the crimes of Nicaragua under the Sandinistas
who where therefore subjected not two U.S. aid as did the brutal
Somoza family dictators before them and their abysmal and far, far
worse human rights record, but rather a "proxy" terrorist war
attacking "soft targets" like agricultural cooperatives, schools,
health clinics, etc, and economic strangulation, etc, until their
economy and whole infrastructure "cried uncle."

Our friends in Washington will often be more than willing to admit
past "mistakes" but at any given time we are "changing course" and
certainly our intentions are good for our neighbors down south whom we
are trying to help, so we may ignore the actual historical record
showing that alongside this rhetoric for decades and decades have been
brutal physical and economic exploitation decade after decade of "good
intentions."

As Chomsky wrote in The Victors:

    The student of American history and culture will recognize the
    familiar moves.  Once again, we witness the miraculous change of
    course that occurs whenever some particularly brutal excesses of
    the state have been exposed.  Hence all of history, and the
    reasons for its persistent character, may be dismissed as
    irrelevant, while we march forward, leading our flock to a new and
    better world.

I end as before on the brighter note from his _Is Peace At Hand?_ in
the premier issue of Z magazine [January 1988]:

    The fate of the Central American accords lies in the hands of the
    domestic enemy of the state, the citizens in "enemy territory" at
    home.  As so often in the past, dissent, protest, pressures of a
    wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of
    costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be
    compelled to permit at least some steps towards "justice, freedom
    and democracy" within its domains.

Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc