> Eh? The US CP has been tiny and marginalized since the 1950s. The
> Sandinistas were supporting a revolution against one of the worst regimes
> in history -- Rightwing death squads and Army forces murdered at least
> 50,000 El Salvadorans in a country of maybe 5 million. I worked for a
> human rights group in 1989 and had to file the human rights reports from
> Church workers in the fields of Morazan -- ghastly, horrifying stuff. The
> Reagan Administration was
> sending something like $500 million a year to the El Salvadoran military
> -- just one of the many grievous crimes of this murderous Empire.
> -- DRR
I know you don't intend to lecture me as if I haven't known that since Blase Bonpane who was expelled from Guatemala in the mid-60's, and Rudy Acuna in the Chicano Studies Dept. there (Rudy in early '80 tipped us off that the recruiters from the U.S. Army were coming in an hour, when they showed up with a damn tank, within three or four hours hundreds of us had expelled them from the campus) among others at CSUN mentored me and other young radicals in the late 70's. Specically on Salvadorean military/death squad massacres, I still have in my boxes of left magazines the issue of Monthly Review w/ the acct. of the river Sumpul massacre of some 300 peasants in the early 80's http://www.icomm.ca/carecen/page67.html Along with friendships with Iranian students aligned with the Islamic socialist mujaheedeen, in that period and since I've been exposed ( http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB15/press.html , GUATEMALAN DEATH SQUAD DOSSIER) to the same evidence of the crimes of our Empire as anyone else here on the list. What I find somewhat perplexing in the responses I get on occasion from fellow lefties with no taint of Leninist or Stalinist ideological baggage is the defensiveness or agnosticism about owning up to the crimes committed by orthodox M-L Communists against fellow Communists, socialists, workers and peasants. There have been bits and starts of this necessary ideological houscleaning inside the official Communist movement in this country in '39 and '56-'57 and '91, but, compared to the Eurocommunists of the 70's, (as evidenced in the publications and speechifying by the ANSWER'ite loons, who despite the best efforts of UfPJ still dominate the public face of the anti-war movement (how an anti-war movement can be lead by folks who applaud tanks in Budapest, Prague and Tienanmen Square, bathing in blood those who sought to democratize, "actually existing socialism, " to use Comrade Brezhnev's phrase and were NOT except in Herbert Aptheker's or Sam Marcy's fevered imagination, "fascist counter-revolutionaries, ") the internal political culture of the sectors of the Left that dominate Movement logistics for demos and marches and attend them, in the main, have the distinct flavor of the Old Left that hasn't learned anything from the failures of the last century and continues to deny, excuse and evade the lessons found in numerous autobiographies by Communists who remained on the left or studies of the Communist movement by marxists such as Fernando Claudin that I've mentioned many a time these last five yrs.
-- Michael Pugliese