My point in this post, which I'm not surprised Y and CB miss, 'cuz they have a purely instrumental and strategic notion of truth and acceptable lies, is that when Communists lie to their own cadres for transmission down via their "mass work" and external solidarity activists and sympathetic foreign publics (which only the naive believe anyway, I mean did anyone on the Left at the time, doubt that the FSLN gave all the material and military support they could to the FMLN? Hell, Ortega even gave Kim Il Sung some pricey gifts now in a museum in Pyongyang, in return for aid given by the DPRK) they forfeit their credibility to lead. The autobiographies of Communists who loyally served the Comintern (those that survived the Purges that is) or the accounting related in a book I've been reading on East German Communists http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/EPSLAS_R.html who survived Hitler's camps, only to suffer repression by the SED/Stasi after WWII, I doubt have been grappled with by either Yoshie or Charles or Carrol or their ilk.
-- Michael Pugliese