Textual evidence from the MoJo pieces or articles in Dissent? One of the ones in the latter was reprinted in a recent collection of pieces from Dissent.
Wouyld you condemn the trenchant crits by anarchist Sam Dolgoff of Huberman and Sweezy on the Cuban Revolution, derived partly from Cuban libertarian socialists? http://silverback.gnn.tv/blogs/9988/Paul_Berman_on_Sandinistas_anarchists_and_the_cult_of_Che
Stephen Marshall: Let's jump back in time to the infamous 1986 article you wrote in Mother Jones, which I find really fascinating. When you wrote that, it was the second and last part of a series you had been sent out there to report – I figured that Michael Moore became Editor of the magazine between the two.
Paul Berman: Right.
SM: Reading it was surprisingly moving. I really only know about the Sandanistas through the prism of the Iran-Contra scandal. But I wanted to ask you, considering Moore's reaction and that of much of the left at the time, were you aware, going into it, that you were writing such an incendiary report? That there were such high ideological stakes at the time? That by presenting this oblique view of the Sandinistas as Leninists, that there would be so much trouble, or did you not see that coming?
PB: I presented the piece in a naïve spirit – calling it the way I saw it. I didn't really worry about what the response should be. I was under a certain pressure from the left to come up with the right response, but the pressure on the left that I was under was the other way; it was to condemn the Sandinistas. That's because I had all these ties to the Wobblies and the libertarian left of America. The Wobblies knew a great deal about Latin-American Marxism – more than me, really – and they were able to read things more clearly in some cases than I was. I listened to them and somewhat pushed that way. The only thing about the reaction to that piece that surprised me was to find that my position was regarded as not left-wing. I thought it was obvious that I was writing from a left-wing position.
The later pieces that I wrote – I wrote a number of pieces where I thought that I was the only journalist in Nicaragua approaching it from a left-wing point of view. In my mind this meant applying the methodologies or analytic approaches that had been worked out by some of the radical left-wing historians in the '70s and the '80s. History from the bottom-up, local history, emphasis on workers themselves – not just on abstractions – and so a lot of the work I did in Nicaragua consisted of going out to one town in particular outside of Managua repeatedly and interviewing ordinary people and workers – shoe makers, looking at the shoemakers' union, things like that. Trying to tell the history of the Nicaraguan events from the point of view of the craftsmen and proletarians. And from the point of view of the workers' organizations. And from that point of view, which was related to the kinds of history that was developed by the New Left, really – from that point of view it became obvious what was happening in Nicaragua, which was that workers were being oppressed by people who were in the name of the left creating a centralized state on a kind of East European model. It was not a Reaganite story and not a right-wing story, but neither was it a kind of Marxist mythology or Guevarist or Fidelista mythology about Latin America that a lot of people regarded as left-wing.
SM: Right and there was a concern that the story would be used by Reagan and the right-wing supporters of the Contras against the Sandinista cause.
PB: I'm speaking about my own article and my feelings on my own article. Not about Moore. I don't want to comment on Moore.
SM: Gotcha.
PB: I went about it in the spirit that I hope would be with any journalist – I called it as I saw it. As for the Leninist nature of the Sandanistan front – here I can only laugh at myself because I had to spend a year reading through Sandanistan doctrines before I could look up from my desk and say with great simplicity, "Ah ha! They're Marxist-Leninists!" And it was really just simple as can be that Sandanismo, in the version of the 1970s and '80s, consisted just of some creative linguistic adaptations of traditional Fidelista notions, rhetorical alterations of some very traditional terms. Rhetorical alterations that deceived a lot of people and deceived a lot of Nicaraguans into imagining that the Sandanistan front that was a social democratic organization. But it wasn't.
-- Michael Pugliese