Where was the threat?
Joanna
Chuck wrote:
> Dennis Perrin wrote:
>
>>> Are there no degrees of authoritarianism in your view of
>>> governments? Are they all domineering brutes? Sandinistas didn't
>>> shoot their opponents, which might have been a mistake.
>>>
>>> Doug
>>
>>
>>
>> No man! Like, those Sandinista dudes shoulda like, y'know, let
>> everybody do their thing. I mean, like wow, forcing peasants to get
>> shots to prevent disease?! That's fucking fascist, man! It's totally
>> authoritarian! There shoulda been no government down there, man. Like
>> it's sooooo fucking obvious!
>
>
> "On Radio Sandino, denunciations of U.S. imperialism are followed by
> commercials for Pepsi Cola, but then the Sandinistas are such a thret
> to the Yankee Empire that they had to get $60 million in aid from
> companero Jimmy Carter. In Nicaragua there are a wonderful variety of
> 'mass organizations' that are supposed to give the illusion of popular
> power when they are actually one-way transmission belts from the
> ruling junta downwards to the masses. The country is covered by a
> network of Cuban-styled Saninista Defense Committees (CDSs), which act
> to integrate all citizens into the reconstruction plans of the state
> and which also serve to spy on anyone suspected if disloyalty to the
> regime."
> --Keith Sorel, Socialism (in quotation marks), No Middle Ground, Fall
> 1984-Winter 1985.
>
> "In Nicaragua today, under the 'revolutionary socialist' vanguard of
> the Sandinista Front, the most basic defensive weapon of the working
> class, the strike, has been banned."
> --Keith Sorel, Socialism (in quotation marks), No Middle Ground, Fall
> 1984-Winter 1985.
>
> "In the past forty years or so, many new nation-states have been
> created by the struggles of 'national liberation' movements. But what
> really changes for the vast majority of people? Imagine that you live
> in a small village in Angola, or work in a factory or farm in Vietnam.
> One day the bosses and landlords leave town. A horrible war develops
> and is fought against a vicious foreign power or local tyrant, and
> when the fighting ends the bosses and landlords march into town at the
> head of an army, hang up red banners and portraits of the new leaders
> everywhere and announce that from now on you will work just as hard as
> before the new bosses have taken over and they know what's best for
> you and all members of the working-classes. All of this is presented
> to you in the name of a 'people's revolution.'"
> --Keith Sorel, Socialism (in quotation marks), No Middle Ground, Fall
> 1984-Winter 1985.
>
> "The writer gets into trouble when she insists on referring to what is
> going on in Nicaragua as a revolutionary process. A government
> consolidating itself is not a revolutionary process. It never was and
> never will be. What is crucial in any revolutionary process is the
> autonomous, radical activity of the people involved, with definite
> movement toward a cooperative society, dispensing with the
> inefficiency and dehumanization of capitalism (state or laissez faire)
> and resisting the rigidification of new institutions of society into
> hierarchies. Authoritarian formations come about when certain
> individuals/groups during revolutionary upheavals (or not) are able to
> make powerful positions for themselves, and others allow, or even
> encourage, this to occur. When this happens, of course, the revolution
> is a failure."
> --Sally A. Frye, "Revolution on a leash", No Middle Ground, Fall
> 1984-Winter 1985.
>
> "For genuine democracy to exist in Nicaragua, it would mean that
> decisions at all levels of Nicaraguan society, from the local coffee
> farm to major national issues, would be shaped and concluded by the
> people themselves, not by a few leaders. But the FSLN's talk of
> 'democracy' is a pathetic joke, this is equally true of their use of
> the phrase 'workers control.'""
> Tom Wetzel, "Where is Nicaragua going?", No Middle Ground, Fall
> 1984-Winter 1985.
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