12

The Threat of a Good Example

Concern over “the threat of a good example”—the well-chosen subtitle of the Oxfam pamphlet cited earlier—has always been a leading feature of U.S. policy.1 It is illustrated once again by the satisfaction of Reagan administration officials over their success in impeding Sandinista social reforms. What concerns them is that the perception expressed by the founder of Costa Rican democracy, that “for the first time, Nicaragua has a government that cares for its people,” might come to be widely shared among the dispossessed, who might draw unacceptable conclusions. The central problem was outlined by the commander of U.S. forces in Latin America, General John Galvin, explaining why enlarging armies in neighboring countries and stationing more U.S. troops in the region “would be barking up the wrong tree,” an inappropriate means to counter Sandinista aggression. The problem is that “the Sandinistas would attack with ideological ‘subversion’ rather than conventional warfare, and ‘You cannot contain that by putting military forces on their border’.”2

The editors of the Wall St. Journal issue similar warnings, decrying the blindness to reality on the part of House Democrats and European parliamentarians, who “wrote a joint letter to members of Congress, opposing aid to the contras fighting what the Europeans called, ‘the democratically elected government of Nicaragua’.” “At least the Europeans have a plausible excuse for this preposterousness,” the editors add: “Much of their junta aid [i.e., support for what they absurdly take to be the “elected government” of Nicaragua] is no doubt a sop to the left in their own countries,” just as South America and the American media are dominated by the left, as the official Nicaraguan democrats and their supporters lament. But the Journal editors, not subject to such illusions about Nicaragua, see that diplomatic measures will not do the job:

If the Sandinistas remain in power, they will surely carry out their promise to spread revolution throughout Central America. The U.S. will have no choice but to invoke the Monroe Doctrine and spend more of its defense budget securing its southern flank by blockading or finally invading communist Nicaragua.3

Presumably, the editors are not anticipating direct conquest of neighboring countries by the Nicaraguan superpower while the U.S. stands by helplessly (though this reading may be too charitable). It must be, then, that the Sandinistas will achieve their nefarious ends, thus threatening our security, even without invading their neighbors, by “ideological subversion.”

The concerns are also felt—for good reasons—by the leadership in U.S. client states. They don’t like the contras, “but they don’t trust the Sandinistas, either,” the Wall St. Journal reports accurately, also offering the reason: “Few seriously believe the Sandinistas will invade a neighbor, but officials are concerned that Nicaragua can cause trouble by training radical union and peasant leaders as well as guerrillas”4— thus threatening the monopoly of the U.S. government, which, with the cooperation of the U.S. labor bureaucracy, trains labor and peasant leaders and offers them extensive funding and resources in pursuit of its traditional efforts to install compliant business unionism in the Third World, trains and supplies the proxy forces it calls “guerillas,” and pretends not to notice paramilitary training camps for mercenaries and international terrorists in the southern states. Given the nature of the U.S. client regimes, there is good reason for them—like their master—to be concerned over Nicaraguan training of union and peasant leaders, and even more reason if the Sandinistas were given the opportunity to continue with the quite frightening progress and reforms of the early years, thankfully aborted by Reaganite terror.

The purpose of the American military maneuvers is “to deter the Sandinista government in Managua from exporting its leftist ideology,” the New York Times reports in its news columns with no trace of irony, expressing its understanding that since the U.S., once again, is politically weak but militarily strong, it must rely on violence to prevent the spread of unwanted ideas.5 U.S. allies in Honduras are particularly concerned. “‘We don’t have a wall to stop Sandinista ideology or subversives,’ complains William Hall Rivera, the Honduran president’s chief of staff. ‘It won’t be a fight over land, but over minds’”—just the kind of game that the U.S. and its allies know they cannot win, unless the cards are properly stacked. The reporter, Clifford Krauss, describes such fears throughout the region. But “things could be worse,” he concludes, employing a phrase that expresses the commitments of the media that are sometimes better concealed behind a mask of “objectivity”; fortunately, “left-wing movements in Central America have lost strength over the past few years, and revolution doesn’t seem to be brewing in the region”—thanks to the successful use of terror to destroy “popular organizations,” as he fails to observe. Still, there is the danger that “the Sandinistas will infiltrate [neighboring] countries with Marxist-trained student, union and peasant leaders promoting Nicaragua’s ‘revolution without frontiers’.”6

The New York Times editors, contemplating the likely failure of the U.S. military option, propose that Washington take a “calculated risk” and “tolerate a Marxist neighbor, if it is boxed in by treaties and commitments to rudimentary human rights.” The Sandinistas would have to agree “to keep Soviet and Cuban bases, advisers and missiles out of Nicaragua,” and to observe human rights, a major issue standing alongside of U.S. security concerns, because Washington and its Central American allies “rightly see a connection between internal and external behavior.”7 One hardly knows which of these two ideas is more bizarre: the demand that Nicaragua adhere to treaty limitations barring foreign bases and advisers and missiles (the missiles added gratuitously by the Times editors to induce the proper hysteria)—agreements that Nicaragua has consistently supported along with controls to prevent cross-border operations, in vain, since the U.S. will accept no such constraints; or the concern over human rights violations in Nicaragua, real enough to be sure, but slight in comparison with those conducted by Times favorites, whose atrocities apparently raise no problem about a “connection between internal and external behavior,” and are of little significance in any event, being directed against the poor majority who are the natural enemy of the Free Press.

The real fears of U.S. planners, and the services of the media to power, are well-illustrated by the brilliant exploitation of a speech by Sandinista commandante Tomás Borge,8 in which he expressed his hopes that Nicaragua would be an example that would be followed by others, explaining that Nicaragua cannot “export our revolution” but can only “export our example” while “the people themselves of these countries . . . must make their revolutions.” In this sense, he explained, the Nicaraguan revolution “transcends national boundaries.” These remarks were converted by Operation Truth into the threat of military conquest, in pursuit of a “revolution without borders.” The fraud was conscious and purposeful; the State Department document Revolution Beyond Our Borders (Sept. 1985), constructed on the basis of this gross misrepresentation of Borge’s speech, cites as its source the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) translation, which contains the relevant text, as Wayne Smith observes. The fraud was at once exposed publicly by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, just as earlier similar frauds had been. But the device was far too useful to abandon and Borge’s call for a “revolution without borders” is now a staple of U.S. disinformation, regularly cited by reporters (e.g., Krauss, cited above, and innumerable others) and by columnists who warn that “Sandinista Stalinism” may be serious about “waging a ‘revolution without borders’.”9

As noted, the fraud provided the framework for the State Department’s pathetic attempt to support its allegations about Nicaraguan arming of Salvadoran guerrillas. Secretary of State George Shultz informed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that just as Hitler spelled out his goals in Mein Kampf, so the Sandinistas had revealed their true intentions in “calling for a revolution without frontiers,” yet another exhibition of his refreshing “candor.” Asking rhetorically why there is such a “formidable buildup” of military forces in Nicaragua, Shultz testified that Borge had given the answer when he said “This revolution goes beyond our borders.”10 The same phrase has repeatedly been quoted by Reagan and other officials, though sometimes the formulations are more careful, as when Reagan explains that Nicaragua is far worse than South Africa because they seek “to impose their government on other surrounding countries” (see chapter 5), by means left unspecified: in reality, by “ideological subversion,” the force of their example.

The most interesting use of this brilliantly executed operation of the Office of Public Diplomacy was in Reagan’s speech on the eve of the House vote on contra aid in June 1986, considered to be an outstanding triumph of “the great communicator,” or “the great prevaricator,” as he is now sometimes described.11 After warning of the threat to our existence posed by Nicaragua, Reagan worked his way to the final climactic flourish: “Communist Nicaragua,” he declaimed, is “dedicated—in the words of its own leaders—to a ‘revolution without borders’.” In short, they themselves admit that they intend to conquer and destroy us.12

Reagan’s invocation of this dramatic Communist admission of their aggressive intent was reported by the press without comment, including the anti-Reagan liberal press. The editors of the Boston Globe wrote that “the State Department has never been able to document any arms shipment to back up the Sandinistas’ boast about ‘a revolution without borders’,” adding that “their failure to spread their revolution, and their humiliating silence about it, should be taken as a sign of reassurance, but is ignored in Washington.”13 Thus the Sandinista failure to realize their hopes of social reform in the interests of the poor majority thanks to U.S. terror is “a sign of reassurance” for liberal humanists. “Conservative” commentators naturally were delighted with the successful fraud perpetrated by Operation Truth.

Apart from this intriguing illustration of the U.S. disinformation system at work, it is worthwhile to ask just what would be the significance of an actual Sandinista “boast” that they intend to conquer the hemisphere—a threat before which we must obviously quake in terror.

The fears about the demonstration effect of Sandinista achievements are real, and it is understandable that they should be masked in hysterical rhetoric about Soviet missiles and military bases, and a sudden, unprecedented and very narrowly focused concern over peasant discontent and human rights and democracy. These fears explain why the media and Congress adopt the framework of Reaganite doctrine virtually without exception, tactical judgments aside. There is, after all, broad agreement that the U.S. cannot tolerate any threat to the rule of the brutal and repressive elements that prevent the establishment of “nationalistic regimes” that are responsive to the needs and concerns of their own populations, the guiding policy principle laid down in secret planning documents; the traditional U.S. hostility to democracy and human rights remains without challenge. The media serve their function by defining carefully the range of expressible views, framing news reporting within the assumptions laid down by Operation Truth and simply excluding facts that are inappropriate, a highly consistent practice as has been illustrated throughout.14 Congress serves its function by restricting its investigations to narrow procedural issues while proclaiming its support for the “noble objectives” of the Reagan administration. Once the basic doctrinal framework is adopted—U.S. benevolence and devotion to democracy, Sandinista totalitarianism15 and service to their Soviet masters, Central America as a stage for the East-West conflict, the fledgling democracies, and the remainder of the familiar claptrap—there is no longer any danger of sane discussion informed by fact or guided by conditions of rationality. Within the bounds set by the doctrinal system, debate can rage in the Free Press, the more the better, since it serves only to reinforce the principles that are adopted across the spectrum because they serve the needs of the powerful and the privileged, while helping preserve the required illusions about American society and its internal openness.