Somebody asked me how was it possible that the Sandanista's was not a democratic organization, a legitimate expression of the people's will, given that the Sandanista's won their election fair and square from Samoza. Here's how. Read and weep.
"The year 1956-which is also the year Soviet tanks flattened the freedom fighters of Budapest-is the year that tells us who the Sandanistas really are. I this year, because the truth had to be admitted at last, the left all over the world was forced to redefine itself in relation to the Soviet facts. China's Communist leader, Mao, decided he liked Stalin's way better. For Mao's sinister folly, 25 million people died in the "great leaps" and "cultural revolutions" he then launched. But in Europe and America a new anti-Stalinist left was born. This "New Left", of which I was one of the founders, was repelled by the evils it was now forced to see and embarassed by the tarnish the totalitarians had brought to the socialist cause. It turned its back on the Soviet model of Stalin and his heirs.
In Nicaragua, the Sandanista vanguard was neither embarrassed nor repelled. The following year, 1957, Carlos Fonseca, the revered founding father of the Sandanista Front, visited Russia and its new and improved totalitarian state. To Fonseca, as to Borge and his other comrades, the Soviet monstrosity was their revolutionary dream come true. In his pamplet, A Nicaraguan in Moscow, Fonseca proclaimed Soviet Communism his model for Latin America's revolutionary future.
A second step in this vision of a Communist America is now being realized in Nicaragua. The 'commandante' directorate, the army, and the secret police (socialism's three most important institutions) are already mirrors of the Soviet state- not only structurally but in their personnel, trained and often manned by agents of the Soviet axis.
Yet the most important figure in this transformation is not a Nicaraguan at all, but Cuba's first communist, Fidel Castro. From 1959, when Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge first arrived in Havana, and for 20 years after, the Sandanista leaders became disciples of Fidel in Havana and with his blessings went on to Moscow, where Stalin's henchman completed their revolutionary course. Humberto Ortega, Daniel's less visible but more important brother, is Fidel's personal protege. Ortega is the author 'tercerista' strategy, which allied their miniscule sect to a coalition of democrats contending for power. Fidel is not only the image in which the Sandanista leadership has created itself and the author of its victorious strategy, but the architect of its politburo, the 'commandante' directorate. The directorate was personally created by Fidel in Havana on the eve of the final struggle, sealed with a pledge of military aid agaisnt the Samoza regime. Without Castro's intervention, Arturo Cruz and the other anti-Somoza and pro-democratic Contras would be the government of Nicaragua today.
And it was Fidel who showed the Sandanistas how to steal the revolution after the victory and how to secure their theft by manipulating their most important allies: the American left and its liberal sympathizers.
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Huber Mato's fate came to pass with Fidel's second revolution. All the fine gestures and words with which Fidel seduced us and won our support -the open Marxism, the socialist humanism, the independant path- were calculated lies. For even as he proclaimed his color to be olive green, he was planning to make his own revolution Moscow red. So cynical was Fidel's strategy that at the time it was difficult for many to comprehend. One by one Fidel removed his own comrades from the revolutionary regime and replaced them with Cuban Communists. At the time, the Communists were a party in disgrace. The had opposed the revolution; they had even served in the cabinet of the tyrant Batista while the revolution was taking place! But this was all incidental to Fidel. Fidel knew how to use people. And Fidel was planning a new revolution that he could trust the Communists to support. He had decided to turn Cuba into a Soviet state. Moreover, Fidel also knew that he could no longer trust his Fidelista comrades, because they had made a revolution they thought was going to be Cuban olive green.
Although Fidel was a party of one and the Sandanistas were a party of nine, and though he removed socialists and they removed democrats, the pattern of betrayal has been the same in Nicaragua as it was in Cuba: To gain power, the Sandanistas concealed their true intention (a Soviet state) behind a revolutionary lie (a pluralist democracy). To consolidate power, they fashioned a second lie (democracy, but only within the revolution), and those who believed in the first lie were removed. At the end of the process there will be no democracy in Nicaragua at all, which is exactly what Fonseca and the Sandanistas intended when they began. (When the Sandanistas removed their anti-Somoza allies, of course, they did not need Nicaraguan Communists to replace them, because they had Fidel behind them and thousands of agents and technicians from the Communist bloc.)
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A final word to my former comrades and successors in the left: It is no accident that the greatest atrocities of the 20th century have been committed by Marxist radicals; and it is no accident that they have been committed by radicals in power against their own peoples. Hatred of self, and by extension one's country, is the root of the radical cause. As American radicals, the most egregious sin you can commit is to betray the the privileges and freedoms ordinary people from all over the world have come to this country to create- privileges and freedoms that ordinary people all ove the world would feel blessed to have themselves. But the worst of it is this: that you betray all of this tangible good that you can see around you for a socialist pie-in-the-sky that has meant horrible deaths and miserable lives for the hundreds of millions who have already fallen under its sway.
David Horowitz in a speech for a debate on Nicaragua at the University of California at Berkeley, April 4, 1986.
So, that's how you give the appearence of having broad support for your cause.
You lie about your intentions and when your goals have been met, you get rid of your supporters and replace them with your own team.
Hope this answers your excellent question.
