Although it had shifted its critical gaze elsewhere, WOLA’s solidarity with the Sandinistas remained as strong as ever. When contra aid lost in the Congress in 1984, a major factor was the report entitled “Human Rights Violations by the Contras” circulated under the auspices of WOLA to Congress and the press. However, WOLA had used its reputation as an independent “human-rights” organization to provide cover for a Sandinista stratagem. The investigation had been initiated—and the investigator Reed Brody selected—by the law firm of Reichler and Applebaum, registered representative of the Managua regime. Brody’s housing and transportation were supplied by the Sandinistas while he was in Nicaragua, and “witnesses” to contra atrocities were supplied by the security police. Before he departed with his report, Brody was provided with a photo opportunity which resulted in a snapshot showing him hugging Daniel Ortega.
The deception practiced by organizations like WOLA in behalf of the Sandinistas is also practiced against the Duarte government in El Salvador. In the spring of 1980, while the Salvadoran guerrilla leader Shafik Handal was traveling to Soviet-bloc countries in search of the weapons with which to begin his final offensive, his brother Farid arrived in New York to organize political support for the FMLN war. As Farid later described it, his mission was “the creation of the International Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.” CISPES, as the American branch of this international committee would be called, was to be modeled on the Nicaragua Network and would have direct links with the guerrilla forces and with parallel “solidarity committees” which the World Peace Council had created in sixteen countries around the world.
After touching base at Cuba’s UN Mission, Farid Handal went to Washington to meet supporters at the Institute for Policy Studies and WOLA. As he recorded in his journal (which was later found by authorities in Salvador in a captured guerrilla safe house), members of the Communist party in Washington, D.C. introduced him to Congressman Ron Dellums of California, who in turn arranged for him to meet with the congressional Black Caucus. Dellums provided other services. “Monday morning,” Handal wrote in his journal, “the offices of Congressman Dellums were turned into our offices. Everything was done there. The meeting with the Black Caucus took place in the liver of the monster itself, nothing less than in the meeting room of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.” Understanding that the opportunities laid before him would vanish if he spoke in the language of his brother Shafik, Farid noted that the guerrillas’ cause “should be presented with its human features, without political language, and, most importantly, without a political label.”
After Farid Handal had left the United States, CISPES was formally created by his American supporters. One of the organization’s first acts was to disseminate a “dissent paper” allegedly drafted by disaffected experts at the State Department and National Security Council who believed that further military aid to El Salvador would eventually force the U.S. to intervene there militarily and who had a “consensus” in favor of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, the political arm of the FMLN guerrillas. Although the State Department denied its authenticity, the report was accepted as legitimate by several journalists, among them Anthony Lewis who wrote about it in the New York Times. Even after it had been established that the “dissent paper” was a forgery (there is evidence that it was one of many Soviet “active measures” planned by the KGB to create disinformation in the U.S.), CISPES continued to distribute it.
During the early 1980s, CISPES held press conferences and marched Salvadoran refugees allegedly fleeing “U.S.-sponsored terror” through Washington. The organization has also been effective in Congress. In the spring of 1985, its lobbying efforts enabled its congressional supporters on the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs to schedule hearings on the “air war” in El Salvador. The object of the hearings was to determine whether the strikes against the guerrillas hit civilian populations in violation of congressional certification conditions, which would be a cause to cut off U.S. aid. Eyewitness testimony was presented for this claim. One witness was Gus Newport, mayor of Berkeley and also vice chairman of the Soviets’ World Peace Council. Newport’s observations of the Salvadoran air war were supported by a written report submitted by Carlottia Scott, chief aide to Congressman Ron Dellums (who had shaped Newport’s mayoral career). Both Newport and Scott got their insights during a visit they had made to Berkeley’s “sister city” which was located inside the guerrilla zone.
Despite its tainted origins and its deceptive politics, CISPES has been able to mobilize support on hundreds of campuses across the country. Congressmen Dellums and Mervyn Dymally of California have written fund-raising letters for the organization, while Congressmen Edward Markey and Gerry Studds of Massachusetts and others have provided endorsements and moral support. With this kind of backing CISPES has become the most influential lobby against U.S. aid to the Duarte government—not only military aid, but food, medicine, and agricultural assistance. When it is not lobbying against aid to the Duarte government, CISPES is raising money to send to the FMLN guerrillas. The strategy of CISPES, in the words of one of its internal documents, is “to challenge U.S. policy; to disrupt the war effort, to polarize opinion, to inspire people to refuse to cooperate; to create divisions within Congress and every other institution… Each escalation of the war must bring a response more costly than the one before, precisely the Vietnam war phenomenon the administration is trying to avoid.” One of the slogans at a recent CISPES rally expressed the intention more succinctly: “Vietnam Has Won, El Salvador Will Win.”
We find it hard not to be ashamed of some of the things in which we were involved in the 1960s. Yet New Left radicals had a certain candor, reveling in their outlaw status and not trying to seem something politically they were not. That is not true today. W.H. Auden once called the radical ’30s a “low dishonest decade,” and the ‘80s are turning into another “low dishonest decade” on the Left. While the ’60s Left took its case to the streets, where its commitments could at least be examined, the members of today’s Left, exploiting the political process and the vulnerabilities of the two-party system, posture as respectable liberals who only want to make sure that there are no more Vietnams. “Liberal,” in fact, is the way the establishment media invariably describe the activities of organizations like CISPES and WOLA, and the coterie of Congressmen who consistently support Communist advances in the Third World.
Ron Dellums, whom we ourselves helped elect in 1970, is perhaps the most characteristic of these Congressmen. When his bill prescribing sanctions against South Africa was recently adopted by the House, for instance, a profile in the Washington Post portrayed him as “the outspoken liberal he has always been,” noted that a colleague had called him a “moral force for reordering priorities,” and quoted Dellums himself as asking, “If you carry controversial ideas in a controversial personality, how can you ever get anything done?”
His persona has changed somewhat from the days when he stood beside Black Panther party leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver and harangued audiences with revolutionary rhetoric. When he was attacked in the early ’70s as a radical, Dellums did not shrink from the charge: “I am not going to back away from being a radical,” he said. “My politics are to bring the walls down.” But in the ’80s Dellums has changed the words if not the tune. He now speaks in the name of “peace” and “democratic values,” which in practice always seem to dictate attacking the United States and apologizing for the U.S.S.R. and other enemies of this country. Thus he travels abroad as an ornament for functions of the World Peace Council. Thus, too, when Carter sought to raise the defense budget after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Dellums was alarmed by the specter of a resurgent American “militarism” in response to an action taken by the Soviets “to protect their borders.” In a speech about this issue he said:
“This is the capitalist, monopoly capital structure at work, preparing now to draft eighteen-year-olds to go and fight to protec
t their oil while every one of them are taking in billions of dollars in profits…”
In his role as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, Dellums is a passionate opponent of the use of American force. But he has different criteria for Communist dictatorships. When he traveled among the Marxist-Leninists of Grenada a few years ago, he did so as an open admirer of their revolution. His congressional office offered the Grenadan revolutionaries advice and encouragement. Writing strongman Maurice Bishop, for instance, Dellums’s administrative assistant Carlottia Scott described the Congressman’s attitude as follows:
Ron has become truly committed to Grenada, and has some positive political thinking to share with you… He just has to get all his thoughts in order as to how your interests can be best served… He’s really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn’t want anything to happen to building the Revo[lution] and making it strong. He really admires you as a person and even more so as a leader with courage and foresight, principles and integrity. Believe me, he doesn’t make that kind of statement often about anyone. The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel.
When the Reagan administration became concerned by the presence of large numbers of “advisers” from the Soviet bloc on the island and by what seemed the military dimensions of the new airport the Cubans were constructing there, Dellums went off to Grenada to make his own observation. Upon his return he defended Grenada before the House Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs:
President Reagan characterized [Grenada] as a totalitarian Left government and… stated that Grenada “now bears the Soviet and Cuban trademark which means it will attempt to spread the virus among its neighbors.” Based on my personal observations, discussion, and analysis of the new international airport under construction in Grenada, it is my conclusion that this project is specifically now and has always been for the purpose of economic development and is not for military use… [I]t is my thought that it is absurd, patronizing, and totally unwarranted for the United States government to charge that this airport poses a military threat to the United States’ national security.
When American troops landed in Grenada the year after Dellums made this statement, they discovered a cache of official documents from the Marxist regime. Among them were the minutes of a Grenadan Politburo meeting which took place after Dellums had made his “fact-finding” trip, but before he had submitted his report to Congress. The minutes of this meeting state:
Barbara Lee [a Dellums aide] is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport that was done by Ron Dellums. They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary. They will be willing to make the changes.
At the same time Dellums was giving his report to the Marxist junta to edit before he presented it to Congress, an official of the Grenadan revolutionary government was disproving the Congressman’s central thesis. Another document retrieved after the liberation of Grenada was the notebook of Defense Minister Liam James. In an entry dated March 22, 1980, James had written: “The Revo[lution] has been able to crush counter-revolution internationally. Airport will be used for Cuban and Soviet military.”
In the 1960s the New Left colluded with totalitarian movements. But it was clear and candid, sometimes painfully so, about what it was doing. The post-Vietnam Left which has succeeded it not only colludes with totalitarianism but tries to delude people about its aims. It is always ready to believe the official Soviet lie, give the Soviets the benefit of the doubt, or, where the abuses are too great, at least to “understand” horrific Soviet acts as a legitimate reflexive fear of American power. On the other hand, it has an inexhaustible cynicism about American motives and a perpetual inability to locate America’s virtues. It is an “us/them” mentality in which “us” are the dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, and elsewhere in the Third World, while “them” is the United States. Thus, for example, to the Nation, a magazine which exemplifies this mentality, the hundredth birthday of the Statue of Liberty was, “Imperial Weekend”; but the seventh anniversary of Daniel Ortega’s Marxist coup a few months later was a moment to celebrate hemispheric “hope” and an occasion to engage in yet another solo performance of the Sandinista anthem, “The Yankee is the Enemy of Mankind.”
The post-Vietnam Left is effective because of its deceitful layering of the apparatus through which it works and also because it has found a way to support totalitarian movements while appearing to be interested only in improving America’s international morality. Its techniques of dissimulation and disinformation have worked. The Sandinistas’ lies about their intentions may be obvious enough when studied in retrospect, but their support network in the United States has been remarkably effective in promoting these lies in the nation’s political forums. The aims of the revolution that has seized control in Managua are not Nicaraguan in origin; the power that guides it lies in Havana and Moscow. The revolutionary ambition in Central America is not nationalist but imperialist in nature, with the goal of overthrowing the hemispheric system and substituting for it a gulag of interlocked Communist regimes. It is a goal shared by those who work in, and furthered whether wittingly or unwittingly by those who support, organizations like WOLA or CISPES. These people may use the language of American democracy, but for them, democratic politics is only a means; Vietnam has taught them that the neutralization of American power and the victory of Communist revolution comprise a single symbiotic act.
These “secret agents” of the revolutionary cause (to use Conrad’s term) fend off inquiries about their political attitudes by accusing their questioners of “red-baiting,” which suggests once again that the embalmed corpse of Joe McCarthy lies in state in the Left’s consciousness just as Lenin’s does in Red Square. But tolerance for unpopular ideas does not require ignoring political commitments that undermine our republic and strengthen its enemies. The time has come in the life of this nation to name these attitudes for what they are and to eliminate the taboos that prevent discussion of the dangers they pose.
The Last Article, by Harry Turtledove
Editor’s Introduction
The late Fletcher Pratt, discussing the way in which he selected events for inclusion in his magnificent The Battles That Changed History, said:
“The first criterion was that the war in which the battle took place must itself have decided something, must really mark one of those turning points after which things would have been a good deal different if the decision had gone in the other direction… the special genius of Western European culture when it takes up arms is that for really changing the course of history in battle, not merely arresting a movement, but completely altering its direction. The battles described did this, regardless of whatever subjective regrets one may have in the individual case.”
What Pratt asserts is that war matters; that those who say, “Violence never settles anything,” simply don’t know what they are talking about. He might be wrong, of course. Certainly many today believe he is, as so many did during that strange period between the World Wars, when the Oxford Union, after debate, solemnly carried the motion that “this House will not fight for King and Country.”
They did so in reaction to “militarism,” at a time when the National Socialists had introduced universal military service in Germany, and the Hitler Youth encompassed most German schoolchildren. (In the Soviet Union today, according to the Soviet press, the mandatory exercise known as “Summer Lightning/Little Eagle” annually instructs some 30 million children from age seven upwards through military drills designed to teach them how to fight and win wars—even nuclear wars.)
The Oxford Union acted at a time when the German war budget was soaring. (Soviet emigres estimate that the Soviet Union spends more than 20 percent of its GNP on the military; Andrei Sakharov puts that at 40 percent.)
The Oxford Union said that violence never settles anything; that wars are fought for nothing; that to answer the call to arms is to throw one’
s life away for nothing.
Herewith historian Harry Turtledove and a future in which the Union’s philosophy carried the day.
The Last Article
Harry Turtledove
Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.
—Mohandas Gandhi
The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force.
—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
The tank rumbled down the Rajpath, past the ruins of the Memorial Arch, toward the India Gate. The gateway arch was still standing, although it had taken a couple of shell hits in the fighting before New Delhi fell. The Union Jack fluttered above it.
There Will Be War Volume VII Page 13