In the years before the final destruction of El Independiente, the offices were bombed twice, an office boy was killed when the plant was machine-gunned, Pinto’s car was sprayed with machine-gun fire, there were two other attempts on his life, and army troops in tanks and armored trucks arrived at his offices to search for him two days before the paper was finally destroyed. These events received no mention. Shortly before it was finally destroyed, there had been four bombings of La Cronica in six months; one of these, the last, received forty words in the New York Times. (39)
It is not that the US media are unconcerned with freedom of the press in Central America. Contrasting sharply with the silence over the two Salvadoran newspapers is the case of the opposition journal La Prensa in Nicaragua. Media critic Francisco Goldman counted 263 references to its tribulations in the New York Times in four years. (40) The distinguishing criterion is not obscure: the Salvadoran newspapers were independent voices stilled by the murderous violence of US clients; La Prensa is an agency of the US campaign to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, therefore a “worthy victim,” whose harassment calls forth anguish and outrage. We return to further evidence that this is indeed the operative criterion.
Several months before his paper was destroyed, Dr. Jorge Napoleon Gonzales, the publisher of La Cronica, visited New York to plead for international pressure to “deter terrorists from destroying his paper.” He cited right-wing threats and “what his paper calls government repression,” the Times noted judiciously. He reported that he had received threats from a death squad “that undoubtedly enjoys the support of the military,” that two bombs had been found in his house, that the paper’s offices were machine-gunned and set afire and his home surrounded by soldiers. These problems began, he said, when his paper “began to demand reforms in landholdings, angering the dominant classes.” No international pressure developed, and the security forces completed their work. (41)
In the same years, the church radio station in El Salvador was repeatedly bombed and troops occupied the Archdiocese building, destroying the radio station and ransacking the newspaper offices. Again, this elicited no media reaction.
These matters did not arise in the enthusiastic reporting of El Salvador’s “free elections” in 1982 and 1984. Later we were regularly informed by Times Central America correspondent James LeMoyne that the country enjoyed greater freedom than enemy Nicaragua, where nothing remotely comparable to the Salvadoran atrocities had taken place, and opposition leaders and media that are funded by the US government and openly support its attack against Nicaragua complain of harassment, but not terror and assassination. Nor would the Times Central America correspondents report that leading church figures who fled from El Salvador (including a close associate of the assassinated Archbishop Romero), well-known Salvadoran writers, and others who are by no stretch of the imagination political. activists, and who are well-known to Times correspondents, cannot return to the death squad democracy they praise and protect, for fear of assassination. Times editors call upon the Reagan administration to use “its pressure on behalf of peace and pluralism in Nicaragua,” where the government had a “dreadful record” of “harassing those who dare to exercise free speech,” and where there had never been “a free, contested election.” (42) No such strictures apply to El Salvador. In such ways, the Free Press labors to implant the illusions that are necessary to contain the domestic enemy.
CHAPTER 3 - The Bounds of the Expressible
While recognizing that there is rarely anything strictly new under the sun, still we can identify some moments when traditional ideas are reshaped, a new consciousness crystallizes, and the opportunities that lie ahead appear in a new light. Fabrication of necessary illusions for social management is as old as history, but the year 1917 might be seen as a transition point in the modern period. The Bolshevik revolution gave concrete expression to the Leninist conception of the radical intelligentsia as the vanguard of social progress, exploiting popular struggles to gain state power and to impose the rule of the “Red bureaucracy” of Bakunin’s forebodings. This they proceeded to do, dismantling factory councils, Soviets, and other forms of popular organization so that the population could be effectively mobilized into a “labor army” under the control of far-sighted leaders who would drive the society forward—with the best intentions, of course. To this end, the mechanisms of Agitprop are fundamental; even a totalitarian state of the Hitler or Stalin variety relies on mass mobilization and voluntary submission.
One notable doctrine of Soviet propaganda is that the elimination by Lenin and Trotsky of any vestige of control over production by producers and of popular involvement in determining social policy constitutes a triumph of socialism. The purpose of this exercise in Newspeak is to exploit the moral appeal of the ideals that were being successfully demolished. Western propaganda leaped to the same opportunity, identifying the dismantling of socialist forms as the establishment of socialism, so as to undermine left-libertarian ideals by associating them with the practices of the grim Red bureaucracy. To this day, both systems of propaganda adopt the terminology, for their different purposes. When both major world systems of propaganda are in accord, it is unusually difficult for the individual to escape their tentacles. The blow to freedom and democracy throughout the world has been immense.
In the same year, 1917, John Dewey’s circle of liberal pragmatists took credit for guiding a pacifist population to war “under the influence of a moral verdict reached after the utmost deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community, a class which must be comprehensively but loosely described as the ‘intellectuals’,” who, they held, had “accomplished the effective and decisive work on behalf of the war.” (1) This achievement, or at least the self-perception articulated, had broad consequences. Dewey, the intellectual mentor, explained that this “psychological and educational lesson proved that it is possible for human beings to take hold of human affairs and manage them.” The “human beings” who had learned the lesson were “the intelligent men of the community,” Lippmann’s “specialized class,” Niebuhr’s “cool observers.” They must now apply their talents and understanding “to bring about a better reorganized social order,” by planning, persuasion, or force where necessary; but, Dewey insisted, only the “refined, subtle and indirect use of force,” not the “coarse, obvious and direct methods” employed prior to the “advance of knowledge.” The sophisticated resort to force is justified if it satisfies the requirement of “comparative efficiency and economy in its use.” The newly articulated doctrines of “manufacture of consent” were a natural concomitant, and in later years we were to hear much of “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals” who transcend ideology and will solve the remaining social problems by rational application of scientific principles. (2)
Since that time, the main body of articulate intellectuals have tended towards one or the other of these poles, avoiding “democratic dogmatisms” about people understanding their own interests and remaining cognizant of the “stupidity of the average man” and his need to be led to the better world that his superiors plan for him. A move from one to the other pole can be quite rapid and painless, since no fundamental change of doctrine or value is at stake, only an assessment of the opportunities for attaining power and privilege: riding a wave of popular struggle, or serving established authority as social or ideological manager. The conventional “God that failed” transition from Leninist enthusiasms to service to state capitalism can, I believe, be explained in substantial measure in these terms. Though there were authentic elements in the early stages, it has long since degenerated to ritualistic farce. Particularly welcome, and a sure ticket to success, is the fabrication of an evil past. Thus, the confessed sinner might describe how he cheered the tanks in the streets of Prague, supported Kim Il Sung, denounced Martin Luther King as a sellout, and so on, so that those who have not seen the light are implicitly tarred with the brush. (3) With the transition accomplished, the path to prestige and privilege is open, for the system values highly those who have seen the error of their ways and can now condemn independent minds as Stalinist-style apologists, on the basis of the superior insight gained from their misspent youth. Some may choose to become “experts” in the style candidly articulated by Henry Kissinger, who defined the “expert” as a person skilled in “elaborating and defining the consensus of his constituency, those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions: elaborating and defining its consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert.” (4)
A generation later, the United States and the Soviet Union had become the superpowers of the first truly global system, realizing the expectations of Alexander Herzen and others a century before, though the dimensions of their power were never comparable and both have been declining in their capacity to influence and coerce for some years. The two models of the role of the intellectuals persist, similar at their root, adapted to the two prevailing systems of hierarchy and domination. Correspondingly, systems of indoctrination vary, depending on the capacity of the state to coerce and the modalities of effective control. The more interesting system is that of capitalist democracy, relying on the free market—guided by direct intervention where necessary—to establish conformity and marginalize the “special interests.”
The primary targets of the manufacture of consent are those who regard themselves as “the more thoughtful members of the community, the intellectuals, the opinion leaders.” An official of the Truman administration remarked that “It doesn’t make too much difference to the general public what the details of a program are. What counts is how the plan is viewed by the leaders of the community”; he “who mobilizes the elite, mobilizes the public,” one scholarly study of public opinion concludes. The “public opinion that Truman and his advisers took seriously, and diligently sought to cultivate,” was that of the elite of “opinion leaders,” the “foreign policy public,” diplomatic historian Thomas Paterson observes (5); and the same is true consistently, apart from moments when a “crisis of democracy” must be overcome and more vigorous measures are required to relegate the general public to its proper place. At other times they can be satisfied, it is hoped, with diversions and a regular dose of patriotic propaganda, and fulminations against assorted enemies who endanger their lives and homes unless their leaders stand fast against the threat.
In the democratic system, the necessary illusions cannot be imposed by force. Rather, they must be instilled in the public mind by more subtle means. A totalitarian state can be satisfied with lesser degrees of allegiance to required truths. It is sufficient that people obey; what they think is a secondary concern. But in a democratic political order, there is always the danger that independent thought might be translated into political action, so it is important to eliminate the threat at its root.
Debate cannot be stilled, and indeed, in a properly functioning system of propaganda, it should not be, because it has a system-reinforcing character if constrained within proper bounds. What is essential is to set the bounds firmly. Controversy may rage as long as it adheres to the presuppositions that define the consensus of elites, and it should furthermore be encouraged within these bounds, thus helping to establish these doctrines as the very condition of thinkable thought while reinforcing the belief that freedom reigns.
In short, what is essential is the power to set the agenda. If controversy over the Cold War can be focused on containment of the Soviet Union—the proper mix of force, diplomacy, and other measures—then the propaganda system has already won its victory, whatever conclusions are reached. The basic assumption has already been established: the Cold War is a confrontation between two superpowers, one aggressive and expansionist, the other defending the status quo and civilized values. Off the agenda is the problem of containing the United States, and the question whether the issue has been properly formulated at all, whether the Cold War does not rather derive from the efforts of the superpowers to secure for themselves international systems that they can dominate and control—systems that differ greatly in scale, reflecting enormous differences in wealth and power. Soviet violations of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements are the topic of a large literature and are well established in the general consciousness; we then proceed to debate their scale and importance. But it would require a careful search to find discussion of US violations of the wartime agreements and their consequences, though the judgment of the best current scholarship, years later, is that “In fact, the Soviet pattern of adherence to the wartime agreements was not qualitatively different from the American pattern.” (6) If the agenda can be restricted to the ambiguities of Arafat, the abuses and failures of the Sandinistas, the terrorism of Iran and Libya, and other properly framed issues, then the game is basically over; excluded form discussion is the unambiguous rejectionism of the United States and Israel, and the terrorism and other crimes of the United States and its clients, not only far greater in scale but also incomparably more significant on any moral dimension for Ameican citizens, who are in a position to mitigate or terminate these crimes. The same considerations hold whatever questions we address.
One crucial doctrine, standard throughout history, is that the state is adopting a defensive stance, resisting challenges to order and to its noble principles. Thus, the United States is invariably resisting aggression, sometimes “internal aggression.” Leading scholars assure us that the war in Vietnam was “undertaken in defense of a free people resisting Communist aggression” as the United States attacked South Vietnam in the early 1960s to defend the client dictatorship against the South Vietnamese aggressors who were about to overthrow it; no justification need be offered to establish such an obvious truth, and none is. Some even refer blandly to “the Eisenhower administration’s strategy of deterring aggression by threatening the use of nuclear weapons” in Indochina in 1954, “where French forces found themselves facing defeat” at Dienbienphu “at the hands of the Communist Viet Minh,” the aggressors who attacked our French ally defending Indochina (from its population).(7) Cultivated opinion generally has internalized this stance. Accordingly, it is a logical impossibility that one should oppose US aggression, a category that cannot exist. Whatever pretense they adopt, the critics must be “partisans of Hanoi” or “apologists for Communism” elsewhere, defending the “aggressors,” perhaps attempting to conceal their “hidden agendas.” (8)
A related doctrine is that “the yearning to see American-style democracy duplicated throughout the world has been a persistent theme in American foreign policy,” as a New York Times diplomatic correspondent proclaimed after the US-backed military government suppressed the Haitian elections by violence, widely predicted to be the likely consequence of US support for the junta. These sad events, he observed, are “the latest reminder of the difficulty American policy-makers face in trying to work their will, no matter how benevolent, on other nations.”(9) These doctrines require no argument and resist mountains of counter-evidence. On occasion, the pretense collapses under its manifest absurdity. It is then permissible to recognize that we were not always so benevolent and so profoundly dedicated to democracy as we are today. The regular appeal to this convenient technique of “change of course” over many years elicits not ridicule, but odes to our unfailing benevolence, as we set forth on some new campaign to “defend democracy.”
We have no problem in perceiving the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as brutal aggression, though many would balk at describing the Afghan guerrillas as “democratic resistance forces”(New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan).(10) But the US invasion of South Vietnam in the early 1960s, when the Latin American-style terror state imposed by US force could no longer control the domestic population by violence, cannot be perceived as what it was. True, US forces were directly engaged in large-scale bombing and defoliation in an effort to drive the population into concentration camps where they could be “protected” from the enemy whom, it was conceded, they willingly supported. True, a huge US expeditionary force later invaded and ravaged the country, and its neighbors, with the explicit aim of destroying what was clearly recognized to be the only mass-based political force and eliminating the danger of political settlement that was sought on all sides. But throughout, the United States was resisting aggression in its yearning for democracy. When the United states established the murderous Diem dictatorship as part of its effort to undermine the Geneva accords and to block the promised elections because the wrong side was expected to win, it was defending democracy. “The country is divided into the Communist regime in the north and a democratic government in the south,” the New York Times reported, commenting on the allegation that “the Communist Vietminh was importing guns and soldiers from Red China in the most blatant fashion,” threatening “free Vietnam” after “having sold their country to Peiping.” (11) In later years, as the “defense of democracy” went awry, there was vigorous debate between the hawks, who felt that with sufficient dedication the enemy could be demolished, and the doves, who feared that the resort to violence to attain our noble ends might prove too costly; some preferred to be owls, distancing themselves from the two extremes.
Throughout the war, it was taken for granted within the mainstream that the United States was defending South Vietnam; unwisely, the doves came to believe. Years later, the doctrine remains beyond challenge. This is not only true of those who parodied the most disgraceful commissars as atrocities mounted, seeing nothing more in saturation bombing of densely populated areas than the “unfortunate loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursion of North Vietnam and its partisans”—for example, in the Mekong Delta, where there were no North Vietnamese troops even long after the United States had expanded its aggression to North Vietnam, and where local people resisting the US invaders and their clients evidently do not qualify as “South Vietnamese.” It is perhaps not surprising that from such sources we should still read today, with all that is known, that “the people of South Vietnam desired their freedom from domination by the communist country on their northern border” and that “the United States intervened in Vietnam to establish the principle that changes in Asia were not to be precipitated by outside force.” (12) Far more interesting is the fact that, even though many would be repelled by the vulgarity of the apologetics for large-scale atrocities, a great many educated people would find little surprising in this assessment of the history, a most remarkable demonstration of the effectiveness of democratic systems of thought control.
Similarly, in Central America today, the United States is dedicated to the defense of freedom in the “fledgling democracies” and to “restoring democracy” to Nicaragua—a reference to the Somoza period, if words have meaning. At the extreme of expressible dissent, in a bitter condemnation of the US attack on Nicaragua that went so far as to invoke the judgment of Nuremberg, Atlantic Monthly editor Jack Beatty wrote that “Democracy has been our goal in Nicaragua, and to reach it we have sponsored the killing of thousands of Nicaraguans. But killing for democracy—even killing by proxy for democracy—is not a good enough reason to prosecute a war.” (13) One could hardly find a more consistent critic of the US war in the corporate media than columnist Tom Wicker of the New York Times, who condemned the application of the Reagan Doctrine to Nicaragua because “the United States has no historic or god-given right to bring democracy to other nations.” (14) Critics adopt without a second thought the assumption that our traditional “yearning for democracy” has indeed guided US policy towards Nicaragua since July 19, 1979, when the US client Somoza was overthrown, though admittedly not before the miraculous and curiously timed transformation took place, by some mysterious process. A diligent search through all the media would unearth an occasional exception to this pattern, but such exceptions are rare, another tribute to the effectiveness of indoctrination.(15)
“Central America has an evident self-interest in hounding” the Sandinistas “to honor their pledges to democratize”; and “those Americans who have repeatedly urged others to give peace a chance now have an obligation to turn their attention and their passion to ensuring democracy a chance as well,” the editors of the Washington Post admonished, directly below the masthead that proudly labels theirs “an independent newspaper.”(16) There is no problem of “ensuring democracy” in the US-backed terror states, firmly under military rule behind a thin civilian façade.
The same editorial warned that “from the incursions into Honduras [in March 1988], it is plain what Nicaragua’s threats to Honduras are.” The reference was to military operations in northern Nicaragua near an unmarked border, in which Nicaraguan forces in hot pursuit of contra invaders penetrated a few kilometers into areas of Honduras that had long been ceded to the US “proxy force”—as they are described by contra lobbyists in internal documents circulated in the white house, and by their own official spokesman.(17) In the United States, these actions elicited renewed outrage over the threat of the Sandinistas to overrun their neighbors in the service of their Soviet master.
This heartfelt concern over the sanctity of borders is most impressive—even if somewhat tainted by the curious conception of a border as a kind of one-way mirror, so that its sanctity is not violated by CIA supply flights to the proxy forces who invade Nicaragua from their Honduran bases, or by US surveillance flights over Nicaraguan territory to guide and direct them, among other crimes. Putting aside these matters, we can assess the seriousness of the concern by turning to the results of a controlled experiment that history obligingly constructed. Just at the time that the Free Press was consumed with rage over this latest proof of the aggressiveness of the violent Communist totalitarians, with major stories and angry commentary, the US client state of Israel launched another series of its periodic operations in Lebanon. These operations were north of the sector of southern Lebanon that Israel has “virtually annexed” as a “security zone,” integrating the area with Israel’s economy and “compelling its 200,000 Lebanese inhabitants to provide soldiers for the South Lebanon army,” an Israeli mercenary force, by means of an array of punishments and inducements. (18) The Israeli operations included bombing of Palestinian refugee camps and Lebanese towns and villages with large-scale destruction, dozens killed and many wounded, including many civilians. These operations were barely reported, and there was no noticeable reaction.
The only rational conclusion is that the outrage over the vastly less serious and far more justified Nicaraguan incursion was entirely unprincipled, mere fraud.
The US government is happy to explain why it supports Israeli violence deep inside Lebanon: the grounds are the sacred inherent right of self-defense, which may legitimately be invoked by the United States and its clients, under quite a broad interpretation—though not, of course, by others, in particular, by victims of US terror. In December 1988, just as Yasser Arafat’s every gesture was being closely scrutinized to determine whether he had met the exacting US standards on terrorism, to which we return, Israel launched its twenty-sixth raid of the year on Lebanon, attacking a base of the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine near Beirut. As is common, there was no attempt to provide a plausible pretext. “The Israelis were not in hot pursuit of terrorists,” the London Guardian observed, “nor did they have their usual excuse of instant vengeance: they just went ahead and staged a demo” to prove that “the iron fist is in working order.” “The motive for the demonstration was obviously a show of strength.” This “spectacular display,” complete with “paratroops, helicopters, and gunboats,” was “a militarily unjustifiable (and therefore politically motivated) combined operation.” The timing explains the political motivation: the raid was carried out on the first anniversary of the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories, where Israel imposed “a massive military presence, a curfew and strict censorship” in order to “block a commemorative general strike.” In addition to this obvious political motivation, “one may also discern a calculated attempt to undermine Mr. Arafat” and his unwelcome moves towards political accommodation, by strengthening the hand of militants within the PLO. (19)
The Israeli attack was brought to the UN Security Council, which voted 14 to 1, with no abstentions, for a resolution that “strongly deplored” it. Ambassador Patricia Byrne justified the US veto on the grounds that the “resolution would deny to Israel its inherent right to defend itself” from “attacks and reprisals that have originated on the other side” of the border. A fortiori, Nicaragua is entitled to carry out massive and regular attacks deep inside Honduras, and indeed to set off bombs in Washington. Note that such actions would be far more justified than those that the United States defends in the case of its client, as is obvious from comparison of the level of the provocation. Needless to say, this truth is inexpressible, indeed unthinkable. We therefore conclude that media commentary concerning Nicaragua is just as hypocritical as the pretense of the state authorities, from whom one expects nothing else. (20)
The absence of comment on the Israeli actions or even serious reporting is perhaps understandable. These operations were, after all, rather muted by Israeli standards. Thus, they did not compare with the murderous “Iron Fist” operations in Lebanon in 1985; or the bombing of villages in the Bekaa valley in January 1984, with 100 killed and 400 wounded in one raid, mostly civilians, including 150 children in a bombed-out schoolhouse; or the attack on an UNRWA school in Damour in May 1979 by an Israeli F-16 that dropped cluster bombs, leaving forty-one children dead or wounded. These were reported, but without affecting the elevated status of “this tiny nation, symbol of human decency,” as the editors of the New York Times described Israel during a peak period of the repression of the Palestinian uprising with beatings, killings, gassing, and collective punishment, “a country that cares for human life,” in the admiring words of the Washington Post editors in the wake of the Iron Fist atrocities. (21) The fact that Israel maintains a “security zone” in southern Lebanon controlled by a terrorist mercenary army backed by Israeli might also passes without notice, as does Israel’s regular hijacking of ships in international waters and other actions that are rarely even reported, and might perhaps arouse a whisper of protest in the case of “worthy victims.” (22) If Soviet Jews were to suffer the treatment meted out regularly to Arabs, or if some official enemy such as Nicaragua were to impose repressive measures approaching those that are standard in this “symbol of human decency,” the outcry would be deafening.
I will return to some further observations on the extraordinary protection the media have provided Israel while depicting its enemies, particularly the PLO, as evil incarnate, committed only to terror and destruction; and to the remarkable feats of “historical engineering” that have been performed, year by year, to maintain the required image.(23)
During Israel’s March 1988 operations, there was no question of hot pursuit, and Israel is not an impoverished country attempting to survive the terrorist attack of a superpower and its lethal economic warfare. But Israel is a US client, and therefore inherits the right of aggression. Nicaragua, in contrast, is denied the right even to drive attacking forces out of its own territory, on the tacit assumption that no state has the right to defend itself from US attack, another crucial doctrine that underlies responsible debate.
It is remarkable to see how deeply the latter doctrine is entrenched. Thus, nothing arouses greater hysteria in the United states than reports that Nicaragua is planning to obtain MiG fighters. When the Reaganites floated such reports as part of the campaign to eliminate the minimal danger of honest reporting of the unwanted Nicaraguan elections in November 1984, even outspoken doves warned that the US would have to bomb Nicaragua to destroy the invented MiGs, because “they’re also capable against the United States,” a dire threat to our security (Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas).(24) In another propaganda coup of December 1987, a Sandinista defector was produced with elaborate accompanying fanfare in the media on his “revelations” about Sandinista intentions, the most stunning of which was that Nicaragua was hoping to obtain jet planes to defend its territory from US attack, an intolerable outrage. It is, of course, well understood that Nicaragua had no other way to prevent the CIA from supplying the forces it directs within Nicaragua, or to interfere with the US surveillance flights to provide these forces with up-to-the-minute intelligence on Nicaraguan troop deployments so that they could safely attack “soft targets” (i.e., barely defended civilian targets) in accordance with pentagon and state department directives. But no such reflections disturbed the display of indignation over this latest proof of Communist aggressiveness. (25)
The logic is clear: Nicaragua has no right of self-defense. It is intolerable, tantamount to aggression, for Nicaragua to interfere with US violence and terror by presuming to protect its airspace, or by defending the population against the US proxy forces, “the democratic resistance” of public rhetoric. For the same reason, the report by the Sandinista defector that Nicaragua intended to reduce its military forces while providing light arms to the population for defense against possible US invasion elicited further outrage as it was transmuted by the Free Press into a threat to conquer the hemisphere.
This doctrine of the elite consensus is, again, highly revealing, as is the fact that its meaning cannot be perceived. We might imagine the reaction if the Soviet Union were to respond in a similar way to the far more serious threat to its security posed by Denmark or Luxembourg.
It is interesting that, in the midst of the furor over the Sandinista plans to obtain means to defend themselves, the United states began shipping advanced F-5 jet planes to Honduras on December 15, 1987, unreported by the New York Times.(26) Since only the United States and its allies have security concerns, obviously Nicaragua could have no legitimate objection to this development, and it would be superfluous, surely, to report the protests in the Honduran press over “the debts unfairly imposed upon us by pressure from the United States, that force us to pay the bill for the F-5 fighters that do nothing to feed our hungry people,” though they please the military rulers. (27)
One might ask why Nicaragua was so intent on obtaining Soviet planes. Why not French Mirage jets instead? In fact, the Sandinistas would have been quite happy to obtain jet interceptors form France, and openly say so. They could not, because US pressure had blocked supply from any non-Communist source. All of this is unreportable, because it would give the game away. Thus Stephen Kinzer and James LeMoyne of the New York Times would never disturb their efforts to fan hysteria over the Sandinista threat by reporting such facts, nor would they dwell on the reasons why the Sandinistas might be attempting to obtain jet interceptors. (28) Such inquiry escapes the bounds of propriety, for it would undermine the campaign to portray US aggression and terror as legitimate defense.
The point is more general. Attack against those designated “Communists” will normally compel them to rely on the Soviet Union for defense, particularly when the United States pressures its allies and international lending institutions to refrain from offering assistance, as in the case of contemporary Nicaragua, where it was clear enough in early 1981 that “Nicaragua will sooner or later become another Soviet client, as the US imposes a stranglehold on its reconstruction and development, rebuffs efforts to maintain decent relations, and supports harassment and intervention—the pattern of China, Cuba, Guatemala’s Arbenz, Allende’s Chile, Vietnam in the 1940s and the post-1975 period, etc.”(29) This predictable consequence of policy can then be taken as retrospective proof that we are, indeed, simply engaged in defense against the Kremlin design for world conquest, and well-behaved journalists may refer to the “Soviet-supplied Sandinistas” in properly ominous tones, as they regularly do, carefully avoiding the reasons. An additional benefit is that we now test the sincerity of the Soviet Union in their professions about détente, asking whether they will withhold aid from Nicaragua if we reduce aid to the contras. The idea that US sincerity could be tested by withholding aid from Turkey or El Salvador is too outlandish to merit discussion.