Requiem for the Revolution, Part I

September 7, 2005

I sleepily shuffled into a tiny classroom tucked away in small corner of the Humanities wing at Ramapo College, a public liberal arts college in northern New Jersey. Our Professor, Dr Sam Mustafa, waited patiently as the students slowly filed in and settled down for the very first day of class at the start of the Fall semester. He cleared his throat and began to speak, and for the next fifteen years the introduction that followed would be indelibly imprinted on my mind like the markings of a reed pen on wet clay tablets:

“You will be forgotten.”

I leaned forward. “You will all be forgotten. The vast majority of us will be remembered for, at best, maybe two of three generations. Whatever hopes you may have for fame, legacy or immortality, remember this. There are three great fallacies that plague the study of history. The first is that history ‘had to happen the way it did’ to get us to where we are. This is nonsense, because nobody knows ‘where we are’ relative to the complete story of human history, which is still being written. This is the teleological fallacy.”

The mental fog vanished and I felt my senses sharpen.

“The second fallacy sees history as some epic struggle between good and evil. This is the fallacy of Manicheanism. We construct this narrative to suit our preexisting values and beliefs. The third has to do with projection, and the extent to which we make moral judgments about the events of the past based on our upbringing and the unique circumstances into which we were born. We view the past through the lens of our current experience and that of the civilization with which we identify.

 Welcome to World Civilizations I. What colour are your lenses?”

***

It has been said that history repeats itself. George Santayana’s most famous quote in this regard rings out like a prophetic, oracular warning any time a serious discussion is to be had about the supposedly cyclical nature of history, and the extent to which the ebb and flow of historical currents seems to follow a familiar rhythm for those who have ears to hear. Those who forget the lessons of the past may be indeed doomed to repeat them, but perhaps a proper understanding of first causes would better place us in a position to at best, avert calamity, and at least, mitigate its worst excesses.

The observation is as follows: at a particular time, and at a particular place, cracks in the social order begin to appear after a period of what was perceived of as relative stability. Great wealth and great poverty exist uneasily alongside each other, and society’s ruling elites, having long lost touch with the populace upon whose quiet acquiescence their privileged position rests, make blunder after blunder which alienates and then enrages the masses. Perhaps it is an ill-advised war which drains the public purse and prompts the Government to levy duties and taxes that push the people to a breaking point. Perhaps it is some wasteful and extravagant vanity project that becomes a rallying cry for the rabble-rousers. Or perhaps the regime delegitimises itself through the banality of corruption and incompetence. There are rumblings of discontent, followed by a heavy-handed, disproportionate response by the State, which, far from crushing dissent, sparks a conflagration of outrage which radicalizes the moderates, validates the radicals and moves those calling for the wholesale collapse of the regime from the fringes of the public discourse ever so closer to the centre. The conflagration creates an all too familiar spiral vortex of action, overreaction and destabilization: protests are violently put down. Leaders and intellectuals critical of the regime are captured, tortured, and killed. Disappearances are common. Freedom of expression is suppressed. And yet, for all the power and might of the State, they cannot prevail.

A charismatic figure emerges. He or she is able to not only articulate the inchoate discontent of the masses, but help give it structure and form. Such figures have a flair for the dramatic; their arguments sometimes wax poetic. Copies of their speeches are circulated by the underground, whatever form that may take. Anecdotes about the exceptional nature of these individuals take on lives of their own, and myths begin to form. And the more cruel the existing regime becomes in its desperation to project an aura of strength, the more the full extent of its precarious position becomes evident to all, for a regime that rules through fear and force of arms alone is the weakest one of all. For all their cynicism, the élites, in their na?veté, think that the armed forces are their sword and shield against the very people they presume to rule, as if the armed forces were separate and apart from the rest of the unwashed masses, with no social ties, bonds of fellowship or grievances in common. When the proverbial palace gates are finally stormed, the sentries posted do not fight to the last man. They either flee, or join the opposing side. Whatever remnants of the ancien régime that did not have the good sense to flee meet their untimely end, whether at the end of a firing squad, garrotte, guillotine, or long imprisonment. If there is an afterlife, one imagines the families of Czar Nicholas II and King Louis XVI commiserating together over their fate- and perhaps without a trace of self-awareness. But I digress.

In the heady days that follow the revolution, the euphoria is tangible. Soaring rhetoric is now accompanied by far more mundane debates over administrative matters. What of the rumours that the royalists were plotting with members of the extended royal family in Germany and Austria? How do we stop the internal food shortages, or break the blockades preventing grain from getting into our ports? Most importantly, the new Parliament is to be comprised of whom, exactly, and who shall preside over it? Thus, power struggles emerge, factions form, and former comrades-at-arms inevitably turn their daggers upon each other.

In the hierarchy that emerges, the towering figure that is invariably left standing is able to cement his or her position not just through wooing and seducing the masses, leading a successful revolt and toppling the previous regime, but by ruthlessly eliminating rivals within the fold. It is for this reason that after every great Revolution there is usually a great purge- not of defeated loyalists, but of dear, dear friends. The Machiavellian nature of these manoeuvres, however, is not always immediately apparent to the public. These figures must take great care to embody the ideals of the new zeitgeist, whether liberté, egalité and fraternité, or the spirit of the new proletariat utopia. One cannot shout ‘workers of the world unite!’ in the public square and be seen stabbing one’s fellows in the shadows. Better not to hand out bread in the proverbial Circus Maximus with hands visibly stained with the blood of compatriots[1]. The myth must be kept alive, and propaganda becomes more important than ever. The international media must also be seduced, in modern terms. The narrative, which is fairly easy to establish, is that of a wicked and perverse regime that receives its just deserts from a sweeping social movement whose time has simply come- a narrative not entirely false. The leaders of the successful revolt must (ideally) be made into altruistic avatars of justice in sharp contradistinction to the greedy, klepto-parasitic despots who had for too long kept the people under its jack-booted heel. There is usually some element of truth to this; in any revolution you will find not only rank opportunists and turncoats but sincere ideologues who want naught but the best for their countrymen and whose chief motive is not necessarily self-interest. This makes it easier to stir powerful emotions, tap into the natural human tendency to want to root for the underdog, and encourage precisely the kind of false dichotomy of thought necessary to frame complex socio-political phenomena in reductionist terms: heroes and villains. If a villain has been vanquished, we unconsciously look for an archetypical hero, and if one if not readily available, we will fashion the golden calf ourselves if the right materials are present. To wit, the potential candidate either openly validates our worldview, or serves as tabula rasa to allow us to project our hopes and fantasies onto this person. We want either a mirror, or an utter enigma. A cult of personality may even become the de facto state religion.

After the waves of euphoria have subsided however, a darker picture emerges. The purges begin. While there may have been an initial improvement in the overall standard of living, after a short spell the same type of hardships prevail as before. The new ruling class, while denouncing the excesses of their predecessors, often resort to the same tactics (or worse) because they are all too aware of the tenuousness of their grasp on power, having usurped through violence. An uneasy disillusionment sets in, and whether suddenly or through the slow passage of time the bright shining hope of a generation begins to resemble something not altogether unlike the darkness it was supposed to dispel, with the new hope behaving in disappointing yet all too familiar ways. The faithful are cowed into silence or bribed into compliance, but questions eventually find a voice in hushed, anxious tones barely above a whisper. Did he become a monster, as Nietzsche would put it, having ‘stared into the abyss’ for too long, or were these latent tendencies always there, but somehow overlooked? Perhaps the dashing, idealistic young revolutionary is trapped, or being ill-advised by wicked and invidious advisers acting in their own narrow interests, but under the cover of the leader’s authority. In each such instance there are some who go so far as to fantasize that the corruption, brutality and repression would come to an abrupt end if only their dear leader could be reliably informed as to what was really taking place. In such instances, the cult of personality is clearly working.

The stakes are high. If done correctly, this process can create a myth so powerful that this public persona can somehow survive the de-pedestalization that typically follows such elevation. The resultant cult of personality appears to defy gravity. Supporters and apologists find their identity and sense of self so wedded to their initial character assessment of this person, cause or movement that they would rather perform convoluted mental gymnastics to justify supposedly out of character or downright horrific acts than confront the cognitive dissonance associated with condemning a figure they once publicly upheld. The facts are debated or dismissed outright to fit the broader narrative, and no amount of logic or evidence can convince these people that the object of their fixation is worthy of condemnation, or at best, faint and qualified praise. There is no room for nuance. Critics, meanwhile, are flabbergasted by the wilful denial of these supporters, and fierce debates about the ‘legacy’ of these controversial figures can last for decades after the person’s death. Just as individual human memory often romanticizes the past, so too are we collectively prone to misplaced nostalgia. Surround yourself with a sufficiently impenetrable aura of greatness, and some misguided soul will excuse your worst excesses – he or she may have been cruel, sociopathic and capricious but they held the nation together, and things had to happen the way they happened in order for us to get to where we are.

Sounds familiar?

Creating a cult of personality, however, is a team effort. While the propagandists are no doubt busy concocting stories and aphorisms they can attribute to their figurehead, we are all the rest of us complicit in this process, from the media outlets who either cynically recognize the power of the underlying narrative and strategically withhold much-needed criticism, to those outlets who are perhaps themselves seduced or blinded by their own ideological affinity, to us as passive consumers who fail to challenge them when they do not live up to the highest standards of journalistic integrity. In the age of social media, we are all the more complicit when we uncritically share stories and anecdotes without doing basic factual checks once the narrative resonates with us or affirms or fundamental life choices - even when the facts as presented are false. It is why, for example, millions of people believe that Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple, supposedly gave a long-winded soliloquy about the importance of family and the impermanence of wealth just before he died. The widely shared speech attributed to Steve Jobs is a complete fabrication that was nonetheless widely circulated because of the poor and middle-classes’ deep need to believe that the ultra-wealthy are secretly miserable, full of regret and therefore pitiable to some extent. It serves a socially useful purpose to the élite- to diffuse class envy. Hollywood films in which a wealthy, ruthless businessman reveals some great hurt or lost love only to abandon his hard outer shell and reconnect with a lost love or reunite with estranged family provide a similar sort of release.

To inoculate ourselves against the tendency to idealize famous historical figures we must adopt a Stoic view from above. By this I mean that while as citizens we must act, vote (if we are so privileged) or otherwise fulfil our civic duty in real-time as events unfold, as students of history and human nature we reserve judgment on matters of legacy and contribution until at least death, whether it is the death of an individual, a movement, or an idea. For an anecdotal example of the wisdom of this Stoic restraint, we hearken back to the father of history himself, Herodotus.

“…UNTIL THE END IS KNOWN.”

In the histories of Herodotus, Solon, the great Athenian legislator and one of the founding fathers of Athenian democracy, is travelling through Lydia. Invited to the court of King Croesus of Sardis, the king asks the Senator as to who is the happiest man he has never known, fully expecting that Solon, after seeing his wealth, splendour, and idyllic family life, would surely name Croesus of Lydia the happiest of men. Not so. He names Tellus of Athens, a commoner who lived well during a time of prosperity, raised a happy family, died bravely in battle, and was buried with honours befitting a war hero. Incensed, Croesus refused to believe that this Tellus of Athens could be happier then himself, further asserting that if not Tellus of Athens, surely he, Croesus, King of Lydia, should be the happiest. Again, not so. The old legislator then named a pair of twins, Cleobis and Bito, strong, upright young men who, for their filial devotion to their mother, were esteemed by all who knew them, blessed by the gods, and died peacefully in their sleep. At this point the king is overcome with impatience, and Solon calmly explains that he will not be able to assess Croesus’ supposed happiness without knowing the manner of his death in taking the full measure of his life, uttering the famous words, “Call no man happy until the end is known.” The king could not comprehend, and dismissed Solon. In the years that would follow, Croesus’ son would be killed in a hunting accident, Croesus himself would be struck blind, and when he asked the famed Oracle at Delphi what would happen if he were to attack Persia, the Oracle replied that if he attacked Persia, “…a great empire would fall.” Oblivious to the ambiguity of that statement or blinded by his own hubris, Croesus attempted an ill-fated invasion of Persia that ended with his crushing defeat by King Cyrus. He was to be burnt alive for his impudence, and we are told that in his final moments he remembered the words of Solon of Athens and cried out with his last breath:

“Oh Solon! Oh Solon! Oh Solon! Count no man happy until the end is known!”

The ancient Greek historians saw history as a form of moral education and their cultural appreciation for tragedy as a performance art often manifested as dramatic flair, so anecdotes from Herodotus and Thucydides should sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt. Whilst some aspects of this story are probably apocryphal, perhaps we can all take a page from Solon’s book, and adapt its most famous maxim for our own purposes. We can count no man worthy until the end is known. I now draw your attention to the recent past for our first case study of the modern era.

NICARAGUA

To be certain, General Anastasio Somoza was a kleptocrat and a brute. Moulded in the style of right-wing dictators all too common in that era of Latin American history, the list of atrocities attributed to his regime read like a standard recipe from any repressive dictator’s cookbook: endemic corruption, widespread theft, suppression of labour unions, disenfranchisement of the rural poor, opposition to land reform, extra judicial executions and of course sprinkled with torture and disappearances throughout. A most notable entry into the hall of shame came in 1972, when in response to a devastating earthquake that left thousands dead and thousands more homeless, the Somoza regime, while unbelievably lethargic in responding to the crisis, proved quite nimble at illegally profiting from it. As international aid poured in, his regime used every available opportunity to re-appropriate aid for personal gain and that of his cronies. Somoza was not, however, altogether without some wiles. Like Augusto Pinochet in Chile or the military junta in Argentina during its Dirty War, he had read the geopolitical landscape well enough to know that in their intelligence preparation of the battlefield, the US saw South America, Central America and the Caribbean as a strategically vital theatre of operations in an ongoing Cold War, one that nearly escalated into a not-so-cold thermonuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As far as the CIA and the State Department were concerned, Soviet agents were canvassing Central and South America with the goal of setting up satellite states sympathetic to the Kremlin that could be used to project power in America’s back yard. There was some truth to this, and so the colour of the CIA’s lenses was therefore decidedly red. This cast a crimson hue on any and all movements advocating for social change, social justice or any form of redistribution of wealth. Any elements that appeared to be advocating for social change, much less outright socialism, according to this logic, must therefore be either unwitting puppets dangling on the ends of the strings of their hidden masters in Russia, or wilful provocateurs. The nightmare scenario was one in which multiple countries in Latin America formed a socialist league loyal to the Soviet Union on America’s doorstep, a direct challenge to American economic and military hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Whether or not the US’ operating framework was as misconceived as the now infamous Domino Theory used to justify the invasion of Vietnam is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that the situation was probably much more complex, and the autonomy of the various actors involved was probably understated. What the United States’ net assessment of the situation meant for the Somozas and the Pinochets of that era was that they were able to come to an understanding of sorts with their powerful neighbour to the North.

In stylized terms, the narrative they upheld went something like this: Latin America is crawling with communists. Sure, they wear different guises, some of which appear quite reasonable, even noble, but they are being aided, abetted and funded by Soviet agitprop peddlers and KGB spies. If these rabble rousers are allowed to spread their dangerous ideology and seize power, they would wreak all manner of havoc- nationalising American energy, agriculture, mining and other commercial interests, giving their Soviet overlords a base of operations, denying American companies access to growing Latin American markets and Latin American resources, and so on. Only the strong men of South America, these caballos on horseback, stood between the Red Tide and America’s shores. However, this sort of (wet) work was necessarily unpleasant – but necessary nonetheless. The right-wing dictators, with the support of the landed oligarchy and their paramilitary proxies, would root out the communists, ensure that American economic orthodoxy would be allowed to prevail, pursue monetary, fiscal and trade policies advantageous to Western corporate interests in the region, and maintain order. In return, the United States would be wilfully blind to the human rights abuses, torture and various forms of repression necessary to enforce such a status quo. Coincidentally, anyone who opposed this status quo eventually found themselves labelled as communists or communist sympathizers.

How convenient.

Are activist Roman Catholic priests galvanizing the poor under a theology of liberation? Then it must be some clever ruse for Soviet agitation. Is the bishop of El Salvador calling for El Salvadorian soldiers to disobey orders to shoot unarmed rural peasants? Why, he must be at least an unknowing dupe, but dangerous nonetheless. So it went. And in this great drama, Somoza played his part to perfection. For the Soviets, establishing a league of socialist client-states in Latin America would indeed represent quite an accomplishment. It would have been no less a feat of coup d’oeil than Hannibal crossing the Alps in 219 BC to rattle his sabre at Rome. The fear of the USSR having a ‘fourth column’ at the city’s gates, so to speak, would eventually even seep into popular culture and entertainment with the release of the 1984 Hollywood film Red Dawn, in which an intrepid band of high school students faces off against an invading coalition of Russian and Nicaraguan forces. Why Nicaragua?

Funny you should ask.

Enter Daniel Ortega. At first glance, he fit well enough the archetype of the Romantic revolutionary hero- at least in dim lighting. He established his revolutionary bona fides early on, having been arrested and tortured at the tender age of 15, and captured and beaten numerous times in the early days of the street protests that first convulsed the nation. He had an intuitive grasp of the power of the media and seized every opportunity to claim the moral high ground on the international stage. While he was trained in guerrilla warfare by Castro’s Special Forces and modelled his campaigns after Fidel’s overthrow of Bautista and Mao Tse Tung’s defeat of the Nationalist government in China, he often eschewed the more militant appearance of a Che Guevara or a Fidel Castro in favour of a more intellectual cast. As such, he was eminently more accessible to some Western audiences weaned on stories of Somoza’s brutality and corruption. In 1979, US President Jimmy Carter welcomed him to the White House, urging him to ‘be kinder’ to the US. To a generation of young, idealistic audiences not only in Latin America but even within the United States, he even became a darling of the Left in certain circles, and the overthrow of the decrepit Somoza regime was a cause célèbre. It seemed to fit very neatly into a popular and easily digestible narrative- the overthrow of an old, corrupt and self-interested ruling class by a younger, dynamic change agent bent on restoring justice and returning power to the people. Reality, as it would seem, defies such easy categorization. 

In 1979, the Somoza regime was overthrown, and initially, by all accounts, the Revolution proceeded to deliver on many of its longstanding promises. A programme of agrarian reform was implemented, empowering smaller impoverished rural farmers. Widespread economic reforms were announced which attempted to correct some of the worst distortions and inequities of the feudal crony capitalism of the Somoza era. Healthcare became more accessible and infant mortality rates declined. Literacy rates rose dramatically. From 1980 onwards, Nicaragua would achieve international acclaim from UNESCO and other bodies for their progress in health care, literacy, education, land reform, childcare, and a host of other social initiatives that came to be called a Cultural Revolution, one much less malignant than its namesake in China under Chairman Mao.

What would happen next would become part of the geopolitical lore on the 1980’s. In the US, there was a change in administration. President Ronald Reagan absolutely hated the very idea of a socialist state so close to the US border, and the March 31, 1986 cover of Time Magazine featured President Ortega in olive-green fatigues and dark glasses under the title The Man Who Makes Reagan See Red. The CIA immediately began mobilizing a counterrevolution composed primarily of Somoza loyalists, who began to wage a guerrilla war of their own to retake the apparatus of the State and restore the old order. When their publicized human rights abuses prompted Congress to cut US funding for these so-called contras, men whom Mr. Reagan once referred to as “…the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers”, Nicaraguan exiles who were loyal to the old Somoza regime began to engage in wholesale narcotrafficking to the United States in exchange for using a portion the proceeds to finance the counterrevolutionary effort. Men such as Oscar Danilo Blandón and Norwin Meneses Cantarero shipped tonnes of cocaine into the United States, and with what appeared to be the tacit non-objection if not outright support of the CIA. During the second term of the Reagan administration, in spite of the fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran was under an arms embargo imposed by the US Government ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, high-ranking US officials were secretly facilitating the sale of armaments and matériel to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in order to help finance the contras in what would become known as the Iran-Contra scandal. The counterrevolution failed, but Ortega would find himself politically exiled to the opposition bench for virtually all of the 1990’s and most of the first decade of the new century.

In 2007, however, Daniel Ortega ascended to the Nicaraguan presidency for the second time. Whatever the ideals of the original Sandinista revolution, however, the second presidency of ‘Danny’ Ortega has, by all accounts, taken a much darker turn.

End of Part I

Notes

[1] There are notable exceptions to this rule. In 133BC, the Roman tribune Tiberius Gracchus was beaten to death by enraged Senators while attempting to implement ambitious land reform legislation – the infamous Lex Agraria. His brother Gaius Gracchus would have his head cut off a few years later by order of the Senate for his attempts to revive this controversial law. Because the bounty was set at the weight of his severed head in gold, the assassin dug Gaius’ brain out of his head and poured molten lead into his skull to increase the weight. The guilty parties in this sordid drama, some of whom came from Rome’s wealthiest, most prestigious families, did not appear to suffer too much discredit.