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15 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
Twisting the Truth, September 13, 2003
According to Noam Chomsky, the US has turned Latin America into "one of the world's most awful horror chambers," in which every attempt to bring about some constructive change has been met with "a new dose of US violence" (pp4-5). Turning to the facts, democratic revolutions occurred with US support in Ecuador (1979), Peru (1980), Bolivia (1982), Honduras (1982), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985), Uruguay (1985), Guatemala (1986), El Salvador (1989), Panama (1989), Chile (1990), Nicaragua (1990) and Paraguay (1993).Moreover - and Chomsky ignores this point - even under the prior military regimes, the death tolls are instructive: in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay (hundreds); in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador (thousands); or in Guatemala (scores of thousands) - major crimes, surely, but hardly noticeable in comparison with the multiple millions butchered at the same time in Marxist hell states such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique. Chomsky suppresses these facts, invoking one far-left front group after another: Americas Watch, Oxfam America, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, the Latin American Studies Association, the Institute for Policy Studies. On El Salvador, he repeatedly cites the Legal Aid Office of the Archdiocese of San Salvador (pp15, 18, 25). He does not explain that the first Legal Aid Office, Socorro Juridico, was repudiated by the Catholic Church because of its misleading civilian death counts (Washington Post, May 15, 1982), while its replacement, Tutela Legal, was found to have invented an army massacre of 250 people (Washington Post, August 19, 1984). He does not explain that far from supporting a feudal oligarchy against social change, the US backed a leftist regime which nationalised the banks while expropriating major land holdings for redistribution to the poor. He does not explain that in retaliation, the far right and its military allies organised death squads which killed not only radical activists but also the ruling Christian Democrats, at one point even targeting the US Ambassador (Washington Post, September 17, 1984). Since he conceals these facts, it is hardly surprising that he does not predict the outcome: the US achieved democratic reforms while ending death squad murders and defeating the communist FMLN, producing a multi-party system with a free press, freedoms of speech, religion, occupation and movement, independent labour unions, a mixed economy, and improving civil, political and judicial guarantees (John Norton Moore, "The Secret War in Central America," p121). On Nicaragua, Chomsky's source for Contra abuses is the infamous Reed Brody report (pp10-1), written "at the initiative of a New York law firm representing Nicaraguan interests" (p256n18), i.e. prepared on behalf of the Sandinistas' law firm with Sandinista complicity. When Chomsky pretends that the Contras were terrorists, he does not explain that four-fifths of the fatalities in their operations were combatants, as the Sandinistas admitted (Shirley Christian, "Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family," p369). In a typical move, Chomsky quotes a Contra leader to show that he is killing civilians (p11), transferring to a footnote his very next sentence: "We are not killing civilians" (p256n19). Conversely, when Chomsky denies that the Sandinistas are guilty of mass murder, he does not mention that 2,000 political prisoners were killed in the first months of their dictatorship (Moore, p143n94), with 3,000 disappearances, according to Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights (Roger Miranda, "The Civil War in Nicaragua," p193); that the Sandinistas kill their victims by stabbing, or that "the prisoner's arms and legs are cut off while he is alive, and he is left to bleed to death" (Moore, p126). He does not mention 4,200 political prisoners (Washington Post, March 31, 1982), the ethnic cleansing of 70,000 Miskito Indians (Miranda, pp253-6) or the forced removal of 200,000 peasants to resettlement camps in order to create free-fire zones, allowing the Sandinistas "to use their artillery without concern for civilian casualties" (Sam Dillon, "Commandos: The CIA and Nicaragua's Contra Rebels," pp159-60). When Chomsky excuses Sandinista crimes as wartime measures (pp72-5), he does not explain that the Sandinistas were building an army of 200,000, the largest in the region, before there was any Contra threat (New York Times, February 20, 1981). When he tries to whitewash the Sandinistas' antisemitism (pp77-8), he does not mention that his sources have been discredited (Joshua Muravchik, Susan Alberts and Antony Korenstein, "Sandinista Anti-Semitism and its Apologists," Commentary, September 1986). When he denies the totalitarian goals of the Sandinistas (pp80-2), he does not mention the many defectors who warned of a communist dictatorship, including Alvaro Baldizon of the Ministry of the Interior, who "related that alleged opponents of the revolution had been tortured and murdered by the thousands" (Martin Kriele, "Power and Human Rights in Nicaragua," German Comments, April 1986); Miguel Bolanos Hunter of the State Security Service, who detailed the training of Salvadoran guerrillas and warned of the plan to overthrow democracy in Costa Rica (Moore, pp26, 31); and Roger Miranda, chief of staff to Sandinista Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, who wrote of "a dictatorial, antidemocratic system" which "proclaimed adherence to Marxism-Leninism" as it entered "the Cold War camp of the Soviet Union" (Miranda, pp19, 75, 77). All such evidence is suppressed in this book. When Chomsky defends the veracity of the 1984 election (pp137-43), he does not explain that there was no freedom of speech, that the democratic opposition was denied access to the media, that the only remaining independent newspaper was censored, that campaign rallies were broken up by gangs of thugs resembling "the stormtroopers (SA) of the Nazi era in Germany," that the major opposition parties withdrew in protest and that there was no secret vote, since the ballots were marked with personal numbers (Kriele, ibid.). Chomsky did not predict that having crushed the population, devastated the economy and caused 50,000 deaths (Miranda, p281), the Sandinistas would incur landslide defeats in free elections in 1990, 1996 and 2001. Indeed, Chomsky's communist "popular movements" have never won a democratic vote in Central America. Is further comment necessary?
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