Workers World, Vol. 21, No. 24
June 12 – In his great classic, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx says that great personalities often enter the stage of history twice – once as tragedy and again as farce. What Marx says about personalities may be equally true of historical events in general.
Half a century ago the liberation forces of Nicaragua, under the leadership of General Cesar Augusto Sandino, were conducting a truly great revolutionary struggle to emancipate the country from imperialist domination. The forces at the disposal of Sandino, notwithstanding his immense popularity with the peasantry and the poor in the urban centers, mostly workers, were meager when compared with the overwhelming might of the adversary – the U.S. military colossus spearheaded by the U.S. Marines.
Notwithstanding its military prowess, the U.S. government at that time dispatched Henry L. Stimson, then Assistant Secretary of State, to Nicaragua with a plan for “mediation.” The Coolidge administration deemed it necessary to try to form a coalition government which would include the Sandinist forces. The U.S. government, though Stimson, proposed “fair and impartial elections” if only the Sandinist forces would lay down their arms.
How familiar these proposals still sound today!
Sandino contemptuously rejected the proposals which, as has been proven a hundred and one times over the succeeding fifty years, were intended as nothing but a fraud and deceit upon the masses. Sandino continued to fight to the very last rather than accept a shameful and deceitful formula concocted by the U.S. State Department in order to put across its domination through a democratic façade.
If half a century ago the mission of Stimson and the U.S. intervention in Nicaragua had such tragic consequences for the Nicaraguan people, today’s engagement by the U.S. of substantially the same tricks and devices is of an altogether farcical character. It is totally out of accord with reality. The face of the planet has literally been transformed in the half century since the Stimson mission.
Whereas the liberation forces in Nicaragua at that time were almost totally without direct and formidable allies in the world, today the Sandinist forces enjoy the powerful sympathy and support of the bulk of humanity. Moreover, unlike half a century ago, Central America as a whole is today on the verge of a revolutionary struggle.
Not far from Nicaragua stands the socialist bastion of revolutionary Cuba. The support of a material, political, and moral character that the Nicaraguan revolutionary struggle can derive from it is enormous.
All of Latin America, every progressive worker, peasant, student, and intellectual, awaits the revolutionary victory in Nicaragua with bated breath. At this moment the Sandinist forces are not only inside Managua, but a stone’s throw from the Intercontinental Hotel where the miserable clique of Somoza rabble are ensconced, feverishly consulting with U.S. envoys on how to deal with the hopeless situation.
But American finance capital has not thrown in the towel. Even as the Somozist National Guard continually shrinks to a mere cipher of its former self, the Carter administration shows no inclination to fully retreat of its own accord. On the contrary, it is once again resorting to the time-honored use of various odious instrumentalities to carry through its nefarious scheme to retain the Somoza dictatorship without Somoza and without the trappings of a dictatorial regime.
For one thing, it is feverishly beefing up the so-called CONDECA (Central American Defense Council) to intervene militarily. There can be no doubt about the fact that all sorts of plans have been set in motion to make CONDECA operational at the proper moment. The National Guard too is being supplemented by the use of foreign mercenaries who are already engaged in the fighting. The puppet regimes in Chile, Guatemala, and Honduras are unquestionably funneling all kinds of support and mercenaries to Somoza.
Nevertheless, the Sandinistas have already captured the basic interior cities as well as many villages, hamlets, and, above all, strategic hilltops. The latter are of tremendous military significance, even if a prolonged struggle is enforced upon the liberation forces.
It should not be thought that the Carter administration is confining its strategic approach to the revolutionary movement in Nicaragua merely to employing the threat of CONDECA. It has other irons in the fire as well. Washington is hoping, as it did a half a century ago, that by the use of hocus-pocus, pro-imperialist, bourgeois-coalition politics it can ensnare segments of the Sandinist Front into some sort of viable coalition government with elements of the bourgeois opposition to Somoza. This is what the imperialist press calls the “risk element” in the State Department strategy.
Both the Washington Post and the New York Times refer to this strategy and approve of the Carter administration using it. The risk, you see, is that the U.S. government must then lower its profile of clandestine support to the Somozist National Guard while conspicuously making overtures to a new revolutionary government once it takes over. But this government, they hope, will be a coalition of conservatives, moderates, and disguised pro-imperialist elements.
“The risk,” according to the New York Times editorial of June 12, “in this gingerly approach is that it could facilitate a radical [meaning a genuine revolutionary – S.M.] takeover. Still, it continues to be wise policy.”
This, then, is the two-pronged nature of the U.S. thrust on Nicaragua. It employs clandestine methods of continuing assistance to the Somoza forces, hoping to save them intact as a viable force even without Somoza and as a means of bargaining with the new revolutionary government once it is established and trying to integrate it with the Sandinist forces.
But the U.S. is not putting all its bets on such a variant of development. Even the integration of the National Guard with the revolutionary forces would still pose the possibility of a “radical takeover,” to use the Times’ phraseology. A coalition government, which in the Times’ reckoning means a government dominated by bourgeois elements at the top, with the Somozist National Guard as a protective instrument for its survival against an assault by the revolutionary Sandinist forces, might not survive once Somoza is gone and the National Guard possibly fully disarmed. It might end in the same way as the Imperial Guard, which stuck by the Shah to the last until it was overwhelmed by the Iranian revolutionary forces, mostly the Fedayeen and the Mujahedeen.
It is for this reason that U.S. policy in relation to Nicaragua retains still another facet of U.S. diplomacy. As the Times puts it in that same editorial, “it continues to be wise policy to leave the big stick in the closet.” Note carefully. It doesn’t say to throw away the big stick, but to put it in the closet for use in case ... This is nothing less than the same old veiled threats used for more than half a century in the form of gunboat diplomacy and the landing of Marines south of the border.
Anyone who thinks that U.S. imperialist policy can fundamentally alter in this respect is not assessing the role of American finance capital according to the experience of the last century and certainly in its most contemporary phase of development.
On the same day that the Times editorial appeared, the UPI carried a dispatch from Moscow dated June 11 which said that the Soviet press agency TASS charged that “American instructors were teaching Afghan rebels in special camps how to use weapons against the pro-Soviet Afghanistan Government.”
If the U.S. government, which is besieged all over the world for its colonialist, interventionist, and militaristic role, can afford to intervene in a small country thousands of miles away after a victorious revolution, how can it possibly retreat in its so-called “own backyard”? Obviously the Pentagon planners have not learnt the lesson of Viet Nam.
If the U.S., with hardly any dissent in Congress, made ready plans to militarily intervene in faraway Yemen, and of course in Afghanistan as well as in Ethiopia, how can it possibly persuade its own militarists to make a graceful exit out of Nicaragua? The past half century shows that even where socialist revolutions are completely victorious, the U.S. still continues subversion and sabotage. This, however, should not deter but can only stimulate the revolutionary struggle to defeat U.S. imperialism, since it shows it cannot be expected to surrender or gracefully bow out.
In order to force it to retreat, it will be necessary to muster that type of revolutionary determination which forced the U.S. out of Viet Nam and Cuba. Fortunately for the Nicaraguan people, the liberation forces and their vanguard elements have demonstrated in action, particularly in the last two years, that they are more than equal to this great historic task.
Imperialism brigandage is not only out of date chronologically, it is out of accord with the vital fundamental trends of world history. It is a time of high tide for the revolutionary forces not only in Nicaragua but in all of Central America, and soon in all of the Americas. No amount of force can stop the march of these great historic forces. The victory of the liberation forces in Nicaragua is inevitable as is the victory of all the oppressed and exploited everywhere.
Last updated: 11 May 2026