The Left’s human sacrifices and its war on peoples

The Left has sacrificed human beings in pursuit of its grand ideas throughout its history, This has now also happened in Nicaragua: Ortega’s regime killed, tortured, captured and condemned to “defend the revolution” and deal with a “conspiracy.” Why does the Left consider dissent to be treason? Why has the European Left been so dazzled by Latin American revolutionary rhetoric while failing to critique its predatory extractivism that has declared war on the region’s peoples?

José Luis Rocha

During the Cold War, Latin American dictators murdered, disappeared and imprisoned the citizens oppressed under their jackboots in the name of anti-communism. Today, “progressive left” rulers are massacring us in the name of socialism and anti-imperialism because people must be punished when they don’t appreciate and recognize what’s good for them.

People deserve to be punished

Napoleon Bonaparte imposed French revolutionary principles at sword’s point and on a heaving mountain of corpses. He best articulated the idea of progress with bloodletting in a letter to one of his lieutenants in which he justified his actions by arguing that if the people reject their own happiness, they are guilty of anarchy and deserve to be punished. Today, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega punish out-of-line, insubordinate people with the same reasoning. They have enough bullets to make people pay for their ingratitude and lack of class consciousness.

Both men are applauded, a capella or with a full orchestra, by leftwing analysts such as Tariq Ali, Atilio Borón, Emir Sader and Ignacio Ramonet; and joined in Spain by the Podemos party’s politicians-consultants, hiding from the Treasury the petrodollars Chavism pays them for their advice. José Mujica, the former President of Uruguay, applies a cooling poultice to a bleeding gash when he says that Ortega must realize that, at some stage, the time comes to leave power, but doesn’t say a word about the massacres and the hundreds of political prisoners. Looking over to Venezuela, Mujica invokes the danger of a military intervention, but neither the millions of migrating Venezuelans who have voted with their feet nor the evidence of the millions who have demonstrated their repudiation in the streets have managed to extract the most minimal comment from him. At the other end of Latin America, just settling into Mexico’s presidential chair, Andrés Manuel López Obrador discredits the Organization of American States’ multiple, unified vision as interventionist…

Hence the questions that Uruguayan journalist and political theorist Raúl Zibechi asks and asks of us: How could José Mujica remain silent for so many months, while hundreds of young people died in Nicaragua and after Ernesto Cardenal’s open letter, until finally making some criticism of Ortega? How can certain noted Latin American intellectuals justify the slaughter with unsustainable arguments or with a guilty silence? What leads them to demand freedom for Lula without turning against the government of Nicaragua?
Tariq Ali, Atilio Borón, Emir Sader, Ignacio Ramonet, José Mujica and Andrés Manuel López Obrador are intellectuals and politicians who deserve some respect because they have all—some more, others less—shown sparks of lucidity in their speeches or their writings at more than one moment in their lives. That’s why it’s surprising to see them underestimating, disparaging or even discrediting the demonstrations of repudiation against the Ortega and Maduro regimes.

In their opinion these aren’t genuine revolts but insurgences, skillfully conceived and meticulously executed by imperialism. If the masses participate, it must be because they were tricked. After all, wasn’t it the alienated masses that brought Bolsonaro into power in Brazil? The masses can be mistaken; they are often wrong. In whom or in what does sovereignty then lie? According to the Left, sovereignty is an impersonal entity that lies in inalienable principles. The people on the streets aren’t sovereign or self-determined; they are manipulated and dependent, especially if they demonstrate against its buddies…

An auto-immune /meme:
“It was a conspiracy”

Arthur Koestler, George Orwell and Raymond Aron, all European critical thinkers, turned away from the Left when they saw their fellow believers give the crassest justifications for Stalin’s purges. The Polish writer and journalist Isaac Deutscher, whose judgment was always nuanced and virtually unruffled by prejudices, penetrated with easy empathy the experience that marked these thinkers: “There’s no spectacle more repugnant than that of post-revolutionary tyranny dressed in the banners of freedom.” While these intellectuals exercised criticism, others knuckled under to the power of the red czar. There was always a “conspiracy” to attribute the imperative need for exceptional measures.

The idea of conspiracy is a meme, as this word is defined by the British biologist Richard Dawkins: a unit of cultural transmission that replicates in the same way as genes. He said that in the same way as genes propagate in a gene pool by jumping from one body to another via sperm or ovules, in conspiracies, the memes propagate in the meme pool by jumping from one brain to another via a process that, in its broadest sense, can be called imitation.

The best way to stop a meme from propagating is to subject it to critical scrutiny. The problem is that there are auto-immune memes and the conspiracy meme is one of them. Conspiracy theorists claim that the absence of evidence of conspiracy is precisely the best proof that the conspiracy was seamlessly fabricated with utmost professionalism. In the case of Nicaragua, the absence of evidence that the April rebellion was sponsored by the imperial Right is the best proof that institutions such as the CIA and its underlings participated in its design and execution at the highest level.

Ideologies that are religions

The Right’s conspiracy theory, which attributes all geopolitical evils and movements to Putin’s meddling or Islamic fundamentalism, dovetails the Left’s conspiracy theory, which attributes all the South’s hardships to the imperial Right. On both sides, the pensée unique is a single idea that explains everything…and reveals its religious roots.

In The Worship of Man, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari shows the religious roots of various currents of Western secular ideologies: “The modern age has witnessed the rise of new natural-law religions such as liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise.

“If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam… Whereas Buddhists believe that the law of nature was discovered by Siddhartha Gautama, Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Like other religions, Communism too has its holy scripts and prophetic books, such as Marx’s Das Capital, which foretold that history would soon end with the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Communism had its holidays and festivals, such as the First of May and the anniversary of the October Revolution. It had theologians adept at Marxist dialectics, and every unit in the Soviet Army had a chaplain, called a commissar, who monitored the piety of soldiers and officers. Communism had martyrs, holy wars and heresies, such as Trotskyism. Soviet Communism was a fanatical and missionary religion. A devote Communist could not be a Christian or a Buddhist, and was expected to spread the gospel of Marx and Lenin even at the price of his or her life.”

The recipe of terror

The conspiracy theory has served to justify terror. Virtue and terror were a revolutionary slogan ever since Robespierre proposed: “If the attribute of popular government in peace is virtue, the attribute of popular government in revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror; terror without virtue is fatal, virtue without terror is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue.”

The Soviet revolution took up this legacy, putting into practice a lot more terror than virtue. As Grigory Zinoviev, one of the seven members of the first Soviet Politburo, wrote in 1918, “We must carry along with us 90 million of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.” And in 1919 when Professor Kuznetsov warned Trotsky that people in Moscow were dying of hunger, he replied: “That’s not hunger. When Titus was taking Jerusalem, Jewish mothers ate their children. When I have your mothers eating their young, then you can tell me you’re starving.”

The Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alekievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel prize for Literature, quoted an order from Lenin in 1918: “We must hang (and it has to be hanging, so that the people will see) no fewer than 1,000 inveterate kulaks, the rich ones… seize their grain, take hostages... Make sure that people hear about it one hundred versts around and tremble from fear.” (A verst is an obsolete Russian unit of length equal to approximately 0.7miles)

It would obviously be wrong to maintain that these comments contain all the intentions of Trotsky and Lenin’s thought. In fact, Trotsky condemned Stalin’s hunger policy which, between 1931 and 1934, ended the lives of more than 5 million people, of whom about 4 million were Ukrainians, an eighth of that country’s population. However, it would also be fallacious to take refuge in a distinction between historical and ideal socialism in order to distance oneself from this tradition.

Today, Stalin is rightly blamed for a large part of the Soviet Union’s crimes, but he was a continuation of a tendency to deprecate the will, judgment and life of the masses. Focusing on this pattern, the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote that Stalin was clearly a singular case but many of his theories and his characteristic traits, such as using death as a political tool, and of course his paranoia, were shared by his comrades.

The British political activist and writer Tariq Ali has to recognize that the path initiated by Lenin and expanded by Stalin led to the constitution of an authoritarian State that denied its citizens their civil liberties, expropriated all rights of association and organization, maintained a total media monopoly, repressed ideas and resorted to crude displays of nationalism and xenophobia to maintain some legitimacy.

Why did this happen? Ali explains that its highest priority was safeguarding the revolution at any cost. And the cost was high: the suspension of civil liberties, summary executions, arrests without trial and the prohibition of other Soviet parties, whose rationale was to definitively banish dissent among its ranks. This is the same recipe Ortega has used on the people of Nicaragua and very similar to that of Maduro. Regrettably, Ali refuses to recognize these traits in the “21st-century socialist” governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Human beings sacrificed in the
name of the Left’s noble ideals…

One of the Left’s weapons for seizing or holding onto power has been terror and the suppression of liberties. Using terror to stay in power is evidenced by Thermidor in France (1794) and the kulak liquidation policy in the Soviet Union (1929-33); and using it to seize power by the attacks of anarchist terrorism.

At one point the Sandinista revolution wanted to distance itself from the tradition of widespread terror. Its failure to achieve it fully in the 1980s include multiple individual abuses and also the terror it propagated on the Caribbean Coast and in rural Nicaragua in defense of the revolution, admittedly in the midst of a war waged indirectly by the United States. In April 2018 it fully resumed this tradition of spreading terror throughout the country in a context that wasn’t remotely similar.

But leftwing analysts and politicians, who would never apply repressive policies or want them for themselves, assume that what happens in Nicaragua and Venezuela is the result of the extremes to which leftist leaders are forced when they are victims of that auto-immune meme, a conspiracy. They refuse to see that what is being used in Nicaragua and in Venezuela isn’t even the Robespierre principle, because in both countries what we have is terror without virtue; just fatal terror.

…and of the goals of
the Right and of religion

Obviously, the Left hasn’t been the only one to use terror and practice holocausts. The most and largest human sacrifices have been perpetrated in the name of progress and religious beliefs. In order to accomplish them, progress has been cloaked as civilizing companies, promoting racial purity or economic growth.

The German theologian and economist Franz Hinkela¬mmert wrote some time ago about human sacrifices. He explained that Western society always talks about a man so infinitely worthy that for him and his freedom concrete man must be destroyed. Concrete man’s most ordinary rights have been erased in the name of man’s goals such as knowing Christ, saving his soul, having freedom and democracy or building communism. From the perspective of those purported values, rights seem merely mediocre ends, materialistic goals in conflict with society’s elevated ideas. Obviously, it isn’t a question of renouncing any of those ideals but rather of rooting them in the ordinary and immediate: the right of all to be able to live.

Hinkelammert gives us a hint about the bait that attracts leftwing intellectuals: a noble ideal. He says that if the construction of that ideal leaves a trail of concrete human bodies it should be rejected. That must be the criterion that leftist activists and intellectuals employ when subjecting historical socialisms’ experiences to critical scrutiny.

There were always
dissidents on the Left

Leftwing analysts and politicians in many parts of the world have made a preferential option for everything leftist in Latin America. But this position is contrary to the Left’s tradition since its inception.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s supporters throughout Europe split when he discarded his republican attire to don that of an emperor. When Beethoven, who had composed Symphony No. 3 in his honor and titled it Bonaparte, heard that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor in May 1804, he tore the top off the title page and renamed it Eroica. Earlier in the French Revolution there were extreme expressions of division among the Left of the day. Dissentions between the Cordeliers, Jacobins and Girondins enable us to know now which ones were for granting the most political and social rights.

Karl Marx invested much of his time and intellectual wit to fighting those he considered members of a false Left, a portmanteau into which he put idealists, radical activists, dreamers, those who had sold out and been coopted. Most of those he fought with were his close companions in the struggle, breaking with them when they adhered to questionable creeds, repressive regimes or sterile ventures.

The history of socialism was marked by divisions. Lenin and his friend Martov divided the Russian Social Democratic Party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party when they split from the German Social Democratic Party because its leadership supported Germany’s imperialist pretensions and involvement in the First World War. According to these two revolutionaries, this option went against proletarian internationalism because it chose a national inter-class alliance and set workers against each other in defense of imperialist and nationalist flags. This schism caused Luxemburg’s breakup with her old friend Karl Kautsky, who saw the war as the fight against the czar’s absolutism.

Isaac Deutscher wrote, “Hegel says somewhere that any party is real only when it becomes divided. The idea, far from being a paradox, is simple and profound in its dialectic realism. Any political movement (or any philosophical school of thought) as it grows and develops cannot help unfolding the contradictions inherent in itself and its environment; and the more it unfolds them the richer is its content and vitality. Stalin’s conception of the monolithic party was one of his terroristic utopias, the pipe-dream of an autocrat, frightened to death of any dissention or ‘deviation’ and raising himself in his imagination above the realities of society and history.”

With comparable panic against dissent, a large part of the Latin American Left is closing monolithic ranks around its hagiography of self-proclaimed leaders and is now sheltering under its cloak López Obrador, a Social Democrat it clings to as a life vest despite the repudiation of the Zapatista movement, which refused him its support during the electoral campaign and now denounces the holocausts he is preparing on the altar of progress.

When they abandon democracy...

The images of Vladimir Lenin, León Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg can today share the same altar but, but as flesh-and-blood human beings they squabbled with others whose ideological differences and strategic options annoyed them. Their dissents should help us formulate our own political criteria.

Lenin made the decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, but he didn’t want to replace it with a new, revolution-generated one. Trotsky justified the dissolution in these terms: “The open and direct struggle for power enables the laboring masses to acquire a wealth of political experience in a short time and thus rapidly to pass from one stage to another in the process of their mental evolution. The ponderous mechanism of democratic institutions cannot keep pace with this evolution—and this is in proportion to the vastness of the country and the imperfection of the technical apparatus at its disposal.”

In marked opposition to this analysis, Rosa Luxemburg proclaimed her defense of democracy and its institutions: “…the cumbersome mechanism of democratic institutions possesses a powerful corrective—namely, the living movement of the masses, their unending pressure. And the more democratic the institutions, the livelier and stronger the pulse-beat of the political life of the masses, the more direct and complete is their influence…

“To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.”

On this point Karl Kautsky, a friend to Marx and even more so Engels, agrees with Rosa Luxemburg, denouncing the Bolshevik dismantling of direct democracy’s institutions. His denouncement went even further: “After the destruction of the large estates Bolshevism had nothing more to offer the peasants. Indeed, the peasants’ love for the Bolshevik was soon changed to hatred for the town workers, who did not work and who could not deliver goods for agricultural purposes; to hatred also against the ruling powers, who sent soldiers into the villages in order to commandeer the commodities…

“…it endeavored to abolish class differences. It began by humiliating and destroying the upper classes, and hence it really threatens to end in a new kind of class-society… Right from the beginning of their supremacy (the Bolsheviks) showed themselves to be filled with human ideals, which had their origins in the conditions of the proletariat as a class. ….if we would consider the question of their culpability, we should find this came to light…when they decided, in order to gain power, to sacrifice the principles of democracy…”

Within the Left,
dissent is betrayal

On this point, despite the differences that had distanced them, Luxemburg from the left and Kautsky from the Social Democratic center agreed in their decided defense of democracy’s principles and institutions. They warned Lenin about the many dangers entailed in prohibiting all opposition parties, even if it was—as the Bolsheviks claimed—a “temporary measure,” probably not intending that this suppression would last throughout the Soviet regime’s entire existence.

At the point of ending his active life, Lenin was troubled by doubts and fears. Isaac Deutscher said, “He realized that he had gone too far, and that the new machine of power was turning into a mockery of his principles. He felt alienated from the State of his own making. At a party congress, in April 1922, the last congress he attended, he strikingly expressed this sense of alienation.” On his sick bed, and against his doctors’ orders, he dictated notes on Soviet policy towards the small nations. It was an involuntary way of saying that Luxemburg and Kautsky were right: “I am, it seems, strongly guilty before the workers of Russia.” Deutscher concludes: “In his ability to utter such words lay an essential part of Lenin’s moral greatness.”

This, perhaps excessive, narration of the old brawls between comrades shows that the Left has had traditional internal differences since its inception. But the way of addressing them—both in the heat of the moment and a posteriori —has always been total disqualification. Bakunin and Kautsky were confined in the socialist’s ninth circle of hell. Luxemburg was vetoed by Stalinism and is still not entered in the Communist hagiography with full rights. Kautsky still awaits his vindication.

We’ve not yet shaken off the dominant influence attained by the Soviet version, as a Mecca of Marxism, which ultimately saw dissent and divisions as betrayal. This way of “evolving” has impoverished the tradition of socialist and Marxist thought.

Not only the empire…

Europe has been a constant scene of conflicts among the Left’s different factions. But in Latin America it’s enough just to call yourself a leftist. The strongmen of 21st-century socialism only had to call themselves leftists for intellectually impoverished leftists to recognize them as such, not caring what they do with people, just fascinated by what their proclamations say. Perhaps they think this is the only Left we can achieve here. It’s a way of saying: “Every nation has the Left it deserves.”

Influenced by the eternal conspiracy meme, they only want to see a movie where the empire has the starring role and leftist governments are working to undermine it. The people are just extras favoring one side or the other. They will pay homage to a regime if it opposes the empire—even if only rhetorically and in everything else submits to its logic.

That blunt narrative doesn’t correspond to reality. The empire moves its pieces but people also deploy theirs. Sometimes the moves overlap and tactical interests partially coincide. If the people’s moves are varied, contradictory and often erratic, and don’t obliterate the imperial interests in play, neither does imperial action cancel out the people’s strength.

According to pragmatic realpolitik, the empire dominates. The empire is the invariable variable, which is why it’s ridiculous that some analysts claim, as a novel finding, that the United States is interested in Venezuelan oil and deride the idea that the people also have their own interests; and are moving their own pieces. Within the major narrative of imperial strategy are hundreds of small narratives of surreptitious and open resistance that are also important.

There’s no better example of the duality of this confrontation than the armed counterrevolution (Contra) in revolutionary Nicaragua during the 1980s. The Contra was a peasant movement that arose through the FSLN’s urban-centered, repressive policy in the countryside. The US government provided arms and resources to those peasants to maintain them, so they could last and have a greater military impact. But, even with a hundred Elliot Abrams’ and two hundred Oliver Norths, the Reagan administration would not have been able to establish such a movement.

The Contra’s underlying component was a discontented peasantry, which not only fueled the ranks of the Resistance’s army but also provided the basic elements all guerrillas need: a sympathetic population where they could hide, feed, rest and ambush. For the narrative that only sees good/bad, white/black, communists /imperialists, this version is too inconvenient.

Percunia non olet

Just like historians who focus on relating episodes from the lives of emperors, princes and princesses, many leftists also exclude ordinary people from history, those Rubén Darío called, “the wandering, municipal and difficult masses.”

Only two can play on their checkerboard: the empire and those who oppose it. They forget or relegate to the insignificant events box the clamors of the murdered, the widows, the mothers, the children, the political prisoners… Perhaps they think, “If they hadn’t been manipulated they would complain less.” They leave aside that the Left also gets its resources from the unfair, bloody, imperial market.

The Roman emperor Vespasian declared Pecunia non olet (money doesn’t smell) when he was reproached for his new tax on the urine collected from public urinals to be used as a powerful whitener for clothes. The Germans still say Geld stinkt nicht (Money doesn’t stink). Economists say that money is fungible: it’s impossible to determine where it came from once it’s all thrown into a single sack.

The Latin American and global leftists who applaud the Left in power consider themselves purists, but they don’t question the origin of funds once they are deposited in the coffers of politically correct foundations. It doesn’t matter if they came from bribes paid to the Ortega government by mining companies or logging mafias. Nor does it seem to matter to them if this now sweet-smelling money goes to social projects or into the Ortega family’s pockets. The only thing that matters is that it goes to leftists in presidential office… These funds non olet. The same happens with foreign cooperation. It doesn’t matter if the money comes from a metalworker’s daily sweat or from a land-grabbing company in Senegal, once filtered by the State and the foundations that channel it to development projects in the South. That money non olet either.

Ortega handed over
Nicaragua to mining

In the 1980s anti-US propaganda tried to convince us that Coca Cola was “the black water of imperialism.” In the 21st century the Venezuelan oil that sustains Cuba, underpins Evo Morales’ regime and has fattened the pockets of Ortega’s inner circle appears to be seen by some leftists as crystal clear water.

They probably think the dividends from unbridled capital accumulation that Latin American leftists have accrued from Venezuelan oil are better going to fatten the pockets of leftist leaders rather than falling into the coffers of the traditional rightwing oligarchies or transnational corporations.

But, how is it possible that when so many activists and intellectuals are now speaking out against the ravages of mining, there are leftist analysts willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that, under the Ortega regime, mining has expanded like never before in Nicaraguan history?

By 2016, with Ortega in government since 2008, gold exports had grown at a dizzying pace: from 10,800 troy ounces and US $4.2 million in 1994 to 236,900 troy ounces and US $357 million in 2016. Income from gold exports in 2016 represented 20% of the value of the country’s main export products, ranking it in third place after meat and coffee. During the same period, silver exports rose from 94,200 to 681,700 troy ounces and from US $1.3 million to almost $12 million. Evidence of the Ortega government’s pro-mining policy was embodied in the 2017 law creating the Nicaraguan Mining Company, passed by Ortega’s representatives who have a parliamentary majority through the 2011 electoral fraud. This law grants concessions for 22% of national territory to mining. Formerly it was 12%. These are official figures, not defamation by the empire or ultra-left Trotskyists.

In Nicaragua, the Left in power lives from oil and mining. It also kills through mining. In 2016, according to the Global Witness annual report, 11 people were killed in Nicaragua for defending their lands or the environment, the majority of them Caribbean indigenous people killed by mestizo settlers.

In Nicaragua, mining, timber extraction, the telecommunications duopoly, land-grabbing, discretionary tax exonerations and political operators whose greatest merit is their unconditional obedience to Ortega, have thrived in a government that proclaims itself “Christian, Socialist and Solidary.”

The list of expulsions, displacements and killings of peasants is long and the Caribbean Coast’s indigenous communities top the list. The resources of that half of Nicaragua are a magnet for unscrupulous entrepreneurs. The region’s isolation—which translates into low coverage not only by the State, but also by the media and human rights organizations—offers many opportunities to hide outrages.