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| Larreynaga, Nicaragua |
September 9
NicaNotes: Hands off Nicaragua!
Dr. Matlin has made Nicaragua an important part of his life. After visiting Nicaragua in the late 1980s during the Contra Wars, he has returned over 30 times to the sister city his group in Rochester, NY had established in El Sauce, Leon. My brother and I have been to El Sauce too, each of us driving a truck full of medical supplies, bicycles, and schoolbooks. My truck eventually made it to the sister city that my town of Rhinebeck, NY had established. We called our group the Mid Hudson/Larreynaga Sister City Project.
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| El Sauce, Nicaragua |
"Of course, the world is somewhat different. One difference is the population. To the extent that today’s wars are more humanitarian, that’s thanks to people like you. It’s coming from people on the ground. The country has become more civilized as a result of the activism of the 1960s. And there’s plenty of evidence for that, though it doesn’t get discussed. It’s not the right story. Take the Central American wars. Horrible atrocities. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. There was torture, massacres — everything you can think of.
But there were things the United States couldn’t do. It couldn’t do what John F. Kennedy could do in South Vietnam twenty years earlier. They tried, but they couldn’t do it. There was simply too much opposition here.
When he came into office, Ronald Reagan tried to duplicate what Kennedy had done twenty years earlier. There was an immediate backlash from the population. They weren’t accepting that anymore.
What happened in Central America was something totally new in the entire history of imperialism. It was the first time ever that people in the aggressor country didn’t just protest but went to live with the victims. I visited churches in Middle America where people knew more about Central America than the academics, because they were working there." AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY
I am a believer in long term activism. It doesn't always bring our troops home. It often doesn't stop the US Military Industrial Complex's from launching new invasions and occupations. Perhaps Chomsky is right when he describes 250 year of US history. Our country has always had an addiction to expansion, from the extermination of its indigenous peoples, to the continuing economic embargo of Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. We are the empire, and most of the slaughter and mayhem committed since World War II has "Made in America" stamped on every landmine, smart bomb and drone involved in the bloodshed. But people like Dr. Matlin don't give up. Pete Seeger once told me, "You never know which grain of sand it will be. But one grain will eventually tip the balance." We were standing at a vigil against the invasion of Iraq, which happened anyway. The scale wasn't quite ready to tip. But perhaps one day it will, and our beautiful and multicolored country will learn how to take its place with the peaceful nations of the earth.
