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From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: In the Name of God
Message-ID: <368@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 15-Mar-86 22:07:10 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.368
Posted: Sat Mar 15 22:07:10 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 17-Mar-86 22:22:17 EST
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 47
Summary: 

References:

>	My source is quotation from Humberto Belli, former Sandanista
>and former editor of the Op-Ed page of La Prensa, at a recent discussion
>on Sandanista ideology at the Univ. of Illinois.

For chrissake, will you right-wing twits please learn how to spell
SANDINISTA!!!!!!!!  One suspects that you get all your information
from TV and have never read a line about Nicaragua or ever heard of
Augusto Sandino.

>Regardless, Tim, your buddies are avowed communists and have espoused this
>for a long time...

This is an example of what we could call Labelthink.  Labelthink
means that if we can apply a label to someone or something, like
"communist", "Leninist", or "totalitarian", we don't have to think
about it any more -- the label tells us all we need or want to know
about it.

> (I guess this would be ok if socialism worked, but it doesn't. Also, the
>  Government of National Reconstruction has failed to acheive the goals of
>  the revolution - or maybe it never planned to.)

The Nicaraguan government has some modest but important achievements
to its credit -- to mention one, the literacy program was quite
successful.  There have also been remarkable improvements in public
health and medical care.  Please supply some evidence that the Junta
for National Reconstruction never planned to achieve its stated
goals.  Have you ever actually read the Nicaraguan government's
statement of its goals, published in 1982?  Or the program of the
FSLN, published in 1969?  (Both are reprinted in *The Nicaragua
Reader*, ed. Rosset and Vandermeer.)

If you want to become informed about postrevolutionary Nicaragua
instead of just spouting drivel, please obtain a book edited by
Thomas Walker entitled *Nicaragua After the Revolution* (or
*Nicaragua After Five Years*, I forget the exact title).  Praeger is
the publisher.  It is a fat collection of articles by scholars in
various fields on just about every conceivable aspect of Nicaragua
after the revolution.  All or nearly all of them did field research
in Nicaragua.  But if you drooling idiots can't be bothered to learn
anything about the country, at least spare us the dreary displays, to
which we are daily treated on net.politics, of massive ignorance and
the total inability to be open-minded and entertain for even a
millisecond the possibility that you might be mistaken in some
respects on Nicaragua....
-- 
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes