ARTS

Books

A made-in-the U.S. nightmare

WITH THE CONTRAS: A RE-
PORTER IN THE WILDS OF
NICARAGUA. By Christopher
Dickey. Simon and Schuster.
N.Y. 1985. 327 pp.

Who are the contras? A lot of
mad dogs, drunken killers,
sadists, torturers, remnants of the
worst criminals in the late Nicara-
guan dictator Anastasio Somo-
za’s hated National Guard,
trained, organized, equipped and
acting under the direction of the
CIA, the former Argentine mili-
tary regime and rightwing ‘‘death
squad”’ assassins in Central
America.

The author, Christopher Dic-
key, is not so blunt but that is
what emerges from his book. It
stands in sharp contrast with the
Opening quote he gives from
President Reagan (March 1, 1985)
that “‘these are our brothers,
these freedom fighters, and we
owe them our help ... They are
the moral equivalent of the
Founding Fathers.”’

Dickey was Washington Post
bureau chief for Central America.
He has little sympathy for the
Sandinistas or the Nicaraguan
revolution and says nothing about
it in his book. He even thanks
people in the CIA for sharing their
time, information and thoughts
with him over the years in the
book’s introduction.

But what comes out in the book
is a damning de facto indictment
of the contras and their masters.
People who may know nothing
about the half-century-long pro-
U.S. nightmare of the Somozas’
regime will ask after reading the
book: you mean these were the
guys who ran Nicaragua before
they were kicked out?

The author follows the careers
of several contras who fied
Nicaragua after the revolution,
including 6ne nicknamed Suicida.

.But the payroll-padding and other

double-crossing of the leaders of
Suicida’s group, the biggest mili-
tary unit of the contras, eventual-
ly grew so big that it was decided

With the Contras

the whole leadership had to be .
eliminated (‘‘terminated with ex-
treme prejudice’’ was the CIA
phrase used in Vietnam).

Dickey later found out what
happened to his friend, Suicida: in
October, 1983, a newly-arrived
American, John Kirkpatrick, was .
given a tour of the contra camps
by a member of the contra staff.
“Screaming could be heard’as the
two of them walked into the
school,’’ Dickey wrote. ‘‘Suicida
was being interrogated.’’ After-
wards, Suicida and his buddies
were executed, exactly how, no
one knows.

CIA agent Kirkpatrick was the
author of the notorious terrorism
manual prepared by the CIA to
guide the contras. Dickey wrote
that he was ‘“‘a little strange. An
older man, he dressed entirely in
black. He told some of the
Nicaraguan exiles he worked
with, that it was to inspire a cult of
death among the fighting men.”’
Dickey also pointed out that
Kirkpatrick was a veteran of the
Phoenix program of the CIA in
South Vietnam, a mass murder
campaign aimed at killing even
people vaguely suspected of
sympathizing with the National
Liberation Front. It is said to have
resulted in the assassination of at
least 20,000 people.

Before his death, Suicida and
the leaders of his group had
started drinking days before they
were supposed to go into combat
in Nicaragua. Then they started
quarrelling. One of them, Krill,
had his men tie up another leader,
Cancer. Cancer started shouting
because ‘‘he knew as wellas any-
one what Krill did with people
who were tied up: the boot and
the knife or the bullet in the nape
of the neck,’’ Dickey wrote.

Krill “‘suddenly dropped onto
Cancer, pinning him with his
knees. He put the Browning to
Cancer’s chest, firing again and
again before anyone moved,”’ the
author said. ‘The contras started
running as Krill grabbed a U.S.-
made M-60 machine-gun: “All

Thrashing the poor

MINDS MADE FEEBLE: THE
MYTH AND LEGACY OF THE
KALLIKAKS. By J. David Smith.
An Aspen Publication (1986).

In 1912, Henry Herbert God-

dard published a study that be-_
puted to be ‘‘not all there.”’

came famous among attempts to
prove the role of heredity in men-
tal retardation.

He traced the family tree of a
young woman resident of the
Training School for Feeble-
Minded Girls and Boys in Vine-
land, New Jersey (where God-
dard himself was director of the
research laboratory), and learned
that she was a descendant of the
illegitimate son of a Revolution-
ary War Militiaman.

According to oral histories col-
lected by Goddard’s field worker
Elizabeth Kite, the descendants.
of this man were mostly a bunch
of poverty-stricken ne’er-do-
wells, while the descendants of
his legitimate half-brothers and
half-sisters were successful in

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JUNE 25, 1986

business, politics and society.
The theory was that this was
because the mother of the legiti-
mate family was mentally normal,
while their half-brother’s mother
was a tavern wench who was re-

Since the family’s real name
was unusual and would have
made them easy to trace, God-
dard save them embarassment by
referring to them throughout by
the pseudonym ‘‘Kallikak,’’ thus
creating a byword — and also,
incidentally, making his research
difficult to verify.

Many years later, Stephen Jay
Gould discovered that, as the
original photographs used in
Goddard’s book faded with time,
it became obvious that they had
been crudely doctored. Pictures
of the ‘‘bad Kallikaks’’ had been
altered to make them look
moronic or degenerate.

— Millea Kenin
Peoples Daily World

right, s--s of b-----s, anybody tries
to f--- me, I’m going to ventilate
him.’’ (He was perhaps quoting
George Washington, Mr.
Reagan?)

It was Suicida, Krill, Cancer
and the others who took Dickey
across the border into Nicaragua.
Dickey was totally wrong to go in
the first place: would he take part
in a bank robbery in order to get a
story? He, however, seems to
have gained a deeper understand-
ing from the trip of what the CIA
is doing and what sort of thugs it is
using to do it. At an isolated farm
in Nicaragua where the large
group of heavily-armed contras
rested, Dickey met the family
who lived there, including ‘‘two
barefoot young girls just on the
verge of adolescence, their faces
streaked with the dirt of play and
the stove.”’

Krill was looking at the little
girls. Dickey wrote: ‘‘ They were
pretty, I said. Krill looked at me,
‘Do you want one of them?’ hé
asked, and grinned.”

— Tom Foley
Peoples Daily World

Left, one of Reagan’s ‘Founding
Fathers’ on manoeuvres in Hon-
duras. Below a mass funeral for con-
tra victims. Nearly 14,000 Nica-
raguans have died in five years of
fighting against the U.S.-sponsored

bands.

_Washington’s grotesque logic |

THE U.S. WAR MACHINE AND
POLITICS Radomir Bogdanov,
Progress Books, $4.50

To fully understand the present
U.S. war policies, it is necessary
to look further back than the elec-
tion of Reagan. In 1975 the then
Secretary of Defence, James
Schlesinger, advanced ‘‘an un-
yielding hard line against any
SALT agreement that did not en-
sure an overwhelming American
advantage. It was a proposal that
the Soviets were sure to reject out
of hand.”’ That is how Nixon re-
remembered the origins of the
current phase of the cold war.

But, as Radomir Bogdanov
points out, Washington’s drive
for this ‘‘overwhelming ad-
vantage’, goes back to World War
II, just as its campaign against
socialism can be traced to 1917.
Its war aims have always been
aggressive.

War Secretary Stimson put it in
1943: ‘‘The atomic bomb is par
excellence the weapon of aggres-
sion, (which) weighs the scales
overwhelmingly in favor of sur-
prise attack.’’ A year later he
thought that neither “‘defence’”’
nor “‘peace’’ had ‘“‘much mean-
ing’ in the dawning U.S.-con-
trolled atomic age — ‘‘unless a
nation is ready to strike before
being struck.’’ He was not think-
ing of Japan.

The Soviet Union was always
the target, and immediately after
the war, plans were drawn up for
a massive atomic strike against
socialism.

That none of these attacks oc-
curred is due not to the con-
sciences of successive govern-
ments, but to doubts that the job
could be completed. The Red
Army was a worry, as was public
opinion, the reaction of survivors,

Trusting the Russians

THE UNBROKEN RECORD:
Soviet Treaty Compliance
by Daniel Rosenberg, Inter-
national Publishers, $4.50

The major justification being
put forward by the Reagan admin-
istration for its wholesale trashing
of existing arms control agree-
ments is the charge that they are
“‘already being violated by the
USSR’’. A long list of such allega-
tions has been made public, yet
the average person has few tools
to analyze or evaluate them.

The Unbroken Record, by
David Rosenberg, fills this gap. It
provides necessary historical
background, tracing Soviet for-
eign policy from its origins to the
present, and illuminates the poli-
tical theory of arms control and
disarmament as understood and

practised by successive govern-
ments of the USSR.

Concerning the current crop of
charges, Rosenberg’s discussion
is thorough. He deals not only
with allegations of Soviet cheat-
ing on the SALT accords, but also
the ABM Treaty, Chemical
Weapons, and the Helsinki
Agreement. While itemized
charges are carefully examined,
the focus is upon underlying polit-
ical thrust and direction.

The Unbroken Record is the
most worthwhile piece of reading
to appear on the general subject of
arms control in some time. In to-
day’s hypertense atmosphere, it
provides indispensable perspec-
tive.

— Fred Weir

and the belief that the air force
not possess enough plane
obliterate the USSR. After !
when the Soviets tested 2?”
the U.S. was forced to bet?
more cautious. pot,
An important feature of
danov’s analysis is his rev!
the middle years, the 50s 28° 4
often seen as a period of co™ US |
tive restraint. In fact, the i |
was constantly arming, 22°”
ring the war pot. .
It discovered mythical oP
in U.S. bomber numbers 2” mot |
ter, missiles, to justify eve gt
arms. Anti-Soviet prop4?, V |
became more sophistical® |
and attempts to thwart the yi 0
of progress were divert a
places like Vietnam, Cub@
Africa. the!
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factor in the arms race: AM®@
inter-force rivalry. He 9%
many of the factional militaY of |
putes to show that the eae
weapons, as well as their ob al
numbers, are cause partly bY A
shared desire of the army, aa
and air force to spend the ™ |
money. ah
Always the policy has be fl
attain sufficient nuclear SUP 4, |
ity to attack the Soviet Umel
Always the Soviet Union has 3]
gated these plans by achie\" 145)
deterrent. Always the U |
avoided serious arms ©” 15)
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measures. hel
Bogdanov’s history puts abet
present madness in an exXP wit |
context. Whether it be “the 9}
dow of vulnerability’, the t© fh
to accept a test ban, the Stat
campaign, or aid to the cO?
Reagan’s aberrations have # ”
tesquely consistent log!¢
Washington.

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— Jeremy **