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PARTISAN REVIEW
ysis of our Vanguard for understanding the historic process and for
carrying out the revolution."
It is this disclosure by Christian that so many on the political
left find most disturbing and seem unable to face up to. Honest ob–
servers can only second the judgment of Timothy Garton Ash, who
wrote that Christian "provides a wealth of detail to demonstrate ...
beyond reasonable doubt, that the Sandinistas set out from the start
to gain for themselves as much power as possible, permanently, and
were prepared from the start to use lies, lawlessness and violence
against their political opponents when these seemed necessary to
achieve that end. " Yet , to call the Sandinistas Marxist-Leninist is
somehow seen as red-baiting by many on the American left, an at–
tempt to pigeonhole revolutionaries they persist in viewing as simple
pragmatists trying to create a just order. Evidently, to take the San–
dinista's own words as to what doctrine they adhere to is forbidden
and is considered an example of the new McCarthyism.
Christian has provided the necessary path to understanding–
and because she has done this with such fine attention to detail, she
has understandably become the
bete noire
of the left - which has con–
demned her as a Reaganite . George Black of the North American
Congress on Latin America portrayed her book as a fraud in the pages
of the left-wing
Nation.
That publication's star columnist, Alexander
Cockburn, whose politics are never too far from those of an unrecon–
structed Stalinist, spent almost two of his biweekly columns using
her as proof of how
The New York Times
has shifted far to the right.
Writing in the ostensibly democratic socialist
In These Times,
Cornell
University Professor Elden Kenworthy dismissed Christian as a re–
porter who is simply "pure Reagan," since she does not understand
that postelection Nicaragua has changed "in the direction of greater
conformity to liberal democratic practices ." (Kenworthy, undoubt–
edly , will be able to come up with the usual rationalizations for the
new repression .)
As one might expect, film director Saul Landau, for decades
the leading United States apologist for Fidel Castro, joined the cho–
rus by predicting in
The Progressive
that Christian "might one day
feel ashamed of herself, for she has done a disservice to journalism."
Charging that Christian might as well have "ghostwritten for Presi–
dent Reagan," Landau, who two years ago explained in an article
that civil liberties were not necessary in revolutionary countries where
they were mere bourgeois luxuries, now condemns Christian's book
as "the propaganda part" of the United States war. The charge has
