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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: El Salvador, Nicaragua
Message-ID: <347@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 31-Oct-85 14:29:11 EST
Article-I.D.: ubvax.347
Posted: Thu Oct 31 14:29:11 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 15:15:49 EST
References: <531@nbires.UUCP> <7280@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Reply-To: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
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Organization: Ungermann-Bass, Inc., Santa Clara, Ca.
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In article <7280@ucla-cs.ARPA> ekrell@ucla-cs.UUCP (Eduardo Krell) writes:
>La Prensa IS NOT a right wing newspaper. The Chamorro family who owns
>the paper were antisomozas and took a leading place in demanding from
>Somoza to step down. La Prensa, just like many other nicaraguans, found
>that the Sandinistas were betraying their own principled of having free
>elections and a democracy. La Prensa is now the only opposition media
>in Nicaragua.

This defense of La Prensa is disingenuous to say the least.  La Prensa
is not run by the Chamorro family, it's run by Pedro Joaquim Chamorro,
the right-wing son in the family.  Another brother abandoned La Prensa
in protest, taking with him most of the staff, and founded Barricada,
a Sandinista outlet.  The "Chamorro family" has heroes and snakes;
the question is which Chamorro is running which paper?

Let's remember that the "objectivity" and commitment of journals to
fact differs substantially from nation to nation.  In some countries,
the major journals try to beat each other to the center in the name
of "objectivity".  In others, the major journals take a determined
stance in one direction or other, which marks their whole political
output.

During the Hearst period, US papers were just like Nicaraguan
papers today; all took political stances that determined their
reporting angles.  Only since the stabilization of American social
institutions under "national priorities" and "national security"
accomplished during the New Deal and WWII have US papers strove
to occupy the center and thereby influence federal institutions.

Before federal institutions like the New Deal programs and DOD had
legitimacy and consensual support of the US population, censorship
was a very common practice here.  Pacifists were imprisoned, WWII
reporting was under complete censorship, etc..

Only after we had won the war and everyone saw their interest in
supporting a large interventionist national state and a bipartisan
foreign policy built on foreign aid and military power did the US
state have enough confidence to add "freedom of the press" to the
laws currently in force.

>    Eduardo Krell               UCLA Computer Science Department
>    ekrell@ucla-locus.arpa   ..!{sdcrdcf,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!ekrell

The problem with lazy applying ideas of "democracy" and "freedom" to other
nations like Nicaragua is that these ideas when enunciated here carry
so much connotation from US history and experience, and so much
forgetting and erasing of US history to suit the current ideal,
that applying them to other nations without great care amounts to
assuming that those nations have had a history similar to the US
with similar lessons learned and the same "good" morality developed.

It's typical of the US point of view, which is basically religious
and prefers rewriting to reading history, that it imposes its moral
models on everyone else without even asking if everyone else agrees
with the moral model in the first place.  Why ask if the moral model
is right, right?  That's democracy US-style.

Tony Wuersch
{amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw