Bill de Blasio’s Communist Pals

Posted By Paul Kengor and Spyridon Mitsotakis On November 4, 2013 @ 12:33 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments

When the New York Times revealed that New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio had been an enthusiastic supporter of Nicaragua’s communist Sandinista regime, old arguments from the 1980s were suddenly rekindled, with renewed debate over the nature of that regime. The left once again emerged from the woodwork to insist that the Sandinistas were never bad guys (or even communists) — quite the contrary. The Times quickly published letters-to-the-editor whitewashing the Sandinistas’ tyranny, and one Times’ blogger went so far as to publish a post declaring: “Whatever their failings, the Sandinistas did not impose a repressive regime on their impoverished Central American nation. There was no mass jailing of opponents nor mass execution of opposing soldiers.”

Gee, that’s good — assuming that it’s even true. Of course, it isn’t true.

To cite just once source, the Russian-born scholar, Dr. Jamie Glazov, who came to America as a child when the KGB forced him and his pro-democracy, dissident parents into exile, is among those who beg to differ. Glazov wrote in his book, United in Hate:

The Sandinistas quickly distinguished themselves as one of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America, carrying out approximately 8,000 political executions within three years of the revolution. The number of “anti-revolutionary” Nicaraguans who disappeared while in Sandinista hands numbered in the thousands. By 1983, the number of political prisoners inside the new Marxist regime’s jails was estimated at 20,000. This was the highest number of political prisoners in any nation in the hemisphere — except, of course, in Castro’s Cuba. By 1986, a vicious and violent Sandinista “resettlement program” forced some 200,000 Nicaraguans into 145 “settlements” throughout the country. This monstrous social engineering program entailed the designation of “free-fire” zones in which Sandinista government troops shot and killed any peasant of their choosing.

Not long after the Times exposé, the New York Post published a column reminding New Yorkers of the Sandinistas’ ugly anti-Semitism — another undeniable truth. That was too much for the old “Sandalistas” (the sandal-wearing Sandinista fellow travelers who haunt the halls of American academe). The Nicaragua Network, of which de Blasio was once a leading member, issued a press release warning its faithful followers that the “New York Post resurrects lies about Nicaraguan revolution!” The Nicaragua Network assured the faithful that the information about Sandinista anti-Semitism were (naturally) just a bunch of CIA fabrications, and urged them to “Send letters to the editor!”

Fortunately, some of those who know better are speaking up. Leading the charge is the former leftist-turned-conservative and Cold War scholar Ronald Radosh. “In the wake of a short Post article noting that Bill de Blasio ignored (at best) the anti-Semitism of the rulers of Nicaragua during his 1988 visit there,” Radosh wrote, “his supporters have insisted the Sandinista junta wasn’t anti-Semitic. In fact, the record is clear — and ugly.” Radosh also notes that “The official Sandinista newspaper, Barricada, ran an editorial in January 1990 in which it attributed distrust of their country by the ‘Yankee bureaucracy’ to the ‘traditional “Jew-style” with which the U.S. Congress manages the taxes of the taxpayers.’”

That newspaper, Barricada, which made those anti-Semitic remarks (and they weren’t the only ones), had American subscribers. One of them was Bill de Blasio, who, the New York Times reports, spent time and energy “hawking subscriptions” to other New Yorkers. Barricada, as Paul Berman reminds us, “was the most hardline of the Sandinista publications,” and was controlled by Sandinista Ministry of the Interior, Tomás Borge.

American Spectator readers will remember that infamous name from the 1980s. Here is what Radosh reminds us about this character:

Borge had been from the start, even in the period of pretend moderation, the regime’s enforcer. He was made minister of the Interior. He named the building which housed state security — something that Orwell might have dreamed up in his novel 1984 — the “Sentinel of the People’s Happiness,” which was proclaimed in a loud banner over the building’s front.

In his post, Borge contracted with the East German government to send a team of Stasi — that country’s hated secret police — to come to Nicaragua to train his own ministry’s agents in the type of techniques they used to control the populace. From East Germany and other Communist regimes in Eastern Europe he obtained advisors, communications equipment, uniforms, and other supplies. But what interested him most was concrete advice on how to use his spies to help concentrate power and give the FSLN complete control of the country. East Germany’s Stasi chief sent him a specially selected group of agents who, he promised Borge, would give them the ability and know-how to crush potential civilian opposition to the Sandinista regime.

He also liked to show the press how adept he was at fooling gullible Western fellow-travelers. Borge met them as he did me at one time in the 1980s — in his would-be office, behind which was a display of Christian crucifixes and a Bible sitting at his desk. Many would remark when they wrote about him how the hated security chief was really a believing Catholic and a religious individual. When they left, Borge would retreat to his actual office, which is the site at which he worked and which had no visible religious symbols of any kind. Of course, Borge used his ministry to regularly attack the Church, to deport opposition priests, and to give his support to an officially sponsored liberation church whose clerics backed the FSLN.

Liberation Theology, so backed and pushed by the KGB that it was practically a KGB-invention, famously became the center of a major clash between the Sandinistas and Pope John Paul II. When the Pope visited Nicaragua in 1983, the Sandinistas organized a mob to harass him at an open-air Mass in a failed attempt to embarrass him. (The Pope deftly countered them with style and panache and truth.)

Of course, the academy has come out in full-throttle defense of de Blasio. He is their product; he’s one of them. He has a degree in Latin American studies, which is no surprise to the two of us. Both of us have rich experiences in dealing with Latin American Studies departments, so we automatically see a red flag. That’s something we could vent about for hours. But, alas, that’s another subject for another time.

A subject for the here and how, however, is Bill de Blasio — almost certainly New York’s future mayor — and his support of a repressive Marxist regime. That regime was a Soviet/Cuban proxy in America’s backyard.

Fortunately, despite the likes of Bill de Blasio and the Sandinistas’ fellow travelers in their American lobby, Ronald Reagan’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua worked. A democratic election eventually took place, and the Sandinistas lost, as communists always do when they dare to (rarely) hold elections. Communism was halted there, as it was elsewhere in Latin America in the 1980s, from Grenada to less-known places like Suriname.

While the people of Latin America rejoiced in their freedom, Bill de Blasio wept for their enslavers. New Yorkers, should take note — assuming they even care.

New York City’s Marxist Power Couple
“You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” Nikita Khrushchev.

NEW YORK CITY’S MARXIST POWER COUPLE

10/14/2013
by Cliff Kincaid

“De Blasio opens up to Baldwin” is how MSNBC described Alec Baldwin’s show with New York City’s Obama-backed Democratic “progressive” mayoral candidate, Bill De Blasio. “I was an early supporter of de Blasio’s,” Baldwin acknowledged.

Having been a virtual arm of the Obama White House for years, MSNBC is now turning into an arm of the de Blasio campaign. De Blasio, a former aide to socialist New York City Mayor David Dinkins, faces law-and-order Republican candidate Joe Lhota on November 5.

De Blasio’s support for communist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, and his embrace of Islam as an emerging political force, were highlighted in a recent New York Times article. The paper also noted his illegal “honeymoon” to Communist Cuba. However, the mysterious trip occurred in either 1991or 1994, depending on which paper you read, and much about the nature of the travel remains unknown.

Our review of documents concerning de Blasio’s involvement in the communist-front Nicaragua Solidarity Network confirms that notes of one meeting in 1991 say that he stated that Islam was an emerging “power,” and wondered if there were “progressive elements” in Islam “we can work with.”

Marxists like de Blasio who were sympathetic to the Sandinista “liberation” struggle in Nicaragua were typically active in support of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a Soviet/Cuban-backed terrorist group. Indeed, anti-Israel and pro-PLO material was found in the archives of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network.

Another document regarding the “vision” of the group says, “End world capitalism and replace it,” and next to de Blasio’s initials are the words “democratic socialism.”

Baldwin’s comments during his MSNBC de Blasio interview included such observations as, “You seem to have a very warm positive healthy home life.” De Blasio, who is white, married a black woman and former lesbian, Chirlane McCray, and they have had two children together.

Modern-day progressives usually consider it wrong to even discuss the option of voluntarily leaving the homosexual lifestyle, but they have let the matter of McCray’s rejection of lesbianism pass without critical comment.

De Blasio says one of his wife’s poems about “growing up as a young African-American girl in a racist society” helped him to fall in love with her.

There is no indication that McCray abandoned Marxism after living in an enclave known as the Combahee River Collective.

The Combahee River Collective had issued a “revolutionary” 1977 statement saying, “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources.

We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”

The “collective” has been depicted by the media as a respectable group of feminist intellectuals, who were merely “radical” in some of their thinking.

The Combahee River Collective “statement” was favorably cited by Harvard Professor Richard Levins in a Monthly Review article called, “Continuing Sources of Marxism: Looking for the Movement as a Whole.”

In discussing the emergence of the Combahee River Collective and other such groups, he wrote, “In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state that what distinguishes communists from other socialists is internationalism and looking for the movement as a whole. ‘Looking for the movement as a whole’ is a fluid concept that expands to embrace ever more inclusive struggles against capitalism and for a just and sustainable world. Increasingly, a movement centered on the working class has to champion the entire cause of the species.”

He mentions the Combahee River Collective after noting that a “core of strong proto-feminist women [had] emerged in the Communist Party USA just at the time when McCarthyism was making all red organizing difficult.”

He went on, “Groups such as Redstockings, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, and the Combahee River Collective and publications such as Sojourner developed a stance against the whole system of oppression. Within feminism, Marxists have played a leading role in insisting on a class analysis that showed that ‘women’ cannot be treated as a homogeneous mass with common interests, and also struggled against racism within the feminist movement.”

Bringing the situation up to date, New York magazine ran a story declaring that Chirlane McCray “would be a First Lady in the mold” of Hillary Clinton.

On a Spanish language New York radio station, WADO 1280 AM, de Blasio was asked about his Cuba trip and he proved evasive: “What did you see in Cuba, what is your impression going on your honeymoon in a country that hasn’t had free elections in the last 50 years. What did you get from the trip?” The radio host went on, “If I can ask you one thing you came back from Cuba with, what was that thing?”

As noted by the New York Daily News, de Blasio dodged the questions and replied, “I didn’t go on a trip to fully study the country, I don’t pretend to have full perspective on the country. I have a huge critique of the current government there because it’s undemocratic.”

But it was just as undemocratic then as it is now. So why did he visit the communist-controlled island, and what did he see and do there?

De Blasio’s opponent, Joe Lhota, has said that de Blasio “needs to explain himself—and explain himself now—to the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who escaped Marxist tyranny in Asia, Central America, and from behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.”

Lhota noted that de Blasio’s involvement with the communist Sandinistas “didn’t happen in 1917; it happened 70 years later when the cruelty and intrinsic failure of communism had become crystal clear to anyone with a modicum of reason.”

He added that de Blasio, who promises to tax the rich and spend more public money, is pursuing a “class warfare strategy” that is “directly out of the Marxist playbook.”

The new MSNBC show, “Up Late with Alec Baldwin,” did include some legitimate news reaffirming de Blasio’s controversial announced intention to crack down on police surveillance of terrorists and criminals. De Blasio opposes the stop-and-frisk practices of the New York Police Department (NYPD) and wants to replace Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has authorized surveillance of radical Muslims in order to thwart terrorist attacks.

“There have been 16 known terrorist plots against New York City since September 11, 2001,” the NYPD says.

The current mayor is Michael Bloomberg, a liberal who has nevertheless been a strong supporter of aggressive police tactics against potential criminals and terrorists.

Bloomberg says, for example, that overturning stop-and-frisk would turn “over the streets to the criminals.”
Mike Long, the chairman of the Conservative Party of New York, told Emily Miller of The Washington Times, “I don’t often agree with Mike Bloomberg, but stop and frisk has made New York City that much safer. It has clearly saved the lives of people of color and is absolutely an important tool for making New York City one of the safest cities in the country.” Long said that without this enforcement mechanism, “we will be like Chicago in very short order.”

But the liberal media are betting that Lhota’s “Republican” label will be more objectionable than the communist sympathies of de Blasio and his wife, sympathies that are being played down by most reporters.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism.

THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW YORK

By Daniel Greenfield On November 6, 2013In Daily Mailer,FrontPage

Twenty years ago, New York’s long nightmare ended with a Giuliani victory over Mayor Dinkins. Now the nightmare returns as former Dinkins staffer and terrorist supporter Bill de Blasio will begin wrecking the city where Dinkins and his Democratic predecessors left off.

Bill de Blasio vowed to undo Giuliani’s reforms and turn back the clock on fighting crime and terrorism. Giuliani’s victory was a wake-up call to Democrats that one of the more dangerous cities in the country had rejected their liberal soft-on-crime policies that had made it unlivable. Bill de Blasio’s victory tells them that soft-on-crime is popular again.

Welcome back Michael Dukakis.

Part of the reason is that New York City has changed. The city’s politics have traditionally been middle class. Even Democratic politicians identified with the storeowner in Brooklyn, the fireman in Staten Island and the auto body mechanic in Queens.

Bill de Blasio breaks with that tradition. The former Warren Wilhelm Jr. did pick a name that opens more political doors for him among working class voters, but other than that his causes, building more housing projects, banning carriage horses in Central Park and ending police surveillance of Muslim terrorists are a grab bag of bad ideas from his two bases; liberal yuppies and welfare voters.

The middle class voters in Queens pleading with Joe Lhota to protect them from Bill de Blasio’s red plague are part of the older New York; that city of gruff accents but kind hearts, loquacious taxi drivers and busybody tenement grandmothers that appears so often on television and in movies that even most New Yorkers still confuse it with reality… even though it hardly exists now.

Bill de Blasio, with his Park Slope digs, represents the city’s new Yuckie overlords, yuppie hippies with Subarus, six- figure salaries, leftist politics and Whole Foods reusable bags full of tofu for the kids. It was only a matter of time until the college kids who moved to the city to slum and protest before finding profitable work formed alliances with minority community groups that would allow them to take over.

The Yuckies would probably have moved somewhere else if Giuliani hadn’t made the city safe for their kids. Bloomberg made things worse because he moved the city deep into debt with the dirty deals that he struck with local power brokers and activists. These deals let a cold fish with an arrogant personality win three elections while putting the city on the hook for his payoffs.

Bloomberg wasn’t stupid. He knew that the money had to come from somewhere. Like so many other urban mayors, he focused on attracting the young and the wealthy who would buy things and pay taxes. He understood how precarious the situation was when he warned that there were 40,000 taxpayers keeping the city afloat. Unfortunately the very people he was attracting were also the likeliest to sink it.

Like Obama’s successes, Bill de Blasio’s victory is a defeat for the middle class and a big win for the alliance between wealthy young liberals and welfare voters. It’s not the first time that happened in the city’s political history, but Red Bill makes John Lindsay look like Ronald Reagan.

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. A single generation is how long it takes for experience to be lost. Many of the New Yorkers who struggled in the bad city of the 70s and 80s have gone elsewhere. They write to me about the troubles they endured in those days. The new New Yorkers are younger and have never lived in that other bad city.

New York’s Black population is declining and its Latino and Asian populations are rising. White flight has nearly reversed as an older middle class continues to drift away while a wealthier younger generation of whites spreads up into formerly dangerous neighborhoods like Harlem and Williamsburg.

Gotham is starting to look more like California with large Asian and Latino populations and small wealthy white elites, trendy industries and a real estate bubble temporarily funding welfare programs and union sweetheart deals that carry with them an unsustainable debt.

Joe Lhota might have been a credible candidate in 1993; but in 2013, New York is safe enough that no one but the older members of the middle class took his warnings about crime seriously. He may have a shot at a comeback in 2017 when the city has grown tired of four disastrous years of Bill de Blasio, the way that it was exhausted after four terrible years of De Blasio’s former boss, David Dinkins.

But then again he may not.

The Reagan Democrats who can catapult a New York Republican to victory, are politically outnumbered by the Yuckies, who came to the city to slum and decided to force the rest of the city to slum with them, and by minority welfare voters greedily fighting to protect their freebies.

Bill de Blasio’s landslide comes from minority votes. A New York Times/Siena College poll toward the end of October showed that he was only up to 55 percent among white voters. It’s the 90 percent support from Black voters and 76 percent support from Hispanic voters that give him his ridiculous lead.

Lhota’s best numbers are in Brooklyn where there are still enough working class voters to make an impact and his worst numbers are in the Bronx and Manhattan. The linkage between the Bronx, New York’s Detroit and its future under Bill de Blasio, and Manhattan is the new wealthy-welfare coalition.

Finally the old muscular tradition of urban journalism has made way for tabloids that are the Huffington Post in print form. Many New Yorkers were barely aware that there was anyone but Bill de Blasio in the race. A few weeks before the election between a quarter and a third of New Yorkers had not heard enough about Lhota to have an opinion about him. Those same people probably couldn’t have named Andrew Cuomo’s opponent in the governor’s race.

New York media outlets have begun ignoring the existence of Republican candidates. When they can’t ignore them, they smear them and destroy them. Many of those who voted for Bill de Blasio not only did not know about his support for Marxist terrorists who burnt and bombed synagogues and churches, but were barely aware that there was even another choice in this election.

Media boycotts of the opposition are turning New York City elections into Soviet elections where there is only one choice.

Bill de Blasio’s victory isn’t an endorsement of his program, but of the manipulation of the political system by the powerful special interests bringing the city to the brink of bankruptcy and of the short memories of city residents voting in more of the same two decades after the Dinkins nightmare ended.

New York City’s meteoric rise from the slums was a national story. Its descent back to the slums will be local crime coverage.

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