Summary: Calls on US and international left to support the uprising against the increasingly reactionary, repressive, and misogynist Ortega regime. First appeared on September 16, 2018 on the website of the Coalition for Peace, Revolution, and Social Justice. First published by IMHO on September 23, 2018. With an addition to the last paragraph, it was approved by a membership vote on October 13, 2018 as a Statement of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization — Editors
We, members of the internationalist anticapitalist Left, stand in solidarity with the Nicaraguan people during this time of repression following their uprising against austerity and injustice.
More than 300 people have been killed since a protest movement began in April 2018. Snipers have attacked student protesters occupying universities—and killed 15 people attending a march led by mothers mourning children killed by the state; members of a family were burned alive when they refused to let snipers use their home to shoot protesters. Doctors at public hospitals who have treated wounded protesters have also been fired, while families have been forced to sign away their right to file complaints against police to get their loved ones’ bodies back. The human rights violations in this period of brutality have been well-documented by local and international groups.
Former leftist president of Uruguay, José Mujica, has also noted that Ortega is responsible for this violence, while Ortega’s own brother, the former head of the Nicaraguan military, has called for him to disband the paramilitary forces attacking protesters and to take responsibility for the state-sponsored killings.
It is worth noting that Ortega came back to power in 2006 on an anti-woman platform in alliance with conservatives in the Catholic church to maintain a complete ban on abortion. Nicaragua is one of the few places in the world where abortion is still banned in cases of danger to the mother’s life. In 2016 Ortega’s government closed down special police stations run by women that handled cases of violence against women. Zoilamerica Ortega Murillo, Ortega’s stepdaughter, who now lives in Costa Rica for her safety, has long accused Ortega of molesting her when she was a child and so it is of little surprise that Ortega would allow impunity for violence against women.
In opposing Ortega, we firmly oppose any efforts by the U.S. to intervene in Nicaragua. Neither the US government nor its possible appendages in civil society have any positive role in the Nicaraguan people’s struggle for justice. We stand with the great many famous Sandinista revolutionaries who have stood up against Ortega’s opportunistic regime and with the 70 percent of Nicaraguans who want him to resign. They continue Nicaragua’s great tradition of mass struggle against dictatorship.
If you wish to endorse this statement either on an individual or collective level, please leave your information in the comments section or write to [email protected] or @PaxRevSocJust on Twitter.
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sollie on October 16, 2018 at 6:46 am
In Hegel’s History of Philosophy, he presents Pythagorus’s concept of the trinity as the ONE (the all of everything – the abstract Universal of Being), which contains a duality (two) of opposition. Then comes the creative third part which can move, either forward to a new way of being, that’s hopefully revolutionary, or fall back into submissive orthodoxy as now with a return to medieval religions combined with the brutal force of modern tech – mammon too being a savage fetishized form of orthodox belief.
Is there a link between Marxist and Catholic orthodoxy in the sense that both rely on submission to a given line of argument in which the individual and particular unique point of view and voice is annihilated and crushed as the supposed threatening enemy? What is it they fear if not a loss of control and power to rule, boss and enslave us?
There’s a good history of the Trinity at Stanford + ed + history on google which was news to me and probably many Christians too. Its orthodox form is not found in the Old Testament or NT and cannot of dropped out of nowhere but like all human concepts, came to be, as a process of intellectual debate and social struggle. The C2-C4 CE period was diverse including Gnosticism, stoicism, plato, Aristotle, zoroastarianism, caballa, pythagorus, aswell biblical texts. Gradually, the rule of bishops, the Christian orthodox party, silenced the heretical questioning and critical voices by engaging the power of the Emperor and only this state’s version was enforced through fear and submission – something the early Christians would have found very strange, just as the most revolutionary and humanist Bolsheviks were murdered by Stalin as so-called fascists. Similarly, Augustine C4 seems to have found our inner voice of unique conscious insight as the very work of the devil. This is what he called Socrate’s inner daemon which to me is the creative self-determining revolutionary act of finding our own voice as it ploughs its own path and way of being – Hegel’s 3rd movement. On reading a text, do we submit to it or do we have a creative relationship with it? Each voice is a vital facet of the whole in any free and democratic debate if we are to break down the fundamental division between mental and manual labour which can keep us silent, submissive and enslaved or slide back to using unequal force without reason. Real human growth is the expansion of our minds and relationships as creative development once basic needs are met.
Famously Eve was blamed for human strife for eating from the tree of knowledge on being enticed and misled by the serpent. Yet thinkers in the early centuries of Christianity, interestingly, saw the logos/intellect/demiurge/concrete/secular part of the ONE – the oppositional voice of the slave whose conscience is deeper knowing the master who is unaware of the slave world – the movement out of the ONE that is both of it, and not of it – as creation and labour. Both Marx and heretical thinkers of the Renaissance like Giodorno Bruno were interested in this period after the apex of Greek philosophy which seemed to have come to a standstill with no new movement, just a regurgitation in ever more skeletal forms on one side, and the orthodox straight jacket on the other.
Maybe Ortega needs us to educate him theoretically, as the youth on the streets already practise. As Raya taught, the movement is both from practise and theory and we need everyone to participate if we are not to fail better. Theory is like the sand that settles beneath the swirling waves and eddies of masses in motion that, exhausted, needs the solid shore of a new continent of thought on which to wash up on.
In solidarity.
Reply
In Hegel’s History of Philosophy, he presents Pythagorus’s concept of the trinity as the ONE (the all of everything – the abstract Universal of Being), which contains a duality (two) of opposition. Then comes the creative third part which can move, either forward to a new way of being, that’s hopefully revolutionary, or fall back into submissive orthodoxy as now with a return to medieval religions combined with the brutal force of modern tech – mammon too being a savage fetishized form of orthodox belief.
Is there a link between Marxist and Catholic orthodoxy in the sense that both rely on submission to a given line of argument in which the individual and particular unique point of view and voice is annihilated and crushed as the supposed threatening enemy? What is it they fear if not a loss of control and power to rule, boss and enslave us?
There’s a good history of the Trinity at Stanford + ed + history on google which was news to me and probably many Christians too. Its orthodox form is not found in the Old Testament or NT and cannot of dropped out of nowhere but like all human concepts, came to be, as a process of intellectual debate and social struggle. The C2-C4 CE period was diverse including Gnosticism, stoicism, plato, Aristotle, zoroastarianism, caballa, pythagorus, aswell biblical texts. Gradually, the rule of bishops, the Christian orthodox party, silenced the heretical questioning and critical voices by engaging the power of the Emperor and only this state’s version was enforced through fear and submission – something the early Christians would have found very strange, just as the most revolutionary and humanist Bolsheviks were murdered by Stalin as so-called fascists. Similarly, Augustine C4 seems to have found our inner voice of unique conscious insight as the very work of the devil. This is what he called Socrate’s inner daemon which to me is the creative self-determining revolutionary act of finding our own voice as it ploughs its own path and way of being – Hegel’s 3rd movement. On reading a text, do we submit to it or do we have a creative relationship with it? Each voice is a vital facet of the whole in any free and democratic debate if we are to break down the fundamental division between mental and manual labour which can keep us silent, submissive and enslaved or slide back to using unequal force without reason. Real human growth is the expansion of our minds and relationships as creative development once basic needs are met.
Famously Eve was blamed for human strife for eating from the tree of knowledge on being enticed and misled by the serpent. Yet thinkers in the early centuries of Christianity, interestingly, saw the logos/intellect/demiurge/concrete/secular part of the ONE – the oppositional voice of the slave whose conscience is deeper knowing the master who is unaware of the slave world – the movement out of the ONE that is both of it, and not of it – as creation and labour. Both Marx and heretical thinkers of the Renaissance like Giodorno Bruno were interested in this period after the apex of Greek philosophy which seemed to have come to a standstill with no new movement, just a regurgitation in ever more skeletal forms on one side, and the orthodox straight jacket on the other.
Maybe Ortega needs us to educate him theoretically, as the youth on the streets already practise. As Raya taught, the movement is both from practise and theory and we need everyone to participate if we are not to fail better. Theory is like the sand that settles beneath the swirling waves and eddies of masses in motion that, exhausted, needs the solid shore of a new continent of thought on which to wash up on.
In solidarity.