Developing a sense of smell

It requires a grounding in one's inheritance as a product of Western civilization

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I’d already started formulating the gist of this piece (in one of those 3 AM racings of the mind) when this title occurred to me. It then occurred to me that I may not be the most qualified to discuss this topic, given that my own sense of smell is completely shot from this permanent sinus infection I have. I suppose one of these days I’ll have to bite the bullet and have the deviated-septum surgery, but I’m in no hurry, given what I’ve heard about how rough recovery is.

(My sense of taste is also pretty well shot, which has been harder for me to make my peace with. Anyone who knows me to any degree knows the high priority food has in my hierarchy of values.)

Fortunately, I’m employing the term metaphorically, as in “passing the smell test.”

What I want to look at is the rapidly vanishing ability on the part of post-Westerners to size up bad dudes.

To begin the unpacking process for this, let me direct your attention to a recent piece at The National Interest.

It’s about the collaboration of three Latin American countries run by parties that, to some degree, still think of themselves as Marxist-Leninist, even after their fortunes took a hit with the end of the Cold War.

What, in particular, are they collaborating on that should be of interest to those of us to the north?

They’ve cooked up a scheme for getting bad actors from around the world into the porous southern border of the United States:

If Biden wants to get serious about securing the border, he must step up his game against the Western Hemisphere’s axis of anti-Americanism: Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

The dictatorial regimes in Havana, Managua, and Caracas are manipulating the flood of illegal immigration to sow discord among American voters. Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega and his fellow dictators are turning a profit while worsening the U.S. border crisis by flying in thousands of migrants on their way to cross the U.S. border illegally.

The joint venture to support this surge begins at Managua’s international airport in western Nicaragua. Since 2022, Ortega and his cronies relaxed visa restrictions while simultaneously engineering a dramatic increase in international flights to Managua. Immigrants who previously would have started their dangerous trek northward into Ecuador, Colombia, or even Brazil can now skip the hundreds of miles of dangerous terrain and pay a coyote’s fee by flying north into Managua and starting from there.

Not only has Nicaragua relaxed its visa requirements, but it also allows chartered flights to reach Managua, carrying immigrants from all over the world, including faraway places like Mauritaniaand India. Many immigrants, including Cubans, make their way to Managua from Havana’s international airport. The regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela all facilitate these clandestine immigration routes and handsomely benefit from them. Transit revenues bring hard currency to the regime; the increased flow of illegal immigrants puts pressure on the U.S. 

What is Venezuela’s main contribution to the arrangement? Its national airline:

a key air conduit for illegal migrants—operated by Conviasa, Venezuela’s national carrier, with the connivance of Cuba and Nicaragua—is not even mentioned. How can the industry conduct due diligence if the main carriers involved in this mischief are omitted from the advisory?

But Nicaragua is the coordinator:

To be sure, the advisory names Ortega’s regime in Nicaragua as the main culprit. On the same day the advisory was released, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced new sanctions against Nicaraguan entities tied to the Ortega regime and a Nicaragua-based Russian military school that trains regime goons in repression tactics. The Treasury also mentioned the issuance of visa restrictions against over 250 Nicaraguan officials by the U.S. Department of State.

However, neither the DHS advisory nor the Treasury press release clarifies who keeps flying immigrants into Managua, though since the U.S. began to take action to disrupt charter flights, Managua, Caracas, and Havana have switched to Venezuela’s official carrier, the U.S.-sanctioned Conviasa, to continue their scheme.

It's an open secret that Conviasa is a key vector for the immigrant surge. Flight tracker data shows a recent increase of Conviasa flights running the Caracas-Havana-Managua route, using long-haul A340s that Conviasa illegally obtained from Iran in 2022 (and which Iran illegally procured in May 2015 through an Iraqi cutout, which the U.S. has since sanctioned). Conviasa recently advertised its increased flights from Havana to Managua as a convenient way for Cubans wanting to make their way to the United States.

One would not know that the Venezuelan regime’s airline is helping the immigrant surge if they only read the recent DHS travel advisory. There is no mention of Conviasa or Venezuela. Yet, there is plenty of evidence that these commercial flights are really a one-way ticket to the United States. Last month, a Korean TikToker traveling across Latin America happened to purchase a ticket on the Conviasa flight from Managua and was the only passenger on the plane. Additionally, a study recently published by a Nicaraguan English language publication confirms that many foreign visitors entering Nicaragua are neither flying back home nor staying in Nicaragua—a clear sign that they are leaving the country by land to a different destination.

Now it’s time to revisit the moment of my conversion experience, when I realized I was a conservative.

It was 1985. I wasn’t married yet, and what I was doing for a living has little to do with my subsequent writing career. But I was your basic snot-nosed Boomer who thought the leftists were the cool kids. I was basically awash in the dissolute lifestyle practices attendant to the countercultural milieu in which I’d come of age, and I wore my rock and roll bona fides (I’m a guitarist; this was before I studied jazz) like a badge. But when I’d weigh in on a matter of public policy, it was with a leftist position.

I was attending the local Unitarian Universalist fellowship at the time. The congregation didn’t have a minister. We had various kinds of guest speakers each Sunday.

One week, it was a guy from the local “peace fellowship.” He’d just come back from a “fact-finding” tour of Central America.

Now, let me back up just a bit.

I may have had my head . . . um, placed where the sun shineth not, but I’ve always been a curious person. Print newspapers were still a major way people consumed information, and I had a ritual of perusing the Indianapolis Star at a local diner each morning before heading to work. I started to see not only the erudition of the columnists it carried on its op-ed pages, but their humanity and moral clarity as well. Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Michael Novak. Norman Podhoretz. George F. Will.

A topic they all discussed regularly was the Reagan administration’s attempt to keep Soviet Communism from gaining a foothold in Central America. From reading their columns, I was steered to a number of books that fleshed out what was going on.

The first to really open my eyes was Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian. Christian was a New York Times reporter who had previously worked for the Associated Press. She’d lived in Latin America for 20 years. The granularity of her work drew high praise from various quarters, even from outlets not inclined to concur with her conclusions.

It was from that book that I learned about Augusto Cesar Sandino, the 1930s Nicaraguan guerrilla who engaged the US Marines in skirmishes. He was never a Marxist-Leninist himself, but he let himself be feted at various gatherings of the international Left.

And the Somoza family, a three-generation dynasty that, among other things, offed Sandino. It ruled Nicaragua corruptly until 1979.

And Carlos Fonseca, the founder, in 1957, of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which was most definitely Marxist-Leninst from the outset. Fonseca went to the USSR that year as a Nicaraguan delegate to the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students.

And Tomas Borge, who met Fonseca in the late 1950s and was an integral part of the FSLN from its inception.

And the Ortega brothers, Daniel and Humberto, who joined the FSLN in the mid-1960s.

Fast-forward to the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979, which disingenuous types tried to paint as a straightforward seizure of power by the FSLN from the Samoza regime. That’s a lie. Many sectors of Nicaraguan society had had it up to here with the Samoza regime. Businessmen like Adolfo Calero, who ran the Managua Coca-Cola bottling plant, and Alfonso Robelo, who’d been rector of the University of Central America, president of the Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce, and leader of the Nicaraguan Development Institute. The Chamorro family, which had published La Prensa, the most widely read newspaper in Nicaragua, for decades. The Chamorro family had run afoul of the Somoza regime to the point where then-editor Pedro Joachim Chamorro Cardenal was assassinated in 1978. The Catholic Church - the real Catholic Church, not the Liberation Theology bunch.

Yes, the Sandinistas were the armed faction among those opposed to Somoza, and therefore important to putting some teeth in that opposition.

But there was a brief period after Somoza was deposed during which matters of power-sharing needed to be sorted out. Christian tells a great story in her book about how Bayardo Arce, one of the nine FSLN comandantes, was invited to a meeting at Calero’s house to discuss it. Calero opened his liquor cabinet and invited Arce to select his libation. Arce said, “I see you bourgeois still have a lot of stuff.” Calero replied, “Yes, and we intend to keep on having it.” (Calero later organized an armed group in opposition to the Sandinistas, one of several groups called Contras.)

Well, the Sandinistas elbowed all these other stakeholders aside and took over the revolution. The nine comandantes’ first move was to fly to Cuba to get advice on how to proceed from Castro.

In neighboring El Salvador, centrist president Jose Napoleon Duarte was struggling to maintain a balancing act between a corruption-prone military and an armed Marxist-Leninist party called the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. (Namesake Marti had, like Sandino, been a 1930s guerrilla, but was definitely a Marxist-Leninist.)

(Duarte’s autobiography is an informative read as well.)

The US Left didn’t want the public to know these particulars. The picture it wanted to paint was of a trigger-happy Ronald Reagan who wanted to to suppress the region’s peasants and keep them working for paltry wages on the banana plantation.

Again, a lie. Ronald Reagan knew from the outset of his presidency that his mission was to dismantle the entire worldwide Soviet project - which he eventually did, with the help of Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher.

Back to the “peace fellowship” guy’s appearance that Sunday morning. When he opened his presentation up for Q&A, I stood up and said, “Mister, you’re not telling these people the whole story by any stretch. In fact, you’re telling some falsehoods.”

Gasps arose from the congregation. In fact, I surprised myself. But I knew at the moment I was a conservative. I soon subscribed to National Review, Commentary, The American Spectator and Insight. I became a think-tank conference junkie. I began work on my master’s degree in history.

All this recedes into the mists of antiquity the further we get out from that a time. US citizens across a wide array of ages have at best a faint idea of how current Latin American dynamics came to be. Some of this is due to the ever-expanding array of technological distractions that characterize daily life. But one cause is damn sure the way Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has been embraced by high school and university history teachers since its first appearance in 1980.

I sometimes think about the “peace fellowship” guy and wonder what he now thinks of the moral preening he did on behalf of the guy who is now smuggling bad actors from around the world to Managua and helping them get to the United States.

Orgtega’s not popular at home. The Nicaraguan economy is in the toilet and journalists and religious leaders are routinely jailed.

All this stems from the antipathy with which the American Left regards the entire American experiment. Howard Zinn gave that a boost, but things really got going in the 1950s, when University of Wisconsin historian William Appleman Williams introduced the concept of moral equivalency, which posited that the US and USSR were just two superpowers with little if anything to distinguish them from each other.

I think a lot of the support that America’s snot-nosed, self-congratulatory “peace activists” gave to Central American Marxist-Leninists in the 1980s was about that generation wanting to have its own Vietnam.

Thank God I did some book learning before I fell for that crap.

The division that the peaceniks sowed during the 1980s made possible the return to power of a scumbag despot and his “poet” wife, with rather immediate implications for national security in our time.

As Richard M. Weaver said, ideas have consequences.

That’s true of even really bad ideas.