The Unlearned Lesson of Granada

Author: Jim Guirard

Source: Washington Enquirer, October 26, 1984

As we approach the first anniversary of the May 1983 liberation of Grenada, there should be great cause for rejoicing. But Democrat Vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro objects.

She angrily assures that if the decision had been left to her, the people of Grenada would not have been freed from their Gestapo-Left dictatorship. She assures that the little Caribbean island would still be Fidel Castro's favorite colony.

In response to a recent question from commentator George Will, Ms. Ferraro insisted that she would have "negotiated" and would have "inquired" and would have performed any conceivable contortion to avoid "invading" Grenada.

Such a response suggests that she has either learned nothing or cares nothing about the grisly things which were going on in Grenada under the guidance of Moscow and Havana. She still portrays the US role as that of a giant swatting a giant -- rather than that of a surgeon excising a deadly cancer.

Ms. Ferraro seems to be asking us (despite mountains of hard proof to the contrary) to join her in pretending

That the American medical students on Grenada were not really in danger;
That the Cubans were there only to help build an airport for the tourist trade;
That the Russians, East Germans, Bulgarians, Libyans and North Koreans were there merely for reasons of technical and cultural exchange;
That Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was too charming and charismatic to have been trained and bankrolled and installed by Castro and the Kremlin;
That, even so, Bishop was not really a communist but merely a "leftist" or "progressive" of some harmless sort;
That Grenada was not a Soviet-Cuban colony and staging base for terrorism in Central and South America;
That the Soviet ambassador to Grenada was not a four-star general and an expert in guerilla warfare;
That the multi-nation liberation of Grenada is the moral equivalent to Russia's 1979 Blitzkrieg and subsequent colonization of Afghanistan;
That we need not be concerned with the secret military treated entered into by Mr. Bishop with the Soviets, the Cubans, the Libyans and the North Korean -- treaties which almost certainly have their parallels in Marxist Nicaragua's current relationships with these same dictatorships.

Among these fairy tales, perhaps the most insidious is the pretense that the Bishop regime in Grenada was not "really" the Marxist-Leninist and that the New Jewel Party had not "really" consolidated its power. Therefore, the argument goes, the overthrow of this regime in favor of pluralist democracy does not "really" prove that communism can be rolled back.

Just as damaging to Moscow and Havana as their loss of the island as a strategic and military outpost are the political and ideological implications of its total liberation from communist control. It is, after all, the very fist instance of a single-party Marxist-Leninist regime being eliminated in favor of a multiparty, pluralist one.

Correctly understood, this is an historic precedent of major proportions -- a deadly proof to other oppressed colonies of the Soviet Empire that if Grenada can be free, there is hope for them too.

A decade earlier, following the fall of the Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile, the Soviets got off this hook by convincing world opinion that since there was still opposition political parties and since Allende had not yet established control over the military, his government was not truly "consolidated" -- and, therefore, an established Marxist-Leninist regime had not been overturned.

In the case of Grenada these convenient excuses do not apply. The Marxist New Jewel Party was the only one in operation, and it had for more than four years been in full control of the military.

Reinforcing Grenada's True Meaning

But will the historical implications of Grenada's liberation ever be widely perceived? Not of the Kremlin's and Havana's propagandists have their way. For if it does, the communists self-serving theory of "irreversibility" -- once communist always communist -- will be dead and buried. And dead with it will be the concomitant theory that the Western democracies are in a state of irreversible decline.

With the stakes so high, Soviet and Cuban propagandists are working their black magic to cast a dense fog over the clear perception of what Grenada really means. In this effort they are greatly aided by two unwitting (for the most part) allies:

as not the committed Marxist-Leninist he was but as something of a "palm-tree idealist" -- the words of Washington Post writer in Caribbean affairs Edward Cody, and
imperceptive and partisan Western politicians who continue condemning the liberation of Grenada and assuring us that if it were left to them the island would still be the dictatorship it was -- rather than what that awful little democracy Ronald Reagan has made of it.

(Never, incidentally, do these self-anointed "progressive" politicians bother to ask the people of Grenada how they feel about what happened: Do they now feel "invaded" or "liberated"?)

The simple truth is that Grenada's freedom and independence are, for all of the world to see, the first and final proof that communist colonialism is, indeed, reversible. And if it can happen once, it can surely happen again and again.

But this will become the universal perception only if we have the intellectual foresight and the political wisdom to openly proclaim that the true legacy of Grenada and then to defend the legacy against those like Ms. Ferraro who argue either

that it should never have been permitted to happen, or
that, having happened, it didn't "really" happen in a context which serves the purposes of democracy and human rights.

JIM GUIRARD -- TrueSpeak Institute 703-768-0957 Justcauses@aol.com