TOM BREVOORT DOWNPLAYS THE ATROCITIES OF THE SANDANISTAS

The Marvel editor who decidedly never deserved his position to start with keeps on with his disastrous defenses for Islam, getting to the point where he's making really flaccid defenses. First, he tried to say that terrorism isn't entirely the fault of Muslims, even though nobody's ever said terrorism was solely Islam's fault; it's just that in the past few decades, it's been the only serious ideology spawning terrorism. Then, he screws up further by writing a post defending the Sandanistas (and this is after he named them as a terrorist group), and reveals a lot more of his leftist side, wherein he also attacks Ronald Reagan:

Regarding the inclusion of the Sandinistas on the list of terrorist groups, the historical record suggests otherwise. The Sandinistas were no angels, but they were not terrorists. To choose just one example, according to the LOS ANGELES TIMES in 1985 “The most detailed report, issued Thursday by the International Human Rights Law Group, was based on 145 sworn statements from Nicaraguans who said they had witnessed 28 incidents of misconduct by the contras. ‘The documentation shows a pattern of brutality against largely unarmed civilians, including rape, torture, kidnapings, mutilation and other abuses,’ the group said. Earlier, Americas Watch, another private human rights group, said that both the contras and the Sandinistas have violated the laws of war in their conflict but added that the government has reduced its abuses while reports of contra violence against civilians continue to accumulate.”

I am not an apologist for the crimes of the Sandinistas, but they pale in comparison to the atrocities conducted by the contras. This is why Congress cut off the contras, thus leading Reagan to fund them with profits from weapons sold to Iran.

I know this conversation is supposed to be about comics, and I totally agree with your refutation of anti-Islamic prejudice, but this is an important bit of history.

I assume some of this was written in response to messages he either didn't post directly, or was answering on Twitter, but regardless of that, he's gone overboard into apologies for communist tyrants, and relies on one of the worst papers to fortify his defenses. He says he's not an apologist, but if he relies on distorted propaganda and makes the Contras out to look like the real baddies, then he is. Here's an article from The American Spectator that gives better info about the Sandanistas and the Contras:

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:

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.

Glazov has more on the subject here. So, just what is Brevoort trying to prove by apologizing for those south American marxists? He has effectively parroted the same lines as the NYT, LAT and their ilk. The Sandanistas were even guilty of anti-semitic persecution, and he has the gall to whitewash that too? It doesn't take a genius to guess Brevoort's not a fan of Stan Lee and Marvel's Silver Age stories that condemned communism. I was recently reading a Masterworks compilation of the early Thor tales (from Journey Into Mystery #83-100), and the second one has the God of Thunder helping a group of doctors stuck in a Latin American country being menaced by "the Executioner", a metaphor for savages like Che Guevara. Why did Brevoort ever want to get a job with a company built up by a guy who'd taken a critical eye against communism? What does he even think of Lee, for that matter?

Then, to address his abrupt damning of Reagan, AWR Hawkins at Breitbart gives some history of the Iran-Contra case, and says:

Then, in late 1986, everything came to light and what we all know now as the “Iran/Contra scandal” was underway. It would result in an independent prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, charging 14 members of the Reagan administration, 11 of whom were convicted: included in these 11 were “employees of the National Security Council staff, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Reagan was not found guilty, as there was not sufficient evidence that he knew about the sales or the subsequent monies that were sent to the Contras. (There definitely weren’t any speeches wherein he boasted of overseeing the program, as there are with Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder and Operation “Gun Runner.”)

How come Brevoort also chose to damn Reagan without researching to see what the outcome of the investigation was? And while the sale of arms to Iran may not have been right, why didn't Brevoort at least mention that the people involved were trying to rescue an American named Benjamin Weir, along with several others, from Iran's chambers of horror? Obviously, his leftism and meaningless dislike for Reagan got the better of him.

With those recent posts, Brevoort has sunk deep into leftist apologetics, and proven he's not good at making political arguments. Nor is he any good at making comics history arguments, and I'd wouldn't recommend anybody interested in historical research look to him for answers. In fact, it remains to be seen how much longer he'll even bother to answer the queries of passersby on Tumblr, because all he's done now is prove how awful he is addressing many serious issues.