[Transcript]

When the Sandinstas came to power in Nicaragua ten years ago, filled with ideals and hopes for their nation and their people, they discovered a very awful thing—

And it wasn’t about themselves, even though they had to do it to themselves! It was about that capitalist encirclement. They discovered that they needed a secret police. They discovered that they needed a security police. Because all around them, coming in from two borders and within their own society, were acts of sabotage, espionage, attack, mercenary invasion, and the like.

And they understood that if the revolution was gonna survive, it would have to build up instruments of state power. Instruments of coercion, even. And these instruments, by the way, can make mistakes, and these instruments cannot only make mistakes, they can commit some serious crimes.

If there had been no invasion…if there had been no espionage, if there’d been no attack, if there’d been no white guard armies burning villages…there wouldn’t have been a Red Army of that size. There wouldn’t have been a Stalin, there wouldn’t have been a KGB. If there hadn’t been a CIA there wouldn’t have been a KGB. If there hadn’t been a NATO encirclement there wouldn’t have been a Warsaw Pact.

And to lose sight of that fact is to lose sight of an essential course of what was going on over those seventy years, or ten years. And if you want to know what the Soviet Union went through in its early years, just look at what Nicaragua went through in these ten years, and then multiply that by ten.

Every single one of those countries was targeted. They were targeted by missiles, they were targeted by acts of espionage, they were targeted by, as I say, economic embargo, and all sorts of other forms of aggression. They were targeted by incredible propaganda barrages, and the like. Unrelenting, unremitting.

The most targeted socialist country in the world…is not Nicaragua. It was not Nicaragua. Not even Cuba. It was the Soviet Union. All those missiles were pointing at the USSR, they still are, and they’re still building those missiles. And they’re refusing to negotiate those missiles.

Mercenary armies, destruction of the productive facilities of society, more invasion, more sabotage, economic boycott, economic embargo, monetary embargo, technological embargo…