Sandinistas, Contras & Osama bin Laden

Sandinistas

The Sandinistas was established by Carlos Fonseca. He is considered the principle Ideologue. He was also the one who popularized the Sandinista’s thoughts. The most important attributes was the ideology of Nicaragua’s creation. Carlos had goals from the Cuban Revolution in 1959. So he believed that Nicaragua’s revolution should begin. This tendency was entitled as “Prolonged Popular War” (GPP). They had support from rural people. They believed that they had to develop a new 'revolutionary consciousness' to take part of the guerrilla.

Contras

The Contras is a label of groups that were opposing Nicaragua’s FSLN (Friente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) in July 1979. They are a number of groups with the same ideology called Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN). In 1987 they were united and called the Nicaraguan Resistance. They were supported by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) from the United States. “Contra” comes from the Spanish “la contra- revolución” which means “the counter-revolution”. Rebel fighters refer to themselves as commandos, and los primos. Later they were called la Resistencia.

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden Was born the March 10th 1957. He is a member of the Saudi bin Laden family and he was in the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. He is known for the September 11 attack in the United States. He is considered the most wanted person in the world. Since 2001, Osama bin Laden and his organization have been major targets of the United States' "War on Terrorism." Bin Laden and fellow Al-Qaeda leaders are believed to be hiding in the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Ronald Reagan

(February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989) and the 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975).
He was born in Tampico, Illinois. He began a career in filmmaking and later television. Originally a member of the Democratic Party, he switched to the Republican Party in 1962. After delivering a rousing speech in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy in 1964, he was persuaded to seek the California governorship, winning two years later and again in 1970. He was defeated in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 as well as 1976, but won both the nomination and election in 1980.

He was notable amongst post-World War II presidents as being convinced that the Soviet Union could be defeated and not negotiated with. Jeffery W. Knopf, Ph.D. gave encouragement to the East-European citizens opposed to communism. That Reagan had little or no effect in ending the Cold War, the Soviet Union would have collapsed in the end regardless of who was in power. President Harry Truman's policy of containment is also regarded as a force behind the fall of Communism, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan undermined the Soviet system itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan#Cold_War

Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte

He was a Chilean army general and head of state. He was the Commander in Chief of the Chilean army from 1973 to 1998, President of the Government Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981 and President of Chile from 1974 until the return of democratic rule in 1990.
He studied to become an officer and was a professor of the War Academy in Chile. At the beginning of 1972, he was appointed General Chief of Staff of the Army. In 1973, he was appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army by socialist president Salvador Allende.

Salvador Isabelino Allende Gossens

(26 June 1908 – 11 September 1973) served as the President of Chile from November 4, 1970 until the U.S. backed September 11, 1973 coup d'etat that ended his democratically elected Popular Unity government. He was a physician and the first democratically elected Marxist socialist to become president of a state in the Americas.
Allende's involvement in Chilean political life spanned a period of nearly forty years. As a member of the Socialist Party, he was a senator, deputy and cabinet minister. He unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in the 1952, 1958, and 1964 elections, but was elected in 1970.


Richard Milhous Nixon

(January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th President of the United States (1969–1974) and the only president to resign the office. He was also the 36th Vice President of the United States (1953–1961).

Ho Chi Minh and Domino Theory

Ho Chi Minh

Born on May 19, 1890 was a Vietnamese Communist revolutionary and statesman who was prime minister (1946–1955) and president (1945–1969) of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam).
Ho led the Viet Minh independence movement from 1941 onward, establishing the communist-governed Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and defeating the French Union in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. He lost political power inside North Vietnam in the late 1950s, but remained as the highly visible figurehead president until his death. The former capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honor. He died in September 2, 1969.

The Domino Theory

The domino theory was a foreign policy act, promoted by the government of the United States, that speculated that if one land in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect. The domino effect suggests that some change, small in itself, will cause a similar change nearby, which then will cause another similar change, and so on in linear sequence, by analogy to a falling row of dominoes standing on end. The domino theory was used by successive United States administrations during the Cold War to clarify the need for American intervention around the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory

Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro

John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963.

Nikita Khrushchev was a leader of the Soviet Union, serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, following the death of Joseph Stalin, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the world's early space program, as well as for several relatively liberal reforms ranging from agriculture to foreign policy. Khrushchev's party colleagues removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (born August 13, 1926) is the former head of government of Cuba, a position which he held for nearly 50 years, and a leader of the Cuban Revolution. Fidel Castro, as he is widely known, was the Prime Minister of Cuba from February 1959 to December 1976 and then President of the Council of State of Cuba until he transferred power to his brother Raúl Castro in February 2008.

Fidel Castro became prime minister of Cuba in February 1959. In its first year, the new revolutionary government expropriated private property with little or no compensation, nationalised public utilities, tightened controls on the private sector and closed down the mafia-controlled gambling industry. By 1961, hundreds of thousands of Cubans had left for the United States. In 1961, John F. Kennedy became President of the United States. He directed the CIA to conduct the Bay of Pigs invasion using the CIA's elite Special Activities Division and Cuban exiles to restore multiparty democracy in Cuba, with professor and the first post-revolution Prime Minister José Miró Cardona serving as provisional head of state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba#The_Cuban_Revolution_and_the_Cold_War

Arbenz, Armas, and the CIA

The early 1950s was a time of tension and uncertainty in the world. The Cold War replaced hot war. The New York Times carried news about a newly discovered Communist threat almost daily. Sen Joseph McCarthy would even accuse the CIA and other units of the Federal government of harboring 130 Communist infiltrators in their midst. The day after the Times reported the coup in Guatemala, it ran a notice that signs ordering civilians off the roads in the event of an air attack were to be taken down. Now that the Soviets had the hydrogen bomb the only hope for city dwellers was to flee to the countryside as quickly as possible. The Guatemalan Revolutionary government, while acknowledged by the US Embassy as having "an unusual reputation for incorruptibility", was a thorn in the side of UFCO continuing business as usual. Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a leader in the Army, was elected president of Guatemala in 1951 and continued the Revolution’s moderate course. When Arbenz was elected in 1950, the State Dept. saw him as an "opportunist"; in other words, someone they thought they could deal with. UFCO continued pressing the State Dept. and the CIA for action. Neither organization seemed much inclined initially to take action, but the CIA quickly came around based on the views of the OPC. The OPC viewpoint quickly became the official one of the CIA, which pressured those in the State Dept. to come around in its views on Guatemala. The struggles of the revolutionary government were to provide a more secure economic future for the people of Guatemala.

http://www.spinelessbooks.com/newspoetryarchive/1999/991226.html

Kim Il Sung

President Kim Il Sung was born in Mangyongdae, Pyongyang on April 15, 1912. His parents were engaged in revolutionary activities. In June 1926, after his father Kim Hyong Jik’s death, he was admitted to Hwasong Uisuk School, a two-year military political school belonging to an anti-Japanese nationalist organization in Huadian, China, where he organized the Down-with-Imperialism Union (DIU) and was acclaimed its leader on October 17 the same year. He lived up to the motto “The people are my God” all his life. He died the 8 of July of 1994 because of a heart failure.

He formed various mass organizations and led the anti-Japanese struggle. He formed the first party organization—the Society for Rallying Comrades - on July 3 in Kalun and organized the Korean Revolutionary Army, a political and paramilitary organization to make preparations for an anti-Japanese armed struggle in Guyushu, Yitong County, on July 6 the same year. He formed the Central Organizing Committee of the Communist Party of North Korea and proclaimed the founding of the Party on October 10, 1945. He organized the first democratic election. His classic works were translated into over 60 different languages and published in a total of 24.57 million copies in 110 countries.

http://www.kcckp.net/en/great/biography.php?1

The Korean War

The Korean War is a military conflict between North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and South Korea (the Republic of Korea) regimes, with major hostilities lasting from June 25, 1950 until the armistice signed on July 27, 1953. The conflict started from the attempts of the two Korean powers to re-unify Korea under their respective governments. The period immediately before the war was marked by escalating border conflicts at the 38th Parallel and attempts to negotiate elections for the entirety of Korea. These negotiations ended when the North Korean Army invaded the South on June 25, 1950. Under the aegis of the United Nations, nations allied with the United States intervened on behalf of South Korea. After rapid advances in a South Korean counterattack, North-allied Chinese forces intervened on behalf of North Korea, shifting the balance of the war and ultimately leading to an armistice that approximately restored the original boundaries between North and South Korea.
While some have referred to the conflict as a civil war, many other factors were at play. Each side was supported by external powers and the conflict expanded, becoming a proxy war in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The term has also been used to describe both the events preceding and following the main hostilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War

Mao Tse Tung

Mao Tse Tung

BIOGRAPHY

Mao Tse-tung was born on Dec. 26, 1893. As a child he worked in the fields and attended a local primary school, where he studied the traditional Confucian classics. 1918, Mao had graduated from the Hunan First Normal School and had gone to Peking, the national capital, where he worked briefly as a library assistant at Peking University. In 1920, Mao married Yang K'ai-hui, the daughter of one of his teachers. Mao died in Peking on Sept. 9, 1976.

When the Chinese Communist party (CCP) was organized in Shanghai in 1921, Mao was a founding member and leader of the Hunan branch. By the next year, when he had control of the Nationalist armies as well as the Nationalist government, Chiang purged all Communists from the movement. As a result, Mao was forced to flee to the countryside. It was this almost accidental innovation--the fusion of Communist leadership with a guerrilla force operating in rural areas with peasant support--that was to make Mao the leader of the CCP. Because of their growing military power, Mao and Chu were able by 1930 to defy orders of the Russian-controlled CCP leadership that directed them to try to capture cities. When Mao's efforts to open relations with the United States in the late 1940s were rejected, he concluded that China would have to "lean to one side," and a period of close alliance with the USSR started. The Cultural Revolution was largely orchestrated by Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing. In February 1989, a member of the Central Advisory Commission to the Communist party wrote in an official Peking newspaper, the Guangming Daily, that "Mao was a great man who embodied the calamities of the Chinese people, but in his later years he made big mistakes over a long period, and the result was great disaster for the people and the country. He created a historical tragedy."

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~lcall/mao.bio.html