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This will strike any dispassionate observer as propaganda of the lowest kind, as will Ortega’s claims that the student-led protests are the work of a satanic cult, that the protesters are terrorists, and that the Roman Catholic clergy which had supported Ortega, then retreated into neutrality, then mostly turned against him, are agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

But across the spectrum of left-wing or formerly left-wing solidarity groups that have long supported Comandante Ortega’s Sandinista National Liberation Front, the capacity for wishful thinking, narrative-mongering and make-believe is apparently fathomless. When it’s not that kind of thing, it’s an embarrassed silence.

In the United States, the anti-globalization Alliance For Global Justice proposes some kind of conspiracy against Ortega involving the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. In the United Kingdom, the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action chalks up Ortega’s problems to fake news and a misinformation campaign aided and abetted by Amnesty International. In Canada, the labour and church groups that have been backing the Sandinistas since the glory days of their 1979 revolution, which handily and usefully overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza, have lately gone strangely silent.

There’s also the usual gibberish produced by Venezuela’s TeleSur network, and lately the slavishly pro-Ortega interventions of the creepy anti-Zionist pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal, whose sundry “anti-imperialist” followers drink it all down, vomit it back up and circulate it all over the place via the convenience of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.