I did not realize until after the coup how much the Right hated us.
Laura Allende 1974
Numerous third-world fascist regimes might as well have upon them stamped an imprint reading "Made in the USA". Chile was just one of many U.S. supported coups from 1949 on. Most had the virtue of being anti-communist and pro-U.S. corporate capitalism.
News from Chile recently caught my eye as it does from time to time since I worked with leftist refugees after the U.S. supported fascist coup on September 11, 1973 that overthrew a duly elected socialist government lead by President Salvadore Allende.
Chile's 9/11 was a deadlier and more brutal travesty than our own, particularly if one considers the relative population sizes of both countries, and with the added tragedies that the proximate perpetrators were their fellow citizens and the coup initiated 17 years of political repression all in the name of defending the western hemisphere from communism. But more truly it was in defense of Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics version of free-market capitalism against democratic socialism--- not to mention our own more capitalistic welfare state. Behind that lay the fear, not that Allende would seize absolute power, but that he would lose a future election and peacefully step down thus invalidating the U.S. rationalization that sometimes the only way of fighting one form of repressive totalitarianism was with another more to its liking.
The putatively good news as reported in the Buenos Aires Herald (http://www.buenosairesherald.com/...) was that a recent poll indicated that now, 22 years after Chile's return to constitutional democracy, that 35 percent of Chileans remained fearful of honestly expressing their views. But at a lesser remove from the days of the dictatorship when in the last years of the previous century and the first years of this, 70 percent of Chileans did not say what they thought.
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A useful thumbnail definition of fascism as put forth in 1933 by what were admittedly a bunch of dirty rotten commie rats:
The open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.
Times have changed somewhat since then so I will propose an updated definition: Monopolistic crony-capitalism absent and antagonistic toward meaningful democratic processes and constitutionally guaranteed human and political rights for those who own little or no capital.
Or, if you prefer greater brevity: capitalism without democracy.
Times have not changed so much that the views, predilections and economic motivations of many among the financial and power elites here and abroad have lost their appetite for this purer, less namby-pamby form of capitalism. Today's China, as one example, is in this regard a perverse wet dream come true.
We are now in a period when finance capital, highly concentrated in the hands of few, continues to aid and abet brutal authoritarian regimes abroad while at home it is having its way with us by subverting democratic institutions and the rule of law without the massive use of force. Perhaps the greatest difference for Americans between then and now is that during the cold war the economic benefits of skulduggery abroad were more widely shared with the general populace while now those benefits are being withheld and/or squandered through financial adventurism. This was for corporate America, not an alliance based on principle or some beneficent vision of the great society, but one of temporary necessity until the defeat of communism had been accomplished.
Back in Chile the article continues to describe a political situation that is eerily familiar:
"The country's changing but not its party politics, that remains frozen in time from 1990 with the feudal lords of Congress the same as two decades ago, points out Andres Velasco, a presidential hopeful from the centre-left Concertación de Partidos alliance for the elections scheduled for late next year, in conversation with the Herald.
This Chilean perception of a stagnant political class matches a Giro Pas opinion poll from early this year, quoted by Velasco. In it soccer players emerge as the most respected professionals at 44 percent, followed by television actors (39 percent) and with businessmen (11 percent), trade unionists (10 percent) and the clergy (8 percent) all lagging badly behind. But none of the latter three are as direly unpopular as politicians with just four percent.
Ringing any bells? If so then ask not for whom they toll.