A date. A single day in a calendar which contains 365 of them. Nearly 10,000 of them have been recorded in human history. Yet when the date "September 11" is mentioned, most of us immediately think of 2001, when the dreadful attacks on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon were carried out. Across the planet, the date of September 11 carries a uniform reaction.
However, there is another meaning, and another infamous historical event that finds its roots in the exact same day, twenty eight years earlier. September 11, 1973.
To most of the world, that particular date in history contains no symbolic meaning. Yet to a medium-sized constitutional republic in South America, it represents the darkest hour in their history, and a stark reality of the depths to which the unholy empire of the world will sink to ensure its dominance is guaranteed.
On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet - trained by the United States, given the green light by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, initiated a coup against the Socialist government of Chile - led by Salvador Allende. Allende's government had had a difficult time delivering on its promises of reconstruction, mostly due to an American economic blockade of the nation after Allende's nationalization of the mining industry. According to declassified CIA documents, Richard Nixon wanted to "make Chile's economy scream". The plan worked to an extent, causing significant dissidence within the Chilean army, and in particular the economics department of Santiago - mostly filled with Milton Friedman's Chicago Boys. In 1973, Pinochet seized power in a violent coup d'etat, bombing the presidential palace. Rather than face capture, Allende committed suicide.
What followed is perhaps one of the darkest chapters of the cold war - exceeded only by El Salvador, Indonedia and Vietnam in the sheer scale of brutality and mercilessness. Following his seizure of power, Pinochet rounded up Allende supporters, and took them to the national stadium. Over the next two weeks, the bloody spectacle that unfolded within that building led to the torturing of thousands of Allende supporters. The Valech Report, released in 2005, described just some of these processes:
1. Repeated beatings
2. Deliberate corporal lesions
3. Bodily hangings [suspensions]
4. Forced positions
5. Application of electricity
6. Threats
7. Mock execution by firing squad
8. Humiliation
9. Stripping down to nakedness
10. Sexual aggression and violence
11. Witnessing and listening to torture committed on others
12. Russian roulette
13. Witnessing the execution of other detainees
14. Confinement in subhuman conditions
15. Deliberate privation of means of existence
16. Sleep deprivation or interruption
17. Asphyxia
18. Exposure to extreme temperatures
This was not an isolated incident. It is estimated that anywhere from 3,000-5,000 were killed, with anywhere from 28,000-200,000 incarcerated and tortured; all this in a country that even today only possesses a population half that of Canada. All this was done with the full knowledge (and open support of) the US Government. In communiques sent to CIA Field Stations in Chile as early as 1970, Nixon & Kissinger ordered that "Allende be overthrown in a coup as early as possible".
The question that comes back is why? Why did a global superpower actively support such brutality? The answer is twofold, and (despite the accusations of some) had little to do with communism and the KGB. The first of these reasons deals with open defiance. Similar to what Chavez and Morales now do in Venezuela and Bolivia, Allende openly defied American power and corporate wealth, attempting to nationalize the mining and banking industries for the use of his people. If he turned to the KGB, it was only because he had no other option. The United States, in 1970, began an economic blockade designed to "make Chile's economy scream". Deprived of the funds of the standard loan-agencies (the IMF, the World Bank), Chile turned to Russia for help. The second of these reasons deals with the belief that what is good for the most powerful corporate empire is ultimately good for the rest of us. In one of his briefings to Nixon on the issue, Kissinger famously said "The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves". That's right; the issue of who should control Chilean resources was far to important and vital for Chilean people to decide. Kissinger's arrogance is astounding, even to this day, to the point where even Christopher Hitchen's scathing The Trial of Henry Kissinger does not go far enough in its accusations against the man.
The precedent Chile set was clear, and has resonated in American policy throughout Latin America: You must serve our interests first, your own second. If serving our interests is democratic, that's nice. If it isn't, then bring in the fascist coups that continue to serve our interests. This reputation has cost the United States dearly, leading to it being almost universally loathed throughout the developing and underdeveloped worlds. Twenty eight years to the day after the Chilean coup, this would come back to haunt them.
Ebook , by Autumn Reed
6 years ago
4 comments:
1. "Unholy empire of the world?" Give us a break. If anything, the real unholy empire was the Soviet Union, that thing the US fought against and which you seem so willing to support just because it opposed the Americans.
2. I repeat, Allende was elected by only 37% of his people. He won by only 39,000 votes in a nation of 3 million; votes that his half-million in KGB funds got him. The Americans didn't assist any specific candidate; they ran only against Allende, and even then, in its usual incompetence, the CIA funds didn't do anything to influence the election.
3. There are a lot darker chapters in the Cold War besides Chile, El Salvador, and Vietnam. How about:
- The USSR, a nation that killed maybe 20 million of its own citizens during its existence;
- China, who did three times better than the USSR at killing its own citizens (60 million);
- North Korea, which to this day continues to oppress its citizens;
- Cambodia, where Communists murdered about one million of their own people;
- The Eastern European satellite states, which together killed a million in total;
- Afghanistan, where the Soviets and Afghan Communists killed almost 1.5 million people resisting Communist oppression.
Lest I forget, there's Syria, Angola, Iraq, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Cuba....
Do you not see the point, Cameron? Communist regimes, in every single case, have killed more people than the regimes the West supported to oppose them. We supported those regimes not because we liked them, but because we were fighting Communist opression all across the world, and they were the only people who could help us.
1: All empires are unholy, it just so happens that the United States is the only one left.
2: Harper got 34% of the vote, yet conservatives seem to think he's thus ordained by God to run the country with absolute power. In a parliamentary system, 34% got him the majority of the power that he needed.
3: Evil is evil, regardless of whether it is communist or capitalist. The soviets killing their own people was the same as the native Americans being slaughtered in the millions in the 1830's. If you leave out those who died in the cultural revolution and the purges, the two killed nearly the exact same number. 1,700,000 died in Cambodia; 4,000,000 died in Vietnam. 1,000,000 died in the European satellite states, 400,000 died in East Timor alone (a country with a population of under 1,000,000 at the time). Evil is evil.
4: Since when is using a nation's resources for the benefit of that nation's people "communist oppression"?
We can go back and forth forever like this.
Cam, one of my concerns is the implied association of the Pinochet coup (and thanks to Naomi Klein for most of this, right?) with 9/11. The synchronicity of the dates is accident; surely there are no connections other than that? No one could associate the USA's perverse support of fascist regimes with al-Qaeda's attack on the WTC and Pentagon. Somehow I don't see bin Laden as a representative of the downtrodden peoples of the Third World.
Enough of that.
I would also argue that America is hardly the only empire left. I'd suggest that there are other empires afoot in the world today, many of which are not exactly nationalist in their allegiances. Vivendi, Total, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch, Yukos, Coca-Cola and so the list goes on and on--none of these have anything but corporate loyalty and would sink America (or Great Britain or France or...) before sinking their own profit margins.
Those are the imperial powers in the 21st century and they have a frighteningly short understanding of long-term objectives, often limited to the next quarter's projected earnings.
Yes, America has acted incredibly short-sightedly over the past 100 years in terms of propping up governments that have zero respect for the same democratic and libertarian values upon which the USA is supposedly based. That does not mean that other isms didn't make equally heinous decisions. The USSR and Red China are the standard setters for catastrophic choices, no matter what your politics may be. How can you say "If you leave out those who died in the Cultural Revolution and the purges"? That's like saying, "If we overlook the Holocaust, Hitler's program was essentially progressive."
BTW, The Shock Doctrine has several massive holes in its underlying assumptions. Klein doesn't question her own authority enough before jumping to some probably erroneous conclusions.
I'm not trying to suggest that 9/11/01 and 9/11/73 were at all linked except by date. That said, it can be argued that the behavior demonstrated by the US with regards to Chile, when repeated, definitely created the Middle-Eastern anti-American sentiment that led to the creation of the ideology that led to 9/11. The Chilean incident in and of itself was not at all linked. The American mindset within Chile most definitely was, and that has been argued by many (Finkelstein, Ron Paul, Chomsky, Fisk, Pilger, to name but a few). I don't see Bin Laden as a rep of the poor either. I see him as someone who took the anti-Americanism way too far, someone whose skull needs to find its way to a museum in the near future.
As for the idea of corporate empires vs an american empire, I'm of the belief that they are - at the end of the day - one and the same. Money alone does not sustain an empire. If the corporate empire did not have the backing of the largest and most technologically advanced military on the planet, it would never have gotten out of the starting gate.
Most of America's short-sightedness can be traced back to the fact that the corporate empire effectively controls it. I use the terms interchangeably (American Empire vs Corporate Empire) since the former acts based mostly on what the latter wants.
Also, my apologies for the crude usage of "if we leave out the cultural revolution". My intention was to show the parallels between their foreign policies. The domestic policies of China and the USSR were (and in the case of the PRC, still are) appalling.
P.S. - I actually didn't like The Shock Doctrine that much . for one thing, it was horrifically depressing and 2) generally poorly researched. I tend to stick a lot more to Chomsky and Fisk as far as political reading goes.
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