Documentary on Salvador Allende/Rice Media Center

I love the Rice Media Center; I loved it as a student, I love it as a Houston-area resident. They always bring such consistently high-quality cultural offerings to this city, as does MFAH.

Last night I saw a moving documentary on the life and tragic death of Salvador Allende, the former President of Chile, before the Military Coup'd'Etat (materially assisted at some level by the Central Intelligence Agency) which ended his presidency, his life, and Chilean democracy for a couple of generations and installed the brutal fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It was a very moving film, but also very sad. Here was a man, a medical doctor by training, a truly decent human being, a self-described militant socialist, yes, but almost Gandhi-like in his demeanor. In truth he was a classic Fabian (Utopian) Socialist, who believed Socialism can be voted in at the ballot box. As he is described in the narrative of Guzman's documentary of him, he strikes me as a man who was a pure idealist, who really did believe in the power of ideas, that the pen was mightier than the sword, that the upper classes would lay down their opposition because he could out debate them. He insisted always on the pacifist's path, to a fault.

Douglas MacArthur is reputed to have said "whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword never had to contend with automatic weapons"; and that is the lesson Allende learned tragically too late. He would also have done well to remember Mao Tse Tung's dictum about political power flowing out of the barrel of a gun. Allende seemed to like to give aggressive, determinedly militant speeches. The US State Department claims Allende was a deep admirer of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-Tung, and of course every US nationalist's favorite bete noir in Latin America, Fidel Castro. He did invite Castro to Chile, which scandalized and mobilized the Right wing in Chile in reaction. And some of the recorded speeches Guzman assembled for his film seem very determined and defiant. But Guzman himself catches the kernel of the problem by noting that Castro himself once told Allende that he would need to break the army and sieze it as his own instrument (a lesson not lost on Hugo Chavez today, by the way, who rose up through the ranks of Venezuela's military). He failed to do so, in the same way the Social Democrats in 1918 left the Junker-dominated military in place after the Armistice (and sickeningly relied on right-wing paramilitaries like the Freikorps to do their dirty work against their rivals in the German Communist movements--but that's another story). The only reason Lenin's revolutionary movement succeeded is because the Tsar's army was itself broken and disillusioned by World War 1, and when Kerensky ordered them back to the trenches, back to the front, the Bolshevik promise of "Bread and Peace" became unstoppable. Enough of the Tsar's common soldiers went over to the Reds, bringing their valuable military equipment with them.

My point is, if you're going to talk the talk, like Allende clearly relished in doing--and man o man did he have the popular support of the masses, too...you've got to be willing and able to walk the walk as Mao, Ho, Fidel, Lenin, et. al. did. Allende surely remembered the fate of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954...or Mossadegh in Iran. But because his movement was not sufficiently armed and militant, it was doomed when the forces of reaction began their backlash and asserted their traditional class power.

Michael Parenti offers an excellent analysis of the problem of a path like Allende's by noting, with analogues also to the situation around John F. Kennedy...that actually there are 2 centers of power in most countries today...there is the formal, civil, elected government that is (or is supposed to be) relatively open, transparent, democratic, etc. But there is also the vast National Security State, with men and women in appointed, largely unaccountable positions...it is comprised of the nation's armed forces and its intelligence agencies and national police forces and the agencies, corporations, and private interests that nurture and support them and often provide the leadership for. As one prominent investigative journalist has demonstrated, the CIA is Wallstreet, and Wallstreet is the CIA. The same people, in the same small circles, all defending their mutual class interest(s) around the world. These are people who live off of trust funds and use their modest government salary as purely discretionary income. They are the sort of people, both in this country and in their proxies abroad drawn from the elites of third world nations, who support brutal men like Agusto Pinochet, and see to it that men like Salvador Allende meet with an early grave. Allende seized the reins of power of the formal civil government, but learned too late that the real power was in the internal Chilean National Security State, where Pinochet had his base.

Although careless right-wingers might (mis-)label me an "extremist liberal", in fact I'm a radical populist, a socialist with anarchist leanings. Allende could've taken a page from Patrick Henry who rightly insisted "that every man be armed". Although I don't deny the Leftist lable, I'm intelligent enough to know that the Right-Left dichotomy is often chimerical and illusory, and that the real struggle is actually Top versus Bottom, and this does NOT always neatly map the same territory as Right versus Left....lot of overlap? Sure there is--but it's not a perfect overlay, which means there are a few right-wing populists running around that I may actually have more respect for than some centrist and more mainstream "limousine liberals" who mostly focus on "cultural" issues and obfuscate or just plain ignore true class realities and honest class struggle. Michael Parenti has written in a very general way that any Third world leader who starts a socialist revolution will have to beef up his military almost immediately to prepare for the inevitable capitalist backlash and counter-revolution. Nice, inoffensive Fabian Social Democracy might not be possible right away because of these inherent dangers...Allende was right in that genuine democracy IS a road to socialism, but that's why genuine democracy is usually attacked and subverted by ruling classes the world over whenever possible. De Toqueville records the opinions of American oligarchs who privately express their genuine distaste for American democracy at bottom. Point is, they still feel that way...and some of them ever more openly than before. Did you know there was actually a plot to remove FDR from office by possible military coup? The problem is, the conspirators approached a man with far more integrity than they realized and who knew very well that he had been, in his distinguished military career, a "gangster for capitalism"---I speak of none other than General Smedly Butler, author of War is a Racket whose message is as poignant now as then. He would not work with the plotters.

Does Patricio Guzman's Salvador Allende have any lessons for our present moment? Of course it does. But they are not lessons many Norteamericanos either want to hear or learn from or even acknowledge in their own hearts, and so it goes. I'm not talking about US complicity in the Chilean coup, that much is obvious. I'm talking about the lesson of the reaction of the Chilean people to the destruction of their precious democracy by the brutal fascist regime of Agusto Pinochet. I'm not so sure it would be comfortable for many Norteamericanos to walk around in the shoes of Chileans from that generation. There are some important words to know in Spanish if you wish to count yourself as remotely politically aware about what goes on in the world, words like "los deceparicidos", "guerra sucia", "golpe militar". Guzman's film is a documentary, but I can also point to a fictional film, based on real life, that could be set in very nearly any Latin American country (which is why the country goes unnamed in the film); I refer, of course, to the film Hombres Con Armas , "Men with Guns". Also still painfully, ever relevant, Eduard Galeano's classic book Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina , the "Open Veins of Latin America". The United States, with ever increasing gulfs between the super-rich and the rest of us, is structurally becoming ever more like the stereotypical Latin American government(s) that snobbish (and ingnorant) Norteamericanos used to feel vastly superior to. Return of the Repressed? Baby, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Ben Franklin was once asked by an esteemed lady what sort of government he hoped for America. His reply was "a Republic, madam, if you can keep it." He did not mean a "Banana Republic", either.