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9/11
is a date by now, because of its awsomeness, well
engraved in the mind of the Western public. In the
words of Noam Chomsky 'for the first time in history,
a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the
kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.' The media
devotion to the events of that genocidal day two years
past has inadvertently served to bring out that other
9/11 when the democratically elected government of
Chile was overthrown in a right wing military coup.
But the date is not alone in linking the two 9/11s.
As David Morris, writing in Alternet, commented, behind
each attack somebody recruited, trained, armed, financed
and coordinated the people responsible for carrying
them out. In 2001 it was Al Qaeda; in 1973 that job
fell to the US government. Secretary of State Colin
Powell admitted, 'It is not a part of our country's
history that we are proud of.' Nor should it be having
gave rise, as it did, to the reign of what London
MP Jeremy Corbyn described as 'one of the great murderers
of this century.'
In
his Alternet article Morris went on to state:
For
the ties are remarkably intimate between those who
planned the attacks on Chile's White House and those
in charge of responding to the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. Vice President Dick
Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
worked in the Nixon cabinet. And in a most telling
demonstration of continuity, President Bush appointed
Henry Kissinger, the central player in the overthrow
of the Chilean government, to chair the Committee
investigating the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon.
The
latter appointment helps underscore the culture of
fog surrounding US government culpability at different
levels and to varying degrees in relation to both
9/11s.
Looking
back through the increasingly mist beset years, the
first time I now recall becoming aware of Chile was
in Crumlin Road Prison in 1974. Then, Chile was a
name that was redolent of the malevolence that had
stalked the world in the 1930s and '40s. Religious
magazines were forever appealing to their readers
to write to someone either in the country itself or
in authority in another country to complain about
the regime of terror that was prevailing in Chile
post-9/11, 1973. What was Chile's government doing
and what horrors was it responsible for inflicting
were the questions that probed at my teenage mind.
Years later, books like Thomas Hauser's Missing
or Audacity to Believe by Sheila Cassidy were
common reading material in the H-Blocks. Within their
pages my earlier questions began to uncover some answers.
US
military war crimes in Korea and Vietnam had long
since made us aware that democracy seemed rarely to
have been a high priority consideration for US foreign
policy makers. Such disdain for the self-determination
of others - whether governed by imperialist considerations
where opening up foreign markets to capital penetration
was the priority, or as a response to the power and
security spawned imperative in a world of realpolitik
- constituted an outcome that produced similar devastating
effects on democratic structures and procedures. Consequently,
today's widespread international scepticism about
the US decision to flout the UN and invade and occupy
Iraq has hardly been conjured from nothing other than
the supposed 'anti-American' bias of those who oppose
the war. There is no shortage of solid material reasons
for oppositionalism in this regard. In the case of
Chile, US interest decided that democracy would have
to go in favour of a right wing dictatorship, Secretary
of State and internationally reknowned war criminal
Henry Kissinger articulating US policy succinctly:
'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country
go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own
people.' Much like the attitude of the Blair government
here - elections are only sound if they produce the
result the government wants. All of which adds dynamic
to the increasing disenchantment with an electoral
veneer that poses as democracy and which is becoming
more visible throughout the Western world, feeding
into a belief once articulated by Ken Livingstone
that elections don't change anything otherwise they
would be banned.
Chile,
like Uruguay (the Switzerland of South America) had
a strong tradition of democracy - 150 years of it.
And yet, like Uruguay, it succumbed to the undemocratic
reign of the totalitarian right for a 17 year period.
Those in the military who adhered to the constitution
and refused to overthrow democratic insititutions
were gotten rid off through foul means or fouler.
More than 3,000 people died, many of them of a left
wing persuasion who were tortured, murdered and unceromoniously
despatched into the Mapocho river. Others were simply
disappeared never to reemerge.
While
US forces rampage through Iraq and Afghanistan trying
to find the theocratic fascist Osama Bin Laden or
his secular counterpart, Saddam Hussein, prosecutors
in four countries are allegedly in pursuit of Henry
Kissinger over his involvement in Santiago's 9/11.
His penchant for helping fascists and the US willingness
to harbour him belies any notion that either Bin Laden
or Hussein are being hunted out of some democratic
anathema in Washington towards totalitarian dictators.
On
the 30th anniversary Santiago played host to private
acts of remembrance. Thousands cast floral tributes
at the reopened presidential palace where the democratically
elected president, Salvador Allende lost his life
in a robust defence of the country's democracy against
a U.S. backed full frontal military assault. At Allende's
mausoleum in Santiago's General Cemetery, radicals
from all corners of Latin America, gathered to remember
the world's first democratically elected Marxist government.
'We came not only to remember Salvador Allende, but
also to say that he is alive in the fight against
capitalism and the neoliberal economic model,' said
Jaime Caicedo from Colombia's Communist Party: sentiments
now on the increase as a result of the growing global
anti-capitalist movement. Elsewhere in the city the
military gangster who fronted the coup, Augusto Pinochet,
showing no signs of remorse, posed at his mansion
for media photographers. When Reinhard Heidreich's
funeral procession weaved its way through Nazi Germany
from Czechoslovakia in June 1942, where days earlier
he had met a fitting end, the British and US establishments
likened the occasion to that of a Chicago gangster
funeral. Now such gangsters are aided in their afforts
to avoid extradition and are still afforded some diplomatic
courtesies. In the words of one American official
'he may have been a son of a bitch but he was our
son of a bitch.' Such sentiments nourish a fertile
womb reminding us of the words from a Berthold Brecht
character over Hitler's body, 'he may be dead but
the bitch that bred him is in heat again.'
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