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Our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.

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December 11, 2023

Socialism and Disney Are Incompatible

Our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.

Ariel Dorfman
A statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse

A statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse stands in front of Cinderella’s castle at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

(Matt Stroshane / Bloomberg News)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: On October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government.

Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate—and I hope you won’t find this too startling—the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity.

This isn’t, in fact, the first time those two men and what they represented affected my life. Fifty years ago, each of them helped determine my destiny—a time when I had not the slightest hint that global warming might someday leave them again juxtaposed in my life.

In mid-October 1973, as the Walt Disney Corporation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding, I found myself in the Argentine embassy in Santiago, Chile, where I had sought refuge after the country’s military had destroyed its democracy and taken power. Like 1,000 other asylum seekers, I was forced to flee to those compressed premises—in my case, thanks in significant part to Walt Disney. To be more specific, what put me in peril was Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), a bestselling book I had cowritten in 1971 with Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart that skewered Uncle Walt’s—as we then called it—“cultural imperialism.”

That book had been born out of Salvador Allende’s peaceful revolution, the first attempt in history to build socialism by democratic means rather than by conquering the state through armed insurrection. That Chilean road to socialism meant, however, leaving intact the economic, political, and media power of those who opposed our radical reforms.

One of our most urgent cultural tasks was contesting the dominant stories of the time, primarily those produced in the United States, imported to Chile (and so many other countries), and then ingested by millions of consumers. Among the most prevalent, pleasurable, and easily digestible of mass-media commodities were historietas (comic books), with those by Disney ruling the market. To create alternative versions of reality for the new, liberated Chile, Armand and I felt it was important to grasp the ideological magic that lurked in those oh-so-popular comics. After all, you can’t substitute for something if you don’t even know how it works.

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Our goal was to defeat our capitalist adversary not with bullets but with ideas, images, and emotions of our own. So, the two of us set out to interpret hundreds of Donald Duck historietas to try to grasp just what made them so damn successful. In mid-1971, less than a year after Allende’s election victory and after 10 feverish days of collaboration, he and I felt we had grasped the way Walt’s supposedly harmless ducks and mice had subtly shaped the thinking of Chileans.

In the end, in a kind of frenzy, we wrote what John Berger (one of the great art critics of the 20th century) would term “a handbook of decolonization,” a vision of what imperial America was selling the world as natural, everlasting, and presumably unalterable by anyone, including our President Allende. We did our best to lay out how Walt (and his workers) viewed family and sex, work and criminality, society and failure, and above all how his ducks and mice trapped Third World peoples in an exotic world of underdevelopment from which they could only emerge by eternally handing over their natural resources to foreigners and agreeing to imitate the American way of life.

Above all, of course, since the values embedded in Disney comics were wildly individualistic and competitive, they proved to be paeans to unbridled consumerism—the absolute opposite, you won’t be surprised to learn, of the communal vision of Allende and his followers as they tried to build a country where solidarity and the common good would be paramount.

The Empire Strikes Back!

Miraculously enough, our book hit a raw nerve in Chilean society. In a country where everything was being questioned by insurgent, upstart masses, including power and property relations, here were two lunatics stating that nothing was sacred—not even children’s comics! Nobody, we insisted, could truly claim to be innocent or untainted, certainly not Uncle Walt and his crew. To build a different world, Chileans would have to dramatically question who we thought we were and how we dreamt about one another and our future, while exploring the sources of our deepest desires.

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If our call for transgression had been written in academic prose destined for obscure scholarly journals, we would surely have been ignored. But the style we chose for Para Leer al Pato Donald was as insolent, raucous, and carnivalesque as the Chilean revolution itself. We tried to write so that any mildly literate person would be able to understand us.

Still, don’t imagine for a second that we weren’t surprised when the reaction to our book proved explosive. Assaults in the opposition press and media were to be expected, but assaults on my family and me were another matter. I was almost run over by a furious driver, screaming “Leave the Duck alone!” Our house was pelted with stones, while Chileans outside it cheered Donald Duck. Ominous phone calls promised worse. By mid-1973, my wife Angélica, our young son Rodrigo, and I had moved—temporarily, we hoped—to my parents’ house, which was where the military coup of September 11 found us.

Salvador Allende died at the Presidential Palace that day, a death that foretold the death of democracy and of so many thousands of his followers. Among the victims of that military putsch were a number of books, including Para Leer Al Pato Donald, which I saw—on television, no less—being burnt by soldiers. A few days later, the editor of the book told me that its third printing had been dumped into the bay of Valparaíso by Navy personnel.

I had resisted, post-coup, going into exile, but the mistreatment of my book convinced me that, if I wanted to avoid being added to the inquisitorial pyre, I would have to seek the safety of some embassy until I could get permission to leave the country.

It was a sobering experience for the man who had brazenly barbecued the Duck to find himself huddling in a foreign embassy on the very day the corporation that had created those comics was celebrating its 50th anniversary. Consider that a sign of how completely Uncle Walt had won that battle, though he himself had, by then, been dead for seven years. Very much alive, however, were his buddies, those voracious fans of Disneyland—then–American President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, masterminds of the conspiracy that had destabilized and sabotaged the Allende revolution, which they saw as inimical to American global hegemony. Indeed, the coup had been carried out in the name of saving capitalism from hordes of unwashed, unruly revolutionaries, while punishing any country in the hemisphere whose leadership dared reject Washington’s influence.

Nor would it take long before the dictatorship that replaced Allende began enthusiastically applying economic shock therapy to the country, accompanied by electric shocks to the genitals of anyone who dared protest the extreme form of capitalism that came to be known as neoliberalism. That deregulatory free-market style of capitalism with its whittling down of the welfare state would, in the years to come, dominate so many other countries as well.

Fifty years after the coup that destroyed Allende’s attempt to replace it with a socialism that would respect its adversaries and their rights, such a revolutionary change hardly seems achievable anymore, even in today’s left-wing regimes in Latin America. Instead, capitalism in its various Disneyesque forms remains dominant across the planet.

Nor should it be surprising that, in all these years, the corporation Walt Disney founded a century ago has grown ever more ascendant, becoming one of the planet’s major entertainment and media conglomerates (though it, too, now finds itself in a more difficult world). Admittedly, with that preeminence has come changes that even an obdurate critic like me must hail. How could I fail to admire the Disney corporation’s stances on racial equality and gay rights, or its opposition to Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. How could I not note the ways in which its films have come to recognize the culture and aspirations of countries and communities it caricatured in the comics I read in Chile so long ago? And yet, the smiling, friendly form of capitalism it now presents—the very fact that it doesn’t wish to shock or alienate its customers—may, in the end, prove even more dangerous to our ultimate well-being than was true half a century ago.

True, I would no longer write our book the way Armand and I did all those decades ago. Like any document forged in the heat of a revolutionary moment eager to dismantle an oppressive system, imbued with a messianic belief in our ability to change consciousness, and tending to imagine our readers as empty vessels into which ducks and mice (or something far better) could be poured, we lacked a certain subtlety. It was hard for us to imagine Chilean comic-book readers as human beings who could creatively appropriate images and stories fed to them and forge a new significance all their own.

And yet, our essay’s central message is still a buoyant, rebellious reminder that there could be other roads to a better world than those created by rampant capitalism.

Warnings From the Fish

Indeed, our probe of the inner workings of a system that preys on our desires while trying to turn us into endlessly consuming machines is particularly important on a planet imperiled by global warming in ways we couldn’t even imagine then.

Take a scene I came across as I scanned the book just this week. Huey, Dewey, and Louie rush into their house with a bucket. “Look, Unca Donald,” they say, in sheer delight, “at the strange fish we caught in the bay.” Donald grabs the specimen as dollar signs ignite around his head and responds: “Strange fish!… Money!… The aquarium buys strange fish.”

In 1971, we chose that bit of Disney to illustrate how its comics then eradicated history, sweat, and social class. “There is a great round of buying, selling, and consuming,” we wrote, “but to all appearances, none of the products involved has required any effort whatsoever to make. Nature is the great labor force, producing objects of human and social utility as if they were natural.”

What concerned us then was the way workers were being elided from history and their exploitation made to magically disappear. We certainly noted the existence of nature and its exploitation for profit, but reading that passage more than 50 years later what jumps out at me isn’t the dollarization of everything or how Donald instantly turns a fish into merchandise but another burning ecological question: Why is that fish in that bucket and not the sea? Why did the kids feel they could go to the bay, scoop out one of its inhabitants, and bring it home to show Unca Donald, a displacement of nature that Armand and I didn’t even think to highlight then?

Today, that environmental perspective, that sense of how we humans continue to despoil our planet in an ever more fossil-fuelized and dangerous fashion, is simply inescapable. It stares me in the face as we now eternally break heat records planetwide.

Perhaps that fictitious fish and its castoff fate from half a century ago resonate so deeply in me today because I recently included a similar creature in my new novel, The Suicide Museum. In it, Joseph Hortha, a billionaire (of which there are so many more than in 1971), snags a yellow-fin tuna off the coast of Santa Catalina, Calif., a bay like the one where those three young ducks netted their fish. But Hortha, already rich beyond imagining, doesn’t see dollar signs in his catch. When he guts that king of the sea, bits of plastic spill obscenely out of its innards, the very plastic that made his fortune. Visually, in other words, that tuna levels an instant accusation at him for polluting the oceans and this planet with his products.

To atone, he will eventually make delirious plans to build a gigantic “Suicide Museum,” meant to alert humanity to the dangerous abyss towards which we’re indeed heading. In other words, to halt our suicidal rush towards Anthropocene oblivion, we need to change our lifestyles drastically. “The only way to save ourselves is to undo civilization,” Hortha explains, “unfound our cities, question the paradigm of modernity that has dominated our existence for centuries.” He imagines “a Copernican swerve in how we interact with nature,” one in which we come to imagine ourselves not as nature’s masters or stewards, but once again as part of its patterns and rhythms.

And if just imagining a world without plastic is daunting, how much more difficult will it be to implement policies that effectively limit the way our lives are organized around a petro-universe now blistering the planet? You have to wonder (and Uncle Walt won’t help on this): Is there any chance of stunning the global upper and middle classes into abandoning their ingrained privileges, the conveniences that define all our harried existences?

Walt Disney and Salvador Allende Are Still Duking (or Do I mean Ducking?) It Out

On this increasingly desperate planet, I suspect the critique of Disney that Armand and I laid out so long ago still has a certain potency. The values symbolized in those now-ancient comic books continue to underwrite the social order (or do I mean disorder?) that’s moving us towards ultimate self-destruction globally.

Such a collective cataclysm won’t be averted unless we’re finally ready to deal with the most basic aspects of contemporary existence: unabashed competition, untrammeled consumerism, an extractive attitude towards the Earth (not to speak of a deeply militarized urge to kill one another), and a stupefying faith that a Tomorrowland filled with happiness is just a monorail ride away.

To put it bluntly, our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.

And what of Salvador Allende, dead this half-century that’s seen Uncle Walt’s values expand and invade every corner of our souls? What of his vision of a just society that seems so much farther away today, as would-be autocrats and hard-core authoritarians rise up everywhere in a world in which The Donald is anything but a duck?

President Allende rarely spoke of the environment in his speeches, but he did want us to live in a very different world. While he was no eco-prophet, he distinctly had something to say about the catastrophic predicament now facing us.

Today, we should value his life-long certainty, reiterated in that last stand in defense of democracy and dignity in Chile’s Presidential Palace 50 years ago, that history is made by unexceptional men and women who, when they dare imagine an alternative future, can accomplish exceptional things.

As the symbolic battle between Walt Disney and Salvador Allende for the hearts and minds of humanity continues, the last word doesn’t, in fact, belong to either of them, but to the rest of us. It’s we who must decide if there will even be generations, a century from now, to look back on our follies, no less thank us for subversively saving our planet for them.



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50 Years After “the Other 9/11”: Remembering the Chilean Couphttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/the-other-9-11-chile-coup/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanSep 11, 2023

Some personal reflections on history, memory, and the survival of democracies.

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September 11, 2023

50 Years After “the Other 9/11”: Remembering the Chilean Coup

Some personal reflections on history, memory, and the survival of democracies.

Ariel Dorfman
La Moneda on fire
Smoke pours from La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, during the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. (Alberto Bravo / AP)

At precisely 13:50 on September 11, 1973, Gen. Javier Palacios sent a succinct message of six words from the Presidential Palace of La Moneda in Santiago de Chile to his superiors in the Armed Forces who had, that very morning, launched a coup d’état against the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende.

Misión cumplida. Moneda tomada. Presidente muerto.

“Mission accomplished. La Moneda has been secured. The president is dead.”

Palacios—in charge of the troops assaulting the building where Allende and a small contingent of his staff and bodyguards had resisted the demands for his resignation—was signaling the end of one of the most fascinating social and political experiments of the 20th century: the attempt by Allende and his Unidad Popular coalition of left-wing parties to build socialism without resorting to violence.

The violence that Allende had tried to avoid was visited ferociously on the building where he had taken his last stand in defense of dignity and democracy. And if the military had dared to bomb La Moneda from the air and set it ablaze with tanks from the ground, what would they not do to the Chileans (I was one of them) who were fervent followers of Allende? His many supporters—and their vulnerable bodies—soon found out.

In a country where, just the day before, we had enjoyed unrestricted freedom of assembly and expression and could boast about our long-functioning parliament, independent judiciary, and a military that did not intervene in politics, we found ourselves ruthlessly hunted down. I was lucky enough, like thousands of my compatriots, to find my way into exile, dragging along my wife and young child, but innumerable others suffered massive waves of detention, torture, execution—and even more were thrown out of their jobs and blackballed for life. The cruelest torment befell men and women who, kidnapped by security agents, became “desaparecidos,” never to be seen or heard of again.

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I am still haunted today by these violations, those broken and twisted and unfinished lives. I cannot walk the streets of Santiago without constantly being reminded, 50 years later, of the pain perpetrated on the friends I lost and continue to mourn, and of the compañeros whose names and stories I never knew but who marched with me on our common quest for a better land.

That was our sin. To have participated, during the thousand days of Allende’s government, in a process of national liberation and popular empowerment that had recovered for the nation its natural resources, implemented an agrarian reform that gave peasants the land their ancestors had toiled on for centuries, made workers and employees responsible for the factories and banks where they labored, and created a volcanic cultural transformation that brought millions of extremely inexpensive books to penurious readers.

Because Allende’s unique experiment—the first time in history that a revolution did not resort to armed struggle to impose its views or eliminate its adversaries—had captured the world’s imagination, our defeat, and the savage repression that followed it, wielded an outsize influence far beyond the borders of what could be expected from a small, remote country at the far edge of the Southern Hemisphere.

Foremost among these global consequences was how our downfall forced left-wing and progressive forces abroad to rethink their strategy for taking power—particularly in Europe. By early 1974, Enrico Berlinguer, the head of the mighty Italian Communist Party, declared that that the lethal outcome of the Chilean peaceful revolution proved that radical reforms required a vast majority behind them, which meant alliances with the middle classes and their representatives. This analysis was later adopted by the Spanish and French Communist parties, leading to Spain’s transition to democracy after Franco and the socialist François Mitterrand’s tenure as president of France. Others on the left, like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the guerrillas in Colombia, reached the opposite conclusion: Only by engaging in protracted armed struggle could real change be guaranteed.

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Chile’s coup also had a lasting impact in the United States—not because it shifted revolutionary tactics (there were hardly any revolutionaries) but in how it shaped American foreign policy. Washington had, under Nixon and Kissinger, destabilized the economy of Chile and conspired to overthrow a legitimately elected head of state, fearful that if Allende succeeded, other nations would follow his stirring example of trying to effect radical transformation through the ballot box. A series of amendments in Congress restricted security and military aid to the Pinochet dictatorship. And then came the bombshell investigation by the Church Committee in 1975 that revealed the dirty tactics of the CIA in Chile and led to laws that disallowed aid to governments with appalling human rights abuses. Public consciousness about the atrocities in Chile was a significant factor in making support for human rights—or at least giving lip service to it—one of the cornerstones of American foreign policy.

In other ways, however, the coup and its aftermath exercised a far less benign influence on the United States.

Pinochet’s reign of terror, destined to quash the slightest hint of opposition or criticism, allowed the military—and the right-wing civilians who had instigated the coup and then benefited from the ensuing policies—to turn Chile into a laboratory for neoliberalism: a series of measures that privatized the economy, imposed austerity on an unwilling populace, and trusted an unbridled free market to magically solve all the ills of society. The experiments in Chile were soon exported to other countries like Ronald Reagan’s United States (though Margaret Thatcher came first).

Chile today—33 years after democracy was restored—is still struggling with the legacy of those policies that have inflicted tremendous distress on our citizens. Just one example, among so many: Everywhere I go in my country, I am confronted with disheartening stories of elderly pensioners who cannot make ends meet, left destitute by the dictatorship’s privatization of social security—a situation that, as in constraints in education, health, and Indigenous rights, we still seem powerless to fix.

And yet, to focus only on how the weight of the past presses down on us, limiting our future choices, does not let the whole story of these 50 years emerge.

The way in which Chile’s people finally managed to get rid of our dictator is an inspiration to the world. We defeated Pinochet and the fear he had instilled in every inhabitant of the country in a 1988 referendum that he was supposed to win, given his overwhelming control of the main levers of the economy, the loyalty of dreaded security forces, and the complaisance of the mainstream media. This victory was possible because we Allendistas were able to recognize and criticize our own shortcomings and mistakes—a key step if we were to forge a wide coalition in favor of democracy, joining together with the Christian Democrats who had opposed our president and had welcomed, however reluctantly, the coup. At this time in history when illiberalism is on the rise and so many nations are tempted by authoritarian and demagogic alternatives, Chile is an example of how, with the right political strategy that unifies all in favor of more freedom, courageous and enlightened citizens can refuse to be daunted by the dark forces arrayed against them.

Equally important as a model was our successful transition to democracy in 1990 at a moment when so many countries (socialist ones like those in the Soviet bloc—and right-wing ones like those in South Korea and South Africa) were undergoing similar problems. Also exemplary was how Chile dealt with the crimes committed during the 17 years of despotic rule. Given the lies, denials, and cover-ups during that period, it was crucial to establish what had really happened beyond the shadow of any doubt. For that, a Truth Commission was tasked with this investigation, which resulted in a damning 900-page final report, made all the more stunning by its having been ratified and signed by eminent conservative figures who had supported the previous regime. The commission limited itself to cases ending in death and did not name the perpetrators. But this compromise—necessary in a country where Pinochet retained his position as commander in chief of the army—fostered a national consensus about the need to never again repeat such fratricidal horror. And years later, spurred on by Pinochet’s detention in London in 1998 on charges of crimes against humanity (he escaped a trial by feigning dementia), many of the most egregious human rights offenders in the military and security forces were sentenced to long terms in prison.

Even so, despite these advances, we have not yet healed. The most open wound is undoubtedly the lack of progress in finding the remains of more than a thousand of our compatriots who were disappeared—among them several dear friends whose graves I cannot visit. President Gabriel Boric, a young left-wing admirer of Allende, has made finding those bodies a priority as the country commemorates the 50th anniversary of the coup. He understands that the ongoing tragedy of families unable to mourn exemplifies the way in which the coup is not over for too many in a land of countless victims. During the months I spend every year in Chile, not a day goes by without some outrage from the past saturating me. One morning, it’s a group of rabid neighbors protesting the erection of a memorial in front of the airport from where planes left to cast prisoners into the sea weighed down by railway tracks. The next day, over lunch, an old friend tells me of his efforts to get the university to publicly repudiate the false charges brought against him when he was a student leader in 1973—and that led to his expulsion from the career he had chosen. A day later, I pass by a house where my wife and I had a delicious dinner prepared by Brazilian refugees sometime in 1972—and that after the coup was taken over by the secret police and turned into a torture center. And on and on and on it goes.

One would have hoped that this milestone, half a century after the whirlwind devastation of our democracy, might have provided some relief from these lacerations, some agreement among Chileans of all persuasions, not only to lament the shocking abuses of the military regime but also to resolutely condemn the coup itself. No such concord has been forthcoming in a land more polarized than ever. Indeed, recent extensive electoral victories suggest that José Antonio Kast, an outspoken Pinochet enthusiast, might well be Chile’s next president. Kast, along with many ultraconservatives, justifies the coup as having been the only way to save the country from chaos and communism. According to a current poll, 36 percent of Chileans believe that Pinochet was right to overthrow Allende.

It is clear, then, that the battle for memory and interpretation that fiercely commenced the very day of the coup—when some Chileans celebrated and drank champagne while their compatriots were being forced to gag on their own piss in some dank cellar—will continue unabated into the near and perhaps the far future.

And yet, 80 percent of Chileans alive today have no experience of the coup or the Allende years. When they remember the military takeover, what image will prevail?

I wager it will be the iconic photo of La Moneda burning, with huge billows of smoke emerging from the besieged building. Perhaps the majority will see that picture as a warning that democracy is precarious and can be slowly undermined and then, one day, destroyed, even in countries with long traditions of adherence to the rule of law—a warning that other nations across the world should heed and meditate upon.

Is that, then, how September 11, 1973, will ultimately be remembered, as a day when our attempt at national liberation was reduced to rubble, a day overwhelmed by desolation and anguish? Is that the best way to remember what the coup wrought, dwelling on an endless dirge of grief, bleeding outrages into the present?

Or will some other memory persist?

Because inside that Presidential Palace in flames, a man is awaiting death. Allende must know that he will pay with his life for the catastrophe into which he has led his people. But that is not the message he sends to the world in his final hours. Not a word about his personal failings or remorse. What matters, in this moment that defines him and his legacy forever, is his decision not to surrender to the usurpers but to resist to the end.

Others “will overcome,” he says, “this gray and bitter moment when treason tries to impose itself.” He is passing the torch of struggle and solidarity, stating his certainty that the dream of a just society will not die with him. That president whom I loved like a father affirms his faith in Chile and its destiny. Tengo fe en Chile y su destino. And, then, his farewell: “These are my last words and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain.”

It is my hope that enough people in Chile now and more than enough for generations to come will listen, that this is what they will remember, along with the rest of the world, about that day when Allende and democracy died in my damaged land.



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Chile’s Battle for Memory: A Report From the Latest Fronthttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-memorial-carlos-berger/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanFeb 22, 2023

Santiago, Chile—Every morning, as I take my daily walk up toward the nearby Andes mountains, I pass by the Aeródromo Tobalaba, an airfield catering to a wide variety of private planes.

For most neighbors in La Reina, the district in Santiago where my wife and I keep a house, this is a welcome open space in a congested city—a guarantee that no high-rises will blot out the horizon. For me, in a year that marks the 50th anniversary of the coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the Aeródromo stirs up less-warm feelings.

It was from here, a few weeks after the September 11, 1973, military putsch, that a huge Puma helicopter took off filled with Chilean Army officers on a mission from Chile’s dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet: to summarily execute Allende supporters who had already been condemned to light sentences by local military tribunals. Among the 97 political prisoners who were dispatched in this manner by what became known as the Caravana de la Muerte (the Caravan of Death), was a friend of mine, a young Communist named Carlos Berger.

Carlos and I were colleagues at the State Publishing House, Quimantú, which brought out popular magazines and millions of books at very low prices. I remember him now as mischievous and handsome, earnest and joyful, sharing my commitment to the peaceful revolution launched by Allende when he had won the presidency in 1970. The last time we met, Carlos told me how excited he was that his wife, Carmen Hertz, had given birth to a son, Germán, and that the boy would live in a world without exploitation or injustice. Carlos himself was leaving Santiago to direct a radio station in Calama, a town in the north of Chile strategically located close to the rich copper mines nationalized by the socialist government. He could not know that this transfer would be his death warrant.

Though the 30-year-old journalist had offered no resistance to the coup, he was condemned to 70 days in prison in Calama—a sentence that had been commuted to a fine. Then the Caravana de la Muerte arrived in that Puma helicopter, and, on October 19, Carlos and 25 other political prisoners were taken into the Atacama desert, where they were first eviscerated by bayonets and then shot point-blank. Their bodies were buried under the anonymous sands. Though Carmen and Germán survived this tragedy, Carlos’s parents did not. In 1984, his father, Julio, committed suicide and, a few years later, so did his mother, Dora. His widow had to wait till 2014 for a funeral service to be held, when forensic scientists identified some tiny human fragments found in a dune as belonging to her husband.

Last year, Carmen, a well-known human rights activist and now a member of Congress, cosponsored a law that will build in front of the Aeródromo a memorial to the victims. Because that airfield was not only the place from where the Caravana had departed. Other Puma helicopters that took off from there were subsequently used to cast the bodies of prisoners who had been tortured to death into the sea, tying their bodies to sections of railroad track to ensure they did not surface. Which is why the proposed monument, stark and imposing, displays a row of upright steel rails clamoring into the sky against the “vuelos de la muerte,” the death flights. The law, approved in the lower house (88 in favor, 49 against, 15 abstentions), is expected to be ratified soon by the Senate.

Not everyone, however, agrees with the memorial. A group of inhabitants of La Reina has started a campaign to stop the monument from being erected. They are full of fear, they say, that it would create conflict, cause disturbances. Social media warns that it will encourage violence, that mobs will paint graffiti on walls, build barricades, loot stores. Though there is not one case where such violence has occurred at any of the dozens of other human rights memorials, that has not deterred those who suggest that it would be better to move the memorial to another part of town. Out of sight, out of mind?

It would not be worth even mentioning such protests against a memorial in one solitary Chilean community, if this were not representative of something more dire. This attempt to rally citizens against a shrine for victims of human rights abuse is one more skirmish in a larger and prolonged national battle for memory that has been ramping up as the 50th anniversary of the coup approaches. The question Chileans cannot avoid answering all through this year is how we want to remember that day in September of 1973 when the Presidential Palace was bombed, and Salvador Allende died along with the democracy he was defending?

There are two main answers to that question.

The government of President Gabriel Boric, a charismatic 36-year-old former student leader—and an unabashed admirer of Allende—is organizing a series of activities and commemorations that will culminate on September 11. The emphasis will be on memory and human rights as a way of guaranteeing a future where a dictatorship is inconceivable, especially for the new generations who did not live the endless nightmare of terror that their elders endured, the young who are increasingly skeptical that democracy can respond to their frustrations and cravings.

The stakes could not be higher. Like so many countries around the world, Chile is in crisis. Unbridled crime, waves of immigrants, economic insecurity, drought and forest fires, odious political polarization—all are fertile ground for the rise of authoritarian populism, fueled by a nostalgia for the days when a strongman ruled Chile and there was order in the streets. To foreclose the prospect of new forms of tyranny, it is not enough to recall the atrocities of the past, the railroad tracks weighing us down. Equally necessary is to rekindle the popular belief that a different and better Chile is possible—the dream that drove Allende’s peaceful and democratic revolution. It is also a way for Boric, whose government is still reeling from the resounding defeat of a progressive Constitution last year, to change the narrative and retake the initiative, reminding the people of how many politicians and overly rich entrepreneurs who now call themselves democratic profited from the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship and were and still are its accomplices.

To recall those Pinochetista roots and horrors is inconvenient for Boric’s rabid right wing opponents. They would rather frame the 50th anniversary as an occasion to leave the past behind, as proven by the 42 percent of conservative congressional representatives who chose not to approve the Aeródromo memorial. If the past is to be remembered, what they want brought to mind are the errors and disarray of the Allende years, and how the desire for a socialist society led to insurmountable divisions that compelled the Armed Forces to act. “Excesses” (the murder of Carlos Berger?) should be deplored, but Chile needs to learn yet again the basic lesson of the coup: If we persist in demanding too much change, the result will be disastrous. And virulent. Boric should be wary of trying to push through excessively radical reforms.

These two visions will confront each other throughout this year—as indeed they have for the last five decades. In Chile, as in the rest of the world, the way in which a nation understands its most traumatic past is constantly determining its deepest identity, the sort of future it imagines for its children.

I cannot foretell how my country will emerge from this search for an elusive unity, a consensus about who we really are.

What I can hope is that the dead will not be absent from this process of national reckoning.

From the dark night of his receding voice, Carlos Berger is demanding that his compatriots not forget him. And by that fierce and gentle remembering, help ensure that no child like Germán will grow up without a father, no parents like Julio and Dora will die from grief and despair, no widow like Carmen will have to recall him through a monument. It would be the best legacy left to us—from Carlos and so many of his dead brothers and sisters: that their memory of their existence, can bring us together instead of pulling us apart, encouraging us, as a nation, to defeat the fear and hatred and blindness that stops justice being done to the living and to the dead.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-memorial-carlos-berger/
Salvador Allende Still Speaks to Us Todayhttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/salvador-allende-boric-sanchez-un/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanDec 2, 2022

Fifty years ago, in late 1972, I was one of a multitude of Chileans who lined the streets of Santiago to support President Salvador Allende as he embarked on a trip abroad to tell the world about how his homeland was advancing toward socialism using democratic means—an unprecedented revolutionary process that was under siege from forces both inside and outside the country. Arrayed against the left-wing government were powerful adversaries: the CIA, Nixon and his éminence noir Henry Kissinger, multinational corporations, international financial institutions, allied with a rabid conservative opposition within Chile itself that was increasingly armed and violent.

Efforts to overthrow the democratically elected president had thus far been unsuccessful. An insurrectionary month-long strike by truck drivers and entrepreneurs in October of 1972 had just been thwarted by the extraordinary mobilization of Chilean workers. But the writing was on the wall. This is not a mere metaphor: On many walls of the country, paramilitary fanatics had scrawled the words “Djakarta, ya viene”—“Jakarta is coming,” referring to the massacre in that city of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians after the coup against the left-wing government of Sukarno in 1967.

It was this prophecy of death and doom that Allende was trying to prevent. His 1972 trip was meant to explain to the international community what was at stake in Chile and to enlist the sympathy of the nations of the world. The cornerstone of that strategy was a rousing speech that he delivered 50 years ago this Sunday, on December 4, 1972, to the UN General Assembly.

Allende begins by emphasizing what differentiates the Chilean road to socialism from previous revolutions: major transformations are being carried out peacefully, strengthening civil liberties, respecting cultural and ideological pluralism, centered in the belief that economic democracy can be achieved through the full exercise of political freedom. But his efforts at recovering control over the country’s natural resources and riches have been met with unrelenting aggression from transnational corporations like ITT and Kennecott Copper, which were actively sabotaging the economy and seeking to create civil war in his country. Allende uses this situation of vulnerability to illustrate the tragedy of underdevelopment in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: “We are potentially rich countries; yet we live in poverty. We go from place to place seeking credit and help; yet—a true paradox in keeping with the capitalist economic system—we are major exporters of capital.”

Allende’s speech reads as a master class about the “tremendous injustices committed…under the guise of cooperation,” a brilliant analysis of the ravages created by the exploitation of the developing world. He calls for solidarity with Chile as it attempts to resolve the “dramatic deficiencies in housing, work, food and health,” but goes further, by stressing how all solutions to a series of global perils (wars, racism, nuclear weapons, “the truly vast and varied needs of more than two-thirds of mankind”), depend on the community of nations cooperating.

Allende’s words resonate heartbreakingly today. The world, of course, has changed, but many of the challenges remain the same (accelerated by the coming climate apocalypse, which was not on Allende’s radar—or anyone else’s—back in 1972). More heartbreaking still is that our president was to die 10 months later in Santiago, defending democracy and the Constitution—the first of so many other deaths during the 17-year dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. It is a consolation that his message of hope and dignity still motivates the generations that followed him.

Indeed, two prominent members of those generations recently met in New York, along with Allende’s daughter, Isabel, to commemorate Allende’s speech. One of them, 36-year-old President Gabriel Boric, of Chile, was born more than 14 years after that speech was delivered and the other, 50-year-old Prime Minster Pedro Sánchez, of Spain, had not yet celebrated his first birthday in December of 1972. Both of these socialist leaders currently find themselves besieged by the virulent resurgence of right-wing movements that echo the very forces that demolished democracy in Chile and turned the country into a laboratory for the free-market neoliberalism that is now in crisis across the world. Boric and Sánchez saw Allende’s speech as a call to persevere in seeking justice, sovereignty, and equality for their own people, and a reaffirmation of their shared certainty that there can be no solution to humanity’s current predicaments without a different, egalitarian global order.

I was privileged to have been invited to that encounter in Manhattan in order to introduce the speakers and comment on their words. As someone who, back in 1972, had said goodbye to Allende with so many of my fellow citizens, it was profoundly moving, 50 years later, to hear these two young heads of state recount how inspired they were by Allende’s courage, his sweeping view of history, his ethics of liberation and compassion, his brand of democratic socialism.

Though they had never met Allende, and I had breathed the same air as he had and worked with him during his last months in office, all three generations were joined, as so many men and women around the globe may be, by the words with which he finished his speech at the UN to a 10-minute standing ovation: “It is our faith in ourselves that increases our confidence in the great values of humanity and our confidence that those great values will prevail. They cannot be destroyed.”



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Stumbling on Chilean Stones—and Chilean Historyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-history-pinochet-boric/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanJan 27, 2022

Last week, a few days after I returned to my native Chile from a prolonged, pandemic-induced absence, my face suffered an unfortunate accident. During an early morning walk, I stumbled on an uneven pavement and, staggering to regain my balance, ended up bashing my nose violently against the window of a parked car. Nothing broken, but blood galore drenched my aching face and body and a deep gash opened just above my nasal septum that required stitches, antibiotics, and an anti-inflammatory injection.

The primary fault, of course, lies with Chile’s woefully neglected sidewalks, but blame can also be laid to my wandering mind, which was not attentive to my physical surroundings but looking to the sky, full of wonder at the air of freedom I was breathing in a country where voters had, just last month, given a resounding victory to a young revolutionary leader, Gabriel Boric, who promised to make the land more just and equitable. As I ambled along, I could not conceive that anything bad might happen to me, not with such a joyous dawn of dignity ahead of us.

Though my nosedive can be understood as an isolated, random event—only noteworthy in terms of one individual’s pain and disarray—I am prone as a writer to interpret all my special experiences as portents or revelations. In this case I was also inspired by Pablo Neruda, our country’s greatest poet, who had sung the marvels of Chile’s mineral world—the music in rocks and sand, pebbles and boulders. In many odes to the piedras of the nation that had given him birth, Neruda had asked them to speak from their silence. The stones had been here before humans inhabited this volcanic land and had witnessed all the sorrows, dreams, and frustrations of men and women who labored to make this a true Residencia en la Tierra (the title of Neruda’s most extraordinary collection of verse), patriots who struggled and often died so la tierra, the earth, would be a residence for all and not just for a few.

And so it felt natural to ask myself, what were the prophetic stones of Chile trying to tell me by brusquely interrupting my glorious, optimistic morning walk?

The most obvious response was that, as we venture forth on an experiment of wresting control of the economy from the super-rich minority that has exploited the people for so many years, we had better keep our feet on the ground and advance slowly, as the road is full of pitfalls and the going will not be smooth or easy. A message of prudence: If we do not step carefully, we risk getting bloodied and battered and bruised by the twists and pitfalls of hard reality

But why not read into the stone that upended me and sent me sprawling a less cautious, more imaginative message?

For the 30 years since democracy returned to Chile, as I have walked the streets of Santiago, Valparaíso, and other cities, I have been concerned by what I did not know about what had happened in the houses I passed during the 17 years (1973–90) of the Pinochet dictatorship.  Who had been dragged from there in the dead and dread of night? Who had never come back home from the detention center—or came back destroyed by what had been done to him, to her? What pain was hidden behind each door, and inside those who had survived?

Which was why I was glad to hear from my friend and former student Francisco Estévez, director of the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights, that the museum had started a small pilot program to memorialize victims of the dictatorship, imitating the Stolperstein initiative that started in Germany in 1992 and has spread across Europe to commemorate Jews and others (Gypsies, communists, homosexuals) exterminated by the Nazis by placing an inscribed brass plaque slightly above the level of the pavement in front of the house where those taken away once lived and ate and loved.  The idea was that anyone passing would be stopped by that stein/stone, would stumble against it and be awoken to the secret truth of that site. In the case of Chile, five plaques were inaugurated at the end of 2018 in the town of Limache. The program was called “Residencia de la Memoria.” Besides signifying that memory now resided in this place, the name alluded to Neruda’s magnificent poems, answering his demand that we consecrate in stone what we collectively remember.

And so, in the days that have followed my own stumble against a stone, I have asked myself, now that Chile is about to inaugurate a president who is a fierce champion of human rights, whether it is not time to amplify these Residences of Memory, so that Chile overflows with plaques that stub the toes of our citizens as they go about their daily, oblivious lives. After all, millions of my compatriots—fully 44 percent of the electorate—voted against Boric and for José Antonio Kast, an ultra-right admirer of the Pinochet dictatorship, a man who had threatened to close the Museum of Memory. If there had been plaques with the names of those who were damaged irreparably by that dictatorship scattered across the country, perhaps Kast would have had less support; perhaps this would be a land where nobody would dare to aspire to become president without repudiating those crimes against humanity.

Given my advanced age, it’s probably inevitable that in some near future I will trip against a Chilean stone. Along with hoping that this time I am not hurt, it would be a considerable consolation if the reason I stubbed my toe was because I had been stopped by a Residencia de la Memoria, positioned there to make me and so many others aware of our country’s tragic history—a reminder that we must never regress to a traumatic past.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-history-pinochet-boric/
The Challenge of Chilehttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-election-boric-president/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanDec 21, 2021

There are many reasons the resounding victory of Gabriel Boric, a millennial left-wing congressman, in Chile’s presidential elections will echo far beyond the borders of that Andean nation.

In times that have seen the alarming rise of authoritarianism worldwide, it is a cause for celebration that Chilean voters rejected not only Boric’s opponent, the ultraconservative faux-populist, José Antonio Kast—an admirer of the country’s former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet—but also Kast’s anti-immigrant, traditionalist, anti-abortion, law-and-order message of fear and intolerance.

Just as significant globally is that my compatriots chose in Boric a leader who, at 35, will be the youngest president in Chilean history, someone who embodies the emergence of a new generation on our troubled planet. The causes he believes in are those youth everywhere have been increasingly fighting for across the globe: gender equity, the empowerment of women and indigenous peoples, an end to police brutality and neoliberal economic policies, a deepening of democracy and civil rights and, above all, urgent action on climate change.

But like militants elsewhere, Boric also faces massive obstacles in order to enact the crucial changes that, in the case of Chile, are necessary to ensure justice and dignity for the country’s neglected majority. Despite the ample margins of Boric’s win with 56 percent of the vote and the largest total in the country’s history, the road ahead will not be easy. After all, 44 percent of the electorate voted for someone as retrograde as Kast, who has, like autocrats in other nations (Trump, anyone?), sidelined and devoured the potentially liberal elements of traditional right-wing parties. And major reforms will need to be negotiated in a Congress where the radical coalition that supports the incoming president—along with allies on the center-left—barely possess a workable majority.

Boric also confronts a country ravaged by the pandemic and a roiling economic crisis—with entrenched economic and social actors unwilling to forego their privileges, who are more than ready to sabotage attempts to redistribute power and income. Pressured by his radical base to go faster, Boric will simultaneously have to deal with calls to go slower by moderate allies required to carry out an extremely bold agenda of structural changes. There are already ominous signs from members of Chile’s financial and industrial elite—and from many milquetoast pundits—that the future president should limit his ambitious goals.

Yet I remain cautiously optimistic.

Partly, this derives from the exceptional qualities of Chile’s next president. Boric was forged in the student protests of 10 years ago—and has kept faith with the tenets of that struggle, averting the temptation of being corrupted and domesticated by those in power. He has also learned the value of flexibility. It is encouraging to see him so open to dialogue, to note his willingness to recognize mistakes and proclaim himself as someone—as he said in his victory speech—who listens more than he talks. Never underestimate the capacity to prevail of a leader with genuine compassion for those who suffer, who counts on the unique gift of courage and generosity from his fellow humans.

Another factor in Boric’s favor is that a Constitutional Convention (which he was instrumental in creating) is, at this very moment, discussing a new Magna Carta to replace the fraudulent Chilean Constitution pushed through in 1980 by Pinochet and that has hamstrung reforms ever since. The unprecedented process of reimagining how the nation should be governed, of how it can fulfill the dream of becoming a truly inclusive society, is being carried out by delegates who represent the immense diversity of the Chilean people. The convention has parity of male and female representatives, is presided over by an indigenous woman, and is on its way to liberating Chile from the persistent legal and ideological shackles of Pinochet’s legacy. It has also taken pains to make its deliberations participatory and community-based—a practice that coincides with and enhances Boric’s own instincts and experiences.

Equally promising for Boric’s success is that his triumphant rise comes at an auspicious moment for the Latin American left. Argentina, Bolivia, and Perú, the three nations bordering Chile, are currently ruled, however uncertainly and precariously, by left-wing administrations. Farther afield, the election of a socialist woman as president of Honduras and the likelihood that the progressive Lula da Silva will defeat Jair Bolsonaro (a buddy, by the way, of Kast) are other signs of major shifts on the horizon. Right-wing governments in Ecuador and Colombia are in trouble, with the possibility that the former M-19 guerilla Gustavo Petro, one of the front-runners for the Colombian presidency in next year’s elections, could pull off a startling win. And Boric’s fierce defense of human rights wherever they are violated and his commitment to democratic norms and institutions—which have already led him to criticize the dictatorship of the pseudo-Sandinista Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and the travesties of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro—could assist in a needed renovation and rethinking of the left in Latin America, helping to avoid the mistakes of previous revolutionary governments.

Finally, though, my belief that those who voted overwhelmingly for Boric may be able to meet, along with him, so many different challenges, is rooted in my personal existence. When I arrived in Santiago as a 12-year-old boy in 1954, born in Buenos Aires and raised in New York, I was soon entranced by the beauty of the land and the valor and wisdom of its people. In the decades that followed, I found a home in the vast movement for social justice that Chileans had built since independence, a movement that culminated in the democratically elected government of socialist Salvador Allende. And after the bloody 1973 coup that terminated the Allende experiment, I was amazed and inspired by how the country I had made my own managed to resist the dictatorship with enormous sacrifices and then oust Pinochet by peaceful means, initiating a transition to democracy that, with all its imperfections, has now found a leader who can help the people complete their journey toward freedom and equality.

I have seen what the men and women of Chile can do when they are called to a noble cause. I can only pray that now, yet again, my country will be a shining example of liberation for a turbulent world that is crying out for some light in the midst of so much darkness.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-election-boric-president/
Donald Duck Quacks Again as Chile Elects a New Presidenthttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/donald-duck-chile-president/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanNov 22, 2021

It is hard to believe that half a century has passed since Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), a book I wrote with the Belgian sociologist, Armand Mattelart, was published in Chile in November 1971.

We never anticipated that our essay would become an international best seller, translated into dozens of languages. It had been born, quite modestly, as a way of participating in the unique Chilean experiment of building socialism, for the first time in history, through electoral and nonviolent methods, without eliminating our adversaries. This meant that the government of Salvador Allende, which had captured the presidency in September 1970, would have to win the battle for public opinion in a situation of considerable inequality, since most of the media was in the hands of the enemies of the revolution.

In this struggle to define Chile’s identity and leave behind the obstacles and prejudices of the past, the Allende government had acquired an important asset: the most important publishing house in the country. Renamed Quimantú (“sun of knowledge” in Mapuche), it gave our peaceful revolution the means to bring out millions of books at inexpensive prices, as well as an assortment of magazines, including children’s and adult comics that would have to compete for readers in a market saturated with foreign products. If we were to devise progressive alternatives, it was urgent to probe how those imported stories worked, and Armand and I therefore set out to analyze the most popular comics in Chile—and in the world: those generated by the immense corporation founded by Walt Disney.

We decided to choose the emblematic character of Donald Duck, hoping that revealing the secret messages hidden behind his innocent and supposedly apolitical façade would inventively expose the dominant ideology in Chile. Exploring how Disney conceived of work, sex, family, success, individualism, the relationship between poor and rich countries, might help everyday Chileans comprehend how insidiously capitalism and the American dream of life were presented as the only viable ways to achieve development and prosperity. And the book became, in effect, a “handbook of decolonization,” as John Berger would enthuse years later.

The tract—conceived in 10 feverish days—caused furor and fury when it appeared. A second massive printing was soon published the next year, and a third one was ready to go on sale when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende in September 1973, and all those copies were cast into the bay of Valparaíso. First water, then fire. Forty years after the Nazis had incinerated so many “degenerate” volumes, it was Chile’s turn. Days after the coup, in a safe house where I was hiding, I saw, on television, no less, a group of soldiers throwing hundreds of subversive texts into a bonfire. Among them was Para Leer al Pato Donald.

These were not the last attempts to suppress that indictment of cultural imperialism. In 1975, US customs, at the behest of Disney, seized thousands of copies of the English translation, claiming copyright infringement (we had reproduced the drawings of the comics without authorization from their owner). We won the respective trial, but, afraid that Disney would sue them, diverse American publishers refused to bring out the book, which had to wait till 2020 to finally see the light in the land where Uncle Walt and his duck had been born.

How relevant to anyone today is this youthful book, hastily forged in the midst of a revolution whose own days were numbered?

While our pamphlet suffers from limitations typical of the era in which it was born, I believe it still has something to offer readers at a time when immense social movements are questioning the neoliberal model that has generated so much inequality and injustice. Today, with so many of Earth’s inhabitants seeking to radically re-imagine the foundations of society, what I rescue most from How To Read Donald Duck is its brazenness, its sense of humor, the liberating endless energy gifted to Armand and me by a people on the move searching for their own redemption—qualities that, by one of those strange coincidences that history provides and literature delights in, can today again be observed in Chile itself where, exactly 50 years after of our book appeared, the first round of the presidential elections has just been held.

Of the seven contenders who were in the race, the one who garnered the most votes ( 27.89 percent) is José Antonio Kast, an admirer of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro and especially of Pinochet—an ultra-conservative who personifies the traditional ideas about work, family, sex, competition and fear of change which we criticized in our book. I don’t know if Kast, who was seven years old during the 1973 coup, saw the burning of our helpless duck on television. It is probable that his father, a Nazi officer who sought refuge in Chile after the fall of the Third Reich, celebrated those inquisitorial pyres that reminded him of Hitler’s good times. What is certain is that José Antonio Kast, who believes in returning Chile to long-established values, would not be a fan of our book. His whole campaign is based on stirring up fear of the “disorder” that “socialism” would supposedly bring.

On the other hand Gabriel Boric, the second candidate in the runoff, with 25.83 percent of the vote, represents a Chile that seeks to free itself from the past and create a different future of justice for all, embodying the vast contingents of protestors who— brazenly indeed—took to the streets of Chile over the last two years with such ardor and audaciousness that they imposed the need to write a new, fully democratic Constitution. Like our book, these activists have been attempting to leer Chile con ojos insurrectos—to read Chile with insurrectionary eyes. Boric and his followers dare to think, feel and relish reality in a joyful and rebellious way that reminds me of the spirit that animated the Allendistas of half a century ago. And I note, with satisfaction, that Boric—born 15 years after our book was so violently—came to read it in his teens, when he was one of the student leaders who revolted against the inequities of the post-dictatorial period.

There is a chance, of course, that the cryptofascist Kast will manage to sow so much fear that he will become President. But Boric has a better chance, I think, to appeal to a wider coalition of dignity and courage, and lead the country to a rebirth on December 19th. If that is the case, I can only hope that How to Read Donald Duck—drowned and burned, seized and left for dead a thousand times—will itself be reborn as well in the streets of the prophetic cities of the Chile where it first saw the light five decades ago.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/donald-duck-chile-president/
How Theater Can Help Us Survivehttps://www.thenation.com/article/culture/theater-oscar-castro/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanMay 6, 2021

At a time when we have been deprived of live theater for over a year, I can think of no one as inspiring, no one who proves more vividly why theater matters as it faces an uncertain future than Oscar Castro, a Chilean actor, director, and playwright who died of Covid in Paris on April 25 at the age of 73.

Oscar Castro’s saga began, like that of so many of his compatriots, when the Chilean military overthrew the democratically elected government of Socialist Salvador Allende in September 1973 and installed a reign of terror. While many of Chile’s cultural figures—I was among them—opted for exile, my friend Oscar decided to stay behind and test the limits of the regime’s ferocious censorship.

A little over a year after the coup, on October 14, 1974, Oscar and his company, El Aleph, premiered a play that cobbled together texts from the Bible, Don Quixote, Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince. It was all presumably innocuous material, save for two scenes. In one, the captain of a shipwrecked boat goes down, vowing that better days would someday come, and in the other, at the end of the play, a prophet promises that his words of hope and courage would outlive him, continue beyond death. Oscar hoped that the audience would understand the allegorical references to Salvador Allende, who had died in the presidential palace defending democracy, but that the secret police would be less savvy.

He was right about the audience that flocked to the show—and wrong about the secret police. A month later, they came for him and his sister, the actress Marietta Castro. They were interrogated, tortured, threatened with execution. Something worse, however, was in store. Some weeks later, their mother, Julieta Ramírez, and Marietta’s husband, Juan Macleod (also a member of the troupe), were arrested when they visited their detained relatives. To this day, both Julieta and Juan are among the desaparecidos, the disappeared, of Chile.

Despite the terrible price Oscar Castro had paid for his devotion to art and free expression, he did not let this tragedy dampen his creativity. Over the next two years in a number of detention centers across Chile, he worked with his fellow prisoners to put on plays, some of them from established authors, like Sophocles (Antigone), Brecht (The Trial of Lucullus), and Albee (Zoo Story), but mostly his own work. He would often have to change the text. One Captain demanded that the word “red” in Albee’s play be changed to “pink,” so it would sound less revolutionary and subversive. Another officer was outraged at the use of the word “Salvador” in an Easter play about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. On another occasion, Oscar convinced the commandant of the Melinka Camp that the programmed play had been penned by an Austrian refugee in Buenos Aires, a Jew called Emil Kan (anagram for Melinka) and the Commandant had nodded sagely, of course, he had heard about this famous author, of course there was no objection to the performance.

Besides these plays—filled with melancholy and hopefulness and humor, with oblique references to struggle and memory and sex—Oscar also organized delirious happenings. Pretending that the detention center was a town and that he was its mayor, he dressed up in a top hat and a tuxedo (recovered from an aid package for the detainees) and greeted the bedraggled prisoners who had just arrived after many days of torture and beatings. They were entering, he said, the only free space in the country. All those people out there, especially the soldiers, were, in fact, imprisoned behind the barbed wires. He went on to apologize for the town’s transportation problems. Although trucks and buses arrived with efficient regularity, departures were, alas, unpredictable and arbitrary, so it might be a while before anyone could leave. In the meantime, championship games were being held, including a marathon, and all the new arrivals were welcome to participate in ways beneficial to their health and sanity. Having established the whole camp as a stage for his feverish imagination, Oscar prolonged the illusion day after day, entrancing those fellow prisoners with his playfulness and optimism, finally saying good-bye when the day came for them to be discharged, congratulating them on the many races they had won.

That same indomitable spirit accompanied Oscar when it was his turn to be released. Banished to France, he laboriously rebuilt his theater company and started to stage some of the plays written in the camps and newer ones that explored the challenges of exile. It was not an easy transition. Rooted in the Chilean vernacular, with a visceral relationship with the dispossessed and neglected sectors of his land, he had to adapt to an alien environment, find a language that could pass barriers and frontiers. If he succeeded it was because he was also an heir to Fellini and Grotowksi, Augusto Boal and the Beatles, able to find common ground with audiences that he thrilled with his versatility and inventiveness.

As in the concentration camps, Oscar managed, with precarious means and under extremely adverse conditions, to create life-affirming work, sending out the same message of hope and belief in the defiant value of art that we can ill afford to ignore as we cope, all these decades later, with so much global grief, silence, and despair.

That hope is also alive in Oscar’s work in film, most notably a 1983 movie called Ardiente Paciencia, based on Antonio Skármeta’s eponymous novel. Skármeta decided that Oscar would be ideal as a tongue-tied postman who, very much in love, seeks advice from Pablo Neruda to conquer the girl of his dreams. This is, of course, the plot of Il Postino, the award-winning remake that Michael Radford filmed 11 years later, transferring the story to Capri and casting Massimo Troisi as the postman who proves that poetry can triumph over fascism.

Troisi died a few hours after the film wrapped. Oscar, the original postino, lived on till the pandemic took him from us, killed the man whom the plague of dictatorship was unable to subdue or suppress, the actor who, many decades ago, stepped onto a small stage in Santiago, and, embodying the role of a prophet, promised that the words he had cast into the whirlwind would outlive him, continue beyond his death.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/theater-oscar-castro/
Trump’s Dilemma: Who Will Give Him Asylum Now?https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-criminal-north-korea/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanDec 8, 2020

aybe I’ll have to leave the country.”

Those words that Donald Trump pronounced a month and a half ago in Florida, when he contemplated publicly what he would do if he was not reelected, must be haunting him now that “safe harbor” day has finally arrived, certifying that he has decisively lost to Joe Biden.

In effect, as soon as his rival is inaugurated on January 20 of next year, the former president—no longer protected from prosecution by the executive privilege of his office and unable to escape the scrutiny of justice officials at the state level—will have to face the judicial consequences of his criminal and financial misbehavior.

In similar situations, many corrupt leaders who have lost power have departed their countries in order to avoid justice. If Trump decides to follow their example, the question arises: Who would receive him? Who could truly guarantee his safety?

The best candidate, by far, is Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, the despotic ruler of North Korea. I cannot know for sure, of course, if any offer has been made in the secret correspondence between these two men. But here is a letter that I imagine Kim might well have been patiently and cunningly preparing since he first met Donald Trump in Singapore and in two subsequent meetings, a letter that, if I were he, I would have sent off as soon as the outcome of the election became clear:

Your Excellency, Donald J. Trump:

When there is trouble at home, it is wise to have friends elsewhere.

Never were the words of my venerable father, Kim Jong-il, wiser or more pertinent to this historic moment.

If I can be honest—and what are friends for, if not to tell each other the truth?—you face much trouble. I am surprised that, given your command of the presidency, the armed forces, and all those militias that support your cause, you allowed Joe Biden and his fake news acolytes to steal this rigged election. In any case, your triumphant enemies will now seek vengeance and demand that you be sentenced to prison and pay enormous fines for fraud and back taxes.

It is a pity that you cannot cling to power, heeding your own wise advice that when someone attacks you, you always attack back… except 100 times more. And you certainly have tried! But you have also stated that being a winner is knowing when to move on to something that’s more productive, knowing that the worst of times often create the best opportunities to make good deals.

It is such a deal that I wish to propose now, as you select the right country to grant you asylum once your term is up. Forget your so-called allies, who were unreliable yesterday and will shun you even more today. As for strong leaders you admire—Erdogan, Duterte, Sisi, Orbán, Putin, Bolsonaro—can any of them provide you with real security? Could they not be overthrown or lose an election?

There is only one natural and solid choice for Your Excellency.

Who could be a more delighted host than myself, and what place could be safer than the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea? Who else is part of a dynasty, as you are, and learned from his father to be tough, as you learned from yours? Who else is assured of remaining in office till the day he dies? Is there any other nation that can boast not one Covid-19 case, ensuring that no one who accompanies you will come down with the virus that you have defeated with a speed that has astonished mankind?

No other land will appreciate more your innumerable talents. I own, after all, the best real estate on Earth. Primely located between China and South Korea, with pristine, virgin beaches and valleys, vast resources, and cheap labor—and no meddling judges or pesky ecological fanatics to interfere with their stupid environmental regulations. Even when you were bankrupt, you managed to procure the sort of capital to make miracles happen. I am sure that you will be able to obtain huge investments from Russian oligarchs and petro-sheiks. Casinos, hotels, skyscrapers, resorts, the Trump-Kim Towers—all of this is within reach. While you, of course, will be safely out of reach of your creditors.

What do I expect in return for granting asylum to you and your loved ones?

As you are already planning to inflict, over the coming weeks, as much pain and havoc as possible on a country that has not been smart enough to recognize how you made it GREAT AGAIN, why not be remembered for a huge international victory as well? All you need do is announce the withdrawal of troops from South Korea and the lifting of all sanctions on my beloved nation, in return for my solemn promise to totally denuclearize. As your intelligence services have stressed (an appraisal you have sagely ignored), I have no intention of giving up the DPRK’s nuclear arsenal or missiles. In what other way can I protect myself from foreign aggression—and provide a big, beautiful shield for Your Excellency, if you accept my generous offer?

Besides a surefire Nobel Prize for us both, for having secured the peace that has eluded our predecessors, my offer brings with it an extra advantage. I predict that your decision to settle permanently in Pyongyang will turn into the spectacle of the millennium, publicity the likes of which the world has never seen before. And if you travel here on January 19, you can undermine the coverage accorded to your rival—the worst and weakest candidate in history to gain the US presidency—and grab the spotlight for yourself. Truly, a fantasy film for all involved.

I end with a Korean proverb: A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.

Let the rest of the world walk away from Your Excellency as long as you have in me a real friend, someone who loves you as dearly as my people love me.

Do we have a deal?

With enormous reverence and expectation for the great honor you are about to bestow upon your humble servant,

Chairman Kim Jong-un



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A New Constitution: What the United States Can Learn From Chilehttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-constitution-referendum-democracy/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanOct 26, 2020

It is not often that a country gets to decide its destiny in one momentous election. I am thinking, of course, of the United States. But I am also thinking of the referendum in Chile, where, this past Sunday, the people of that country decided by a landslide—78.27 percent of those who voted—to give themselves a new Constitution and thereby drastically redefine the way they wished to be governed.

Though a change in its founding document is not on the ballot in the United States, we should, here in America, pay close attention to what just happened in that distant land at the end of the earth. Heartened and inspired by the sight of ordinary people forcing a small ruling elite to accept, against all odds, the need for radical reforms, we would do well to learn some valuable lessons from that Chilean experience.

Sunday’s victory in Chile did not come easily or swiftly.

The Constitution that Chileans have just voted to supplant was installed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in a fraudulent plebiscite in 1980, seven years after a lethal coup overthrew the democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende. Pinochet’s Ley Fundamental—as it was called by those who drafted it—ostensibly established an itinerary for a transition to a restricted form of democracy, as there was to be another plebiscite in 1988 to ask citizens if they wished the general to remain in office for another eight (endlessly renewable) years. In reality, that Constitution guaranteed that no matter who was in charge of the country, there would be no possibility of questioning the oppressive system that the dictator and his allies had built, particularly the neoliberal economic model of exploitation that had been imposed on workers with unprecedented violence.

And in effect, when Pinochet lost that 1988 plebiscite and was forced to retire as president (retaining control of the armed forces, of course), the Magna Carta he left behind acted as a straitjacket that for the next 30 years, blocked all key efforts to create a more just and equitable society. The center-left coalition that has governed Chile for most of that period was able to negotiate a number of amendments to Pinochet’s fascist Constitution—and, significantly, lift a large section of the country’s destitute population out of poverty—but none of those amendments altered the ability of a minority of right-wing legislators to undermine any attempt to alter the way in which wealth and power were distributed. And it was presumed that a populace traumatized by torture, executions, disappearances, exile, and incessant censorship and persecution would not dare to rebel against such an immoral situation.

And that is how things would still be today if a startling revolt had not exploded in mid-October of last year. Sparked initially by groups of students jumping subway turnstiles to protest a small hike in the fares, it soon grew into a nationwide uprising by millions of Chileans who threatened to bring down President Sebastián Piñera’s conservative and unpopular government. Though the demands were wide-ranging—for better salaries, health care, education, housing, environmental protection, clean water; for Indigenous, LGBTQ and women’s rights; for reforms to the miserable pension plans and the untrammeled ferocity with which the police operated—the one issue that united all those who had taken over the streets was the urgent need to get rid of Pinochet’s Constitution and its stranglehold on Chilean society.

Alarmed at what such an upheaval might unleash, right-wing leaders who had till then adamantly vetoed any changes to the status quo made up their mind to decompress the situation and avert a full-scale revolution by agreeing to hold a referendum in which voters would decide if they wanted a new Constitution, either choosing Apruebo (approval) or Rechazo (rejection).

Many of those hardcore Pinochetistas believed they would be able, as time went by, to derail that referendum. They insisted that the current Congress was perfectly capable, with much less effort and cost, of instituting some of the most salient transformations being called for. They used the pandemic to claim that it was too dangerous to carry out an election in those conditions (though they had no such qualms about opening malls!). And when that delaying tactic failed, they ran a vicious campaign of terror against “socialism,” warning that those in favor of a new Magna Carta were extremists intent on turning Chile into Venezuela.

The people repudiated them. The right-wing proponents of the Rechazo option have garnered a scant 21.73 percent of the vote. It is true that several major figures on the right, sensing where the wind was blowing, came out in favor of a new Constitution, but the verdict is inescapable. The Pinochet era is finally over.

As a native of Chile, I had planned to fly to Santiago with my wife to participate in this historic event, but we were unable to do so because of the perils posed by Covid-19.  I would have liked to witness the rebirth of a nation that seemed to have died when the coup destroyed our democracy all those decades ago. I was 28 years old when Salvador Allende became president, and such a fervent enthusiast that three years later, when he was overthrown, I was working at La Moneda, the building where he died, and was saved from sharing his fate only by a chain of incredible circumstances. Along with so many who believed in Allende’s dreams of a liberated Chile, I have spent most of my life since then hoping for a moment when those dreams of his would be echoed by future generations. That has now come to pass. The road to justice has been opened and, by the middle of 2022, Chileans will be governed by a Constitution that embodies the wishes and needs of the vast majority.

If I was unable to travel to Chile to celebrate this triumph of memory and courage over silence and death, I have been struck, as I celebrated this redemptive process from afar, by its significance for the United States, a country where I am also a citizen.

Indeed, along with my fellow countrymen and women, I am voting under a Constitution that severely curtails the will of the people. It is a travesty that we must choose our next president through a seriously flawed and antiquated system, with an Electoral College that does not reflect the preference of the majority. And it is just as much a scandal that we have a profoundly undemocratic Senate, where small states like Rhode Island or Wyoming carry as much weight as gigantic California or Texas. This is the legislative body that is responsible for approving Supreme Court justices, who have disenfranchised large sections of the population and allowed corporations to influence electoral outcomes with an endless flow of unaccountable dollars. It is a Constitution, as Alex Keyssar has demonstrated in his remarkable book, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?, that is tainted by the compromise reached by the founders with Southern slave owners and has remained a staunch bulwark of minority, white-supremacist interests. It is a Constitution that has been unable to stop a psychopathic, serially mendacious demagogue like Trump from storming the executive office and trashing democracy, its norms, its institutions, its supposedly irreversible restraints of checks and balances. It has established a shameful system where profits matter more than people, where discrimination and racism are rampant, where the very rich can accumulate more wealth than the rest of the country combined.

There are, of course, many splendid features enshrined in that Constitution. Its defenders, including many who notice its limitations, point to the ways in which it has often served to expand freedom, maintain stability, and ensure prosperity, and therefore deem it possible to overcome the glaring inadequacies of that 18th century document with more amendments and stopgap remedies, such as abolishing the Electoral College, introducing radical changes to the justice system, passing legislation that guarantees voting rights, giving statehood to Puerto Rico and senatorial representation to Washington, D.C.

For my part, I wonder if the current crisis of authority, the sense that the United States has fallen into disarray and madness, could not open the door to a more drastic solution. Would it not make more sense to engage in a process like the one that Chile has just gone through, where the people have taken upon themselves the right and obligation to determine the fundamental tenets and principles of the system and rules that govern their existence? Should we not at least start to envisage the possibility of calling for a constitutional convention as a way of addressing the failure of our country to live up to its promise of a more perfect union? Do the problems that beset us, so similar to those that plague our Chilean brothers and sisters—the systemic racism, the police brutality, the ecological disasters, the offensive disparity of income, the increased polarization of our public—not cry out for a radical reimagining of who we are? Has not the pestilence of Covid-19 revealed that we are woefully unprepared for the challenges ahead?

It could be argued that the economic, political, and historical conditions in Chile and the United States are so different that any comparison between the two is pointless. The US Constitution, for all its shortcomings, did not originate in a fraud like the one perpetrated by General Pinochet. And it is unlikely that enough citizens in the 50 states are so dissatisfied with their lot that they would be willing to undergo the sort of intense reexamination of their identity that Chileans are about to embark upon. I do not doubt, in fact, that most Americans, fearful of disruption, terrified that their country might crumble under yet more divisiveness, would prefer that alterations to their fundamental laws and institutions be carried out, if at all, by their elected representatives.

That was precisely how Chileans were told change would happen.

What they finally decided, after 30 years of waiting and increasing despair, was to use their extraordinary power as a mobilized people to demand action. What they understood is that the Constitution affected every aspect of their daily existence, even if they had no say in shaping it. The only way that it could cease to be an abstract, faraway document, unrepresentative and unresponsive to their concerns— the only way it could fully belong to them—was to fight for it, risk having their bodies bruised and their eyes blinded by police pellets, risk their jobs and their tranquility to create an order that they could recognize as their own and not imposed from above. What has been most amazing about the year since insubordinate Chileans forced a referendum to take place—and what will be yet more amazing in the year and a half ahead—is the vast educational value of discussing and gauging, measuring and weighing, the pros and cons of all manner of questions that are so often left to a select group of remote experts. The process itself of a joyful, collective reckoning with the past anticipating the sort of country that is envisioned transforms and makes better those who are part of that communal exploration.  

It is a process that, once begun, can be thrilling and emancipatory.

However long it takes for the American people to move in that direction—and the protests of the last months and the tradition of struggle for peace and justice that has always been beating in the epic heart of Martin Luther King Jr.’s country gives me hope that it will be sooner rather than later—there is one message from Chile that should always be borne in mind.

My family in Santiago sent me a photo of some words a young man had scribbled on a placard that he was parading around the city on his bike:

“Lo impensable se volvió posible porque salimos a exigirlo y el país no se vino abajo.”

The unthinkable became possible because we went out to demand it and the country did not crumble.

Or, as Salvador Allende—so alive today!—said, just minutes before dying in defense of democracy and dignity: The future is ours and it is made by the people.

La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-constitution-referendum-democracy/
What Would Hell Be Like for Donald Trump?https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-hell-dante/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanOct 23, 2020

For some time now, I’ve wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once caused grievous harm to their fellow humans.

The more Trump has abused his power and position in this world and the more he’s escaped any retribution for his crimes, the more obsessed I’ve become with visualizing ways for him to pay in some version of the afterlife.

As I mulled over the treatment he deserved for the havoc he continues to wreak on the lives of countless others here in the United States and across the globe, I turned almost automatically to the work of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose Divina Commedia minutely recreated in the verse form terza rima what awaited the readers of his time once they died. Dante (1265–1321) laid out his otherworldly landscape in three volumes—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso —that have rightly been considered among the towering and influential literary achievements of humanity.

There was nothing abstract about the Hell he created. Dante pictured himself personally taking a voyage into the hereafter to meet men and women, both of his time and from the past, who were being rewarded for their virtue or eternally castigated for their offenses. Of that journey through purgatorial fires and heavenly wonders, guided by his dead childhood sweetheart, Beatrice, it was the Florentine writer’s descent into the saturated circles of Hell that most fascinated and enthralled readers throughout the centuries. We listen to stories of the wicked as they express their remorse and experience the excruciatingly sophisticated torments he dreamt up as suitable reprisals for the damage they did during their earthly existence.

Witnessing the infernal realities President Trump has unleashed on America, I can’t help wondering where Dante would have placed our miscreant in chief in his afterlife of horror. In the end, perhaps not surprisingly, I realized one obvious thing: The 45th president has such a multitude of transgressions to his name that he fits almost every category and canto that Dante invented for the sinners of his age.

As I pondered what the Italian author would have made of Trump and his certainty that he was above the laws of society and nature, I was invaded by Dante’s divinatory and lyrical voice. It came to me as if in a hallucination. Listening carefully, I managed to record the words with which that visionary poet of yesteryear would describe a man who, until recently, believed himself invincible and invulnerable, how he would be judged and condemned once his life was over.

Here, then, is my version of Dante’s prophecy—my way, that is, of finally consigning Donald Trump to Hell for forever and a day.

Dante Greets Trump at the Gates of Hell and Explains What His Punishment Is to Be

My name, sir, is Dante Alighieri. Among the innumerable dead that inhabit these shores, I have been chosen to speak to you because an expert on the afterlife was needed to describe what awaits your soul when it passes, as all souls must, into this land of shadows. I was chosen, whether as an honor or not, to imagine your fate once you wind your way toward us.

Having accepted this task, I was tempted, sir, as I watched your every act in that life before death, to make this easier for myself and simply conjure up the circles of Hell I had already described in my terza rima. I would then have guided you down my cascade of verses, step by step, into the depths of darkness I had designed for others.

Were you not the selfish embodiment of so many sins I dealt with in my Commedia? Lust and adultery, yes! Gluttony, yes; greed and avarice, oh yes; wrath and fury, certainly; violence, fraud, and usury, yes again! Divisiveness and treachery, even heresy—you who did not believe in God and yet used the Bible as a prop—yes, one more time!

Did you not practice all those iniquities, a slave to your loveless appetites? Do you not deserve to be called to account in ways I once envisioned: buffeted by vicious winds, drowning in storms of putrefaction, choking under gurgling waters of belligerence, immersed in the boiling blood that echoes rage, thirsting across a burning plain, steeped in the excrement of flattery and seduction, clawed to pieces by the night demons of corruption, or feeling that throat and tongue of yours that tore so many citizens apart mutilated and hacked to bits? Would it not be fair that, like other perjurers and impostors, you be bloated with disease? Would it not make sense that you be trapped in ice or flames, endlessly chewed by the jaws of eternity, like those who committed treason against country and friends in my time?

And yet, in the end, I rejected all of that. After all, I was selected not to repeat myself but because I was trusted to be creative and find an appropriately new reckoning for you—something, said the authorities in charge of this place, less savage and fierce, more educational, even therapeutic. Thus have times changed since I wrote that poem of mine!

My mission, it seems, was not to insert you in rings of an already conceived Hell of terrifying revenge. So I began to seek inspiration from my fellow sufferers so many centuries later, and there, indeed, they were—your multitudes of victims, the ones who need to heal, the ones you never wanted to see or mourn, whose pain you never shared, who now want to greet you, sir, in a new way.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed yet, but I have. They’ve been lining up since the moment they arrived. Now, they’re here by my side, counting the days until your time is up and you must face them. And so I decided that they would be given a chance to do exactly that, one by one, through all eternity.

After all, each of them was devastated because of you: a father who died of the pandemic you did less than nothing to prevent; a little boy shot with a gun you did not ban; a worker overcome by toxic fumes whose release your administration ensured; the protesters killed by a white supremacist inflamed by your rhetoric; a Black man who expired thanks to police violence you refuse to condemn; a migrant who succumbed to the desert heat on the other side of the wall that you stole taxpayer money to (only partially) build. And let us not forget that female Kurdish fighter slaughtered because you betrayed her people.

On and on I could go, naming the wrongfully dead, the untimely dead, the avoidable dead, now all huddled around me, otherwise unrepresented and forgotten but awaiting your arrival for their moment of truth. Each of them will have to be patient, since according to my plan, every single casualty of yours will be afforded whatever time he or she desires to relive a life and recount its last moments. You will be forced, sir, to listen to their stories again and again until you finally learn how to make their sorrow your own, until their tragedies truly lodge in the entrails of your mind, as long as it takes you to truly ask for forgiveness.

Trump Tries to Find a Way Out of Hell

Your first reaction will undoubtedly be to indulge in the fantasy that, just as you swore the pandemic would be magically dispatched, so this new predicament will miraculously melt into nothingness. When you open your eyes, however, and still find yourself here, your urge will be to call on all your old tricks, those of the ultimate con man, to avoid sinking deeper into the moral abyss I’ve prepared for you.

Just as you’ve bribed, bought, and inveigled your way out of scandals and bankruptcies, so you’ll believe you can bluster and wriggle your way out of this moment, too. You’ll try to pretend you’re just hosting one more (ir)reality TV show where this Dante fellow can be turned into another of your apprentices, competing for your largesse and approval.

And when none of that works, you’ll make believe that you have indeed atoned for your terrible deeds and fall again into the lies and macho bravado that were your second skin. You’ll swear that you have repented so you can escape this confinement, these rooms where you have become the prey rather than the predator. You will present yourself as a savior, boast of having single-handedly concocted a vaccine against accountability, discovered a manly cure for the terrors of Hell. You’ll dream—I know you will—of reappearing victorious and, of course, maskless on that White House balcony.

This time, though, it just won’t work, not here in this transparent abode of death. And yet you will certainly try to hurry the process up because you’ll know—I’ve already decided that much—that those you ruined while you were still alive are only the start of your journey, not the end. You will become all too aware, while you spend hours, days, years, decades with the men, women, and children you consigned to an early mortality and permanent grief, that a multitude of others will be arriving, all those who will perish in the future due to your neglect and malevolence.

They will, I assure you, snake endlessly into your mind, accumulating through many tomorrows, all those who are yet to die but will do so prematurely as the brutality you worshipped and fueled takes its toll, as the earth, heavens, and waters you ravaged exact heat waves of revenge—hurricanes and droughts and famines and floods, ever more victims with each minute that slithers by, including the women who will die in botched back-alley abortions because of your judicial nominations. The decades to come are already preparing to welcome the legions of your dead.

That is the despair I imagine for you now that I am no longer the man bitterly exiled from his beloved Florence. The centuries spent in the afterlife have evidently softened me into compassion for those who have sinned. Beatrice, the love of my life, would have admired my transformation, the one that, as you are ground down and down, will also allow you to be lifted up and up until you really do repent, until you beg for an absolution, which (if you are truly sincere) will be granted.

Even so, even as I speak and divine, I find myself eaten by a worm of doubt. This, I am being told, has been tried before. The mists of time are filled with men who, like you, thought they were gods and who, upon their demise, were led howling into rooms overflowing with the lives they broke, with the irreparable damage they wrought. And these criminals—Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Augusto Pinochet, Napoleon Bonaparte, Andrew Jackson, Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin (oh, the list is endless!)—never left the twisted mirror of their own penitential rooms.

They are still stagnating in them. That’s what’s being whispered in my ear, that the redemptive prophecy of Dante Alighieri will never come true for you, Donald Trump. Perhaps like those other accursed malefactors, you will refuse responsibility. Perhaps you will continue to claim that you are the real victim. Perhaps you will prove as incorrigible and defective and stubbornly blind as they continue to be. Perhaps there is an evil in you and the universe that will never completely abate, a cruelty that has no end. Perhaps when pain is infinite, it is impossible to erase.

I fear, then, that it may be unkind to promise any kind of justice when there will be none for those who stand in line hoping to meet their tormentor on the other side of death. Why, I ask myself, resurrect the dead if it be only to dash their hopes again and again?

What Forever Means

And yet, what else can I do but complete the task given to me? Of all poets, I was chosen because of the Divina Commedia that I wrote when I was alive and banished from Florence, because I descended into the Inferno and climbed the mount of Purgatory and caught a glimpse of what the sun and stars of Paradise looked like. I was chosen from the fields of the dead to prepare these words for you as a warning or a plea or a searing indictment, an assignment I accepted and cannot now renounce.

What’s left to me, then, but to conclude these words by responding to the one objection you might legitimately raise to my picture of your fate in the afterlife? I imagine you crying out—“But Dante Alighieri,” you will say, “the future you’ve painted will take forever.”

And I will answer: Yes, Donald J. Trump, it will indeed take forever, but forever is all you have, all any of us have, after all.



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Confronting the Pandemic in a Time of Revolt: Voices From Chilehttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/chile-protest-literature-coronavirus/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanApr 6, 2020

It is oddly appropriate and perhaps ironic that Chile happens to be preparing to celebrate—in the midst of a pandemic that is drastically questioning all previous paradigms of behavior and human relationships—the centenary of the death of Alberto Blest Gana (1830–1920), the country’s preeminent novelist of “manners” (costumbres) of the 19th century, who understood his moralizing work as part of a “high mission” that “brings civilization to the least educated classes of society,” excoriates “vices,” and teaches the public “healthy, wholesome lessons.” It is even more paradoxical that exactly a hundred years after Blest Gana breathed his last, the founding myths of nationhood he helped to imagine and define have been shattered by a heroic social movement led by young people brought up on the works of this very author.

Like those youngsters in the streets, I first read Blest Gana’s most famous and popular novel, Martín Rivas, in my Chilean high school, though that was back in the late 1950s. I confess that I immediately felt wary of the eponymous protagonist, who, coming from an impoverished provincial middle-class family, triumphs against all odds and manages to marry the haughty, albeit sparkling and sensitive, daughter of his aristocratic patron in Santiago. I found Martín too noble, too industrious and earnest, too tediously innocent, preferring his romantic friend, Rafael San Luis, rebellious and slightly satanic. I resented the fact that San Luis, because he breaks the rules of conformist existence and sexual monogamy, is condemned to die by the narrator (who at least bestowed upon him a gallant departure, combating a reactionary government), whereas the overly virtuous and mildly liberal Martín, after much intrigue and many misunderstandings, is rewarded with the girl and her family fortune.

Partly my disquiet came from the circumstance that I was reading Balzac and Stendhal at the time and thirsted for a Rastignac or a Julien Sorel to burst open the corset of social hierarchies. I also would have wanted the melodramatic and often prosaic Blest Gana to delve into some of the psychological complexity probed by the French and English novelists of those years, the way, for instance, that Balzac himself and Dickens laid bare the corrosive influence of money on their characters.

But my distrust of the ascendancy of Martín ran deeper than a literary aversion. Already, at the age of 16, I was committed to critiquing the very society that Blest Gana’s exemplary character personified. I saw the future of Chile (and humanity) not in the falsely meritocratic model presented by men like Martín, but forged by the struggle of millions of dispossessed people for a more just world, workers who, unsurprisingly, never make an appearance in the novel that celebrates the triumph of Martín and his incorporation into the dominant bourgeoise of his era.

My dream for Chile would prevail during the three years (1970–73) of the presidency of Salvador Allende, a socialist whose peaceful revolution ended in a bloody coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. His dictatorship imposed the neoliberal model imported from the Chicago school of economics in thrall to Milton Friedman’s ideas, a model of development and extreme privatization and exploitation that has ruled Chilean society (and much of the world) ever since, remaining prevalent even after democracy was restored to the country 30 years ago.

It is against that model that the Chilean people have rebelled since last October, demanding a new constitution and a system that works for the many and not for the privileged few at the top. (Chile is one of the most unequal nations in the world, with an appalling gap between the super-rich and the rest of the population) And though the unexpected eruption of the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that the plebiscite that was supposed to lead to that new constitution (the first one to be forged by the people themselves, in the year when Chile celebrates the 210th anniversary of its independence) has been put on hold until late October, that same plague has confirmed to the people how the abysmal structural unfairness of the current social and economic system punishes the poor and helps the prosperous to thrive—a revelation about power that, one would hope, might also be central to the discussion regarding what the United States should learn from this crisis about its own national failings.

Though the considerate, upright, and austere 19th century Martín Rivas, if he were to resurrect today, would probably deplore the greed and excesses of the cutthroat and all-too-real “Chicago boys” (among other things, Martín’s progressive ideas and actions got him into trouble with the conservative authorities of his day, who are satirized in the novel), one can safely declare, nevertheless, that the current Chilean revolt is born out of a widespread rejection of the free-market, laissez-faire worldview that Blest Gana’s hero represents. The youth of Chile had been promised that if they behaved like goody-goody Martín Rivas, benefits of all sorts would rain upon them. Instead, they live in a land where their education is discriminatory and underfunded; their families have dreadful health care; their parents are deeply in debt, earning Third World salaries to pay for goods with First World prices; and their grandparents have been immiserated by pension plans privatized by the dictatorship and devoted to taking advantage of pensioners rather than providing them with a comfortable old age. All the more reason to be enraged by the corruption and ostentatious luxury flaunted by the ruling elite.

As I recently returned to Blest Gana’s novel during a prolonged visit to Chile, it did not seem farfetched to interpret the uprising of Chile’s youth—sustained by their elders in overwhelming numbers—as a rebellion against the paternalistic ideal of success through competition and individual accomplishment, embodied by Martín Rivas, that activists read at school and that has been at the heart of how the ruling class wanted the people to dream of themselves during most of the republic’s existence.

Of course, this view of Chilean identity—what my compatriots were supposed to collectively and personally aspire to—did not go uncontested in the country’s society, nor in its literature. Besides the endless struggles for social justice by workers, miners, peasants, and intellectuals that would culminate in Allende’s victory, the major novelists, poets, and playwrights in the hundred years since Blest Gana’s death have channeled their creative energy into imagining an opposite, contrasting version of what Chile was and should be, vibrantly expressed in linguistic exploits that assail the prevailing certainties of sanctimonious and sanctioned history. The poetry of Neruda, both in his epic and surrealistic phases, and the mystical and covertly lesbian explorations of Gabriela Mistral, Chile’s two Nobel Prize winners, are merely the most prominent of these endeavors. To these we can add an array of social-realist fiction devoted to the working class (Volodia Teitelboim, Francisco Coloane, Nicomedes Guzmán); the erotic narrative longings of María Luisa Bombal and Pía Barros; the acerbic verses of Nicanor Parra’s “Anti-Poems” and José Donoso’s phantasmagoric dissection of a decadent aristocracy; the freewheeling spirit expressed in the stories of Antonio Skármeta and Alejandro Zambra; the probing of marginal lives in novels by Manuel Rojas and Diamela Eltit; Raúl Zurita’s hallucinatory love poems to a scarred and buried landscape of love and the glorious danger zones of the past conjured up by Tomás Harris in his Cipango; and the incisive plays of Jorge Díaz, Isidora Aguirre, and Egon Wolf. These and so many additional literary incursions exposed a submerged country that did not believe that the road to liberation depended on imitating the conventional Martín Rivas archetype or the sort of unadventurous language in which his triumphant ascent and consolidation was transmitted.

But of all these authors, the one who best exemplifies a fierce and unbending rejection of Blest Gana’s vision of what Chile should be is Carlos Droguett (1912–1996), who may not have been read by those who have flooded the streets for the past five months clamoring for justice, but who could be considered their secret godfather, a writer who predicted the rage of today’s most militant protesters and their embrace of resistance, often violent, as a way of purging a corrupt and conformist social order.

Consistently and consciously outside the mainstream, the vitriolic and anti-establishment Droguett only received high-status recognition in 1970, exactly 50 years after Blest Gana’s death and the year of Allende’s victory, when he was awarded the National Prize for Literature. His most notorious novel continues to be Eloy (1960), a visceral, sympathetic, and tender stream-of-consciousness recreation of the last hours of a real-life bandit and murderer being hunted by the police, reflecting a fascination with the criminal and marginal sectors of society that Droguett never abandoned (he even has a novel in which Christ resurrects as a serial killer). More relevant, however, for fathoming today’s revolt is another work, Patas de Perro (1965), which I consider his masterpiece (none of his work, alas, has been translated into English).

In that novel, the protagonist, Bobi, is born with the legs of a dog (that is, with patas de perro), and this radical symbolic and physical difference brings with it abuse, discrimination, persecution by every institution in the land (church, government, armed forces, politicians, entrepreneurs, educational system, the very ones being questioned by today’s activists). Refusing to submit to society’s way of dealing with him (he won’t join a circus, will not put himself on display, will not market his divergence from the norm, will escape from an insane asylum where his murder is being planned), Bobi represents everything that official Chile has suppressed. His very existence epitomizes the spirit of defiance of those neglected by the powerful, ready to be martyred if need be. Droguett suggests that Bobi is alone now, but that a day will come when his example will be prophetic, when many others fight for the right to be different and rebellious.

As I reread Patas de Perro during my recent stay in Chile, I was acutely aware that not far from where I serenely sat with the novel, thousands of inadvertent emulators of Bobi were rising up and demanding recognition, that their countercultural voices be appreciated and their strangeness and desires be given legitimacy and respect. Like them, Droguett is furious and expresses that fury in a primeval, feverish flow of words and metaphors, eerily anticipating the wrath that has, as of late, been consuming a country whose elites have been blind for far too long to the needs and anguish of the greater part of the population.

With Droguett’s ranting, lyrical, blood-filled indictment of Chilean society, we have traveled as far as it seems possible from the mundane, traditional realism of Blest Gana. Could this confrontation between these two acute opposites of Chile’s halved identity bring to light anything about the crisis gripping this country at the end of the world, perhaps showing us ways in which a solution to its conflicts might be hammered out? Or am I engaging in an intellectually fanciful exercise by trying to examine present society’s dilemmas through the prism of past literature, when so many other efforts and responsibilities await us? Indeed, do any of these fictional imaginings from decades ago speak to us, when the most immediate and harshly real tasks facing Chile—and humanity—are confronting the threats to our common survival in these times of pestilence?

I wager that there is something to be learned from the contrast between the extremes of Martín Rivas and Bobi, between Blest Gana’s vision and Droguett’s. For the immediate political trials facing Chile, it seems clear that without the explosive energy of the remote, unacknowledged disciples of the boy with the legs of a dog and his radical interrogation of established reality and societal norms, there is no likelihood of significant change. But that leaderless and anarchic insurrection against all forms of authority does not provide a blueprint for how, in concrete political terms, such real change might be implemented. For that to happen, Chile will need a meeting of sorts, a search for some kind of common ground. The followers of decent, honorable, hard-working, liberal Martín Rivas (and there are many of them, both in the middle class and among the disadvantaged, who continue to desperately crave, and believe in, upward social mobility) must be part of any long-lasting response to the challenges posed by the protests. The best among the elite that have ruled Chile are aware that the country cannot endure as a unified entity unless they reach some basic consensus with the multiple, passionate, contemporary avatars of Bobi and envision with them a strategy that maps out a future where the discordant parties disputing power can coexist, however uneasily, in the same land.

Until recently, I was uncertain if, given the chasm separating these contrary social actors and their antagonistic agendas, such an agreement could be worked out. The pandemic that now assails Chile, as it has the entire planet, has led me to believe that some sort of social pact, some semblance of an understanding, may not only be urgently necessary but practical and viable. A catastrophe of such epic dimensions will require both the dynamism and solidarity shown by the youth in the streets and the steadiness and efficiency of people in power who would probably define themselves as the distant descendants of Martín Rivas. If they do indeed embody the worthiest principles and experience of that character—his constancy, his loyalty, his reliability—they can prove it by using this moment of crisis as a way to learn about the enormous submerged nation they have ignored. They can do what Martín never did: recognize the permanent, defiant existence of that other Chile, the one Allende once represented and gave a voice to, his vision of a society founded on the principle that the needs of the many are more important than the profits of the few.

For that to happen, enough Chileans of all classes would have to realize that merely to survive the havoc of the virus will be meaningless in the long term if the underlying causes of prevailing injustice and inequality, revealed ever more starkly by the current calamities, are not simultaneously addressed. The question then becomes whether Chile’s citizenry, as they pull together to defeat this plague, can also block the authoritarian predisposition of those in charge to use the threat of this dreadful disease as an excuse to put off much-needed reforms and endlessly defer the democratic and participatory discussion of a new constitution that would represent the great majority of the people. Will that great majority, even in the throes of a pandemic, find ways of keeping up the pressure for a better world while compromising enough, showing enough Rivas-like self-control, to insure that Chile heals itself in multiple ways and becomes a country where those who feel radically alienated from the system are offered a place at the table, perhaps even near the head of the table?

It would certainly be wondrous if the crisis, both political and medical, ended up creating the conditions for a marriage between Martín Rivas, with his moderate bourgeois dreams, and Bobi, with his implacable dog legs, an experiment worth looking forward to, a new form of dreaming our identity, in both literature and reality—and not only in Chile, but beyond its faraway frontiers.



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Salvador Allende le ofrece una salida a Madurohttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/salvador-allende-le-ofrece-una-salida-a-maduro/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanFeb 27, 2019

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icolás Maduro ha invocado frecuentemente la figura señera de Salvador Allende, muerto en Santiago de Chile en 1973 en un golpe apadrinado por los Estados Unidos. Como alguien que trabajó con el presidente socialista chileno durante los últimos meses de su gobierno, imagino así los consejos que Allende le dirigiría a su díscolo colega venezolano desde el otro lado de la muerte:

Señor Presidente Nicolás Maduro:

Ud. ha jurado que nunca será derrocado como me sucedió a mí cuando el General Pinochet liquidó la democracia en mi país y estableció una larga dictadura de diecisiete años que dejó tras sí una secuela de sangre, dolor e injusticia.

Entiendo su deseo de enfatizar las similitudes entre su situación y la mía. Aunque hay incómodas y embarazosas diferencias entre nosotros, también existen paralelos alarmantes. Tal como en Venezuela hoy, el Chile revolucionario de 1973 estaba ferozmente dividido en dos campos beligerantes, con los líderes del Congreso clamando sediciosamente para que los militares intervinieran contra el gobierno constitucional, acicateados por los sectores más pudientes de la sociedad que no aceptaban que intentáramos construir una sociedad que beneficiaba a las grandes mayorías ciudadanas de la patria en vez de intereses minoritarios.

El experimento chileno – llegar al socialismo por medios pacíficos– se encontraba asediado, padeciendo formidables problemas económicos, aunque nada en comparación con el desastre humanitario que aqueja a Venezuela hoy. Y tal como Nixon y Kissinger y las multinacionales yanquis conspiraron contra Chile en 1973, Trump, Pence, Pompeo y los consorcios petroleros alientan la campaña contra Venezuela, una arrogante repetición de las innumerables intervenciones de Washington realizadas incesantemente en los asuntos internos de países de todo el mundo.

Pese a estas semejanzas entre Chile en 1973 y Venezuela en 2019, siento que Ud. le hace un flaco servicio a la causa revolucionaria al equipararse conmigo. Durante toda mi vida fui un ardiente defensor de la democracia: mi gobierno nunca restringió los derechos de asamblea y prensa, ni menos encarceló a opositores, aunque algunos abusaron de esta libertad con atentados terroristas y mentiras descomunales, ayudados por millones de dólares de la C.I.A.. Y acepté el resultado de cada elección durante mi mandato, sin tomar en cuenta si me eran favorables. Una disparidad adicional: Ud. cuenta con profuso apoyo de Rusia y China, mientras que a mí, cuando le pedí ayuda a lo que era entonces la Unión Soviética, me prestaron apenas unos mendrugos (tal vez una revancha por haber condenado yo las invasiones soviéticas de Hungría en 1956 y de Checoslovaquia en 1968). En cuanto a China, tenía reservas acerca de nuestra revolución libertaria, hasta el punto de que Mao rehusó romper relaciones con el régimen de Pinochet.

Vuestra crisis se ve complicada: si bien se encuentra Ud. amenazado con una revuelta militar financiada y coordinada desde el extranjero, al mismo tiempo despliega tendencias fuertemente autoritarias con las que definitivamente no me identifico. Tiene razón al rechazar la interferencia foránea en Venezuela y razón al denunciar las funestas consecuencias de que las Fuerzas Armadas se alcen contra un gobierno constitucional. Pero se equivoca al socavar, con sus acciones represivas, la democracia que dice estar protegiendo, y se equivoca cuando persigue a ciudadanos cuyo patriotismo y amor por los derechos humanos no puede ser disputado. Y quien puede dudar de que su gobierno exhibe niveles preocupantes de corrupción e ineficacia. Debo agregar que, para mis compatriotas que sufrieron un exilio masivo bajo Pinochet, es angustioso observar los vastos contingentes de sus propios ciudadanos que se sienten compelidos a huir de su tierra natal.

Como declara que soy su héroe y modelo, permítame ofrecerle un consejo acerca de cómo salvar a Venezuela de una guerra civil y, a la vez, conservar algunas de las reformas bolivarianas que han favorecido a los sectores desaventajados de su país. Cabe observar que muchos de los que ahora azuzan un motín contra vuestro gobierno en nombre del pueblo sufriente mostraron en el pasado escasa preocupación por la situación desmedrada y, en efecto, sufriente, de los venezolanos más desamparados.

Cuando Chile se encontraba paralizado por una oposición dispuesta a todo para derrocarme, tomé la decisión de anunciar el 11 de septiembre de 1973 la convocatoria a un plebiscito para que el pueblo decidiera el rumbo futuro de la patria. Si yo perdía, renunciaría a la Presidencia y se llevarían a cabo nuevas elecciones. Al conocer los golpistas mis propósitos–¡qué sorpresa!,—adelantaron el día de su asonada, probando que, lejos de querer resguardar la democracia, deseaban destruirla.

No sé si Ud. está dispuesto a impulsar un referéndum como el que yo iba a plantear hace más de 45 años en Chile, una consulta que hubiera preservado tanto la democracia como la soberanía nacional.

Este tipo de solución, además de ahorrarle tanto sufrimiento y sangre al pueblo venezolano, tendría un efecto benéfico en el resto de América Latina. Aunque es verdad que muchos de los problemas que acosan a vuestro país se deben a USA, que ha boicoteado y saboteado vuestra economía, como lo hizo con la nuestra, es incontestable que su mal gobierno está dañando a las fuerzas progresistas del continente, donde se lo presenta a Ud. como un cuco, el hombre del saco y del saqueo. Varios movimientos de derecha, incluyendo en Colombia, Argentina, Brasil y Chile, han tenido éxito al proyectarse como los únicos capaces de salvar a sus patrias de instaurar “otra Venezuela”. En Chile, tal campaña del terror llegó al absurdo de que la derecha de raíces pinochetistas acusó a la centro izquierda que había terminado con la dictadura de querer convertir al país en “Chilezuela”. Hasta Trump ha dicho, ridícula y maliciosamente, que solo él podrá impedir que su país caiga en el “socialismo” de Maduro.

Tales insidias han contribuido al auge de un populismo conservador y ultranacionalista que demoniza a quienes batallan por las profundas transformaciones que Nuestra América sigue necesitando.

No me extrañaría que me hiciera ver que mi creencia en las negociaciones y una revolución que valoraba los derechos de mis contrincantes llevó a mi muerte y al desmoronamiento de “la vía chilena al socialismo.” Mi respuesta desafiante es que ahora, tantas décadas más tarde, mi decisión de sacrificar mi vida por la democracia y una revolución pacífica es un ejemplo leal y luminoso para los pueblos sedientos de libertad y justicia social.

Me cabe la esperanza de que Usted, al meditar mis palabras, sepa hallar una salida de esta crisis que, junto con prevenir una conflagración fratricida, facilite la lucha de los hombres y mujeres de nuestra Tierra que buscan una existencia digna y decente, libre de miseria, opresión y mentiras, las grandes alamedas de que hablé cuando me despedí de este mundo.

Lo saludo, desde el otro lado de la muerte y de la historia,

Salvador Allende



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Gen. Simón Bolívar, Latin America’s Liberator, Has Advice for the US Militaryhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/gen-simon-bolivar-latin-americas-liberator-has-advice-for-the-us-military/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanFeb 25, 2019

Santiago de Chile

hough I do not believe in ghosts or an afterlife, I have always felt the presence of the dead among us, their voices never entirely erased from memory. Meditating in Santiago de Chile upon the recent call by Donald Trump to the Venezuelan military to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, who, despite his many faults and mistakes, is the constitutional president of his country, I imagined how Simón Bolívar, known as the Liberator of Latin America, would have responded from the grave to the current crisis in the land where he was born in 1783.

To the Commanders of the Armed Forces of the United States:

Why am I not asking you, in the name of the Latin America that I helped to free from the bonds of colonialism, to depose Donald Trump?

I would, after all, be justified in proposing such a bold move, given that your president has flagrantly intervened in the internal affairs of my Venezuela, demanding that its soldiers topple President Maduro or risk “losing everything.” Why, then, do I firmly reject the very idea that I could dictate, from outside the United States, what your duty might be as military men of honor?

It is true that the reasons for unseating Donald Trump are manifold, the very reasons that he has used to attack Maduro (for whom I have scant sympathy, no matter how often he invokes my name to justify his actions).

Trump has accused Maduro of being an illegitimate president. Trump should look in the mirror. Trump was elected with 3 million votes less than his rival, and he owes his victory, in part, to the incessant and illegal suppression of unfavorable news about his sexual and financial transgressions. It remains to be seen if he was also helped, as has been claimed, by the meddling of a foreign state.

Trump has accused Maduro of violating the Constitution. Trump should look in the mirror. He has consistently violated the Constitution, the latest example being the declaration of a nonexistent national emergency at the border, which flouts the separation of powers by attempting to use funds that were not authorized for that purpose by Congress.

Trump has accused Maduro of being corrupt. Trump should look in the mirror. His presidency is the most corrupt in the history of the United States, with collaborators indicted, scandals forcing Cabinet members to resign, and his companies and family enriched at the expense of the American taxpayer (emoluments clause be damned!).

Trump has accused Maduro of being a dictator. Trump should look in the mirror. The leaders he admires are all strongmen: Erdogan, Duterte, Al-Sisi, Orbán, Putin, and, of course, Kim Jong-un.

Trump has accused Maduro of endangering the national security of the United States. Trump should look in the mirror. He has made the world much more unstable and prone to war by shredding the agreement with Iran and withdrawing from the nuclear missile pact with Russia. And he relentlessly jeopardizes the nation’s security and future by denying the effects of global warming, as he assaults every regulation or treaty that can save humanity from the apocalypse of climate change.

Even so, despite Donald Trump’s misdeeds and his desire to revive gunboat diplomacy in Latin America (“all options,” he has said, “are on the table.”), and even though I myself warned in 1829 that “the United States seem destined by Providence to plague our [Latin] America with miseries in the name of liberty,” I still resist the urge to wish upon your land the fate of our sad republics south of the border.

Regardless of the fact that so many of the military takeovers we endured over the Past century have been planned, financed, and assisted by the United States, I would not want your people to suffer the sort of pain and terror that a coup d’état occasions. The young United States was an inspiration to me and all the others who led the struggle for Latin American Independence in the early 19th century. As I stated in my Declaration of Angostura in 1819, “the North American people are a singular model of political virtue and moral rectitude.… That nation was born in liberty, was raised in liberty, and has prevailed only through liberty.” It would thus be a tragedy if your soldiers were to abolish the democracy they are sworn to defend. Our experience is bitter and should not be imitated: Once the armed forces have overthrown a government elected by the people—however foolish the people may be—there is no turning back: pain, death, torture, confusion, havoc, guilt, and mendacity are sure to follow.

The fate of Donald Trump needs to be decided by the citizens of the United States, without me or any other foreigner making the choice for you. There is no other way for the crisis in the United States—a nation now divided against itself—to be resolved without needless bloodshed and violence.

And if that is the case for the country of George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr., why should it not also be the case for the Venezuela that I called home and that deserves a better destiny than a civil war encouraged irresponsibly from abroad?

In the name of peace, this warrior salutes you from beyond death and wishes your country and mine a future of mutual respect and friendship,

General Simón Bolívar, El Libertador



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Salvador Allende Offers a Way Out for Venezuela’s Madurohttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/venezuela-maduro-chile-allende/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanFeb 11, 2019

Santiago de Chile

icolás Maduro, Venezuela’s embattled president, has frequently invoked Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown and died in a US-backed coup on September 11, 1973, as a hero and a model. As a fervent supporter of the democratically elected Allende, who worked with him in the Presidential Palace in Santiago in the months before the military takeover, I feel compelled, therefore, to imagine the words of advice Allende might direct from beyond the grave to his Venezuelan colleague at this dangerous moment for Latin America.

Señor Presidente Nicolás Maduro:

I send you these words as you fight for your political life, vowing that you will not be deposed as I was in Chile by a military coup carried out by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, terminating democracy in my country for 17 years and leaving a lasting legacy of pain and injustice.

I understand why you wish to emphasize the similarities between your situation and the one I endured. Though there are many uncomfortable and embarrassing differences between us—which I will not hesitate to point out—there are also striking and alarming parallels. As in Venezuela today, revolutionary Chile back then was ferociously divided into two warring camps, with leaders of Congress seditiously asking the military to intervene against the constitutional government, goaded on by the more prosperous sectors of the population, whose interests were under siege as we gave birth to a society for the majority and not the select and privileged few.

The Chilean experiment—we were trying to build socialism through peaceful means, rejecting the sort of armed struggle that had prevailed in all previous revolutions—was in trouble, and undergoing considerable economic difficulties, albeit nothing like the extraordinary humanitarian disaster plaguing Venezuela at this moment. And just as Nixon and Kissinger and American multinational companies conspired against Chile in 1973, Trump, Pence, and Pompeo (not to mention the redoubtable Elliott Abrams, of Iran/Contra infamy) are leading the effort to oust you, the constitutional president of Venezuela, through the force of arms.

Latin Americans can be excused if they see in this imperial arrogance a sad repetition of the countless interventions—military, political, and financial—in the internal affairs of countries around the world that have disgraced Washington’s foreign policy for far too many decades.

Despite these resemblances between Chile in 1973 and Venezuela in 2019, I feel that you do a disservice to history and to the cause of revolutionary change by comparing yourself to me. I was, throughout my life, and until the moment of my death, a defender of democracy in all its forms. Never, during my three years in office, did I restrict the freedom of assembly of my opponents (even when some of them engaged in virulent tactics and terrorist acts), nor did I curb in any way the freedom of the press (even when papers, radios, and TV stations owned by the Chilean oligarchy were calling for my removal and spreading lies about my person and my tenure). Not one person was jailed for expressing his or her opinion, nor, heaven forbid, was anyone tortured while I was president. If anything, my opponents were given free rein, which they grievously abused, helped by millions of dollars expended by the CIA. And I scrupulously respected the result of all manner of elections during my time in office, especially when they were unfavorable to me. One other disparity: You have enormous support from Russia and China, whereas I asked what was then the Soviet Union for help and received not a penny in aid (maybe as payback for my having condemned the Soviet interventions in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968). As for China, it had reservations about our libertarian revolution, and later refused to break relations with the Pinochet regime.

The situation is, therefore, complicated: Echoing the Chilean crisis of 1973, you find yourself threatened with a military takeover financed and coordinated from abroad, while, at the same time, you display strong authoritarian tendencies that I most definitely do not identify with or condone. You are right to reject the flagrant foreign intervention in Venezuela’s internal affairs and right to warn about the consequences of calling for the armed forces to drive out a government elected by the people of your country, a move that would fracture the legal constitutional order and imperil hard-earned sovereignty. But you are wrong to undermine through your repressive actions the democracy you claim to be protecting, and wrong when you persecute many citizens whose patriotism and love for human rights cannot be disputed. And despite my sympathy for some of your reforms (though they often smack more of populism than socialism), your administration exhibits a worrisome level of corruption and ineptitude. Let me add that for Chileans who suffered massive exile under Pinochet, it is disturbing to watch such vast contingents of your own compatriots fleeing their homeland.

You keep stating how much you admire me. Allow me, then, to offer some advice as to how you might save your country from a civil war and, at the same time, preserve some of the reforms that have redistributed income and empowered the poor who have been perennially neglected by some of the very people who now seek to terminate your presidency. When I faced an analogous state of affairs—Chile was paralyzed by an opposition that knew no bounds in what it was willing to do to unseat me—I decided to hold a referendum that would allow the people to determine the road that our country should take. If I lost that referendum, I would resign and call for new elections. My plan, announced to the high command of the armed forces, was to definitely call for that referendum on September 11, 1973. But—what a surprise!—the plotters of the coup advanced the day of the takeover in order to block a nonviolent solution to our impasse, proving that they wanted to destroy democracy and not defend it, which may well be the case with a number of your own antagonists.

I am not sure if you are willing, or able, to envisage a referendum in Venezuela today such as the one I was going to propose over 45 years ago in Chile. I did not trust my opponents and they did not trust me. But I still believe that we could have negotiated a series of agreements that would have left democracy and the will of the people intact.

It is not only the suffering of the Venezuelan people I am hoping you can avoid, but something of significance to all Latin Americans. Although it is true that some of your troubles are due to the actions of the United States, which has boycotted and subverted your economy as it did ours, and instigated a coup against your predecessor, Hugo Chávez, I am particularly concerned that the way in which you have irresponsibly misgoverned your country is doing immeasurable harm to the progressive forces in the rest of Latin America. You are being used as the bogeyman of the continent, and several right-wing movements, including those in Chile, Colombia, and Argentina, not to mention the neo-fascist Bolsonaro in Brazil, have gained power, in part, by positing themselves as the only ones who can save their lands from becoming another Venezuela. Even Trump has, absurdly and maliciously, implied in his recent State of the Union speech that only he can stop America from becoming “socialist” like Venezuela.

There is, of course, no basis whatsoever to the scurrilous claims that anyone who opposed right-wing rule or savage capitalism would be the next Maduro, but such accusations have facilitated the rise of malignant strains of conservative, nationalistic populism, many of which are openly nostalgic for Pinochet’s dictatorship. It is troubling that you give “socialism” a bad name precisely when democratic socialism has again become popular among workers and young people everywhere as a way of solving the global problems the world faces, at a time when we need more democracy and not less, more tolerance and not less, more respect for our fellows and not less, as an answer to our dilemmas.

You may well respond by stressing that my tactic of negotiations, my belief in a revolution that valued the rights of my adversaries, led to my death and the demolition of the Chilean “road to socialism.” My vibrant answer is that, now, so many decades later, my example of sacrificing my life for democracy and a peaceful revolution continues to shine throughout the world, inspiring humanity to never cease its quest for social justice.

It is my hope that you will, at the very least, ponder my words, and find a way forward that will prevent a terrible bloodbath and not inflict permanent damage to the cause of those who struggle for the right of the forgotten children of the earth to dream of an existence full of dignity and decency, free from misery and oppression.

Yours, from the other side of death and history,

Salvador Allende



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/venezuela-maduro-chile-allende/
How Will History Judge Donald Trump’s ‘Human Zoos’?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/will-history-judge-donald-trumps-human-zoos/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanJul 10, 2018

When Donald Trump recently accused “illegal immigrants” of wanting to “pour into and infest our country,” there was an immediate outcry. After all, that verb, infest, had been used by the Nazis as a way of dehumanizing Jews and communists as rats, vermin, or insects that needed to be eradicated.

Nobody, however, should have been surprised. The president has a long history of excoriating people of color as animal-like. In 1989, for instance, reacting to the rape of a white woman in New York’s Central Park, he took out full-page ads in four of the city’s major papers (total cost: $85,000) calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty and decrying “roving bands of wild criminals roaming our streets.” He was, of course, referring to the five black and Latino youngsters accused of that crime for which they were convicted — and, 10 years late, exonerated when a serial rapist and murderer finally confessed.

Trump never apologized for his rush to judgment or his hate-filled opinions, which eventually became the template for his attacks on immigrants during the 2016 election campaign and for his presidency. He has declared many times that some people aren’t actually human beings at all but animals, pointing, in particular, to MS-13 gang members. At a rally in Tennessee at the end of May, he doubled down on this sort of invective, goading a frenzied crowd to enthusiastically shout that word — “Animals!” — back. In that way, he made those present accomplices to his bigotry. Nor are his insults and racial tirades mere rhetorical flourishes. They’ve had quite real consequences. It’s enough to look at the cages where undocumented children separated from their families at or near the U.S.-Mexico border have been held as if they were indeed animals — reporters and others regularly described one of those detention areas as being like a “zoo” or a “kennel” — not to mention their parents who are also trapped behind wire barriers, even if arousing far less attention and protest.

A History of Caged Humans

All the president’s furious contemporary rants and rallies, along with those cages and detainee centers, have certainly brought Nazism to mind for some, but it might be more illuminating to think of them as echoing an earlier moment in history when comparing dark-skinned humans to animals would hardly have caused a stir.  It would have been considered part of normal discourse, in both Europe and the United States.

Indeed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of Europeans and Americans considered it perfectly natural to treat certain members of our species quite literally as if they were beasts. They were unfazed, so the historical record suggests, by the idea of seeing such “animals,” such oddities, displayed in literal zoo cages at boisterous public events. It may now be hard to believe, but our forebears once flocked in staggering numbers to “human zoos,” where thousands of natives kidnapped from Asia, Africa, and Latin America were exposed to scrutiny, curiosity, and derision, as well as, sometimes, undergoing scientific experimentation.

Today, such mindboggling violations of human rights have almost entirely vanished from public memory. I had only vaguely heard of human zoos myself, before I became obsessed with them when research for my latest novel, Darwin’s Ghosts, led me into the world of human menageries. I discovered that the phenomenon had been launched in the most modest of ways.

One hundred and seventy years ago — 1848, a year of revolutions across the globe — a Hamburg fishmonger, Claus Hagenbeck, decided to charge customers to take a peek at some Arctic seals swimming in a large tub in the backyard of his house. Soon enough, that first timid entrepreneurial step developed into a highly lucrative family business exhibiting wild animals, while feeding growing demands for wondrous beasts to populate circuses and fill the private collections of monarchs and other wealthy individuals.

In the end, animals were not enough. By the early 1870s, in conjunction with the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris and American impresarios like P.T. Barnum, the Hagenbeck family started dabbling in displaying “savages” from the farthest corners of the planet. The first victims of this desire to bring exemplars from the rest of humanity to viewers in the West were Laplanders, displayed in a setting meant to look like one of their villages. (A similar urge gave birth to the dioramas that soon began to flourish at museums of natural history.)

That first exhibition in Hamburg of “the little men and women” of Lapland proved so sensational — tours were organized to Berlin, Leipzig, and other German cities — that the desire to see more “primitive” humans soon became insatiable. Scavengers who had previously specialized in locating and bringing African and Asian wildlife to Europe and the United States were now instructed to be on the lookout for similarly exotic human wildlife. They should not be, it was quickly stipulated, so monstrous as to disgust audiences, but neither should they be so beautiful as to cease to be bizarre.

The Laplanders were followed by a multitude of indigenous inhabitants of the planet forcibly removed from their habitats: Eskimos, Cingalese, Kalmuks, Somalis, Ethiopians, Bedouins, Nubians from the Upper Nile, aboriginal Australians, Zulu warriors, Mapuche Indians, Andaman Islanders from the South Pacific, head-hunters from Borneo. The list went on and on, as those human zoos spread from Germany to France, England, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and the United States, all of which — what a coincidence! — just happened to be the globe’s imperial powers of that era.

Representatives of ethnic groups from all over the planet soon became an expectable feature of then-popular World’s Fair pavilions. Besides providing entertainment for the whole family — they might be thought of as that moment’s equivalents of reality TV shows — those exhibitions were proclaimed “educational” experiences by the enterprises cashing in on them. Such tableaus of “prehistoric” people offered a way for affluent visitors to gawk at and be amazed by the bizarre habits of the bizarre inhabitants of the faraway lands that their countries were incorporating with great violence into “civilization” via colonial dominion. In fact, that violence was such that some of the native populations on display, like diverse groups of Patagons from Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Latin America, were already then on the verge of becoming extinct. One of the draws of seeing living specimens of those strange men, women, and children was to do so before their last remnants, along with their languages and their cultures, disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Even if you were among the millions of Americans and Europeans who couldn’t personally visit such folk displays, ethnic villages, and human zoos, you could still inexpensively and vicariously experience those exotic others. The images of the captives — who, of course, had been photographed without their consent — were commercialized on an industrial scale. The postcards upon which their faces and bodies were flaunted soon became an everyday feature of domestic life, one more way that the human zoo was normalized, whitewashed, and sent into the home with barely a thought about the horrors, the suffering being visited on those captives or how their children, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, relatives, and friends, left behind, were dealing with the trauma of having their loved ones torn from their midst.

Nor were such acts repudiated by the most illustrious members of those “advanced” societies. Quite the opposite, many of the abductions had been financed by scientific institutions eager to discover how such specimens might fit into Darwin’s theory of evolution. Their research, in turn, was backed by government officials more than ready to show their respect and support for scholars looking into the origins of humanity. Were those Africans and South Americans entirely human or did they constitute missing links in the great chain of beings that became our species? Eminent naturalists and doctors debated just such matters, gave lectures on them, wrote treatises about them, and (in what then passed for scientific experimentation) poked at or into the bodies of those who had made the mistake of being born far from the so-called civilized world.

The Ota Bengas of Today

Today, of course, human zoos and the medical experiments on live human beings that went with them are inconceivable. The consciousness of humanity, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. 70 years ago, has made such practices disgraceful and intolerable. Who today could stomach the fate of Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Congo who was housed with the primates at New York’s Bronx Zoo in 1906 and committed suicide a decade later when he realized that he would never be able to return to his native land? Who among us would bring their children to gape at “missing links” like Thai dwarfs, Amazonian Indians, or Sudanese villagers as if they were freaks of nature, not human beings?

Unfortunately, congratulations are not (yet) in order, given how often the same racist impulses resurface today, and not only in the president’s intemperate diatribes equating humans and animals (none of which have so far provoked indignation in most of his followers). A similar dehumanization of strangers with darker faces and skins appears to animate current anti-immigrant sentiments in many lands, a desire to escape “infestation” from abroad and maintain mythical versions of racial purity and national identity. Are we really that removed from the spectators who watched their fellow humans abused in zoo-like conditions a century or so ago without blinking or being disturbed?

In retrospect, what’s most sobering about the human zoos of an earlier time is how oblivious those who participated in such degrading spectacles were to the crimes being committed before their eyes. Many of them would have judged themselves decent, enlightened citizens, shining advocates of progress, science, and freedom. And yet, in Berlin in 1882, the police had to be called in to quell a riot by visitors to an exhibition of 11 Kaweshkar natives abducted from Tierra del Fuego. Thousands of customers, having imbibed copious gallons of beer, began to stone the hostages, demanding that they mate in public. Or consider the fate of two female Kaweshkar whose sexual organs, after they died in captivity, were carved from their dead bodies and sent to be examined by a prominent German researcher interested in discovering how such creatures might be distinct from European women.

So many decades later, it’s easy enough to condemn such offenses. More difficult and painful is to ask what injustices are happening now that we take to be as normal as human zoos (or the disempowerment of women and child slavery) were just a few generations ago. Is it the thoughtless annihilation of immeasurable species, the plundering of nature, the loss of wisdom stored for millennia by ethnic groups that are fast disappearing? Is it the punitive incarceration of millions, so many lives wasted? Is it our incredibly counterproductive “war on drugs” that unnecessarily ravages cities, nations, and lives? Or our inability to rid ourselves of the plague of nuclear proliferation, the brutality of widespread hunger, America’s endless wars, the detention centers for immigrants and their children in this country, the spectacle of undocumented minors shut up in cages and crying for their parents, or the overflowing refugee camps elsewhere in the world? And what of so many children displaced in their war-torn lands or incarcerated in poverty? Where is the indignation about them? Who marches to have them released from their structural captivity? And who even noticed the 10,000 children murdered or maimed in armed conflicts in 2017 alone, deaths invisible to us if you didn’t happen to catch a brief news item quickly forgotten?

In reality, those human zoos of the not-so-distant past pose a terrifying question for us: What everyday horrors of our world will our descendants look back on with disgust in the future? How, they will wonder, could their ancestors have been so blind as to condone such transgressions against humaneness and humanity?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/will-history-judge-donald-trumps-human-zoos/
What a 1970s Chilean Satire Can Tell Us About Donald Trumphttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-a-1970s-chilean-satire-can-tell-us-about-donald-trump/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanSep 14, 2017How to Read Donald Duck has some surprising insights to reveal in 2017.]]>

The organizers of the white-supremacist gathering in Charlottesville last month knew just what they were doing when they decided to carry torches on their nocturnal march to protest the dethroning of a statue of Robert E. Lee. That brandishing of fire in the night was meant to evoke memories of terror, of past parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s Freikorps in Germany.

The organizers wanted to issue a warning to those watching: that past violence, perpetrated in defense of the “blood and soil” of the white race, would once again be harnessed and deployed in Donald Trump’s America. Indeed, the very next day, that fatal August 12, those nationalist fanatics unleashed an orgy of brutality that led to the deaths of three people and the injuring of many more.

Millions around America and the world were horrified and revolted by that parade of torches. In my case, however, they also brought to mind deeply personal memories of other fires that had burned darkly so many decades before, far from the United States or Nazi Europe. As I watched footage of that rally, I couldn’t help remembering the bonfires that lit up my own country, Chile, in the aftermath of General Augusto Pinochet’s September 11 coup in 1973—that “first 9/11,” which, with the active support of Washington and the CIA, had overthrown the popularly elected government of Salvador Allende.

The Chilean people had voted Allende in as their president three years earlier, launching an exceptional democratic experiment in peaceful social change. It would be an unprecedented attempt to build socialism through the ballot box, based on the promise that a revolution need not kill or silence its enemies in order to succeed. It was thrilling to be alive during the thousand days that Allende governed. In that brief period, a mobilized nation wrested control of its natural resources and telecommunication systems from multinational (primarily US) corporations; large estates were redistributed to the peasants who had long farmed them in near servitude; and workers became the owners of the factories they labored in, while bank employees managed their nationalized institutions previously in the hands of rich conglomerates.

As an entire country shook off the chains of yesteryear, intellectuals and artists were also challenged. We faced the task of finding the words for, the look of, a new reality. In that spirit, Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart and I wrote a booklet that we called Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck). It was meant to respond to a very practical need: the mass-media stories Chileans had been consuming, that mentally colonized the way they lived and dreamed of their everyday circumstances, didn’t faintly match the extraordinary new situation in their country. Largely imported from the United States and available via outlets of every sort (comics, magazines, television, radio), they needed to be critiqued and the models and values they espoused, all the hidden messages of greed, domination, and prejudice they contained, exposed.

If there was a single company that embodied the overarching influence of the United States—not just in Chile but in so many other lands then known as the Third World—it was the Walt Disney Corporation. Today, in addition to the many amusement parks that bear its name, the Disney brand conjures up a panoply of Pixar princesses, avatars of cars and planes, and tales of teenage angst and Caribbean piracy. But in Chile, in the early 1970s, Disney’s influence was epitomized by a flood of inexpensive comic books available at every newsstand. So Armand and I decided to focus on them and in particular on the character who then seemed to us the most symbolic and popular of the denizens of the Disney universe. What better way to expose the nature of American cultural imperialism than to unmask the most innocent and wholesome of Walt Disney’s characters, to show what authoritarian tenets a duck’s smiling face could smuggle into Third World hearts and minds?

We would soon discover what an attack on Disney would be met with—and it wasn’t smiles.

Roast Author, Not Duck

Para Leer al Pato Donald, published in Chile in 1971, quickly became a runaway bestseller. Less than two years later, however, it suffered the fate of the revolution and of the people who had sustained that revolution.

The military coup of 1973 led to savage repression against those who had dared to dream of an alternative existence: executions, torture, imprisonment, persecution, exile, and, yes, book burnings, too. Hundreds of thousands of volumes went up in flames.

Among them was our book. A few days after the neo-fascist takeover of Chile’s long-standing democracy, I was in hiding in a clandestine house when I happened to see a live TV transmission of a group of soldiers throwing books onto a pyre—and there was Para Leer al Pato Donald. I wasn’t entirely surprised by this inquisitorial blaze. The book had touched a nerve among Chilean right-wingers. Even in pre-coup times, I had barely avoided being run over by an irate motorist who shouted, “¡Viva el Pato Donald!” I was saved by a comrade from being beaten up by an anti-Semitic mob and the modest bungalow where my wife and I lived with our young son, Rodrigo, had been the object of protests. The children of neighbors had held up placards denouncing my assault on their innocence, while their parents shattered our living-room windows with some well-placed rocks.

Seeing your own book being burned on television was, however, another matter. I had mistakenly assumed—an assumption I still find hard to dislodge, even in Donald Trump’s America—that after the infamous Nazi bonfires of May 1933 in which tons of volumes deemed subversive and “un-German” had been consigned to the flames, such acts would be considered too reprehensible to be done in public. Instead, four decades after those Nazi pyres, the Chilean military was broadcasting their fury and bigotry in the most flagrant way imaginable. And, of course, it brought home to me in an alarming fashion a simple fact of that moment: Given the public fate of my book, the perpetrators would have no compunctions about acting with the same virulence against its author. The experience undoubtedly helped persuade me, a month later, to reluctantly accept orders from the underground Chilean resistance to leave the country to assist in the campaign against General Pinochet from abroad.

I carried into exile that image of our book in flames. We had intended to roast Disney and the Duck. Instead, like Chile itself, the book was consumed in a conflagration that seemed to know no end. That the military conspirators and their oligarchic civilian masters had been financed and aided by the American government and the CIA, that President Richard Nixon and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, had worked to destabilize and bring down the whole Allende experiment, only added a bitter scent of defeat to the suppression of our book (and so of our critique of their country and its ideology). We had been so sure that our words—and the marching workers who had stimulated them—were stronger than the empire and its acolytes. Now the empire had struck back and we were the ones being roasted.

And yet, though so many copies of Para Leer al Pato Donald were obliterated—the entire third edition of the book was thrown into Valparaíso Bay by Chilean navy sailors—as with the Nazis, as with the Inquisition, books are hard things to truly destroy. Ours was, in fact, being translated and published abroad at the very moment it was being burned in Chile. As a result, Armand and I nursed the hope that even if How to Read Donald Duck could no longer circulate in the country that had given it birth, the version translated by art critic David Kunzle might, at least, penetrate the country that had birthed Walt Disney.

It soon became apparent, however, that Disney, too, was more powerful than we had anticipated. No publisher in the United States was willing to risk bringing out our book because we had reproduced—obviously without authorization—a series of images from Disney’s comics to prove our points, and Walt’s company was (and still is) notorious for defending its copyright material and characters with an armada of lawyers and threats.

Indeed, thanks to the Disney Corporation, when 4,000 copies of How to Read Donald Duck, printed in London, were imported into the United States in July 1975, the whole shipment was impounded by the Treasury Department. The US Customs Service’s Import Compliance Branch labeled the book an act of “piratical copying” and proceeded to “detain,” “seize,” and “hold [it] in custody” under the provisions of the Copyright Act (Title 17 U.S.C. 106). The parties involved in the dispute were then invited to submit briefs regarding a final determination of the book’s fate.

The Center for Constitutional Rights took up our defense and, incredibly enough, under the leadership of Peter Weiss, beat the serried ranks of Disney barristers. On June 9, 1976, Eleanor Suske, head of the Imports Compliance Board, wrote that “the books do not constitute piratical copies of any Walt Disney copyright recorded with Customs.” As philosopher John Shelton Lawrence pointed out in his account of the incident in Fair Use and Free Inquiry, there was, however, a catch to this “victory,” a “serious snag in the final determination of the Customs Department.” Alluding to an arcane law from the late 19th century as justification, it allowed only 1,500 copies of the book into the country. The rest of the shipment was prohibited, blocking many American readers from becoming acquainted with the text and turning the few copies that made it to these shores into collector’s items.

Duck, It’s Another Donald!

More than four decades have since passed, and only now, eerily enough in this Trumpian moment, is the text of How To Read Donald Duck finally being published in the land of Disney. It is part of a catalogue accompanying an exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles.

I would hardly deny that, so many years later, I find satisfaction in the continuing life of a book once consigned to the flames, no less that its “birth” in this country is taking place not so far from Disneyland or, for that matter, from the grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery where the cremated remains of Walt himself lie. (No, he was not frozen cryogenically, as urban legend has it.) No less important to me, our scorched book has snuck into the United States at the very moment when its citizens, animated by the sort of nativism and xenophobia I remember from my own Chile when General Pinochet reigned, have elected to the presidency another Donald—albeit one more akin to Uncle Scrooge McDuck than his once-well-known nephew—based on his vow to “build the wall” and “make America great again.” We are clearly in a moment when a yearning to regress to the supposedly uncomplicated, spotless, and innocent America of those Disney cartoons, the sort of America that Walt once imagined as eternal, fills Trump and so many of his followers with an inchoate nostalgia.

It intrigues me that our ideas, forged in the heat and hope of the Chilean revolution, have finally arrived here just as some Americans are picking up torches like the ones that once consumed our book, while millions of others are asking themselves about the conditions that put Donald Trump in the Oval Office where he could fan the flames of hatred. I wonder whether there’s anything those who are now my fellow citizens could learn from our ancient assessment of this country’s deep ideology. Can we today read a second Donald into How to Read Donald Duck?

Certainly, many of the values we impaled in that book—greed, ultra-competitiveness, the subjection of darker races, a deep-seated suspicion and derision of foreigners (Mexicans, Arabs, Asians), all enwreathed in a credo of unattainable happiness—animate many of Trump’s enthusiasts (and not merely them). But such targets are now the obvious ones. Perhaps more crucial today is the cardinal, still largely unexamined, all-American sin at the heart of those Disney comics: a belief in an essential American innocence, in the utter exceptionality, the ethical singularity and manifest destiny of the United States.

Back then, this meant (as it still largely does today) the inability of the country Walt was exporting in such a pristine state to recognize its own history. Bring to an end the erasure of, and recurring amnesia about, its past transgressions and violence (the enslavement of blacks, the extermination of natives, the massacres of striking workers, the persecution and deportation of aliens and rebels, all those imperial and military adventures, invasions, and annexations in foreign lands, and a never-ending complicity with dictatorships and autocracy globally), and the immaculate Disney worldview crumbles, opening space for quite another country to make an appearance.

Though we chose Walt Disney and his cartoons as our foil, this deep-seated belief in American innocence was hardly his property alone. Consider, for instance, the recent decision by the generally admirable Ken Burns, that quintessential chronicler of the depths and surfaces of Americana, to launch his new documentary on the Vietnam War, a disastrous and near-genocidal intervention in a faraway land, by insisting that it “was begun in good faith by decent people” and was a “failure,” not a “defeat.”

Take that as just one small indication of how difficult it will be to get rid of the deeply ingrained idea that the United States, despite its flaws, is an unquestionable force for good in the world. Only an America that continues to bathe in this mythology of innocence, of a God-given exceptionalism and virtue destined to rule the earth, could have produced a Trump victory. Only a recognition of how malevolent and blinding that innocence is could begin to open the way to a fuller understanding of the causes of Trump’s ascendancy and his almost mesmerizing hold upon those now referred to as “his base.” My small hope: that our book, once reduced to ashes thanks to an anything-but-innocent CIA-backed coup, might in some small way participate in the renewal of America as its better angels search the mirror of history for the reasons that led to the current debacle.

There is, however, an aspect of How to Read Donald Duck that might offer a contribution of another sort to the quest upon which so many patriots in the United States are now embarked. What stirs me as I reread that document of ours today is its tone—the insolence, outrage, and humor that flow through every page. It’s a book that makes fun of itself even as it mocks Donald, his nephews, and his pals. It pushes the envelope of language and, behind its language, I can still hear the chants of a pueblo on the march. It brings back to me the imaginative enormity that every true demand for radical change insists upon. It catches a missing feeling of our age: the belief that alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives. Para Leer Al Pato Donald was and still is a celebration of such imaginative joy that was its own best reward and that could never be turned into ashes in Santiago or drowned in the bay of Valparaíso or anywhere else.

It is that joy in liberation, that alegría, that spirit of resistance that I would love to share with Americans via the book Pinochet’s soldiers could not liquidate or Disney’s lawyers ban from this country. Now, it finally finds its way into the very land that invented both Donald Duck and Donald Trump. At a terrible moment, I hope it’s a modest reminder that we really don’t have to leave this world as it was when we were born. If I could, I might retitle it though. What about: How to Read Donald Trump?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-a-1970s-chilean-satire-can-tell-us-about-donald-trump/
What Herman Melville Can Teach Us About the Trump Erahttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-herman-melville-can-teach-us-about-the-trump-era/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanMay 10, 2017

Santiago de Chile may seem a strange place from which to try to understand Donald Trump and how to resist his most aberrant edicts and policies, and yet it is from the distance and serenity of this Southern Cone city, where my wife and I live part of the year, that I have found myself meditating on these issues, abetted by the insight and doubts of none other than Herman Melville.

When the Pinochet dictatorship forced me and my family into exile after the 1973 coup, the vast library we had laboriously built over the years (with funds we could scarcely spare) stayed behind. Part of it was lost or stolen, another part damaged by a flood, but a considerable part was salvaged when we went back to Chile after democracy was restored in 1990. What strikes me about these books that have withstood water and theft and tyranny is how they enchantingly return me to the person I once was, the person I dreamt I would be, the young man who wanted to devour the universe by gorging on volume after volume of fiction, philosophy, science, history, poetry, plays.

Simultaneously, of course, those texts, mostly classic and canonical, force me to measure how much desolate and wise time has passed since my first experience with them, how much I myself have changed, and with me the wide world I traveled during our decades of banishment, a change that becomes manifest as soon as I pick up any of those primal books and reread it from the inevitable perspective of today.

It is a happy coincidence that the works I have chosen to revisit on this occasion are by Melville, as I can think of no other American author who can so inform the perilous moment we are currently living. Roaming my eyes on shelf after shelf, I soon lit upon his enigmatic novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, and sandwiched between it and Moby-Dick, a collection of his three novellas, Benito Cereno; Bartleby, the Scrivener; and Billy Budd, Sailor.

Having just participated, as an American citizen, in the recent election that elevated to the presidency an archetypal liar and devious impostor who has hoodwinked and mesmerized his way into power, The Confidence-Man seemed like an appropriate place to start. Though it was published 160 years ago, on April Fool’s Day, 1857, Melville could have been presciently forecasting today’s America when he imagined his country as a Mississippi steamer (ironically called the Fidèle) filled with “a flock of fools, under this captain of fools, in this ship of fools!”

The passengers of that boat are systematically bilked by a devilish protagonist who constantly shifts his identity, changing names and shapes and schemes, while each successive ambiguous incarnation tries out one scam after another, swindles and snake-oil-trickery that were recognizable in his day—and, alas, in ours. Fraudulent real estate deals and bankruptcies, spurious lies disguised as moralistic truths, grandiose charitable undertakings that never materialize, financial hustles and deceptions, bombastic appeals to the honesty of the suckers while showing no honor whatsoever—it all sounds like a primer for Trump and his buffoonish 21st-century antics and “truthful hyperbole.”

Of course, Melville’s time was not the age of Twitter and Instagram and short attention spans, so his ever-fluctuating rascal engages in endless metaphysical discussions about mankind, quoting Plato, Tacitus, and St. Augustine, along with many a book that Trump has probably never even heard of. And rather than a bully and a braggart, this 19th-century pretender is garrulous and genial. But just like Trump, he displays an arsenal of false premises and promises to dazzle and befuddle his victims with absurd and inconsistent projects that seem workable until, that is, they are more closely examined—and then, when cornered by demands that he provide proof of his ventures, the scamp somehow manages to distract his audience and squirm away. And also like Trump, he exercises on his dupes “the power of persuasive fascination, the power of holding another creature by the button of the eye,” which allows him to mercilessly best his many antagonists, exploiting their ignorance, naïveté, and, above all, greed.

Indeed, Melville’s misanthropic allegory often seems less a denunciation of the glib and slippery trickster than a bitter indictment of those gullible enough to let themselves be cheated. The author saw the United States, diseased with false innocence and a ravenous desire for getting rich, heading toward Apocalypse—specifically, the Civil War that was a scant four years away. Fearful that, behind the masquerade of virtue and godliness performed by the role-playing passengers, there lurk shadows of darkness and malignancy, he was intent on revealing how the excessive “confidence” in America’s integrity, virtuousness, and “ardently bright view of life” can lead to tragedy.

And the novel ends in a quietly terrifying way. As the light of the last lamp expires and a sick old man, one final quarry of the Confidence Man, is “kindly” led toward extinction, the narrator leaves us with this disturbing forecast: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.”

Those words pester me, because the “something further” that we are living today is a grievous circumstance that Melville could not have anticipated: What if somebody like the slick Confidence Man were to take power, become the captain of that ship of fools—in other words, what if someone, through his ability to delude vast contingents, were to assume control of the republic and, like mad Ahab, pursue the object of his hatred into the depths (in Trump’s sea there are many white whales and quite a few minor fish) and doom us all to drown along with him?

f Melville was not concerned with the possibility that his Confidence Man might become a demented, uncivil president, he did bequeath us, nevertheless, three short masterpieces where the protagonists rebel, each in their own special way, against an inhumane and oppressive system. By reading once again the novellas Bartleby, Billy Budd, and Benito Cereno, I hoped, therefore, to discover what guidance Melville might provide those of us who ponder how to fight the authoritarian proclivities that Trump and his gang epitomize as they seek total and uncontested power to radically remake America.

I began, obviously, with Bartleby, the Scrivener.

“I would prefer not to”: Those are the emblematic words with which the protagonist, a copyist for a Wall Street lawyer (who is also the bewildered narrator of the tale), invariably responds when asked to perform the most minimal tasks but also when offered a chance to better or protect himself, to the point of losing his job, his housing, and, eventually, his life, as he ends up starving his body to death in prison. When I first read this novella in my youth, I saw it, not incorrectly, as an allegory about Melville himself. At the time it was published—in 1856, just before the experimental and uncompromising The Confidence-Man came out—the author (whose Moby-Dick had sold poorly and been, in general, misunderstood when it appeared in 1851) was struggling with his own refusal to accommodate his style and vision to the commercial literature of his age, a refusal that corresponded with my own 1960s ideas about not selling out to the “establishment.” Though I was able to grasp, as many readers have since Bartleby first appeared, that this radical rejection of the status quo went far beyond a defense of artistic freedom, delving into mankind’s existential loneliness in a Godless universe, it is only now, beleaguered with the multiple dangers and dilemmas that Trump’s authoritarianism poses, that I can fully appraise the potential political dimensions of Bartleby’s embrace of negativity as a weapon of resistance.

Not because his ascetic withdrawal, passivity, and “pallid hopelessness” are what the majority of Americans who voted against Trump need in these times of bellicose regression. It is, rather, the specific way in which the protagonist posits his rebellion that may serve as a model for those of us who feel threatened by the aggressiveness of this president, who, like Ahab, is “possessed by all the fallen angels.” What disarms, indeed leaves Bartleby’s employer “unmanned,” is that the scrivener’s responses are unwaveringly mild, “with no uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence.” Bartleby’s individual intransigence was insufficient to change the disheartening world in Melville’s time, but it is a great place from where to start an active resistance in ours.

Imagine “I would prefer not to” as a rallying cry. Sanctuary cities and churches: “I would prefer not to help hunt down undocumented men, women and children.” Indigenous tribes and veterans and activists: “I would prefer not to step aside when the tanks and the pipelines roll in.” Civil servants at federal agencies: “I would prefer not to enact orders to destroy the environment, eviscerate the public school system, deregulate the banks, devastate the arts, attack the press; I would prefer not to cooperate with unjust, misguided, stupid, contradictory executive orders; I would prefer not to remain silent when I witness illegal acts that violate the Constitution,” and on and on we could go, on and on we must go, if we are to be free. If every opponent of Trump were to adopt this stubborn and placid refusal to go along—each deed of collective defiance always begins with somebody individually saying “No!”—our belligerent president would find it difficult to impose his will, though we should expect a great deal of executive pressure against and persecution of those who stand in his way. Indeed, there are far too many signs already that dissidence, criticism, recalcitrance, whistleblowing, and protests will be met with the full force of the state.

hether that repression manages to control those who challenge Trump on multiple levels will not only depend on the obduracy and cunning of the president’s adversaries, but also on how the judiciary intervenes in this battle. How justice is served and, indeed, interpreted, will determine whether the orders of a fraudulent occupier of the executive branch can be contained.

It was thus natural to plunge next into the most distressing of Melville’s works, the last one he ever wrote (it remained unfinished at his death in 1891), the haunting and haunted Billy Budd. The title character is a sailor, conscripted into the British navy, who never thinks of using the words “I would prefer not to,” but, on the contrary, is agreeable and compliant. An angelic being, almost divinely handsome, able to lighten each day’s burden with his good cheer, popular among the crew and the officers, Baby Budd, as he is called, is an innocent lamb of a man loved by everybody on board the Bellipotent. Well, not everybody—precisely this wholesome harmlessness and beauty create in Claggart, the master-at-arms of the ship, a hatred, rage, and envy, an “unreciprocated malice,” that Melville attributes to sheer depravity and unfathomable evil. Given that Claggart is in charge of policing, discipline, and surveillance, he has at his disposal an arsenal of means to trap Billy, deceitfully accusing him of conspiring in a mutiny, at a time when the British Navy had been wracked with widespread revolts by sailors. When confronted with this indictment, Billy—afflicted by a “convulsed tongue-tie” incapacity to speak out when he is under extreme emotional stress—responds by striking Claggart. The blow kills the satanic master-at-arms—and Billy must face trial in front of a hastily convened drumhead court.

The administration (or mismanagement) of justice that follows is the crux (I use the word deliberately, as we will witness a crucifixion) of the story. Melville goes out of his way to praise Captain Vere, the commander of the ship: He is well-read, fair, brave, often dreamy, eminently honorable, and has a sincere fatherly affection for Billy Budd, intending to promote him. And he does not doubt that Claggart (for whom he feels “a repellent distaste”) is lying, nor that his victim knows nothing of any conspiracy or harbors a single mutinous thought, and yet, Vere’s reaction to the homicide is peremptory:

“He vehemently exclaimed, ‘Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!’ ”

Having thus passed judgment on Billy Budd, Vere will manipulate his court of junior officers (all dependent on him and under his authority) to declare the sailor guilty, without allowing for palliating circumstances or for the matter to be referred, as naval practice and law demand, to the admiral for adjudication. In order to get the verdict he desires—fearing that compassion and flexibility might encourage disorder and sedition—he must ignore his private conscience and yield to the imperial code of war and argue against a “warm heart,” which he calls “the feminine in man” and thus must be distrusted and “ruled out.” This failure of the father figure to protect the weak is a tragedy not only for Captain Vere (who will die in battle not long after this incident, with Billy Budd’s name on his lips as he agonizes) and for the blameless handsome sailor (who dies blessing the captain who has wronged him), but for humanity itself in its journey toward redemption.

If Melville is concerned with the miscarriage of justice (and one can only hope that the US courts will differ from Captain Vere by shielding those who are unable to defend themselves from malignant attacks and overreach by the government), his novella also probes another disquieting matter that obsessed him all through his life: the question and legitimacy of violence.

Violence comes in many guises and varieties in Billy Budd. There is, of course, the violence of the state, which Captain Vere incarnates and exercises with “full force of arms.” And then there is the violence of Claggart, the official enforcer of order who abuses his power and becomes an instrument of perfidy and immorality. But most interesting is Billy Budd himself. Why does the angel deliver the lethal blow that will annihilate him? He speaks with his fists when his tongue and throat are struck dumb by an assault upon the core of his being so wicked that he could not foretell it. Indeed, it is his extreme good nature, his unwillingness to recognize evil—despite having been warned that Claggart, with “his small weasel eyes,” is out to get him—that leaves him unprepared. One could almost venture that our ill-fated hero has too much trust and “confidence” in his fellows.

Melville had already explored these issues of innocence and violence in Moby-Dick—where the crew and officers are unable to stop the crazed skipper of the Pequod from driving them all to ruination (all, that is, save the narrator, who wants to be called Ishmael)—but it can be argued that nowhere did he delve deeper into those predicaments than in Benito Cereno, serialized in a magazine in 1855 and revised when it was published as part of Piazza Tales in 1856 (again, just before The Confidence-Man appeared).

This traumatic story is centered on an astounding event at sea that actually happened, as I vaguely recalled as I opened the book, off the coast of southern Chile, a few hundred miles from where I was now re-reading it. A group of slaves—the year was 1805—took over a Spanish vessel, killed most of its white crew and passengers, and demanded that the captain, Benito Cereno, return them to Africa. Melville moves the date to 1799 and rebaptizes the ship the San Dominick in order to more closely parallel the successful—and extremely ferocious—slave insurrection against the French on the isle of Saint-Domingue that would lead to the establishment of Haiti, the first black republic in the world. He is basically saying to his unheeding American public: This bloodletting awaits us if we do not end slavery.

What is extraordinary about Benito Cereno is that Melville has chosen to oppose slavery not by staging, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or so many abolitionist tracts and memoirs of the day, the cruelty and viciousness of those who hold other humans in bondage but rather by dramatizing how, when those slaves seek liberation through the only fierce means available to them, they will imitate their masters, use the same fear and torment that was imposed upon them to make sure that their former overlords do not dare to rebel. But that is not all: Melville presents this dire reversal of roles through the eyes of Amasa Delano, a well-meaning and decent American captain who, having generously sailed to the rescue, is duped by the masquerade that the slaves have forced the surviving whites on board to perform: that the ship has succumbed to a series of misfortunes (hurricanes, illnesses, adverse winds), that have left most of the whites on board dead and most of the blacks alive and wandering the deck helplessly, the eternal social order intact. Filled with racial prejudices, Amasa is unable to conceive that not only have the slaves broken out of what he considers their natural state of submission and submissiveness but that they have the subtlety and intelligence to create such an intricate plot. His blindness to the possibility of evil (the evil that is slavery and how that evil can also infect the slaves themselves) derives from his blindness to his own complicity in that evil, his failure to distinguish shadows from light, appearance from reality.

Amasa Delano joins a long list of Melville’s male protagonists (there is hardly a spirit-lifting woman or a child in his bleak tales) who are contaminated by innocence, who do not understand that, as a character in The Confidence-Man says, “nobody knows who anybody is” in a world that is a “painted décor,” where the worst of us hide their vilest appetites and sins under a veneer of nobility and the best of us are oblivious to the depths and spirals of that villainy. Melville’s heroes can be fooled because they are fooling themselves. It is the case of Billy Budd, who does not wish to even consider what Claggart is up to. It is the Wall Street lawyer, oblivious to how his style of life and aspirations are ultimately responsible for Bartleby’s refusal to cooperate. It is Benito Cereno, who never realized that the cargo of slaves he was carrying could spell his doom. It is Captain Vere, who suppresses the feminine in his heart in favor of the law of war without realizing that a few days later he will die in that war, that he has killed himself by hanging Billy. It is the case of the predestined company of the Pequod. There is no dearth of tenderness or affection, no lack of humor and intimations of hope in Melville’s parables—and he glories in the wonders of storytelling—but his basic message to America (and the world) is to wake up.

Reading these cautionary chronicles in the light of today’s disastrous Trump ascendancy, what struck me most was how so many Americans were unmindful, as Melville’s characters are, as to what the future would bring, the collective incapacity (and I include many of Trump’s supporters) to imagine, like Billy Budd, that such malice and trickery exist. And I admit that I shared the presumption that there were enough decent and good-willed white people in the United States to stop the lowest moral citizen in the land from capturing the highest political office, the most powerful on the planet. A sin of optimism: America is too good, too exceptional, too wonderful, a country to commit that sort of fatal mistake.

Risky as it may be to extrapolate and extract prophetic words about the future from an author long dead, I might warrant that Melville would thunder: You fools. Fools, those who believed and continue to believe in Trump despite all evidence that he has conned you. And fools, those who thought it could not happen here and did not fully measure the rage and inhumanity blighting America since its inception. And more fools, all of you, to think it might get better than worse as the deranged days rush by, deluding yourselves that the institutions that have provided checks and balances through so many calamities will stand this test.

Wake up. Claggart is plotting and waiting in the wings. A dictatorship is far from impossible.

If it’s any consolation, America is not alone in its blindness.

started rereading Melville in Chile animated by the expectation that my distance from the United States would help me to see how this author could illuminate the America of today and tomorrow, but to my surprise, as I advanced into his fictional universes, I had to admit that the frailties he was exposing and the quandaries he was scrutinizing could be applied to the country where my reading was taking place, a country whose long struggle for equality and justice, culminating in the peaceful 1970 revolution of Salvador Allende, had been sadistically suppressed.

Chileans back then nursed the illusion that our democracy was stable and enduring, only to be inconsolably awakened by the military coup of 1973, becoming aware, when it was too late, of the fragility of our institutions. How quickly so many of our people succumbed to demagoguery and brutality, how easily they normalized the everyday malice of dictatorship as they fell under the spell of consumerism.

But I also recognized in Melville’s masterpieces the very forms of resistance that many of us contemplated during those seventeen years of tyranny. Confronted with regression, shattered by grief, abandoned by the judges who were too craven and cowardly to defy the despotism of General Pinochet and his oligarchical civilian acolytes, we had to choose between the armed rebellion of the slaves on the San Dominick or the “I would prefer not to” of Bartleby. Though there were some—a small group—among the military’s challengers who embraced violence against such a nefarious regime as righteous and the only path to victory, the enormous majority of the democratic opposition were wary of this insurrectionary strategy. It was a tactic destined to fail, we thought—and we were wary of the consequences of that violence, even in the unlikely case that it could be successful rather than counterproductive. History had taught us the same lesson that Melville had presaged in Benito Cereno: Far too often have the revolutionaries of today become the oppressors of tomorrow, repeating the mistakes and coercion of yesterday. And so, with the infinite patience of an Ishmael and the insubordination of a Bartleby and the angelic resolution of a Billy Budd, we vanquished the Claggarts of Chile.

Would the American people be able to do something similar?

Melville might say, I presume, that it cannot be done without a drastic ethical transformation of the country, the recognition that Trump is the mere excrescence of America’s dark soul. Our author would point out that what now plagues us are the sins of the past coming home to roost: America’s tolerance of bigotry and racism, America’s optimistic blindness to its own faults, America’s love affair with bogus spectacle and masquerades, America’s culpable innocence amid imperial expansion. The Confidence Man—and Men—will continue to triumph until the citizens—or enough of them—take responsibility for having helped to create a land where Trump’s victory was not only feasible but, at some point, almost inevitable, a nation where so many Americans felt so alienated and abandoned that they willingly embarked on the “ship of fools.”

Of course, Melville wrote at a time when the submerged voices of humanity were hardly able to make themselves heard. So many of his protagonists are either rendered speechless in moments of crisis, like Billy Budd, or remain mute, like the slaves on the San Dominick, while their story is told and twisted by someone else, someone more powerful. Even Bartleby cannot rationalize or articulate why he rebels. And, except for the narrator, none of the sailors and officers of the multiethnic Pequod survive to tell the tale of the White Whale. Melville saw his blasphemous literature as providing an alternate version to the official “truth” of dominant history.

Today things are different. The voices of those who will and must engage in civil disobedience are anything but silent as they try to avoid the impending catastrophe.

And so, when I wonder if Melville’s fellow countrymen and women will be able to withstand the onslaught of the Confidence Man’s presidency, when I ask myself if the best of the American people will find the strength and cunning to force those in power to listen, when I try to imagine what sort of land the future holds, I leave the answer to that great ally of ours from the past, our eternal Melville. Here is how I prefer—yes, prefer—to envision that tomorrow where “something further may follow of this Masquerade,” describing it with some magical words culled from Moby-Dick: “It is not down in any map: true places never are.”

Or better still: “I try all things, I achieve what I can.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-herman-melville-can-teach-us-about-the-trump-era/
Remembering Günter Grasshttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/remembering-guenter-grass/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanApr 16, 2015Ariel Dorfman talks morality and the legacy of a literary giant

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Every commentary I have read about Günter Grass’s death recognizes his greatness as a writer and then, almost immediately, reminds readers of his youthful affiliation with the Waffen SS and how he remained silent about it for decades while setting himself up as the moral conscience of his country, not to mention of the world.

Have we really understood the relationship between the magnificent talent of the novelist and his ethical failings?

My first fury-filled encounter with Grass may help to illuminate, though perhaps not ultimately answer, that question.

It was in March of 1975, and my wife Angélica and I had come to visit him in his home near Hamburg, an ample rural house bordering a river whose waters were far more placid than our tormentous get-together.

At first, everything went smashingly well. We had been brought there by our friend Freimut Duve, an eminent editor, human rights defender and social democratic parliamentarian for that district. While Grass cooked a succulent fish soup—I had already heard about his legendary culinary skills—we chatted in English about his work and the colossal influence his Danzig Trilogy had played in my own fiction. Slowly, I slipped into the conversation the main motive, less literary, that had led me to seek this meeting. I was hoping to persuade Grass to add his signature to a campaign in defense of Chilean culture and against the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, a crusade already enthusiastically endorsed by his fellow German Heinrich Böll and other notables, such as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar. Given Günter’s left-wing politics, I did not suppose this would be a difficult task.

Nevertheless, when I finished my exposition, he was uncharacteristically quiet for a long while. Then he covered the pot, leaving only some embers in the log stove so that the bouillabaisse could simmer with all the leisureliness it deserved and went off, without another word, to inspect some exquisite engravings that he had been carving that morning.

When he finally lifted his eyes to meet mine,I noted a strange rage shining in them. And then he said, “Why didn’t the Chilean socialist comrades attend the recent conference in defense of the Czech patriots this summer in France?”

I explained that, no matter how much sympathy many Chilean democrats felt for the Prague Spring and the struggle of the Czech dissidents, it was politically unviable to exhibit such a predilection in public. It would have meant breaking with the Chilean Communists, who were at that moment a vital part (indeed, one might venture the backbone) of the resistance to the dictatorship, just as they had been loyal and crucial allies of the government of Salvador Allende, overthrown in the 1973 coup. Allende, I added, had condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

My clarification did not mollify Günter Grass. For him, the Soviet intervention in that country was born of the same imperial impulse that animated the Americans in Chile, and it was essential to denounce both these superpowers simultaneously and, joining in the defense of democratic socialism, seek alternative economic and social models. And when I responded that in order to rid ourselves of Pinochet, we could not jeopardize the indispensable support that the Soviet Union and its allies were contributing, the author of The Tin Drum refused to speak one more word to me. Luckily, he had been enchanted by the presence of my wondrous wife, and he spent the rest of our visits amicably talking with her. I later remarked to our friend Freimut that, if not for Angélica’s magic and charm, Grass would probably have expelled me from his home or set his dog on me. He did, at the very end of our visit, offer me some parting words: “When something is morally correct,” he said, “we must defend it without concern for the political or personal consequences we will pay.”

Forty years later, those words haunt me. It would be easy to return them to his dead body, to ask the man who had demanded rectitude from me what right did he have to try and teach anyone the value of honesty when he was, at that very moment, hiding his own Nazi past. Indict him, as so many seem to be doing today, as they commemorate and puzzle about the Nobel Prize winner who has just died.

Let me, then, defend Günter Grass. I don’t believe that the fact that he concealed his participation in Hitler’s SS invalidates his moral or political judgments. He was right about the amnesia that was corroding Germany in the 1970s. He was right in his defense of Third World liberation movements. He was right that it was necessary to remember the German victims of carpet bombings by the allies during the Second World War. And he was right in the particular case that led to our first meeting having such an unfortunate outcome. I told him so when we met again a few years later at The Hague to read together at a literary conference and I reiterated this to him on several other occasions over the years: the Chilean socialists should have embraced, as I soon did, the cause of the dissidents in the Communist countries. We should have done so with courage and integrity, and as a writer, I had the additional obligation of taking a stand for freedom of expression wherever it was under attack.

Grass was right and yet, all these years later, there is a question, an enigmatic one, that keeps surfacing: Why such a furious response to what was, after all, a legitimate difference of opinion? Why not be tolerant of someone who was, after all, a companion on the road to a better world? Did not the rigidity of his categorical views contradict the splendid ambiguity of his characters, the promiscuous richness of his prose?

He is not here to answer me. And yet, is it not possible that it was precisely that young Nazi, that guilty adolescent alter ego of his, who was requiring Günter’s adult incarnation to never again permit a position that would not be transparent, definitive, ethically uncompromising? Would that not explain his rage, his effervescence, his certainty? Was that not a sign of atonement?

Even so, we must be careful. If we can learn anything from the literary work of such a giant, it is that we are complex and paradoxical and often indecipherable human beings. It would not be fair, perhaps, to end up reducing the whole work of such a magnificently multiple writer to the messages that undoubtedly were being whispered to him all through his existence by that younger Grass who has also died with the older man in the darkness, died along with him. I think that, even at the end, Günter Grass must have been unable to forgive that dim, malignant zone of his past.

All I can do now is lament that I never talked this over at length with Grass then, or later when we became closer. I can only celebrate that our encounter by that quiet river sheds some light on the life and work of a writer I will never cease to read and have never ceased to admire.

 



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/remembering-guenter-grass/
Separated at Birthhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/separated-birth/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanMar 23, 2015The Nation and Alice in Wonderland were born within days of each other. In this seditious reading, they rejoin the dance.

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(Yuko Shimizu)

This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

Alice in Wonderland. Does Alice in Wonderland have anything to teach readers of The Nation today, any lessons for the decades ahead? Any wisdom that might have helped readers of the magazine over the last century and a half in their search for a more just, nonviolent, humane world—if they had only been open to the possibility?

These questions are less bizarre than they might immediately appear. For starters, Lewis Carroll’s comic masterpiece and the weekly where this essay is being published had almost simultaneous beginnings. Only two scant days separate July 4, 1865, when the adventures of Alice first saw light in London, from July 6 of that same year, when The Nation’s inaugural issue came out in New York. And just seventeen months later, in December of 1866, this magazine favorably reviewed the American edition of Alice in Wonderland, calling it “wonderfully clever,” its creatures “wholly nonsensical,” a book that “runs over with fun.”

Alas, from that moment onward, the paths of these entities nearly twinned at birth quickly diverged. Alice in Wonderland went on to become one of the most popular books of all time (second only, it is said, to Shakespeare and the Bible), and Wonderland a place that old and young (and—oh, dear—Disney!) found worthy of incessant visits. The Nation was, to put it mildly, far less popular. Without belittling the myriad successes and triumphs of The Nation and the vast, radiant, contradictory left-wing and liberal movement it represented during these last 150 years, it is undeniable that history has not been kind to many of our causes and dreams. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to bemoan, as the little girl in the book does, that “things are worse than ever…for I never was so small as this before, never!,” we certainly are distant from the utopias we wanted to turn into glorious reality, far from the lands we wondered about and keep longing for.

What messages, then, might be hidden like gems inside Alice in Wonderland—tidbits and intuitions that would have abetted radicals and revolutionaries in their quest for justice, peace and freedom; pitfalls and mistakes and perhaps Mad Tea-Parties that might have been avoided; advice for the future?

“The game was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not.”

I had read Lewis Carroll’s book many times—first as a child and then to my own children, and recently with my wife, Angélica, simply to relish its chaotic wit—but to once again plunge down the rabbit hole, employing as a lens the perspective of 150 years of struggle for a better world, was surprisingly revelatory and frequently disturbing, with many phrases and situations resonating with my own experience of progressive activism and engagement over the course of more than fifty years.

Had I not spent, along with so many of my luminous comrades, too many hours “busily painting [white roses] red”? Have we not habitually exclaimed to those who would like to sit at our table, “No room! No room!”—when there was, in fact, “plenty of room”? And doesn’t this sound sadly familiar: “The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting.” Reminiscing about countless meetings with militants from an array of left-wing organizations and factions that were, like the mouse, “so easily offended,” having ardently bickered over tiny, rarefied details and abstruse, murky theories, I can’t resist Alice’s observation that “the Hatter’s remark seemed…to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.” And I found it all too easy to identify with Alice as she muses: “It’s really dreadful…the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!”

To those who nod their heads in appreciation, remembering their own misadventures in Jargonland, Lewis Carroll won’t let us off the hook so easily. When Alice, polite and invariably reasonable, presumes—as we would—to be above the surrounding bedlam, the Cheshire Cat has no trouble in proving that she is just as insane as everyone else: “You must be,” the Cat states irrefutably, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

At times, that general madness takes the form of harmless nonsense, but it is also often embodied insistently, nightmarishly, in Wonderland violence. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” the Queen of Hearts commands, as if she were Stalin or Mao. Beatings, mock trials, threats of imminent execution, inhumane treatment of underlings and, above all, the incessant chopping-off of people’s heads at the slightest mistake: “They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here: the great wonder is, that there’s any one left alive!” As if Lewis Carroll were unwittingly warning us of the looming dangers of dictatorship, whether perpetrated by twentieth-century revolutionaries assaulting heaven in the name of the people, or regimes trying to salvage capitalism and privilege against the assault by those neglected, beleaguered people themselves. The crazed rush toward the future justified by the fierce urgency of now, the certainty that “there was not a moment to be lost”: we repeatedly find ourselves impulsively going down the nearest rabbit hole, “never once considering how in the world…to get out again.”

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

So, where do I hope to get to myself with this somber meditation on Alice and her potential adventures in Leftland? Is it fair to turn a book so rowdy and lighthearted into an ominous critique of radical projects and methods? In despondently imitating the gloomy March Hare by selecting only lamentations as my bread and butter, am I not ignoring what is essential, enduring, lovable, emancipating about Lewis Carroll’s story and characters?

Because Alice in Wonderland can also be read as a seditious text, overflowing with utopian impulses. Why not emphasize Alice’s realization “that very few things indeed were really impossible”—a credo that has fueled the fire of so many social crusades, that the gay-rights movement and the ecological wave of initiatives and protests have recently revealed to be true? Why not blaze in bold letters the words of the Duchess: “The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours”—a dictum that skewers corporations and greedy executives who collect millionaire bonuses while rejecting a raise in the minimum wage? The book celebrates rebellion and disobedience (the Cook throws frying pans at the Duchess, the Duchess boxes the Queen’s ears, the Knave steals tarts, Alice refuses to cooperate, the guinea pigs cheer despite being suppressed), while despotic figures are derided as bumbling and ineffective.

What we should rescue, above all, from Alice in Wonderland is its subversive, rambunctious humor—the same wildness, the same core questioning of authority that has inspired the insurrection and resistance and dissidence of millions over the last century and a half, the imagining of a possible parallel reality that does not obey the rules of a society in dire need of change. It is this carnivalesque energy and playfulness that we should recognize and embrace as ours, a crucial part of our progressive identity.

The tendency, of course, is toward the opposite language and style and demeanor on the left: a heavy, ponderous solemnity, as if all the tragedies of history were weighing us down. We take ourselves, and our discourse, seriously, and for good reason. The suffering is immense, the injustice intolerable, the stupidity widespread, the depredations of the industrial-military-surveillance complex expanding, the future dark and dystopian, the planet on the verge of apocalypse.

All the more reason, then, to exult in our own liberation when we have the chance, to revel in the thrill of breaking conventions and interrogating our own beliefs, certitudes and dogmas. All the more reason to recognize the re-enchantment that is reborn with each small act of hope and solidarity, and to extol the sheer joy that accompanies the certainty that we need not leave the world as we found it.

“It must be a very pretty dance,” said Alice timidly.

“Would you like to see a little of it?” said the Mock Turtle.

“Very much indeed,” said Alice.

During the Chilean Revolution (1970–73), the people of my country marched endlessly, attending interminable rallies in defense of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The energy of those brothers and sisters by my side, their resilience and fortitude and inventiveness, their irrepressible jokes and homemade placards, have inspired me ever since. What has also stayed with me is how much more vibrant and creative those men and women in the streets of our city were than most of the men (they were predominantly male) who droned away for hours on the podium, exhorting, analyzing, swearing that the masses could not be stopped. I wondered then—as I do now, so many decades later—why the enthusiasm and defiance of those democratic multitudes were not unleashed, why there was such a contrast between the leaders and the people. And it pains me that our peaceful revolution culminated in a disaster: Allende dead, so many tortured, persecuted, exiled, so many dreams that ended, seemed to end.

The King in Alice in Wonderland has some grave and presumably commonsensical advice for the White Rabbit about how to tell a story: “Begin at the beginning…and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

He is mistaken.

Those of us who thirst for a different world, who seek alternative horizons, know that you do not stop when the end has been reached, that there is no end to our need for justice, that rebels never go “out altogether, like a candle.” Rather, we are like the Cheshire Cat. Even when our body has vanished, a grin will always remain obdurately behind, a ghostly presence, to prove that we were once here and may re-emerge, that we can’t go on but, as Lewis Carroll’s heir, Samuel Beckett, understood, we must go on.

Ultimately, as The Nation faces the future, this is what we should learn and cherish from Alice in Wonderland for the next 150 years of illumination and struggle, the challenge that this fantastically absurd text provides us.

After so many tribulations and trials—those we have been through and those that await us anew—are we brave enough to respond, again and again, to the Mock Turtle’s invitation: “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”

I believe he is not wrong, that Mock Turtle, when he sings, when he promises as he dances that “there is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/separated-birth/
What Does it Feel Like to Be Tortured?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-does-it-feel-be-tortured/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanDec 17, 2014Unless you’ve experienced it, you can never really know. Here are five books that come closest to conveying the horror.

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What does it feel like to be tortured?

Now that the Senate report on CIA interrogations and abuse is out, there must be millions of Americans who are asking themselves that question.

Unfortunately, the answer is that, unless you have lived through that demonic experience yourself, you cannot ever really know.

I wish it were otherwise.

I have been shadowed by torture and its imminent possibility for over forty years, ever since a military coup on September 11, 1973, overthrew the democratic government in my country, Chile. So many friends limping into exile, sharing tales of how their bodies were violated in so many ways with so many sharp and blunt instruments. So many nights listening, with my wife, Angelica, by my side, to what happened to them, step by step, horror after horror. And so many times the despair at my own innocence, the safe cocoon of distance, both physical and mental, protecting me from evil, so many times realizing that I was unable to understand, truly understand, what it means to  be stripped naked and forced onto a cot covered with the vomit of previous clients. So many times, wishing and not wishing to surmount the gulf yawning between me and the victims, wanting and not wanting to be contaminated by that knowledge of perversity.

And yet, though I was aware that pain cannot, by definition, be transmitted through words or translated into the rational chronology of spoken or written language—that pain is, literally, unspeakable—even so, I have tried over these decades to access, through a series of remarkable books, a certain obscene familiarity with that extreme form of suffering. Some of those who survived that ordeal had managed to shatter that innocence and distance, invite readers to picture the vulnerability and agony of being at the utter mercy of some cold, taunting, omnipotent god who can decide, at the flick of a finger or the whiplash of a command from a tongue, whether you live or you die, whether your body is torn from you like an earthquake or if you are allowed to subside into the dreadful calm of awaiting the next bout of agony.

Perhaps the most famous of all these harrowing accounts is Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (1981) by Jacobo Timerman, an Argentine journalist imprisoned and tortured by the military of his native land. The author spares us nothing, has no pity on himself or his readers, will not let us escape the systematic way, day after day after night after night, in which he is dehumanized—the brutality and hatred of his tormentors augmented by their crass anti-Semitism. What is most sobering about Timerman’s memoir is that these practices were far from new, reminding him of what the Nazis had perfected against other humans just a few decades earlier.

By alerting the world to the repetition of such tribulations in Latin America, Prisoner without a Name joined such classics as Arthur Koestler’s 1940 classic, Darkness at Noon (where Communist interrogators extract confessions from dissidents) and Henri Alleg’s foundational text The Question, published in 1958 and promptly banned by the French authorities. Alleg, a French journalist arrested during the Algerian War, began to write clandestinely while in prison the story of how he had been beaten, waterboarded, sundered apart by electricity, an indictment which, once his pages were smuggled out of jail, created a sensation in France, helping to shift public opinion and end the colonial war against the Algerian independence movement.

Other books focus more on the after-effects of torture, how the agony never ends, replicating itself over and over in the mind, in the body that cannot help but relive and remember the nightmare that is never past. The most moving of these is perhaps The Railway Man (1995), recently made into a film, in which British prisoner of war Eric Lomax relates his torture at the hands of the Japanese during the building of the Thai Burma Railway in 1941. What makes Lomax’s life fascinating is that he tracked down the interpreter who had been instrumental in those fierce interrogations and found, instead of the devil, a Japanese Buddhist who had spent the rest of his existence trying to atone for having participated in such inhumanity. That interrogator had leapt across the infinite remoteness that separates perpetrator and victim and discovered their common humanity. And Lomax, though damaged beyond repair, responded with forgiveness.

If I had to choose, however, one book of those I have read in pursuit of knowledge, it would be Tejas Verdes: Diary of a Concentration Camp by the Chilean novelist Hernán Valdés, published in 1974. Valdés plunges us, as no one else ever has, into his body, his blindfolded eyes, his burnt skin, his waterlogged lungs, his genitals shocked with electrical current. He reproduces mercilessly the vulgarity of his captors and the coldness that makes him shiver under the hottest sun, a coldness at his core that will never again go away. If I had to recommend one book that comes closest to transporting those who are uninitiated into the chilling abyss of Hell, it would be Tejas Verdes.

Sadly, ironically, significantly, it is out of print.

I guess not enough people wanted to discover what it felt like to be tortured.

I guess not enough people were ready to open their imagination to that experience. And it is the compassionate imagination that we now desperately need at this dire moment of revelation, so that none of us will ever dare to justify, out of fear or out of expedience, cruelty that is inflicted upon our fellow humans on a planet that should, by now, know better. 



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-does-it-feel-be-tortured/
How to Forgive Your Torturerhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-forgive-your-torturer/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanJun 17, 2014Eric Lomax was captured and tortured by the Japanese during World War II. Forty years later, he tracked down the man responsible.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like. these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

What a way to celebrate Torture Awareness Month!

According to an Amnesty International Poll released in May, 45 percent of Americans believe that torture is “sometimes necessary and acceptable” in order to “gain information that may protect the public.” 29 percent of Britons “strongly or somewhat agreed” that torture was justified when asked the same question.

For someone like me, who has been haunted by the daily existence of torture since the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende, such percentages couldn’t be more depressing, but perhaps not that surprising. I now live, after all, in the America where Dick Cheney, instead of being indicted as a war criminal, sneeringly (and falsely) claims to anyone who asks him—and he is trotted out over and over again as the

resident expert on the subject—that  “enhanced interrogations” have been and still are absolutely necessary to keep Americans safe.

As for those Americans and Britons—and so many others around the world—who find such horrors justifiable, I wonder if they have ever met a victim of torture? Or do they think this endless pain is only inflicted on remote and dangerous people caught up in unfathomable wars and savage conflicts? If so, they should think again.

When I read these sorts of statistics a scene comes back to me. I remember a man I met 20 years ago, not in my native Latin America or in faraway lands where torture is endemic, but in the extremely English town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Everybody in the room that day was crying, except for the man who had moved us all to tears, the former prisoner of war whom my son Rodrigo and I had traveled thousands of miles to meet. We had hoped to do justice to his story in a biopic, Prisoners in Time, that the BBC wanted to make for television—based on the same autobiographical material used recently in The Railway Man, the film starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman now showing in theaters across America.

And what an extraordinary story it was!

Eric Lomax, a British officer in World War II, had been tortured by the Japanese in Thailand while working on the infamous Bangkok-Burma railroad, the one most people know about through another film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. Eric, like so many victims of atrocities, was plagued by the experience, his life destroyed by memories of his agony and the desire for revenge. What differentiated him from so many others persecuted worldwide was not only that, more than 40 years later, he tracked down the man he held responsible for his suffering, the anonymous interpreter at his beatings and waterboardings, but the astounding fact that this tormentor, Takashi Nagase, once found and identified, turned out to be a Buddhist monk. Nagase had spent the postwar decades denouncing his own countrymen for their crimes and trying to atone for his role in the atrocities he had helped commit by caring for innumerable orphans of the Asians who had died building that railroad. The one scorching image from the war he could not escape was that of a brave young British lieutenant over whose torture he had presided and whom he had presumed to be dead.

Once Eric Lomax resurfaced, once the two former enemies, now old men accompanied by their second wives, met in Kanchanaburi next to the River Kwai where they had last parted, once they were face to face, Nagase begged for forgiveness. It was not instantly forthcoming. But some weeks later, in Hiroshima of all places, Lomax offered Nagase the absolution that he needed in order to live and die in peace.

The BBC had chosen me to tell this tale because, in my play Death and the Maiden, I had already probed the issues of torture, memory, mercy, and vengeance from the perspective of my beleaguered country, Chile. But in that play there had been no pardon offered and no pardon sought, so writing about Lomax’s dilemma seemed a way of furthering that original exploration with a series of new questions. Is reconciliation ever really possible when the wounds are searing and permanent? Does anything change if the victimizer claims to have repented? How can we ever know if those claims are legitimate, if that remorse is not merely an ego-trip, an accommodation for the sake of outward appearances?

There was also an aesthetic challenge: given the extreme reserve of both antagonists, their inability to articulate to one another—no less anybody else—what they had been feeling all those years, how to imagine, for the screen, dialogue our two silent former enemies would never have said but that would remain true to their affliction? How to bring their story to people who can’t possibly imagine what torture does to the ones who suffer it and those who create that suffering?

Our visit with Eric and his wife Patti at their home in the far north of England was a way of trying to coax from that emotionally repressed man some information—entirely absent from the memoir he had written—about how he had dealt with the barren wilderness of his sorrow, what it meant to survive torture and war more dead than alive. We were accompanied by director Stephen Walker and celebrated psychiatrist Helen Bamberg, who had helped Eric name his demons, and so saved him and his troubled marriage.

That day in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Eric confided to us, after several hours of halting monosyllables, a painful, unbelievable story. When he returned to England by ship after those traumatic years as a prisoner of war, he discovered just before disembarking that the British Army had deducted from his back pay the cost of the boots he had lost during his captivity. Bamberg, who had managed to get Eric to speak out after many distressing sessions, asked him if he had told anyone about this at the time.

“Nobody,” Eric said. And then, after a pause that felt infinite, “There was nobody there, at the dock.” He stopped and again long minutes of silence went by before he added, “Only a letter from my father. Saying he had remarried, as my mother had died three years before.” Another long pause followed. “She died thinking I was also dead. I had been writing to her all that time and she was dead.”

That’s when we all started to cry.

Not just out of sympathy for his grief, but because Eric had delivered this story about his loss in a monotone devoid of any apparent sentiment, as if all that despair belonged to someone else. Such dissociation is typical of torture victims. Their mental survival during their ordeal and its unending aftermath depends on distancing themselves from the body and its fate. And it is in that distance that they dwell.

We were crying, I believe, for humanity. We were crying in the Lomax living room because we were being confronted with a reality and a realization that most people would rather avoid: when grievous harm has been done to someone, the damage may be beyond repair. Eric Lomax had been able to tame the hatred raging in his heart and, reaching into the deepest wells of compassion, he had forgiven one of the men who had destroyed him. And yet there was still something irreparable, a terror that ultimately could not be assuaged.

The film we wrote two decades ago tried to be faithful to that desolate moment of revelation and at the same time not betray the inner peace that Eric had attained, the fact that he no longer heard Nagase’s voice in his nightmares demanding, “Confess, Lomax, confess and pain will stop.” He had triumphed over fear and fury, but that spiritual victory had not been achieved in solitude. In addition to the support of his wife Patti, it was due to the healing process he had gone through with Helen Bamberg. Not until he had fully come to terms with what had been done to him, until he faced his trauma in all its horror, was he able to “find” Nagase, whose identity and location had, in fact, been within reach for decades.

Eric’s tragedy and his attempt at reconciliation had a special meaning for me: it connected his life to that of so many friends in Chile and other countries who had been subjected to inhuman interrogations. It was a way of understanding the common humanity of all torture victims. More so, as the method that Bamberg employed to resurrect Eric’s memories and restore his mental health had first been elaborated as a therapeutic response to the flood of damaged Latin Americans exiled in England during the 1970s and 1980s, those years when grim dictatorships dominated that continent. Eric Lomax, she said, had the sad privilege of being the first World War II veteran with PTSD who was able to take advantage of this new psychological treatment.   

We could not know, of course, that 9/11 awaited us seven years in the future, that the waterboarding inflicted on Eric in the 1940s by the Japanese, and on the bodies of so many Latin Americans decades later by their own countrymen, would go global as the United States and its allies fought the “war on terror.” Nor could we have guessed or would we have dreamed that so many millions would in that future prove so indifferent to a form of punishment that has been classified as a crime against humanity and is against international treaty and law signed onto by most of the world’s nations.

It would seem, then, that Eric Lomax’s story is more relevant today than ever—a story that, one would hope, brings home again, during Torture Awareness Month, the ultimate reality and anguish of being tortured. Or can we accept that the questions Eric Lomax asked himself about forgiveness and revenge, about redemption and memory, no longer trouble contemporary humanity?

How would our friend Eric, who died in 2012, react to the news that so many Americans and so many of the very countrymen he served in the war now declare torture to be tolerable? Perhaps he would whisper to them the words he wrote to Nagase when he forgave his enemy: “Sometime the hatred has to stop.”

 



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-forgive-your-torturer/
My Memories of Gabriel García Márquezhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/my-memories-gabriel-garcia-marquez/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanMay 6, 2014What more could a young writer want than to spend hours and hours with the greatest author alive?

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Sin valor comercial. no commerical value. Those were the words stamped on the cover of the 1967 first edition, in Spanish, of course, of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I still have in our library in Santiago de Chile—ironic words, for a novel that was to become one of the most sold on the planet and one of the greatest of all time.

They had been placed there to ensure that I would not resell the book, though I had no intention of doing so. As the literary critic of Chile’s main magazine, Ercilla, all I wanted to do was read it. I had been waiting for years to devour it, ever since rumors reached me that something special, something beyond special, was coming from the pen of an author whom I had already appraised glowingly in previous columns. When I arrived back home, I announced to Angélica, my wife, that I would not be available for the next twenty-four hours, not even to help with our 2-month-old baby, Rodrigo. It was reported that Gabriel García Márquez had said something similar to his wife, Mercedes, when he shut himself in his room to write this novel for nearly two years, and I modestly intended, though for a shorter interlude, to imitate him.

I consumed the book in one sitting, for hours and hours into the night and through dawn, not daring to stop, being fed sporadically by my dear Angélica. Like the last of the Buendía dynasty, I could not take my eyes off the text that was engulfing me, hoping against hope that the world that started with ice touched by a child in Paradise would not succumb to that other constellation of ice called death, desperate because death was indeed stalking each generation, each act of joy and exuberance. I could not cease my reading until I found out how all this would end, how the life of the family, the epic of Latin America, how my life embedded in the novel’s whirlwind, would end. And also desperate because I could not fathom how I, who was one of the first readers on earth to be privileged to receive this gift, would, in time for tomorrow’s deadline, have a review ready.

Incredibly, I was saved from that obligation by a strange twist of history. I rushed to the magazine to beg the culture editor to allow me 200 or 300 extra words to dedicate to this masterpiece and was greeted by his somber face. An interview that I had done the previous week with the black Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén had been censored, for racial and political reasons, by the publisher. I resigned in protest—and if I lost my job just when we most needed it, as our son Rodrigo was only a few months old, at least I did not have to rush 1,000 transitory words into print about those hundred years of solitude.

Years later, when I told Gabo (as his friends called him) about this incident, during our first meeting in Barcelona—it was March 1974, six months after the Chilean coup that had overthrown our democratically elected president, Salvador Allende—he laughed in delight and said it was lucky for him and for me that destiny had forced me, against my will, to be an ordinary reader, because it was for those readers that he wrote and not for critics or academics, who bored him and put him to sleep.

It was at the end of that bountiful lunch at his home that he suggested I go and visit the writer who was then his best friend (this was before their infamous falling out years later), Mario Vargas Llosa, who could contribute to returning democracy to Chile. I demurred; it was too far away and I had other things to do and—“I’ll take you,” Gabo said, leading me to his car. “If I hadn’t been a writer, I’d have loved to be a taxicab driver. Maybe it would have been a better choice: I could spend my days and nights listening to my passengers’ stories and navigating the streets of cities, instead of breaking my back behind a desk.”

Those first hours spent with Gabo cemented a friendship that was to last us a lifetime, but it also established politics as the center of our relationship. Over the next years, we were co-conspirators in the struggle against dictatorship in Latin America. What more could a young writer want than to spend hours and hours of confabulation with the greatest author alive? Was it possible to ask more than hundreds of meetings with him, Gabo opening his address book, Gabo writing to prime ministers and to Nobel Prize winners and to financiers, Gabo answering my phone calls in the middle of the night, Gabo interviewing clandestine leaders who had just arrived in Paris from Santiago, Gabo always ready to intervene to save a life, open a door, write an article?

Yes, it was possible to ask for more. And the occasion came when I was a member of a jury—Julio Cortázar was also among our group—for a literary prize in Mexico. During that week, I was finally able to speak to García Márquez about the literary obsessions of his and my life, Dante and Faulkner, Chekhov and Cervantes.

It was during those wonderful days that Gabo offered a revelation that may perhaps deeply explain his vision, what made him tick creatively. He had just completed the manuscript of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and one evening, after dinner, under the tropical breeze, he showed me what he called a real treasure. It was the autopsy report of Cayetano Gentile, a friend of his, whose murder in 1951 was the basis for the novel.

“The knife wound that killed him,” Gabo said, “was in the back, right where the third lumbar vertebra is, penetrating his kidney. And you know what, Ariel? That’s where—exactly where—I, without knowing about this detail, imagined the fatal injury to my protagonist. My fiction imitated and remembered and anticipated the exactness of reality, la exactitud de lo real.”

Gabo’s eyes were shining like those of a child filled with wonder. And mine were shining as well, as I caught a glimpse of the way in which García Márquez created his works. For him, as for all of Latin America, everything was at the same time truth and fable, history and invention, pain and myth.

And in his desire to communicate, I saw that we are not as alone as he had implied in One Hundred Years of Solitude, that if we were able to imagine the plague of our violence in such a minute and perfect and excessive way, we would manage somehow to defeat death.

Now that the death he defied all his existence has come for him, I am left with that memory and so many more, but perhaps, above all, with this one. One day I was lunching with him and Mercedes and some other guests at his home in Mexico City, recalling our days as conspirators, when Gabo turned to one of his friends and said: “Do you know that Ariel used to call me at 3 in the morning to tell me his latest scheme for isolating and shaming General Pinochet? And you know what else? He would call me collect.”

Once the other guests had departed and I was alone with Gabo, I said to him: “I did call you at 3 in the morning and many another ungodly hour, Gabo, but never collect. Angélica and I were as poor as could be, but I never called you collect.”

García Márquez grew serious and then, again, his eyes lit up with a smile. “You must forgive me then, Ariel. But you have to admit that the story is funnier and more memorable and more credible even if you called me collect.”

And, of course, I forgave him and I forgive him all over again. The root of his genius was to take something real, something supposedly habitual and almost journalistic, and exaggerate it insanely. Just like Colombia, just like Latin America, just like our extraordinary humanity that no one like him—who may be driving some taxi in the great beyond if the gods are just—conquered and expressed and made immortal.

 



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/my-memories-gabriel-garcia-marquez/
The Struggle for Chile’s Futurehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/struggle-chiles-future/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanDec 4, 2013The presidential runoff between Michelle Bachelet and Evelyn Matthei presents an opportunity to overcome Pinochet's twisted legacy.

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It was in London that I had, for the first and only time in my life, the displeasure of seeing Evelyn Matthei, the right-wing candidate who aspires to become Chile’s new head of state and who will, according to all the polls, be resoundingly beaten by former President Michelle Bachelet on December 15.

My unintended encounter with Matthei happened on October 8, 1999, a few blocks from the Thames, in front of the magistrates’ court on Bow Street, where British judge Ronald Bartle was about to announce whether Gen. Augusto Pinochet, arrested a year before by Scotland Yard for crimes against humanity, could be extradited to Spain. As I happened to be in the English capital on my way to a literary festival with my wife, Angélica, I decided to check out the scene.

The noise that greeted me was deafening. Separated by a strong police contingent, two groups of Chileans were fiercely confronting each other: the largest, made up of Chilean exiles who had been tortured by Pinochet’s secret police and then expelled from the country, was outshouting a smaller faction flown in from Santiago to offer vociferous support to their imprisoned hero, the man who had misgoverned Chile for seventeen years.

Suddenly, from within the bowels of the Pinochetistas, a figure emerged, someone I had seen up till then only in photos and on television. It was Evelyn Matthei, a senator just off the plane from Chile, famous for her vulgarity and the invective she showered on her adversaries. But nothing had prepared me for the foul sewer of words gushing from her mouth, directed at the exiled Chileans demanding justice a few feet away from her.

The impropriety of her onslaught was made all the more shocking as it came from a woman in elegant attire, whose hands, raised like claws, had spent many hours taking piano lessons years ago in—what an irony—that very London she was now revisiting for a different purpose. Even more disquieting was that those receiving this obscene attack were listening to the exact abrasive words that had accompanied their torture in the basements of the dictatorship. This protector of Pinochet’s honor was unconsciously replicating past traumas, returning the victims to the moment of their most brutal humiliation.

Recalling today, fourteen years later, that infamy, I realize something that on that occasion neither I nor anyone else could have anticipated: Bachelet, now Matthei’s rival in the second round of the presidential elections, had heard a similar howl of filth from the men who threatened and beat her when she was arrested, along with her mother, Angela Jeria, in 1975.

Their fault? To be the family of Gen. Alberto Bachelet, who had accepted a ministerial post in the socialist and democratic government of Salvador Allende. When Allende was overthrown on September 11, 1973, General Bachelet, like so many other patriots, was detained and soon died in custody, paying with his life for his loyalty to the Constitution he had sworn to uphold—a life that ended with a heart attack as a direct result of the savage way he was tortured by his former military colleagues.

The symbolic electoral thrashing that Michelle Bachelet is about to inflict upon the woman who mistreated her companions of misfortune in London is, therefore, intimately gratifying. It is a victory that becomes even more significant once we bring into focus the personal history of the two contenders.

They have known each other since they were children, playing together in Antofagasta, in the north of Chile, where their fathers were Air Force officers. Much has been written about the extraordinary circumstance that Fernando Matthei, Evelyn’s father, was the best friend of Alberto Bachelet. And that months after the 1973 coup, then-Colonel Matthei was named director of the Air Force War Academy, his office close to the rooms where his comrade in arms was being direly harmed—without Matthei lifting his voice even once to help his friend, or even visit him. Had he done so, he could not, of course, have become Pinochet’s health minister or, soon afterward, a member of the military junta for thirteen years.

Children should not be held responsible for the cowardice of their parents—or for their crimes. But it is worth noting that Ms. Matthei, while Pinochet’s thugs were interrogating and kicking the hell out of her childhood pal, was studying economics at the Catholic University of Chile, where reigned the “Chicago boys,” fanatic followers of Milton Friedman’s free-market theories. Their neoliberal policies and embrace of unbridled capitalism and repression of workers’ rights became the dominant ideology of the dictatorship, a series of pitiless measures that Evelyn Matthei, once democracy was restored in 1990, would continue defending as a legislator—policies she wishes to continue as president.

Alas for her, there is not even a spitting chance that she will win the runoff election. In the first round, Bachelet, among a field of nine candidates, most of them considerably to her left, garnered almost
47 percent of the vote, while Matthei registered a dismal 25 percent. This, a mere four years after her fellow conservative Sebastián Piñera became president with 52 percent of the vote.

It’s not easy to evaluate how much voters in the runoff will be influenced by the history that joins and divides the two candidates, given that during the campaign no allusions have been made, on their part, to past bonds. The discussion has centered, as it should, on who can best deal with Chile’s pressing problems, its glaring and shameful inequalities, its educational system tainted by an excess of greed, its current Constitution—
fraudulently approved by Pinochet in 1980—burdened with the remnants of authoritarianism and injustice.

And yet the whole country knows that this is not merely about the future. It is a stark chance to decide once and for all how to overcome the twisted legacy of the dictatorial past. Do Chileans wish to spend the next four years under the woman who flew to London to support the tyrant who persecuted and killed so many of his compatriots? Or would they rather be led by a woman who was herself a victim of that terror and managed to rise above the murder of her father and her own harrowing yesterdays of torments and tribulations to become a symbol of a different Chile, where nobody will ever be subjected to such sorrows?

Perhaps finally, on December 15, Chile will be able to dispel once and for all the insolent shadow that has been devouring us for more than forty years.

Peter Kornbluh wrote about Chile’s 9/11, when the military ousted Salvador Allende from the presidency in 1973.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/struggle-chiles-future/
Does the Chilean Experience Offer a Way Out for Egypt?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/does-chilean-experience-offer-way-out-egypt/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanOct 8, 2013My country can perhaps offer Egyptians a strategy whereby a fearful and divided populace can rid itself of an oppressive regime.

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Curious onlookers look at the debris outside La Moneda government palace in Santiago de Chile, on the morning of Sept. 15, 1973. (AP Photo)

I watch from afar the tragedy of Egypt and, inevitably, I think of Chile. I think of Chile and its coup, and I mourn the dead and I mourn history repeating itself. Yet again the massacres and the soldiers in the streets and the jails filled with tortured bodies. Once again the exiles and the censorship; once again a general with dark sunglasses justifying bloodshed in the name of the fatherland; once more the branding of any opposition as terrorism.

And then I remember that Chile is not only a study in sorrow, and tentatively, doubtfully, I perceive a possible way out for the troubled land of Egypt. 

After all, fifteen years after the September 11, 1973, coup against democratically elected President Salvador Allende, the Chilean people managed to defeat our dictatorship in a historic plebiscite, an event recently recalled in the film No. Reaching that triumphant day, October 5, 1988, was possible only because we had laboriously created the Concertación, a variegated alliance of parties and citizens that imposed a transition to democracy so successful that Chile will celebrate this November its sixth presidential election in twenty-four years. So my country can perhaps offer Egyptians a strategy whereby a fearful and divided populace can rid itself of an oppressive regime. 

Can Egypt reproduce this model? It is a daunting task. Chile, unlike Egypt, had a long history of democratic politics, a tradition that allowed Allende to initiate a peaceful revolution, the first attempt to build socialism without resorting to violence as its unruly midwife. Nor did Allende try, like Morsi, to grab all power for himself or persecute and arrest his detractors. And Egypt, unlike Chile, is haunted by religious discord, making compromise all the more difficult. 

Despite these salient contrasts, the dire dilemma faced by Egyptians today is strikingly similar to the one we Chileans confronted back in 1973. The coup against Allende was made possible because the forces for democracy and change were badly split: the Christian Democratic Party, which should have been a progressive ally of the Unidad Popular coalition headed by Allende, ended up (with a few honorable exceptions) fomenting the coup, under the illusion that the military would soon return the country to a constitutional regime. This myopia and selfishness was actively cultivated and financed by the CIA, which was desperate to destroy Allende’s experiment in social justice—one that, if it had triumphed, would have ominously affected American and multinational corporate interests. But the antagonism of the CDP was facilitated as well by sectarianism and arrogance among far too many revolutionary militants, including myself. And it was complicated further by an extremist left-wing faction inside and outside the Unidad Popular that scared middle-class sectors of the country, feeding the dread of committed patriots that Allende—a lifelong believer in pluralism—was paving the way not to democratic socialism, but to a “second Cuba.” 

I could rehash this conflict at great length, pointing out that the CDP was more to blame than our side, given that its leaders rejected last-minute calls from our president to find a constitutional path out of the crisis. They’d answer that we were insufficiently democratic and puffed-up with power and… Though today such finger-pointing can help set the record straight, it was not crucial during the urgent years after the coup, when we needed to find common ground on which the majority of the country could meet (the Unidad Popular plus the CDP polled 65 percent of the vote in the 1970 elections), a consensus between those democrats opposed to Allende and those who supported him. 

Such an evolution was anything but easy. When catastrophe afflicts a nation, it cannot emerge again into the light without many of its citizens descending into a dark night of the soul, a soul that is both political and spiritual. One cannot be reborn without questioning one’s own responsibility, what we could have done to avert this collective and individual suffering. The strains accompanying any rebirth are compounded by the temptation to indulge in excessive self-flagellation, the desire to accommodate one’s new allies without betraying the moral principles and goals of liberation that fed our dreams in the first place. 

Those years of dictatorship, then, were years of darkness and despair. But they were also full of illuminations and redemptive self-scrutiny, an examination of the past so that its mistakes would not be endlessly replicated. On the left, we needed to realize that we must never take democracy for granted, never forget that we can disagree with our adversaries without hating them, never flinch from denouncing human rights violations anywhere in the world, especially if they come from regimes that espouse revolution or are instituting radical transformations that we applaud. And the Christian Democrats needed to criticize their own opportunism, their indifference to the sorrow of others, their self-righteousness, their coziness with the rich and connection to the powerful in Chile and abroad. Both sides had to learn how to practice tolerance in the everyday grind of common struggle, effectively overcoming ancient resentments and bitterness—because Pinochet would not fall until we came to trust each other again, until we shared a vision of what could replace his dictatorship, putting the emphasis on what joined us today and leaving for tomorrow our continuing discrepancies. 

* * *

This is the elementary and arduous lesson of Chile for Egypt. 

The Muslim Brotherhood must realize how its narrowness and fanaticism corroded democracy and excluded the very sectors that are now necessary to restore it to legality. And it must shun the siren calls of those who would rather see the country slipping into violence (just as most, though not all, of the left avoided these calls for armed struggle in Chile). The liberal and secular Egyptians who hailed the army takeover must severely condemn their ill-advised faith in the military as saviors—and stop justifying their acceptance of the coup as something that history forced them to do (just as eventually most, though not all, Chilean Christian Democrats repented of having encouraged the armed forces to oust Allende). Both the Muslim Brotherhood and its democratic rivals have, undoubtedly, an ax to grind—but while they grind it on each other, they should remember that the one wielding the real ax on real bodies is Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the latest heir to Pinochet. 

The process of reciprocal exploration by Egyptians of past errors will take a long time. There is no guarantee that these two hostile camps will manage to surmount their discord, will ever again find themselves side by side in Tahrir Square confronting a despotic regime. They face far more obstacles and mutual suspicions than we Chileans did, recriminations and duplicities that have deeper roots in history and religion. And we had the advantage of being part of an irrepressible movement toward social justice in Latin America, as well as a place in the worldwide transition to democracy in those years, as South Korea, South Africa and the nations of Eastern Europe can attest. The Arab Spring shows few signs, thus far, of a steady march toward peace and prosperity, with Syria only the latest horrifying casualty of basic disagreements among those supposedly fighting tyranny. 

The troubles ahead seem enormous. And so, some final words of advice. One word, in fact: patience

A sacred virtue in Islam, one of the holiest attributes of God, the most difficult demand of Allah for men and women to follow, the most challenging to abide. The ninety-ninth name of God: as-Sabûr, God the Patient, the Timeless One. 

And for nonbelievers, Shakespeare: “How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” 

And for both, for those who trust in God and those who trust only in their own humanity, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” 

Patience with oneself and patience with others, patience to speak the truth and patience to listen to a foe. Patience that the dark is not eternal. Patience, because the people of Egypt, like the people of Chile, are not going away, will not disappear into the night and fog of neglect and oppression. 

Someday in the near future, alas, yet another country will again find its democracy abrogated by another group of unelected soldiers who place themselves above the law. 

On that day, I can only hope that an Egyptian will be able to write the following words to the citizens of that afflicted nation: “There is a way out. Just learn,” he or she will say, “from the lessons of Egypt; please mourn with me the repetition of history, and share with me the certainty that it does not have to be this way. Please believe me,” I hope he or she will be able to whisper, “that patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”

What Happened to Egypt’s Liberals After the Coup?” asks Sharif Abdel Kouddous.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/does-chilean-experience-offer-way-out-egypt/
Martin Luther King and the Two 9/11shttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/martin-luther-king-and-two-911s/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanAug 27, 2013Dr. King’s words in a world awash with surveillance. 

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. makes his last public appearance at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968, a day before his assassination. (AP Photo/Charles Kelly)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

So much has changed since that hot day in August 1963 when Martin Luther King delivered his famous words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A black family lives in the White House and official segregation is a thing of the past. Napalm no longer falls on the homes and people of Vietnam and the president of that country has just visited the United States in order to seek “a new relationship.”

A healthcare law has been passed that guarantees medical services to many millions who, fifty years ago, were entirely outside the system. Gays were then hiding their sexuality everywhere—the Stonewall riots were six years away—and now the Supreme Court has recognized that same-sex couples are entitled to federal benefits. Only the year before, Rachel Carson had published her groundbreaking ecological classic Silent Spring, then one solitary book. Today, there is a vigorous movement in the land and across the Earth dedicated to stopping the extinction of our planet.

In 1963, nuclear destruction threatened our species every minute of the day and now, despite the proliferation of such weaponry to new nations, we do not feel that tomorrow is likely to bring 10,000 Hiroshimas raining down on humanity.

So much has changed—and yet so little.

The placards raised in last week’s commemorative march on Washington told exactly that story: calls for ending the drone wars in foreign lands; demands for jobs and equality; protests against mass incarceration, restrictions on the right to an abortion, cuts to education, assaults upon the workers of America, and the exploitation and persecution of immigrants; warnings about the state-by-state spread of voter suppression laws. And chants filling the air, rising above multiple images of Trayvon Martin, denouncing gun violence and clamoring for banks to be taxed. Challenges to us all to occupy every space available and return the country to the people.

Yes, so much has changed—and yet so little.

In my own life, as well.

Words for an Assassination Moment

I wasn’t able to attend last week’s march, but I certainly would have, if events of a personal nature hadn’t interfered. It was just a matter of getting in a car with my wife, Angélica, and driving four hours from our home in Durham, North Carolina.

Fifty years ago, that would have been impossible. We were living in distant Chile and didn’t even know that a march on Washington was taking place. I was 21 years old at the time and, like so many of my generation, entangled in the struggle to liberate Latin America. The speech by King that was to influence my life so deeply did not even register with me.

What I can remember with ferocious precision, however, is the place, the date, and even the hour when, five years later, I had occasion to listen for the first time to those “I have a dream” words, heard the incantations of that melodious baritone, that emotional certainty of victory. I can remember the occasion so clearly because it happened to be April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King was killed, and ever since, his dream and his death have been grievously conjoined in my mind as they still are, almost half a century later.

I recall how I was sitting with Angélica and our 1-year-old child, Rodrigo, in a living room high up in the hills of Berkeley, the university town in California. We had arrived from Chile barely a week earlier. Our hosts, an American family who generously offered us temporary lodgings while our apartment was being readied, had switched on the television. We all solemnly watched the nightly news, probably delivered by Walter Cronkite, the famed CBS anchorman. And there it was, the murder of Martin Luther King in that Memphis hotel, and then came the first reports of riots all over America and, finally, a long excerpt from his “I Have a Dream” speech.

It was only then, I think, that I began to realize who Martin Luther King had been, what we had lost with his departure from this world, the legend he was becoming before my very eyes. In later years, I would often return to that speech and would, on each occasion, hew from its mountain of meanings a different rock upon which to stand and understand the world.

Beyond my amazement at King’s eloquence, my immediate reaction was not so much to be inspired as to be puzzled, close to despair. After all, the slaying of this man of peace was answered not by a pledge to persevere in his legacy, but by furious uprisings in the slums of black America. The disenfranchised were avenging their dead leader by burning down the ghettos in which they felt themselves imprisoned and impoverished, using the fire this time to proclaim that the non-violence King had advocated was useless, that the only way to end inequity in this world was through the barrel of a gun, that the only way to make the powerful pay attention was to scare the hell out of them.

King’s assassination, therefore, savagely brought up a question that was already bedeviling me—and so many other activists—in the late 1960s: What was the best method to achieve radical change? Could we picture a rebellion in the way that Martin Luther King had envisioned it, without drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred, without treating our adversaries as they had treated us? Or did the road into the palace of justice and the bright day of brotherhood inevitably lead through fields of violence? Was violence truly the unavoidable midwife of revolution?

Martin Luther King and the Dream of a Revolutionary Chile

These were questions that, back in Chile, I would soon be forced to answer, not through cloudy theoretical musings, but while immersed in the day-to-day reality of history-in-the-making. I’m talking about the years after 1970 when Salvador Allende was elected Chile’s president and we became the first country to try to build socialism through peaceful means. Allende’s vision of social change, elaborated over decades of struggle and thought, was similar to King’s, even though they came from very different political and cultural traditions.

Allende, for instance, was not at all religious and would not have agreed with King that physical force must be met with soul force. He favored instead the force of social organizing. At a time when many in Latin America were still dazzled by the armed struggle proposed by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, however, it was Allende’s singular accomplishment to imagine the two quests of our era to be inextricably connected: the quest by the dispossessed of this Earth for more democracy as well as civil freedoms, and the parallel quest for social justice and economic empowerment.

Unfortunately, it was Allende’s fate to echo King’s. Three years after King’s death in Memphis, it was Allende’s choice to die in the midst of a Washington-backed military coup against his democratic government in the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile.

Yes, on the first 9/11—September 11, 1973—almost ten years to the day since King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Allende chose to die defending his own dream, promising us, in his last speech, that sooner, not later, más temprano que tarde, a day would come when the free men and women of Chile would walk through las amplias alamedas, the great avenues full of trees, toward a better society.

It was in the immediate aftermath of that terrible defeat, as we watched the powerful of Chile impose upon us the terror that we had not wanted to visit upon them, it was then, as our nonviolence was met with executions and torture and disappearances, it was only then, after that military coup, that I first began to seriously commune with Martin Luther King, that his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial came back to haunt me. It was as I left Chile and headed, with wife and child, into an exile lasting many years that King’s voice and message began to filter fully, word by word, into my life.

If ever there were a situation where violence could be justified, it would have been against the military junta in Chile led by Augusto Pinochet. He and his generals had overthrown a constitutional government and were now murdering, torturing, imprisoning, and persecuting citizens whose radical sin had been to imagine a world where you would not need to massacre your opponents in order to allow the waters of justice to flow.

The Dogs of Mississippi and Valparaiso

And yet, very wisely, almost instinctively, the Chilean resistance embraced a different route: slowly, resolutely, dangerously taking over every possible inch of public space in the country, isolating the dictatorship inside and outside our nation, making Chile ungovernable through civil disobedience. It was not entirely different from the strategy that the civil rights movement had espoused in the United States; and, indeed, I never felt closer to Martin Luther King than during the seventeen years it took us to free Chile of the dictatorship.

His words to the militants who thronged to Washington in 1963, demanding that they not lose faith, resonated with me, comforted my sad heart. He was speaking prophetically to me, to us, when he said, “I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells.”

He was speaking to us, to me, when he thundered, “Some of you come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering.” He understood that more difficult than going to your first protest was awakening the following morning and heading for the next protest, and then the one after, engaging, that is, in the daily grind of small acts that can lead to large and lethal consequences.

The sheriffs and dogs of Alabama and Mississippi were alive and well in the streets of Santiago and Valparaiso, and so was the spirit that had encouraged defenseless men, women, and children to be mowed down, beaten, bombed, harassed, and yet continue to confront their oppressors with the only weapons available to them: the suffering of their bodies and the conviction that nothing could make them turn back.

Like the blacks in the United States, so in Chile we sang in the streets of the cities that had been stolen from us. Not spirituals, for every land has its own songs. In Chile we sang, over and over, the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the hope that a day would come when all men would be brothers.

Why were we singing? To give ourselves courage, of course, but not only that. In Chile, we sang and stood against the hoses and tear gas and truncheons, because we knew that somebody else was watching. In this, we were also following in the media-savvy footsteps of Martin Luther King. After all, that mismatched confrontation between a police state and the people was being photographed or filmed and transmitted to other eyes. In the deep south of the United States, the audience was the majority of the American people; while in that other struggle years later in the deeper south of Chile, the daily spectacle of peaceful men and women being repressed by the agents of terror targeted national and international forces whose support Pinochet and his dependent third world dictatorship needed in order to survive.

The tactic worked because we understood, as Gandhi and King had before us, that our adversaries could be influenced and shamed by public opinion, and could in this fashion eventually be compelled to relinquish power. That is how segregation was defeated in the South; that is how the Chilean people beat Pinochet in a plebiscite in 1988 that led to democracy in 1990; that is the story of the downfall of tyrannies around the world, more than ever today, from the streets of Burma to the cities of the Arab Spring.

King in the Age of Surveillance

And what of this moment? When I return to that speech I first heard forty-five years ago, the very day King died, is there still a message for me, for us, something we need to hear again as if we were listening to those words for the first time?

What would Martin Luther King say if he could return to contemplate what his country has become since his death? What if he could see how the terror and slaughter brought to bear upon New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, had turned his people into a fearful, vengeful nation, ready to stop dreaming, ready to abridge their own freedoms in order to be secure? What if he could see how that obsession with security has fed espionage services and a military-industrial complex run amok?

What would he say if he could observe how that fear was manipulated in order to justify the invasion and occupation of a foreign land against the will of its people? How would he react to the newest laws disenfranchising the very citizens he fought to bring to the voting booths? What sorrow would have gripped his heart as he watched the rich thrive and the poor be ever more neglected and despised, as he observed the growing abyss between the one percent and the rest of the country, not to speak of the power of money to intervene and intercede and decide?

What words would he have used to denounce the way the government surveillance he was under is now commonplace and pervasive, potentially targeting anyone in the United States who happens to own a phone or use e-mail? Wouldn’t he tell those who oppose these policies and institutions inside and outside the United States to stand up and be counted, to march ahead, and not ever to wallow in the valley of despair?

That’s my belief. That he would repeat some of the words he delivered on that now-distant day in the shadow of the statue of Abraham Lincoln. My guess is that he would once again affirm his faith in the potential of his country. He would undoubtedly point out that his dream remained rooted in an American dream which, in spite of all the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, was still alive; that his nation still had the ability to rise up and live out the true meaning of its original creed, summed up in the words “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

Let us hope that his faith in us was and still is on the mark. Let us hope and pray, for his sake and ours, that his faith in his own country was not misplaced and that fifty years later his compatriots will once again listen to his fierce yet gentle voice calling on them from beyond death and beyond fear, calling on all of us, here and abroad, to stand together for freedom and justice in our time.

Bill McKibben explains what a real movement for a changing planet should look like.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/martin-luther-king-and-two-911s/
Confessions of an Unrepentant Exilehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/confessions-unrepentant-exile/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanNov 9, 2011Returning to Chile decades after Allende’s death, I was no longer a soldier of the revolution. What changed?

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I had last seen Salvador Allende alive one week before the coup, on September 4, 1973, when I joined a million marchers who poured into the streets of Santiago to celebrate the third anniversary of our electoral victory. That night it had taken our group seven fervid hours to reach the street below the balcony of La Moneda where Allende was saluting the multitude. Our hoarse voices might have roared that we would overcome, Venceremos, venceremos, but what we were really doing that night was bidding farewell to our president.

A week later he was dead, his body secretly dumped in a grave by the sea, the first of the Desaparecidos Pinochet would hide away.

On a bright December day in 2006, I stood on that balcony where I had last seen Allende. The making of a documentary gave me access to that iconic space, the chance to stare out onto the empty Plaza de la Constitución, exactly from where our martyred president had saluted us. It was a poignant visitation of ghosts and memories; some solace drifted into me from that visit. All of Pinochet’s repression had not stopped me from standing where Allende had stood—or from believing in the justice of Allende’s cause, his dream of a better world.

But how to arrive at the society he envisioned—ah, that is another matter. The young man who had left Chile as an intrepid revolutionary, convinced that the end of capitalism was nigh and that any sacrifice was therefore justified on the road to socialism, was not the older man who stood on that balcony thirty-three years later. When did it change?

If I had to single out one day, it would be a glacial morning in the winter of 1982 when I was summarily expelled from the chancery of the People’s Republic of Poland in Washington. It had taken me many years to get to the point of walking through the gates of that embassy, to meet that ambassador under an ornate, bourgeois chandelier, to be able to tell that representative of Poland that, as a socialist and follower of Allende, I was ashamed and outraged at what his government was doing to the working class of his country in the name of Karl Marx.

It had been the repression of Solidarity a few months earlier, in December 1981, the martial law declared by General Jaruzelski, the carnage at the Gdansk shipyards, the outlawing of the free trade unions and the jailing of thousands, the spectacle of the party supposedly embodying the hopes and desires of the proletariat turning its guns on those very workers—those events had been the straw that broke Ariel’s ideological back.

* * *

My connection to communism had been, since the adolescent start of my political education, an ambiguous one, probably because I was torn between my mother and my father and their conflicting visions of social change. Like so many of his generation forged in the fight against fascism in the midst of the Great Depression, my dad had enthusiastically joined the communist movement. Although he’d broken with the sclerotic Argentine party by the time of my birth in 1942, he remained faithful to Marxismo-Leninismo, adhering to the Soviet Union and many Stalinist practices. For my father, those Bolshevik beliefs were the bedrock of his immigrant identity; to abandon them would, I surmise, have meant opening an abyss of introspection for which he was neither ideologically nor psychologically prepared.

Whereas my gentle mother, a staunch opponent of the death penalty and all other forms of brutality, had always been wary of communism’s shortcomings. With a vivacious sense of humor that did not sit well with the commissars, she had founded the SRCLCP, the Slightly Reformed Conservation Life Communist Party, of which she was the sole member.

For my part, raised in a Chile with so many impoverished people, a Latin America scarred by arrogant Yankee interventions, I gravitated to my father’s positions, though always held in check by my mother’s refusal to add one more victim to the century’s long list of atrocities. So Salvador Allende was the perfect combination of my two progenitors: an admirer of Cuba and a fervent Marxist, he insisted at the same time that we could build a more just social order without having to repress our adversaries.

The failure of our peaceful Chilean revolution did not turn me into an advocate of armed struggle. On the contrary, it launched, inside me as well as in the left in Chile and across the globe, a multifaceted dialogue about how to achieve socialism in our time and not end up slaughtered by those whose power we were contesting.

At the same time, there were two realities of our Chilean struggle that could not be ignored. First, the international fight against the dictatorship was spearheaded by the Soviet Union, which was pouring resources into the antifascist front we were trying to organize. And second, the Chilean Communist Party, because of its organizational skills, popularity and experience of having outlived ferocious persecution in previous decades, constituted the backbone of the resistance to Pinochet. So even as I drifted away from the more rigid dogmas of Marxism, I bit my tongue whenever the Soviets or the Communists were attacked.

A balancing act that often led to ungainly pratfalls.

The most discomfiting of these occurred in Germany in 1975. Our friend Freimut Duve, the editor of my essays in German, lodged my wife, Angélica, and me for two nights at his house in Hamburg and also arranged for us to visit Günter Grass’s cottage near the city.

The great author (and artist) showed us his latest etchings and then escorted us to the kitchen, where he was preparing a superb fish stew in our honor. I had devoured all his books, we were having the best of conversations and he seemed more than willing to sign on to our committee to help artists in the homeland—everything chummy until he told me that he’d recently been in the south of France at a conference of solidarity with the Czech resistance to the Soviet occupation, which the Chilean Socialists had refused to attend. “Don’t they realize, Ariel,” Günter said, “that the Prague Spring and the Chilean revolution have both been crushed by similar forces, one by the Soviet Empire, the other by the Americans?”

I could glimpse my German host Freimut trying to head me off, change the subject back to flounders and tin drums, but I wanted to treat Günter like a comrade: as a man of the left he’d understand that the Chilean Socialists couldn’t publicly side with the Czechs against the Soviets and our own Communist allies. Günter’s eyes narrowed and his bushy mustache bristled even more, if that were possible. What was my position on the Prague Spring?

I’d been in favor of that flowering of liberty and had condemned the Soviet invasion, as Allende had, to which our host replied that my current stance was then more shameful, because I was subjecting my freedom of opinion to petty party politics. Couldn’t I see that Dubcek and Allende were equivalent?

He abruptly turned and began to work at his drawing table, and it was clear that our meeting was over, not a drop of stew to be savored, no more to be said.

Except when we timorously rose to say goodbye. “When something is morally correct,” he said, “you must defend that position without concern for political or personal consequences.”

What I could not tell Grass, would perhaps not have wanted to admit to myself, was that it was not only out of political pragmatism that I had turned a blind eye to the many glaring excesses of rulers who claimed to be inspired by Marxism. Beyond the loyalty and admiration I felt toward my father, I was held back by all those Communists at whose side I had fought in Chile and the rest of Latin America.

The dead, the dead, we carry so many ghosts to whom we often swear more fealty than to the living. The many heroes of my youth, Marx in the British Library, the workers and soldiers storming the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the Vietnamese dying by the thousands to save their land, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, lucharemos hasta el fin. I had chanted that in the streets of Santiago next to Pito Enríquez, thin as a toothpick, and he had died, my Communist friend, in some aseptic hospital in Toronto, I could not tell him of my transformation and bring him along with me on this voyage away from the dogmas that he had believed in and that I had tolerated in the name of comradeship. And Enrique París, who had been tortured to death, castrated at La Moneda; and Fernando Ortiz, who had been picked up one overcast day in the Plaza Egaña and had never returned home. And the songs of the Spanish Civil War, El Ejército del Ebro, rumba la rumba la rum bam bam, the night when the Republican army had crossed the Ebro and defeated Franco’s mercenaries, ay Carmela, ay Carmela, I had heard that song in the womb, in that same womb had listened from near and far to the partisans’ Bella ciao in the hills of Tuscany as they fought Mussolini, and the battle of Stalingrad and Fidel entering Havana, ay Carmela, ay Carmela, and inside me were Neruda and Brecht and Nazim Hikmet and Che Guevara, all dead, so inflexible in their death and yet alive in the vast vocabulary of my Internationale heart, arriba los pobres del mundo, a part of the legacy I had inherited.

How could I simply throw out everything I had learned in my more ardent days just because of mistakes I told myself did not nullify the quest for equality that I was not willing to declare bankrupt? Above all I was held back by an acknowledgment of what our world would look like without the infinite struggle of so many ordinary men and women for racial equality and the rights of workers, by what a dreadful planet this would be if those militants had not opened a space for women to be free, if they had not stood by the side of the unfortunate colonies of our earth on the road to liberation.

So it took a persistent drip and drop and accumulation of betrayals and mass murders for me to wrest myself away from that confusing allegiance. The Cultural Revolution in China had not been enough, and the Prague Spring had not been enough, and the killing fields of Cambodia had not been enough, and the appalling Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had not been enough, but every one of those events had chipped away at my armor, until finally the workers of Poland—the wretched of the earth, no less—were being repressed for demanding the same freedoms being asked for by the people of Chile, and enough, basta, that was the tipping point.

Though exile as well as history had contributed to my transformation.

One morning in Paris—it must have been 1975—I knocked on the door of the apartment of Ugné Karvelis on the Rue de Savoie. Julio Cortázar, who lived with her, answered and told me they had a guest, just arrived from Prague, staying over for a few nights. Then Ugné slipped out of the living room and whispered to me that he was an author I would hear much about, a novelist destined for greatness.

It was Milan Kundera.

The saddest man I have ever seen.

That was no routine sadness etched deep into his face. It extended out from him like a wave of unmitigated grief, a loss as inconsolable as my own but without any of the hope that I kept forcing myself to feel.

He had fled from a regime that had become one of the cornerstones of the campaign against Pinochet, a regime I had refused to condemn publicly just a few months earlier at Günter Grass’s house. But the arguments I had used in my discussion with the German writer would have been useless, harsh, futile with Milan. The practicalities of “the enemy of my friend is my enemy” simply dissolved in the presence of a man persecuted by my allies, a real face, an anguish I could identify with.

Less than a year later, at the International PEN conference in The Hague, when we expelled the Chilean center, I was approached by a tall Russian man sporting stubble on his cheeks. He was glad that Chile had been banished and hoped something similar could happen to the Moscow branch of PEN, though he doubted that the unanimity engendered by my nation would hold when it came to the Russians. He shrugged, as if used to this labyrinth of politics, and then unspooled to me how he had spent years in a psychiatric ward. “They said I had to be off my rocker if I was against communism. No rational person could be against communism, no rational person could ever write the verses that I wrote.”

I had heard, of course, of the tactic being used by the Soviets against dissidents, of medicating and institutionalizing them. I had actually seen it as a positive sign, thinking that at least they weren’t sending them off to gulags in Siberia. Not quite excusing such a deplorable pseudo-psychiatric practice but somehow accommodating to it—as long as I did not have to sit next to the injured party.

* * *

As the years went by, I met many similar men and women. The Czech coach of a kids’ soccer team in Amsterdam, a Vietnamese tailor, and poets from East Germany and Cuba who wanted only to be free to recite whatever words leapt from their mouths. Something in me began to alter: it became more difficult to pigeonhole each exile according to his or her affiliation. I recognized their stories, the wistfulness they felt for the way tea was brewed back home, all those humiliations so parallel to mine. I did not need to identify with their political choices in order to absorb their pain.

My very slow opening to the victims of Communist experiments was accompanied by a parallel development: the progressive loosening of the bonds securing me to my own party.

My shift toward a more voluntary, less addictive relationship with the organized Resistance became possible, I guess, because literature had rescued me from the remorse of silence. A space began to open from which to establish a critique of my party and all parties. Irreplaceable as these organizations might be in a war against a ferocious enemy with an army of its own, did they have to swamp every aspect of life, force a choral answer to each and every problem? How to build a democratic society with parties that were self-perpetuating and prone to totalizing, as suffocating as the catacombs we were hiding in?

And here was a question I dared not ask: Wasn’t my own distancing a consequence of problems deep in the doctrine itself? I had deposited in a revolutionary party—true, of a new lefty variety—my liberty and conscience, and that Marxist philosophy, still a superb instrument with which to comprehend and critique capitalism, seemed to have increasingly foggy responses to the new dilemmas of our times. What role do indigenous peoples play in guiding us out of our current crisis? How to cope with the monster of industrialization—extolled traditionally by both the left and the right—without confronting the environmental degradation corroding our planet? And the challenges of feminism and the sexual revolution and homosexuality and the new technologies and religion, the world full of intractable mysteries, and the more questions I asked, the more I saw myself at the service of all forms of liberation, the more I understood my political work as occurring mainly in the uncertain territory of my writing and advocacy.

Even so, all the shifts in world history and all the emotional and intellectual alterations in my life would still have been insufficient to make me ring the bell of the Polish embassy that blustery day in Washington. One additional factor nudged me in the direction of moral independence. Oddly enough, this act of autonomy could only have happened, for me at least, in the United States, the center of the empire.

Because I was not alone that day. That visit had been organized by my friends Doug Ireland and Joanne Landy of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, a group of American activists who opposed their government’s bellicosity abroad while at the same time offering support to dissidents in the Soviet bloc. Seven years after rejecting Günter Grass’s reasoning about the need to concurrently denounce repression originating in both the United States and the Communist countries, I had found a band of sisters and brothers who were impeccably dedicated to that very objective, who understood that one cannot be for freedom in Nicaragua and against it in Hungary, that one could not deplore the US support of Pinochet and applaud Jaruzelski’s mentors in Moscow.

It was the American left that helped me find the freedom to walk into that embassy, declare that there can be no socialism without democracy and feel the satisfaction of being ejected, to cease being a soldier of the revolution. So that day in the Polish embassy I said goodbye to the soldier but not to the revolution, I bid a long goodbye to party politics but not to the politics of liberation, I stated that I would henceforth answer to my own conscience.

Back home that night, I made a telephone call. Not to Günter Grass. Or to Milan Kundera. To my father in Buenos Aires. I told my father how that Polish comrade of his had banished me from that building.

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“Ariel,” my dad said, and I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or frowning. “You know that I disagree with you. And I’m sure you also know how proud I am that you’re my son.” “I disagree with you too, Chebochy,” I said, using the endearing term that was his pet name. “And you know that I’m also proud of you.” And we left it at that.

Ay Carmela, ay Carmela.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/confessions-unrepentant-exile/
Salvador Allende Has Words for Barack Obama From the Other Side of Deathhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/salvador-allende-has-words-barack-obama-other-side-death/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanOct 11, 2011As the 2012 election draws closer, what can Obama learn from the many battles of Chile's most famous president?

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com. Click here to listen to the author discuss the Occupy Wall Street movement and his own experience with democratic rebellions.

For the last decade, I have been haunted by voices from the other side of death. In this way, back in 2003 I transcribed the words of Pablo Picasso after a tapestry version of his famed painting Guernica at the entrance to the Security Council was covered over at the UN just before then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was to present the Bush administration case justifying an invasion of Iraq. From the depths of ancient Mesopotamia, I transcribed the words of Hammurabi, the exalted prince of Babylon, as he reviled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for laying waste to his ancient land. And in that same year I found that Christopher Columbus, too, had words for the new warriors/conquerors of the twenty-first century, while the poets William Blake and Franceso Petrarca asked Laura Bush how she could sleep with the man responsible for so many deaths.

The dead were then silent for years, which left me unprepared when Salvador Allende came to me offering advice for Barack Obama. It seemed, at first glance, a strange connection. Elected president of Chile in 1970 by popular vote, Allende was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup three years later. On that other September 11, also (coincidentally enough) a Tuesday, terror rained down from the skies as the Chilean air force bombed the Presidential Palace where Allende died, ending an experiment in constructing socialism through peaceful, democratic means, and inaugurating the long dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Barack Obama has never, of course, claimed to be a revolutionary like Allende, though he did once upon a short time ago give the impression of being a reformer dedicated to bringing about significant change. And though, like Allende, he has faced ferocious opposition to his plans from similarly conservative forces, there has never been the slightest rumor of a coup d’état in the United States (nor, as it turned out, any need for one)—though who knows what would have happened had Obama decided to take on the military-industrial/national security behemoth that essentially governs the country.

And yet, I have no doubt that Allende would have sympathized with Obama on his entry into the Oval Office, and that he would have appreciated his urge to search for common ground with his adversaries, as well as the intelligence and sophistication of his mind. And I’m sure he would have greeted young Barack’s election in 2008, as I did, with a certain joy, seeing in it the popular wish for a different sort of politics, a different sort of world.

Evidently, based on what follows, Allende did feel that it was worth sending a message to the American president from the shores of death where so much becomes clearer, where we will all ultimately discover whether we truly kept faith with the lives and dreams of those who, in turn, had faith in us.

Here, then, is his message:

I have held off, Barack Obama, till now,
I have bitten my tongue in this dusk and averted my gaze
if words like tongue and gaze and bitten biting bite
have any meaning under this grim face of night.
Now it is time that you knew what awaits you here
once you join us in the vast kingdom of the gone,
what your retreat and regret will be if you do not learn
the lessons I learnt from defeat,
the omen I am sending your way as you fail to lead
and flail and neglect the reason you became our hope.

I held off this warning, young Barack, till now.
Who was I, after all, to send you words of advice?
Surrounded as I am in this dark by the many who tried and failed,
who gave their lives to change the world so those unheeded
in the shadow of strife, the child who cries in the dawn of life,
the women and the old and the working poor could rise.
I am surrounded in this sorrow by those who did not prevail.
Who am I, after all, to send anyone a word of advice?

I died that September day at La Moneda in Santiago.
The bombs were falling and the fires burned
and I was worried about the child inside the womb of Beatriz,
my eldest daughter, I ordered her from the Presidential Palace
and only then started to rehearse in my head en medio del fuego
the last words I would pronounce, my goodbye
to the people of Chile, mi adiós, and my greetings to a world
that would have to continue without me, without one more word
from the man who was convinced he could bring justice and peace
to his people without bullets and blood, without widows and their sighs.

No more words from this dead mouth, except for these few I now send
and that may not arrive in time, Barack.
So many words die before they can be heard.
Back then, in 1973, in September, as the bombs fell,
as the soldiers mounted the stairs and I grabbed the gun
with which I would kill myself rather than be taken alive,
pay with my death so others might remember,
there were no thoughts of fire or hate for the United States,
of Richard Nixon who tried to destroy my land,
or Gerald Ford who followed through on that illegal plan,
elected by their people as freely as I by mine,
why waste my last breath cursing men like them,
how to anticipate that a boy like you, then barely twelve,
would someday steer the realm that hounded me to death,
that I’d send words like these to any American president?

The dead that keep me company swear it’s no use, no good.
Spartacus is nearby,
Jeremiah fills me with prophecy,
Nat Turner rebels again and again in his dreams,
our Joan of Arc, who knows so much about perfidy and pyres,
all, all calling out to those who live to repair the wounded world,
all without rest until the living attend the faraway
dead who did not betray.

They tell me not to speak to you, the enchantment gone.
He’s done it wrong, they say, too afraid to brawl and rage and stage
a final confrontation where his foes will bite the dust.
Not me, not I, it’s not a revolution he pursues.
Who was I to tell him to draw a bitter line in the sand?
Do you want him to end as I did, with a divided land?
And yet I was wrong, wrong,
I let myself be seduced by his song.
I gave you, young Barack, the benefit of too many a doubt,
I prayed you would not need my words from beyond the beyond,
that you would clean up and heal a world gone mad with greed.

Before you disappear, before you can no longer hear
my words from beyond the beyond and inside the ground,
before your run ends in downfall and rout and retreat,
let this old heart beating with the Earth and the stars
and the need for not one child, not one, to die for lack of love,
let me tell you one last secret found in the abyss of despair.
It is true that he who is mighty is he who makes of an enemy
a friend, mighty and wise is he who offers the foe
a way out, a bed to sleep in, a meal to share.
But not without a fight. Not without a fight.

Listen to me, Barack, listen to this man who left too soon
and never saw his grandchild born and lost his way.

You will be destroyed. I have seen men like them before.
They will stop at nothing, they want it all and more.
Can’t you see, can’t you see what is being planned?
You are the victim of a silent coup, an invisible invasion
of every last corner, every last law, every last height.
Don’t you understand that they want it all, that they don’t care?
I have seen them, they will not be stopped by smiles.
You will be destroyed, take down with you all that is good,
what the wretched of the Earth built against the dark.
These are the same men, the same billionaires, who did me in.

They will blow it all up, derail the train, they do not care.
They deal in fear, they do not know right from wrong.
Oh do not let yourself be seduced by the siren of their song.

They are coming for you as they came for me.
I can hear their footsteps drawing near.
And you ever more alone.

Listen, listen: if you are to go down, go down fighting.

Barack, listen to your name. Lightning, glittering of weapons,
blessed, blessing, be your name, go down fighting.

You might even win.

Barack, listen: if you are doomed, go down fighting,
so others can come after and build,
so a legend is left, a spark to start the next fire, to inspire
and bring word of a new world waiting to be born,
fight so there may be peace, fight for what you believe in,
do not leave the dead without consolation and the living with no faith.
Trust your name. Go down if you must, but go down fighting.

So that when you arrive on these shores
and look back as I do, you will have no regrets.

Go down if you must, but go down fighting.

Or do you wish to face, one by one, the lovers and mothers
you did not defend? Spend the rest of eternity, one by one,
with the stories of the pain you did not assuage or mend?
One by one, one by one, they will haunt you in the dusk.

Go down, Barack Obama, go down and rise up fighting.

This time we might even win.

Never believe it is ever too late.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/salvador-allende-has-words-barack-obama-other-side-death/
Epitaph for Another September 11https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/epitaph-another-september-11/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanAug 30, 2011Chile and the United States offer contrasting models of how to react to a collective trauma.

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That September 11, that lethal Tuesday morning, I awoke with dread to the sound of planes flying above my house. When, an hour later, I saw smoke billowing from the center of the city, I knew that life had changed for me, for my country, forever.

It was September 11, 1973, and the country was Chile and the armed forces had just bombed the presidential palace in Santiago as the first stage of a coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. By the end of the day, Allende was dead and the land where we had sought a peaceful revolution had been turned into a slaughterhouse. It would be almost two decades, most of which I spent in exile, before we defeated the dictatorship and recovered our freedom.

Twenty-eight years after that fateful day in 1973, on another September 11, also a Tuesday morning, it was the turn of another city that was equally mine to be attacked from on high, it was another sort of terror that rained down, but again my heart filled with dread, again I confirmed that nothing would ever be the same, not for me, not for the world. It was not the history of one homeland that would be affected, not one people who would endure the consequences of fury and hatred, but the entire planet.

For the past ten years, I have puzzled about this juxtaposition of dates; I cannot get it out of my head that there is some sort of meaning hidden behind or inside the coincidence. It is possible that my obsession is the result of having been a resident of both countries at the precise time of each onslaught, of the circumstance that those two assaulted cities constitute the twin cornerstones of my hybrid identity. Because I grew up as a child learning English in New York and spent my adolescence and young adulthood falling in love with Spanish in Santiago, because I am as much American as I am Latin American, I can’t help taking the parallel destruction of the innocent lives of my compatriots personally, hoping that lessons may arise out of the pain and smoldering confusion.

Chile and the United States offer, in effect, contrasting models of how to react to a collective trauma.

Every nation that has been subjected to great harm is faced with a fundamental series of questions that probe its deepest values. How to pursue justice for the dead and reparation for the living? Can the balance of a broken world be restored by giving in to the understandable thirst for revenge against our enemies? Are we not in danger of becoming like them, in danger of turning into their perverse shadow—do we not risk being governed by our rage?

If 9/11 can be understood as a test, it seems to me, alas, that the United States failed it. The fear generated by a small band of terrorists led to a series of devastating actions that far exceeded the damage occasioned by the original ordeal. Two unnecessary wars that have not yet ended, a colossal waste of resources that could have been used to save our environment and educate our children, hundreds of thousands dead and mutilated, millions displaced, a disgraceful erosion of civil rights in America and the use of torture and rendition abroad that ended up giving carte blanche to other regimes to flout human rights. And, last but not least, the bolstering of an already bloated national security state that thrives on a culture of mendacity, spying and trepidation.

Chile also could have responded to violence with more violence. If ever there was a justification for taking up arms against a tyrannical overlord, our struggle met every criteria. And yet the Chilean people and the leaders of the resistance—with a few sad exceptions—decided to oust General Pinochet through active nonviolence, taking over the country that had been stolen from us, inch by inch, organization by organization, until we ultimately bested him in a plebiscite that he should have won but could not. The result has not been perfect. The dictatorship continues to contaminate Chilean society several decades after it lost power. But all in all, as an example of how to create a lasting peace out of loss and untold suffering, Chile has shown a determination to make sure that there will never again be another September 11 of death and destruction.

What is magical about that decision to fight malevolence through peaceful means is that Chileans were echoing unawares another September 11, back in 1906 in Johannesburg, when Mohandas Gandhi persuaded several thousand of his fellow Indians in the Empire Theatre to vow nonviolent resistance to an unjust and discriminatory pre-apartheid ordinance. That strategy of Satyagraha would, in time, lead to India’s independence and to many other attempts at achieving peace and justice around the world, including America’s civil rights movement.

One hundred and five years after the Mahatma’s memorable call to imagine a way out of the trap of rage, thirty-eight years after those planes woke me in the morning to tell me that I would never again be able to escape terror, ten years after the New York of my childhood dreams was decimated by fire, I would hope that the right epitaph for all those September 11s would be the everlasting words of Gandhi: “Violence will prevail over violence, only when someone can prove to me that darkness can be dispelled by darkness.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/epitaph-another-september-11/
Nelson Mandela: Conversations With a Mythhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nelson-mandela-conversations-myth/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanDec 22, 2010In his new memoir the South African leader struggles to overcome his image as a saint.

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Beware sainthood. Everybody wants a piece of you. Just ask Nelson Mandela.

On the final page of his monumental and intriguing new book, Conversations With Myself, undoubtedly the last he will publish under his name, he offers us this closing message: "One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image that I unwittingly projected to the outside world: of being regarded as a saint." And he adds, "I was never one, even on the basis of the earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying."

This sacrosanct image was deliberately built by the African National Congress as a way of personalizing the struggle against apartheid in one man who had already become something of a legend, a "Black Pimpernel," during his clandestine years as head of the ANC’s armed wing. It helped that Madiba (his clan name) incarnated an exemplary story of rural and tribal boyhood, adolescent rebellion against discrimination and an increasing commitment, as an adult, to social justice and nonracial politics, all of which culminated in the 1963–64 Rivonia trial, where he and seven of his co-defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela’s story became even more of a model when, over the next twenty-seven years, he withstood with exceptional nobility the most extreme forms of humiliation exacted upon him and his faraway family.

If Prisoner 46664 could not but acquiesce in this inevitable promotion of his heroic persona during the Manichaean battle against an oppressive regime, once he was liberated into a shifty world of nuances and illusions, Mandela was to discover how difficult, almost impossible, it was to undermine his own aura. His life story turned out to be foundational during the grueling transition to democracy, when he often had to intervene with one side or the other to avoid chaos and further bloodshed.

One needs to recognize—as Madiba incessantly does—that the crucial protagonists of this emancipatory epic were the people of South Africa, inspired and led by countless militants, most of them anonymous and many of them unrewarded and forgotten once democracy was attained. But it is safe to suggest that this is one of those cases where one individual changes the path of history. The end of the racist South African regime is simply inconceivable without the moral capital and charisma Mandela had accumulated during his prison years. As a symbol of dignity and resistance he was, well, irresistible; but the compassion he showed once he was released, the ability to speak to his enemies and bring them to the table, his disposition to forgive (but never to forget) the terror inflicted on him and his people, his willingness to see the good in others, to trust their deepest sense of humanity and honor, turned him into the sort of ethical giant that our species desperately needed in a petty era of devastation and greed. Such a halo can, however, be just as confining as an island where every move and word is guarded.

It is, I believe, in order to escape from that bubble that Mandela has authored (though "authorized" might be a more appropriate word) this new attempt at self-definition, these conversations with himself.

The book is a project Mandela had been nursing for a long time. As he approached the end of his five breathless years as president (he served only one term, which further enhanced his stature in a continent where strongmen perpetuate themselves eternally in power), he sat down one October day in 1998 and wrote out a first chapter of what he termed a sequel to his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. That was, however, as far as he went. The subsequent years were hectic and overwhelming, both in the South Africa then governed by Thabo Mbeki and in a distressed world where Mandela’s planetary stardom foisted on him a leading role in every imaginable humanitarian cause and crisis. By the time an 85-year-old Madiba decided to step away from public life in 2004, he no longer had the energy to spend hours scribbling away to convince readers that he was as "ordinary" as they were, just one more of so many "men and women who are full of contradictions, who are stable and fickle, strong and weak, famous and infamous, people in whose bloodstream the muckworm battles daily with potent pesticides."

But if age, that relentless enemy, denied him the vigor to complete this task, another solution was at hand. His retirement in 2004 coincided with the creation, inside the foundation that bears his name, of the Center for Memory and Dialogue, where the dispersed documentation of Mandela’s existence was to be amassed, classified and contextualized. Soon enough, Verne Harris, the foundation’s archivist and head of its memory program, realized that a book—the sort of down-to-earth self-portrait that Mandela desired to leave behind—might well be culled from the massive materials. It was an arduous task, even with Madiba’s blessing (but not his direct intervention). It would take a terrific team assembled by Harris six years to shape a select number of evocative passages into a chronological montage that would eventually become the book.

Mandela’s obsession with memory is well-known, most notably his insistence that apartheid was a crime against remembering, that it was essential not to allow the minority owners of the land and the law and the word to determine the story that was to be told. Because this battle against collective oblivion has been paramount in the history of South Africa, it is easy for the public to lose sight of a parallel labor of love that threads through his existence, how this fighter for liberation has incessantly strained to remember his past, preserve it for the future. It is what first came to my mind when, during a 2010 trip to South Africa to deliver the eighth Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, I visited the treasure trove containing his documents in a well-secured room deep inside the Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg.

To reach that sanctuary one must descend a wide circular stairway to an underground floor, then pass a gantlet of glass-lined offices until a bolted door is reached, behind which a vast collection of memorabilia awaits. It’s all there, from the earliest photos and identity cards to the letters from prison and the clandestine manuscripts smuggled out of Robben Island. And nearby repose his passports and diaries and marked-up calendars, an endless array of memorandums and interviews and tapes of conversations and scribbled notes.

Though only a smidgen of these could be consigned in Conversations With Myself, readers have been made to feel as if they were tiptoeing through that archive, miraculously eavesdropping on a medley of Mandela’s thoughts and emotions, just a skip and a heartbeat away from the very soul of the man. Each carefully chosen paragraph and episode exudes closeness, the sense that the text has come to us unadulterated, just as the great man wrote or spoke it. This experience of intimacy is heightened by reproductions in the book of correspondence and pages from notebooks, some with corrections from his own hand. Just to give one telling example, Mandela writes that his comrades had "raised him from obscurity to become [an] enigma." But in the original draft, replicated in facsimile, we notice that the author originally wrote "hero," then crossed that word out and substituted "enigma." This struggle over one word embodies the dilemma Mandela faces at the end of his life. As he revises his own words, his own life, he understands that the process of turning him into a hero had ended up making him an enigma.

A similar access to a vulnerable Mandela comes from a fascinating assortment of transcripts of conversations with his two main collaborators on Long Walk to Freedom. It is notorious that this autobiography, secretly composed on Robben Island, was a collective work, discussed, amended and vetted by Mandela’s fellow captives. Madiba has acknowledged that his autobiography, published in 1994 to coincide with his inauguration as the first freely elected president of South Africa, would not have been possible without the help of Achmed Kathrada, his comrade from his Robben Island days, and Richard Stengel, his editor; but what the public could not know until now was the extent and thoroughness of that work. One of the treats of Conversations With Myself is to be able to listen in on the sessions where reminiscences are examined for potential errors, and details are clarified and altered, calling attention to the book as an artifact—like Mandela himself—born of a dynamic process of naked back and forth, give and take. This is an icon who laughs, hems and haws, gossips, disagrees, arbitrates, accepts he’s mistaken, insists he’s right, wonders what happened to such and such, is reminded that it would be kind to look up a former guard and see how he is doing or tone down the polemics used to describe a rival.

If these flickers of banter are the most enjoyable part of the book, it may well be because they are so fresh and unguarded. As soon as Mandela starts to wield the pen, a certain formality creeps in. If this is typical of written words in contrast to oral language, in his case I suspect that it feeds on a natural decorum that has been his inner companion since childhood, that responds to the deepest core of his being. This is a man who has built his image on trust and transparency and yet, perhaps for that very reason, is absolutely adamant about protecting his privacy. Conversations With Myself has no tidbits that readers would expect in tell-all confessions. Only two pages of a book that is more than 400 pages long approach the issue of sexuality. When asked whether he was bothered by the possibility that his wife, Winnie, might have had love affairs while he was serving a life sentence, he answers very simply that this is a question that "you know…one had to wipe out of his mind."

Unsurprisingly, this profound reserve was exacerbated during his prison years, when every sentence in every letter was inspected by his jailers. One of the more chilling aspects of reading Mandela’s Robben Island correspondence is that you can almost hear the overseers turning the page, skimming through the contents of what was not meant for their eyes, probing into what only his loved ones should be reading. And yet this correspondence also breathes a dignity so fierce that it’s heartbreaking. It is almost as if, even in the darkest hours, even when there seemed to be no expectation that he would ever be freed, even the day he received news of the death of his son or the passing of his mother or the detention and then solitary confinement for eighteen months of Winnie, even as he wrote letters he knew might not be delivered—even then, especially then, he was imagining a tomorrow when his every expression would carry weight and meaning, would be meticulously scrutinized not by wardens but by his fellow citizens and possibly, who knows, a worldwide audience. Even so, I doubt he could have anticipated the day when a book like Conversations With Myself would be published in multiple languages and twenty-two countries.

There is another, perhaps even more remarkable, aspect of those letters from Robben Island. As we read, we can guess how Mandela has factored the censors in. He is also writing to them, through them, boring into them—you can almost discern their presence in his mind, his certainty that these custodians can be shamed by his words about their cruelty and lack of the most common decency. You realize how he performs a theory of liberation for that sentinel audience; you catch a glimpse of how he is educating his jailers despite their prejudices. And a glimpse, as well, at how he is educating himself, preparing for the task of bridging the racial and class divide that threatened to destroy South Africa. How he is becoming Nelson Mandela.

Maybe that is why he is so disturbed by his transformation into a saint. It was not because he was removed from others, removed from evil, removed from the weaknesses of a frail humanity, that he prevailed. It was by plunging into what was negative in himself and the aching world around him that he was able to develop "whatever is good," as he puts it in his book. How to do this? One word keeps cropping up, over and over: integrity. His own integrity and his confidence that it exists in everyone on this planet, no matter how harshly hidden by fear and intolerance, and that if you appeal to the best in others, they will, ultimately, respond. But they will do so only if they sense that you are being true to yourself and your values, your desire for a more just and humane world, that you are ready to draw a line in the sand of history.

It is a message that his country needs to heed once again. His wondrous South Africa that is again in danger of losing its way. His land that will soon have to face a long century of renewed struggle for solidarity and truth and peace without Madiba’s guiding presence. The need to face up to that looming absence leads us to the unspoken and hidden heart of this book. Mandela is saying goodbye.

What to say back to him? How to best honor his legacy, his wisdom, his generosity? I can only respond with the last words I offered this 92-year-old man at the end of our conversation in Johannesburg a few months ago. Accompanied by his wife, Graca Machel—who is graciousness personified—and Achmat Dangor, the eminent novelist who has postponed his own literary work in order to serve as chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, we chatted with Madiba for a good hour. About Allende and Chile, about his parents, about Mandela Day, about how the latest wave of xenophobia in South Africa pains him, about the recent loss of his great-granddaughter. Age has slowed him down, but his dignity is majestically intact, and I was glad to note how a mischievous twinkle lit up his eyes now and again. I was aware that his health might not allow him to attend the lecture in his honor I was to deliver a few days later, and that this might indeed be the last time I would ever see him, that this would be the last chance to thank him for what he has done, for who he is. So when we bade farewell, I told him, with perhaps excessive solemnity, that he should rest.

"For a long time, you have carried your country, you have carried the world, you have carried me," I said. "Now it is time that we carried you." And then, not letting go of my hand, Nelson Mandela smiled.

So that’s the answer: if we can learn how to carry him into the future, we will be blessed by his smile. Can we ask anything more of this man who, fortunately for himself and the world, is not, after all, a saint?



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Letter to Americahttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/letter-america-5/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanSep 12, 2002

Let me tell you, America, of the hopes I had for you.

As the smoke was swallowing Manhattan and the buildings fell and the terror spread into the farthest recesses of your land and your hearts, my hopes for you, America.

While around the world many of the past victims of your own terror, your own attacks, were thinking and often saying, saying and more often thinking, they deserve it, serves them right, it’s about time they knew what it’s like to be on the receiving end. Not true, I thought, I said. Nobody deserves terror. Justice. What we deserve, all of us, is some measure of justice.

My hopes for America: not that this was good for you. No, not that. But I have seen suffering before, I have seen widows wandering remote streets with the photos of their loved ones asking if anybody knows if they are alive or dead, I have watched men and women and even countries turn their deepest sorrows into a source of strength, a form of self-knowledge, a chance to grow.

A chance to grow, America, that was my hope.

Loss turned into maturity.

A chance to understand. Not alone, America, not alone in your grief. A perpetual valley of terror, that is what most of humanity is born into day after faraway day. Ignoring if tomorrow we will once again be assaulted and bombed, humiliated and tormented. America suddenly living what almost everyone else on this planet has experienced at some point yesterday or today: the precarious pit of everyday fear.

My hope for America: empathy, compassion, the capacity to imagine that you are not unique. Yes, America, if this dreadful destruction were only to teach you that your citizens and your dead are not the only ones who matter on this planet, if that experience were to lead you to wage a resolute war on the multiple terrors that haunt our already murderous new century.

An awakening, America.

Not to be. What did not happen.

Your country, hijacked. Your panic, used to take you on a journey of violence from which it is hard to return, the men at the controls not worried about crashing America into the world.

But not just the fault of the men who misgovern you.

They can only do what you have allowed them, responding, those men, to some of your deepest desires.

Above all, this: to be innocent again, to feel good about yourselves, after Vietnam. Vietnam? That country you turned into a mass graveyard?

Innocence, handed back to you, America, on September 11, 2001. A terrible price to pay, but there it is. Those atrocities, that devastation, finally making you all into victims. No ifs, no buts, no listening to the naysayers, no patience for those who suggest you look at your own history, your own interventions across the globe, to understand why so many out there in the crazed world might detest you. No more self-doubt, America.

Beware the plague of victimhood, America.

The finger I point at you, pointed back at my own self. I know that thrill, I have sweetly sucked it in, I have felt the surge of self-righteousness that comes from being unfairly hurt. Anything we do, justified. Any criticism against us, dismissed.

Beware the plague of fear and rage, America.

Nothing more dangerous: a giant who is afraid. Projecting power and terror so the demons within and without will not devour him, so the traumas of the past will not repeat themselves.

Beware the plague of amnesia, America.

Or have you forgotten Chile? Not just a name. Chile? Democratic Chile? Demonized, destabilized by your government in 1973? Chile? That country misruled for seventeen years by a dictator you helped to install?

And other countries, other names. Iran, Nicaragua, Congo, Indonesia, South Africa, Laos, Guatemala. Just names? Just footnotes in history books, your creatures?

But I do not speak to you only from afar.

An insider.

How could I not wish you well? You gave me, an americano from the Latino South, this language of love that I return to you. You gave me the hot summer afternoons of my childhood in Queens, when my starkest choice was whether to buy a popsicle from the Good Humor Man or the fat driver of the Bungalow Bar truck. And then back to calculating Jackie Robinson’s batting average. How could I not wish you well? You gave me refuge when I was barely a toddler, my family fleeing the fascist thugs in Argentina in the mid-1940s. One of you then. Still one of you now. How could I not wish you well? Years later, again it was to America I came with my own family, an exile from the Chile of Pinochet you helped to spawn into existence on precisely an eleventh of September, another Tuesday of doom. And yet, still wishing you well, America: You offered me the freedom to speak out that I did not have in Santiago, you gave me the opportunity to write and teach, you gave me a gringa granddaughter, how could I not love the house she lives in?

Where is that America of mine? Where is that other America? Where is the America of as I would not be a slave so would I not be a master, the America of this land is our land this land was meant for you and me, the America of all men, and all women, every one of us on this ravaged, glorious earth of ours, all of us, created equal? Created equal: one baby in Afghanistan or Iraq as sacred as one baby in Minneapolis. Where is my America? The America that taught me tolerance of every race and every religion, that filled me with pioneer energy, that is generous to a fault when catastrophes strike?

So was I wrong?

When I hoped you would rise to the challenge as death visited you from the sky? When I believed America the just, the rebellious, the unselfish, was still alive? Not entirely spoiled by excessive wealth? With the courage to conquer its fear?

America learning the lesson of Vietnam.

Vietnam. More, many more than 3,000 dead. More, many more, than two cities bombed. More, more, more than one day of terror.

And yet, they do not hate you, America.

The enduring lesson of Vietnam. Not next time: Obliterate the enemy. Not next time: Satanize those who disagree.

What the Vietnamese are whispering to you: They remember and yet they do not hate. Not that easy, America, to forgive the pain. Or can you forget your own September 11 that easily?

Not that easy, America.

To grow.

Or was I wrong? Have I become contaminated myself with your innocence, lived too long among you? Do you need 50,000 body bags coming home before you start to listen to your own voices of peace and dissent?

Am I wrong to believe that the country that gave the world jazz and Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt will be able to look at itself in the cracked mirror of history and join the rest of humanity, not as a city on a separate hill but as one more city in the shining valleys of sorrow and uncertainty and hope where we all dwell?



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Lessons of a Catastrophehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/lessons-catastrophe/Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel Dorfman,Ariel DorfmanSep 11, 2003

It can’t happen here.

Thirty years ago that is what we chanted, that is what we sang, on the streets of Santiago de Chile.

It can’t happen here. There can never be a dictatorship in this country, we proclaimed to the winds of history that were about to furiously descend on us; our democracy is too solid, our armed forces too committed to popular sovereignty, our people too much in love with freedom.

But it did happen.

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military overthrew the constitutional government of Salvador Allende, who was trying, for the first time on this planet, to build socialism through peaceful and electoral means. The bombing by the air force of the Presidential Palace on that day started a dictatorship that was to last seventeen years and that, today, even after we have recovered democracy, continues to haunt and corrode my country.

The coup, however, left not only pain and loss in its wake but also a legacy of questions that I have been turning over and over in my mind for the past thirty years:

How was it possible that a nation with a functioning parliament, a long record of institutional tolerance, a flourishing free press, an independent judiciary and, most critically, armed forces subjected to civilian rule–how could that country have ended up spawning one of the worst tyrannies of a Latin American continent that is not exactly bereft of murderous regimes? And, more crucially: Why did so many of Chile’s men and women, heirs to a vigorous democracy, look the other way while the worst sort of abuses were being perpetrated in their name? Why did they not ask what was being done in the cellars and attics of their howling cities, why did they make believe there was no torture, no mass executions, no disappearances in the night? And a final, more dire, challenge, one that is not restricted to Chile and serves as a warning to citizens around our threatened world today: In the coming years, could something similar befall those nations with apparently stable democracies? Could the erosion of freedom that so many in Chile accepted as necessary find a perverse recurrence in the United States or India or Brazil, in France or Spain or Britain?

I am aware, of course, that it is intellectually dangerous to wildly project one historical situation onto another thirty years later. The circumstances that led to the loss of our democracy in Chile were very specific and do not find an exact replica anywhere in the contemporary world. And yet, with all the differences and distances, the Chilean tragedy does send us one central message that needs attention if we are to avoid similar political disasters in the future: Many otherwise normal, decent human beings in my land allowed their liberty–and that of their persecuted fellow countrymen–to be stolen in the name of security, in the name of fighting terror. That was how General Pinochet and his cohorts justified their military takeover; that is how they built popular support for their massive violations of human rights. A few days after the coup, the members of the junta announced that they had “discovered” a secret Plan Zeta, a bloodbath prepared by Allende and his “henchmen.” The evidence of such a plan was, naturally enough, never published, nor was even one of the hundreds of thousands of the former president’s followers who were arrested, tortured and exiled–not one of the thousands who were executed or “disappeared”–put on trial in a court of law for the conspiracy they were accused of. But fear, once it begins to eat away at a nation, once it is manipulated by an all-powerful government, is not easily eradicated by reason. To someone who feels vulnerable, who imagines himself as a perpetual victim, who detects enemies everywhere, no punishment to the potential perpetrators is too light and no measure to insure safety too extreme.

This is the lesson that Chile retains for us thirty years after the coup that devastated my country, particularly in the aftermath of that other dreadful September 11, that day in 2001 when death again fell from the sky and thousands of innocent civilians were again slaughtered. The fact that the terror suffered by the citizens of the United States–which happens to be the most powerful nation on Earth–is not an invention, as our Plan Zeta turned out to be, makes the question of how to deal with fear even more urgent than it was in Chile, a faraway country whose sorrow and mistakes most of humanity could quickly forget.

/dsl:chapter>

What has transpired thus far, in the two years since the disastrous attacks on New York and Washington, is far from encouraging. In the sacred name of security and as part of an endless and stage-managed war against terrorism, defined in a multitude of ever-shifting and vague forms, a number of civil liberties of American citizens have been perilously curtailed, not to mention the rights of non-Americans inside the borders of the United States. The situation abroad is even worse, as the war against terror is used to excuse an attrition of liberty in democratic and authoritarian societies the world over. Even in Afghanistan and Iraq, the two countries “liberated” by America–and free now of the monstrous autocracies that once misruled them–there are disturbing signs of human rights abuses by the occupiers, old prisons being reopened, civilians being gunned down, men abducted into the night and fog of a bureaucracy that will not answer for them.

I am not suggesting that the United States and its allies are turning themselves into a gigantic police state such as Chile endured for so many years–not yet, at least. But that suffering will have been in vain if we do not today in other zones of the world heed the deepest significance of the catastrophe the Chilean people started to live thirty years ago.

We also thought, we also shouted, we also assured the planet:

It cannot happen here.

We also thought, on those not-so-remote streets of Santiago, that we could shut our eyes to the terrors that were awaiting us tomorrow.



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