Just listening to "the dollop" podcast on the Kissinger and the Nixon administration. Really brings a lot of perspective on things, I suppose I didn't realise how insane the administration was - Nixon always drunk, everyone at each others throats, just doing shit for the social status including murdering millions etc. Great examples of why such power shouldn't exist. And I suppose highlights a kind of "banality of evil" conclusion - the worst people aren't necessarily malicious, they just don't care about the consequences of their schemes to play the system.

Anyway I hear about Allende a lot in leftist circles, so I wanted to ask for perspectives to get a well-rounded view.

Comments

kano wrote on November 13, 2023 at 4:57 PM

There was some talk about in this essay I posted earlier.

Salvador Allende is one of many leaders in the colonised world who the USA decided threatened its interests and therefore removed (by proxy). and correct if me I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure I read that Pinochet's implementation of neoliberalism in Chile was the first one,

Kakroom wrote on November 13, 2023 at 4:32 PM (edited on November 13, 2023 at 5:50 PM)

Salvador Allende was a democratically elected Socialist leader who was overthrown by military officer Augusto Pinochet in a CIA-backed coup. Pinochet was a US sympathetic right-wing extremist who subsequently murdered thousands of his political enemies. Allende's final broadcast was made as Pinochet's troops were breaching his residence and getting ready to lynch him, and has become famous.

In my experience his death is often used an example of American imperialism and the roundabout tactics the US has used to expand its influence during and since the Cold War - propping up murderous dictators etc.. Anecdotally it is also used to demonstrate how the American state has been willing to set aside its professed love of democracy when it finds a democratically established situation that it finds politically inconvenient.

From my own perspective, the Allende coup is a single organism inextricable from its own context, so I would find drawing sweeping conclusions from it unwise, but its existence and outcome somewhat fit in with my own views on electoralism and America's role in the world; i.e., besides the fact that electoralism is still a means of investing and creating power+hierarchy, it will hem towards building the power of the most powerful wherever possible. America, being the most powerful, helps to ensure that this does not meaningfully change

uanon wrote on November 13, 2023 at 5:32 PM

Remember when Mao Zedong supported Pinochet and recognized the post-coup government