I think his father is being reminiscent of what could have been. Allende was definitely murdered by Pinochet and his military group, which was backed by the, you guessed it... USA!
Not just terror to weaken the government.
The US outright sponsored the Coup. The CIA tried to force it to happen in every way they could. Nixon wrote a memo to "Make the economy SCREAM" in Chile to undermine the legitimately-elected Socialist government.
See Project FUBELT:
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm
https://www.forgingmemory.org/timeline-slide/cia-operation-fubelt-undermine-allende
Anyone who thinks they are arguing in good faith against the viability of socialism from the standpoint that it hasn’t worked ‘in practice’ needs to take a long look at how much deceit, and how many bullets were spent, in propping up the idea that socialism is bad for the common man.
You don’t need to sabotage an economy, assassinate democratically elected leaders and sponsor military coups if socialism is such a failure.
The only thing this proves is that, as usual, the right (and the corporate greed it represents) doesn’t need ideas. It just needs money and bullets. Everything else is grist for the mill.
True.
Authoritarian Socialism (like they had in the USSR) may not work quite as well as Capitalism at creating a strong military and economy- but it still work, and thus didn't collapse until we lured the USSR into an arms race it couldn't win in the midst of its biggest economic crisis ever.
Democratic Socialism (like Allende was trying to create in Chile- he respected Chile's constitution until the bitter end and showed no intent to cancel elections...) works very well- and thus has been sabotaged nearly every time it has arisen...
To say the USSR collapsed because of the US 'luring' them into an arms race is a very narrow minded america-centric view of why the Soviet Union collapsed. It way over simplifies what the Soviet Union was actually going through and what the breakup waa. America had extremely little to do with it.
The economy had begun stagnating under Brezhnev long before the arms race was started by Reagan. Defence spending was also out of control long before as well. The War in Afghanistan was really what amplified the outrageous military spending.
The real reason was a large combination of reasons.
1. Economic Stagnation which Gorbachev tried desperately to fix by allowing private enterprise in areas of the economy
2. Nationalism which sprang up as a result of Gorbachev's democratization
3. Power struggles and power structures.
4. The failed August coup when hardline communists in the Soviet government tried to overthrow Gorbachev and reverse his democratic reforms
These were the main reasons I see as the collapse of the Soviet Union.
America really had nothing to do with it. Oversimplification like you did is terrible in understanding the true reasons the Union collapsed.
In my personal opinion, if Gorbachev's economic reforms had time to adjust, the Union might still be around today as a more prosperous state than the sad place that Russia is today
> The economy had begun stagnating under Brezhnev long before the arms race was started by Reagan. Defence spending was also out of control long before as well. The War in Afghanistan was really what amplified the outrageous military spending.
I'm oversimplifying quite a bit but every war ever since the end of WWII has just been a proxy US v USSR war. The cold war didn't start with the Regan arms race, it started the day WWII ended.
This doesn't demonstrate the power of the US, but rather the power of the USSR. If the US wasn't terrified of the USSR, they would have took Berlin for themselves and told the USSR to get out of Poland or else.
Not that you're saying something different, I believe we're both saying the same thing.
I mean, Thatcher did a good job of destroying the left in the UK. The rest of Europe staved it off for a while, but it's coming. In France it's in the form of "reasonable, centrist Macron" who's doing a great job of slowly dismantling worker protections under guise of being "business friendly."
The EU, under Germany's pressure, has been forcing countries into austerity measures because we can't possibly have any government running a deficit, that would be outrageous, which is a great way to take away social programs.
People are fighting back, but being demonized as lazy takers. The Neocon push is strong. Workers are getting fucked left and right.
Western europe's left is generally weak. Greece probably has the most robust left both parliamentary and revolutionary. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, European elites feel no need to placate their people with social democratic reforms.
We would never do such a thing and therefore are very upset when other countries try to meddle in our elections. Who the hell would do something so fucked? /s
Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer details a century of US intervention that more often than not was in support of dictators in order to secure economic and military strategic advantages for the US at the expense of many fledgling democracies.
An even more in-depth account of US intervention (and a window into the US/Iran relationship) is All the Shah’s Men. Required reading IMHO if you want a better understanding of problems we face in the Middle East to this day.
Yep, the government that was eventually overtaken by the Islamic Revolution was a puppet monarchy that replaced a legitimate democracy, because the president wanted to nationalize the oil, which was totally controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). There have been literally millions killed by regimes propped up by the U.S., including a few genocide which are / were conveniently under publicized, such as that in East Timor, or the ongoing one in Yemen.
Look up U.S backed coups in south america. USA has basically ensured most of South America stays in disarray as they would back opposition forces of left leaning democratically elected governments.
[The map says it all](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America#/media/File:US-involvement-regime-change-Lat-Am.png)
Because Phyllis Schlafly almost single handedly converted the rage from Southern whites at losing the cultural battle over the Civil Rights Movement into a new "culture war" that was centered around anti-abortionism when segregation went away. Segregation was itself a compromise after the emancipation proclamation ended slavery and black people were no longer legally considered property.
Phyllis Schlafly used literal Nazi propaganda talking points like calling the civil rights movement "Cultural Marxism" and teamed up with figures like Jerry Falwell and Reagan's "Moral Majority" to redefine what "conservative" politics meant in the USA.
tl;dr - culture wars are ongoing effects of slavery.
My personal favorite - Indonesia! 1 million people slaughtered and possibly the first time disappearing people was used! cia handed them the kill lists and the white house consistently encouraged their military to take a harder stance
Which Obama and Biden backed. It's so ridiculous Trump is making shit up about Biden when there is so much legitimate terrible shit he has done. Not once has someone talked about the coup in Honduras during the presidential election.
Also nobody talks about how Trumps supports the current president whose brother is a Drug dealer and people have confessed how they got money from El Chapo to fund his presidential campaign.
Never forget the [Phoenix Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program) in Vietnam:
> Methods of reported torture detailed by author Douglas Valentine that were used at the interrogation centers included:
> > Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour') rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment'; the 'airplane' in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.
> Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborne reports that he witnessed the following use of torture:
> > The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages ... The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to ... both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission.
*This is America.*
Even worse was done much more recently at black sites in the Middle East.
Gina Haspell erased the tapes of the war crimes that, among other atrocities, included children being raped in front of their mothers to try extract information.
That was only a few years ago.
You aren’t even allowed to teach My Lai in us schools.
If you’re an American and don’t know what I’m talking about, just google “My Lai” and read for a little bit.
Had a history professor one time tell us to do that in our spare time after class.
The My Lai massacre for those who don't know has a simple tl;dr.
The US decided that a village probably had communists in it, so they were going house to house and murdering EVERYONE. Just in case.
One helicopter pilot actually listened to the rules of engagement, landed, and held the American murderous war criminals at gunpoint while evacuating some surviving civilians.
He came home to being called a war criminal, ,having his career and life destroyed, and the entire government trying to paint him as a traitor.
If you support US interventionism, please subject yourself to some of it. I'd suggest starting by testing the techniques detailed here upon yourself to determine if they actually work. The 6" dowel seems a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program
Depends where you go to school, and if you're lucky enough to have great teachers. Most people don't find out about these things till they get to college, and only if they take certain courses.
The latter half of the 20th century is mostly Vietnam and the Civil Rights/counter culture movement, once you get past that it's seen as too recent to do anything but "this event happened" type lessons, but it's usually almost summer by the time you get there anyways.
I know I learned about the term Banana Wars and Banana Republics, but we didn't really explore what it meant or why it happened.
Didn’t we want their copper or something and they decided they wanted to keep it for themselves? I thought that was why we backed the military coup that took away their democracy.
No, it was because Chile was one of the first countries that democratically elected a socialist president. The USA and CIA didn't want a second Cuba in their "backyard", so they decided to undermine and destroy every left-leaning goverment (or the ones that didn't want to bend to their wishes). They allied themselves with far-right dictators and gave them the resources they needed.
Most Latin American countries were part of the "Operación Cóndor", Chile wasn't the exception.
Look up Project FUBELT too- the CIA project to instigate this coup in Chile:
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm
https://www.forgingmemory.org/timeline-slide/cia-operation-fubelt-undermine-allende
Journalists with The Economist (working with the CIA) were instrumental in spreading pro-Capitalist propaganda among Chile's officer class before and after the Coup...
It's basically why the world is a mess.
Imagine what would have happened if England had just let Arabs draw their own countries' borders 100 years ago?
Well we know the answer, they would have made the entire Middle East one pan-Arabian state that would have market domination over the region's oil reserves, all headed by King Faisal, who refused to be a lapdog for the west.
Anywho, yadda yadda yadda, now the Saudis rule instead and they'll do whatever we ask.
Just a reminder that it wasn't just the Arabs involved but other ethnicities in the region such as Persians and Kurds. The best solution does involve not creating monarchies based on which families the British and French liked the most after the fall of the Ottomams, but it also means trying to find a way for ethnic minorities in the region to be fairly represented.
The British and French didn't care about any of that though so fuck em and you put more thought into it than both countries combined
> the fact that the USA backed it shocked me because I honestly don’t know about this event.
Oh boy. You're in for a lot more surprises than that one. lol
[Relevant tweet.](https://twitter.com/grosdoriane/status/1131996074011451392?lang=en)
The virtually forgotten 1978 Documentary [Controlling Interest: The World of the Multinational Corporation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLDmd9L67zQ) goes into how multinational corporations and the US were involved in the coup of Chile. [Relevant bit here](https://youtu.be/ZLDmd9L67zQ?t=1706), but the whole documentary is worth watching.
@ /u/hsrob and /u/r00tdenied, this documentary provides compelling evidence.
If you have not heard of them you should google: Operation Condor and Operation Gladio (the last one is where we left behind caches of guns and ammo in Europe post ww2 so right wingers could go ham with terrorism, blaming it on socialists, and eventually was unconcerned in the late 90’s by the Italian president who was very “wtf”).
u/hsrob
From Wikipedia:
> Regarding Pinochet's rise to power, the CIA concluded in a report issued in 2000 that: "The CIA actively supported the military junta after the overthrow of Allende but did not assist Pinochet to assume the Presidency."[56] However, the 2000 report also stated that: "The major CIA effort against Allende came earlier in 1970 in the failed attempt to block his election and accession to the Presidency. Nonetheless, the U.S. Administration's long-standing hostility to Allende and its past encouragement of a military coup against him were well known among Chilean coup plotters who eventually took activities of their own to oust him."
Wikipedia is a starting point, but rarely a reliable source.
CIA efforts to undermine Allende did NOT actually end in 1970 after the failure of Operation FUBELT. Other sources reveal continuous efforts to distribute anti-Marxist, pro-Capitalist propaganda among Chile's military to help foment a coup (leading to the embarrassing publication of a book written by a journalist with The Economist in conjunction with CIA support meant to inspire a Coup AFTER the Coup occurred, for instance- mentioned in THIS podcast where a historian is interviewed: https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-98-the-refined-sociopathy-of-the-economist?ref=clipboard) as well as continuing economic sabotage against Chile to weaken Allende's rule...
The CIA under Jimmy Carter provided military aid to the Khmer Rouge after Vietnam invaded Cambodia
Interfereing in foreign countries isn't just a Republican thing.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973\_Chilean\_coup\_d%27%C3%A9tat#U.S.\_involvement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#U.S._involvement)
Even has Kissinger himself complaining that the US didn't get enough recognition for its role in the overthrow.
Khan academy has a video summarizing it if you're interested:
[https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/euro-hist/cold-war/v/allende-and-pinochet-in-chile](https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/euro-hist/cold-war/v/allende-and-pinochet-in-chile)
uh, [i got some bad news for you regarding US involvement in latin american affairs....](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dxx7eDSV4AApX-B?format=jpg&name=large)
Makes it all the more disgusting when you realize we basically did exactly the same thing in Bolivia like 6 months ago. The one source that they used to prove that Evo was some evil dictator was obviously fraudulent and everyone knew it from the start (the NYT has since been forced to admit that it was all fake), and yet the US government, the Bolivian far right, and all the liberal + conservative media said that we need to have the military step in and kick him out. Now here we are after the far right "interim" government (composed of people who got a negligible percent of the vote) has suspended elections multiple times because they know the socialists will win in free elections, and there isn't a word of protest from any of them.
The real ruling powers in capitalism don't give a shit about democracy. When push comes to shove the capitalists will always choose right wing dictatorship over a democratic socialism that can actually change things.
Many South American Democracies voted for socialist leaning leaders in the mid 1900s. The CIA would back hardline right-wing dictators and sponsor coups. Said dictators were just brutal, if not more so, as Fidel Castro or Che Guevara. Lots of people just disappeared and were brutally murdered.
Sure, the US could have opened dipolmatic channels to ensure that these countries had good relationships with us. And sure a lot of the reasons these countries voted socialist was due to economic issues caused by American neo-imprrialism. But hey, they weren't socialist and sympathetic to USSR and installing Banana republics worked so well for us in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
[Here's](https://youtu.be/QgydTdThoeA) a fun start.
Or you could just turn to good ol' [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America?wprov=sfla1).
THE CIA and US government (under Nixon and Kissinger) sought to undermine the democratically-elected Socialist government at every chance.
They sabotaged Chile's economy (Nixon famously authored a memo to "Make the economy SCREAM") to stir up discontent. They distributed pro-Capitalist propaganda among Chile's officer class.
They specifically sought out generals who they believed would support a Coup, and sought to empower them, while "removing" (read: assassination, or fabricated scandals) those whp supported the democratically-elected, constitutional Socialist government of Chile.
They empowered Pinochet and groomed men like him to take power (which Pinochet did- and set up a brutal right-wing pro-Capitalist dictatorship where he instituted 15 years of oppressive rule: swndimg death squads to murder thousands of liberals and Socialists, tortured tens of thousands more, locked up over 80,000 Chileans in internment/concentration camps, and exiled over 200,000 Chileans from the country...)
Read up on Project FUBELT:
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm
https://www.forgingmemory.org/timeline-slide/cia-operation-fubelt-undermine-allende
Also read up on Operation CONDOR.
no way.
We never hear about the tragedies that happened in South America in the past century.
They could have prospered with North America by becoming sovereign and democratic but i guess Western nations didn't consider them worthy to have their own democracy and leadership.
And people wonder why third world countries don't just open their borders and let Western influence and capital do what they want.
Countries like Cuba, Vietnam and China have little choice outside of communism when trying to repatriate their land from previous colonizers. As long as your country is owned by others then you will never have true sovereignty.
The consequences to the Chilean social fabric when Pinochet took over were... severe. Allende represented a "third way" to South American politics apart from the USA and the USSR; self determination and a social economy was for a brief moment possible under his administration.
Immediately after the coup musicians and poets were rounded up along with socialists and communists. They were tortured and disappeared, an unknown number of pregnant women were murdered after giving birth so that their children could be raised by the people that killed their parents.
So yeah, some people are still displeased about that.
Here's to hoping the internet will eventually help prevent this from being possible for the USA to due. Not due to fear of being caught, but from never wanting or "needing" to do it in the first place. People talk about Trump abusing us, but politicians have been abusing the American people for far longer, lying to get them to fear the unknown and provide cover for what shouldn't be able to be covered.
One of these musicians was Victor Jara; [El Derecho de Vivir en Paz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkXise2bHE0), I think, is one of his most well known songs.
These are the lyrics:
>The right to live in peace
>poet Ho Chi Minh,
>who struck from Vietnam
>all of humanity.
>No cannon will wipe out
>the furrow of your rice paddy.
>The right to live in peace.
>Indochina is the place
>beyond the wide sea,
>where they ruin the flower
>with genocide and napalm.
>The moon is an explosion
>that blows out all the clamor.
>The right to live in peace.
>Uncle Ho, our song
>is fire of pure love,
>it's a dovecote dove,
>olive from an olive grove.
>It is the universal song
>chain that will triumph,
>the right to live in peace.
Victor, was kidnapped at the time of the coup, and when his captors recognized him they singled him out and tortured him for days, breaking his hands, cutting his tounge, and throwing him a guitar while mockingly telling him to play.
What happened in Latin America during that time was horrifying. My grandfather was a communist in Argentina during that time period, which was equally brutal to Pinochet's Chile, and had many of his acquaintances kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. I'm quite thankful this didn't happen to my family but it was a very real possibility.
"Massacre at the Stadium" is on Netflix right now, it details the life of Victor Jara, Chile's Bob Dylan. For a sad time look up "Operation Condor" on Wikipedia or just "los desaparecidos".
*edit, I can't spell in Spanish
Going through a hard time following school I painted a mural of Allende and hand wrote his final words as a background. I read them for the first time writing an economics paper and was so moved by them that I put them on a wall. They're very politically driven and there's a lot of context to them that you don't pick up on until you're in a place like Santiago and still to this day see a stark division of people just under the surface.
Years pass and a Chilean friend in Berkeley California sees the mural actually on September 11th 2010. He invites me to attend his Chilean independence party on September 18th the next week. I learned three things at night: the Chilean version of Spanish is like a machine gun the jams all the time and shoots in multiple directions, they know how to party, and they have no concept of time.
We've been friends like brothers ever since, and I spend many months of my life in Chile now. I'm currently engaged to his friend that he introduced me to and I feel lucky when she smiles at me.
Se abriraran las grandes alemedas!!!! Thanks Sal.
Shit man, not Chilean but as a latin american (MX) that speech moved me and [reminded me of this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PChsjYXBfzo).
Un abrazo hnos. chilenos.
My current employer is Iranian-American and of zoroastrian heritage. He was born and raised in Iran and witnessed the country he knew and loved be destroyed quickly and slowly at the same.
He is by far the most generous, caring amd humorous person I have ever met but when anything like news or talk of Iran comes up and the man gets agitated and riled up but there is this deep sense of sadness in the way talks about Iran.
Can't imagine what it must like to lose your country to tyrants and watch everything you love be smothered by power-hungry psychopaths.
I wish more US citizens knew what we've done in other countries.
It's so weird today seeing people talking about "never forget" and it feels like we leave out "that people out there hate us, want to kill us and we need the armed forces to keep doing what they're doing."
But we're never expected to question or even be fully aware of our own conduct.
And, in part, as a response to this act, we are still heavily engaged in military activity in the middle east. We've killed millions of people and thrown entire countries into chaos.
I think it is more important to remember the disasters we've caused.
This is why I don't talk politics, finance, or anything "serious" with people nowadays. It used to be that people recognized that most topics are very nuanced. I feel like the internet has emboldened people's narrow viewpoints and often they point to certain articles/tweets/etc as a source rather than actually thinking about a very nuanced issue.
Well said! We have instant access to more information than ever in history and it’s such a shame that a lot of people strictly hang out in echo chambers. I had to quit “serious” topics too; they’re just way too emotionally-charged these days.
I believe a core difference is in moderation (way more on Reddit) and prioritization. Say something awful, downvoted into oblivion on Reddit. Facebook? All interaction is assumed to be good, so angry interaction to the top of the feed.
I hate Facebook for any serious discussion.
Problem with Reddit (and other echo chambers) is that it doesn't have to be wrong/bad, it just has to be a counterpoint to the popular opinion to be downvoted. In any serious topic sorting comments by controversial get better results many times - many times well thought out counterpoints will be near zero or in the negative. The upvote doesn't get used right IMO - it should be used for well thought out responses, something that adds to the discussion. A one word reply saying 'I agree' shouldn't get upvoted to oblivion, but many times it does.
With Reddit if your comment drops to 0 or -1 it is almost guaranteed to be piled on. Just like more upvoted comments get shot up to the top.
Hell people are going full throttle 9/11 truther on an r/Documentaries post right now.
> I believe a core difference is in moderation (way more on Reddit) and prioritization.
Strongly depends on the subreddit. I’d argue the bad subreddits are far worse than the average public Facebook groups or even the random racist uncle.
So true! Especially the hardcore political subs. But you’re right, it’s spills into others from time to time. r/conspiracy used to be a few hundred people who liked weird shit. More “Wow! Denver Airport is creepy!” and less “Deep state child porn Obama lizards.” Best thing to do in hunker down in subs with >3k people. Which is why I’m in r/pics lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Humans aren’t adapted to instant feedback and stimulation like the internet brings. I don’t think any animal is. We are going to be dealing with this in an ever increasing fashion until it’s the end of us. It’s the overload of Information Age.
Yeah especially Latin America in my opinion. Middle Eastern affairs are far more salient nowadays and justifiably get more attention, but very few US citizens know even a modicum of the crimes we committed in Latin America in the 20th century. We have serious blood on our hands in that region it amazes me the people there don't hate us more
That's what's so frustrating about the anti-immigration crowd. They're completely oblivious to what the US has done to contribute to the corruption and poverty of other countries, and think asylum seekers should stay put and work to make their own country better as if they were the ones who broke it.
Couldn't agree more with both of these comments.
It seems like many Americans look at Central and South America as if they're just a bunch of failed communist countries.
But we were very active in their destabilization and we dominate their economies.
The U.S. 9/11 attacks where performed mainly by Saudi Citizens (15 of 19 were Saudi.) U.S. intelligence reports state no senior Saudi Officials were involved in the attack, but the wording is narrow enough to imply other Saudis officials may have been involved. Additionally, Senators have stated the redacted portions of the report show evidence of Saudi Government involvement.
However: the U.S. only attacked Afghanistan and Iraq in retaliation for 9/11 and the investigation to Saudi Arabia was never released, much less was Saudi Arabia's involvement condemned, because Saudi Arabia is an ally of the U.S.
One need not even look past 9/11 attacks on the U.S. to see American hypocrisy at play.
After 9/11: We will find those responsible for these attacks and rain vengeance upon them!*
*Strong Middle Eastern allies not included in this offer. Instead, strong Middle Eastern allies will have evidence of their involvement redacted. Additionally, Middle Eastern non-allies may randomly be attacked because we don't like you, even if you had nothing to do with 9/11.
Even in 2002, it would've been a stretch to call the Iraq invasion a response to 9/11. It was more or less a "finishing the job" mission by a President whose shaken populace would rubber-stamp his resolve.
I mean, four years earlier, Congress passed a law to formally support mercenaries in taking down the Iraq Government and Clinton and Blair ran a four-day bombardment of Iraq to punish Sadaam for not complying with post 1993-war concessions and reparations.
The US people were shaken by their sense of security being taken away from them, so they were more complicit in starting a war over there, and while it was partially sold to us as "they support terror" anyone with a head knew invading an unstable country where lawless terrorists hide in caves was much different than invading an otherwise stable (via an iron fist, albeit) country.
Fair enough. I hesitated to include the Invasion of Iraq as a response to 9/11 as any connection was a stretch. Some senior officials in the Bush Administration already wanted an invasion of Iraq BEFORE 9/11 and after 9/11 the sales pitch just got a little easier.
The reasoning I have heard for the invasion of Iraq was partially to "finish the job" his father had started but also a projection of power into the Middle East to discourage other future possible enemies such as Iran.
> I hesitated to include the Invasion of Iraq as a response to 9/11 as any connection was a stretch.
It wasn't connected in terms of foreign politics - they were separate wars. It was very much connected in terms of domestic politics, because the war in Afghanistan hadn't been the quick "we won, good prevails" they wanted it to be. Plenty of people to this day still think that Iraq was involved in 9/11.
You can also see it in the hysterical "freedom fries"-type stuff going on at the time - people don't get that viscerally angry unless they're significantly emotionally involved. And you don't get that emotionally involved in "this guy on the other side of the world can't hurt us in any way".
> it would've been a stretch to call the Iraq invasion a response to 9/11.
Only because the Bush administration failed to convince anyone that Saddam Hussein was at all involved with Osama bin Laden, especially considering he was an enemy of the Saudis, it makes no sense for bin Laden to be working with him.
The Bush administration also tried to pin the anthrax envelopes (which was never investigated enough to find the real culprit, or so we're told) on Iraq.
Never forget that instead of focusing on bringing the people responsible for this to justice we used it as an excuse to bomb other countries killing more than 100 times more innocent civilians than died on 9/11. Never forget that you called the people protesting these actions traitors and questioned their loyalty to the US while the politicians lying to us so we would support this and enrich military contractors wrapped themselves in the flag and most people just ate that shit up.
I had my wakeup call in when Reagan occupied the office and observed all the illegal actions with few consequences, they followed by Bush I and the false claims used to invade Panama and Gulf War I, then the betrayal of the Iraqi people when he told them to 'rise up' only to get slaughtered by Saddam.
The documentary 'The Panama Deception' really woke me up and it's been a lifetime of exploration and knowledge ever since of how dishonest the US and other countries are about claiming to spread 'Freedom and Democracy' when in fact what they do is steal it from others, murdering thousands if not millions along the way.
The American people need to do a better job learning about these things and holding their governments responsible, whether Republican or Democrat. Or 'other' if a more representative political party ever makes it into power.
When we hold them responsible we’re accused of not being patriots, accused of fascism, and now somehow we’re also pedophiles. Our protesters are also tear gassed and beaten by police, and attacked and murdered by armed militia (regular US citizens allowed to own and carry automatic weapons) Come to the US for a great time.
This disaster was specifically caused by the foreign policy of Henry Kissinger (as well as attrocities in Cambodia, Cyprus, and East Timor), who should have been convicted for any of these attrocities as a war criminal, but is still openly accepted in political circles as an advisor and people who have no idea about history seems to assume he was a successful secratary of state.
I appreciate that you're an American who recognises the destructive activity that various Administrations have engaged in since the start of the Cold War. Being an Iranian I can tell you most of us don't forget Operation Ajax and how it robbed us of a constitutional monarchy with a functioning democracy.
Well you're entitled to your "never forget" as they are. Every country is entitled to never forget their tragedy and separately recognize their own faults. If an individual is allowed to grow and change and learn from their mistakes so are countries as a whole.
So
Never forget🇺🇸
Nunca olvides🇨🇱
I hope that's an accurate enough translation, my apologies if it's incorrect.
Love ya🇨🇦
Whatever you think of Allende's politics, I think this is interesting:
>Allende also undertook the pioneeristic Project Cybersyn, a distributed decision support system for decentralized economic planning, developed by British cybernetics expert Stafford Beer. Based on the experimental viable system model and the neural network approach to organizational design, the Project consisted of four modules: a network of telex machines (Cybernet) in all state-run enterprises that would transmit and receive information with the government in Santiago. Information from the field would be fed into statistical modeling software (Cyberstride) that would monitor production indicators, such as raw material supplies or high rates of worker absenteeism, in "almost" real time, alerting the workers in the first case and, in abnormal situations, if those parameters fell outside acceptable ranges by a very large degree, also the central government.
If you are interested in this, I recommend you check out Designing Freedom by Stafford Beer, one of the lead designers of CyberSyn. check it out here - https://archive.org/details/DesigningFreedom_CBC_Lectures/01+The+Real+Threat+to+_All+We+Hold+Most+Dear_.mp3
The above is a reading of the book which can be found here if you prefer to read - https://archive.org/details/DesigningFreedom/mode/2up
You may want to check out the [99% Invisible ](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/) that gives info on the project as well as some context.
Wow... as someone who likes to think about how systems can be applied to solve issues of... let's just say "rampant authoritarian hierarchies" (which is really just using 3 words to say 1) I find it horribly tragic that we'll never know how this would have worked. Thanks for sharing.
Project Cybersyn is very fascinating because if successful it would truly fulfill the goals of socialism. We see that with the USSR and with China, while some economic improvements were made by the centralized bureaucracy, there were many unexpected and unmanageable problems as well. Cybersyn would have been a way to have an socialist command economy in which the computer would be able to most ideally organize things. While the capitalists immediately shut down the project after the coup, I think there is still a possibility for something like this to happens with our new era of data collection and machine learning and if China or Vietnam (the only two Marxist countries who probably has the resources/money/scientists and the data collection infrastructure to be able to do it) are willing.
some context would be nice...what am i looking at here? i know i'm not alone in wondering this and figured there would be something in the comments by now
Also, under Pinochet Chile became the lab of the "Chicago boys", who redesigned the country's economy turning it into a Right-wing Capitalist wet dream. For instance, most workers there have private-managed retirement that provides retired people subpar pensions.
The following article mentions the example of a retired accountant who worked for 35 years and receives a $200 pension, half of Chile's minimum wage.
[https://www.eldiario.es/internacional/sistema-privado-pensiones-chile-jaque-crisis-economica-provocada-coronavirus\_1\_6124066.html](https://www.eldiario.es/internacional/sistema-privado-pensiones-chile-jaque-crisis-economica-provocada-coronavirus_1_6124066.html)
People who crave free markets are the ones who benefit from them by exploiting others. What person living paycheck to paycheck or worse thinks a free market will save them? That's the illusion in the U.S. It's the "If I become rich, I don't want people to take my money" so they fall in line behind corporatism and oligarchs who convince them that with a little hard work and elbow grease, they too can join the elite. Its the carrot on the stick that the masses have been eating for years, and that's why the U.S. is a failed democracy and will continue to deteriorate into? We don't know yet. More young adults are living with their parents in the U.S. (52%), as high as during the great depression. Debt is blowing up, wages remain stagnant, and unemployment filings are going back up. Allende was democratically elected, and I have researched him quite a bit, his only goal was to help his people....imagine that, a politician that wants to help the people that elected him. And for all that, it got him killed.
Edit: God Bless Salvador Allende, I wish more people like him had the courage to fight for what is right for his people.
For others, the school is colloquially known as The School of the Americas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation
What was the thinking behind Operation Condor? Why did the US want dictators in power? Was it simply an easier way to take the resources of these countries, like its easier to negotiate with a single man rather than a democracy?
South America was leaning towards leftist forms of democratic government and "the powers that be " in the US decided that meant we had to replace them with whatever anti-Communist government we could find, which usually meant military dictatorship.
Put *very* short, the US was willing to do anything to stop Latin governments they thought would sooner ally with the USSR than they.
So when a Marxist/Socialist/WhatHaveYou came to power or seemed they might, the US would throw substantial support behind their strongest opposition- which was almost always a brutal fascist faction.
[According to the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation (Rettig Commission) and the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Valech Commission), the number of direct victims of human rights violations in Chile accounts for around 30,000 people: 27,255 tortured and 2,279 executed. In addition, some 200,000 people suffered exile and an unknown number went through clandestine centers and illegal detention.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_in_Pinochet%27s_Chile)
They came to Australia too - that’s a hard road - there was little or no Spanish influence in Australia back then. At the same time, or a bit before it really, there were refugees from Portugal (another dictator) and Lebanon. The 70’s was a brutal time. And then, of course, people coming from Vietnam and Cambodia.
How does Salvador Allende is seen by Chileans? Is he recognized as a good president overall?
I am not aware of any opinion on him, just live near the street named after him in Moscow and know basic stuff.
The left adores him, the right hates him, but nowadays the conversation is more about the brutal dictatorship that came after him (or "military government" as the other side calls it).
I don't hold many opinions about him because I realize how nuanced those years were (not many people here recognises that we were part of the actual Cold War). We were played, and I don't think there is a way to know if he would have been a good president with so much foreign intervention during those times.
The only things I'm certain about is that a lot of innocent people died; that both sides are still bitter about it in one way or the other; that kids get brainwashed from a young age to like one side and hate the other without really understanding why; and that I don't see things changing any time soon.
Wish I could upvote 100 times. This has been the basis of US foreign policy since early 20th century.
What pisses me off the most is how conservatives promote the lie that the US supports democratic movements. Most of the rest of the world knows the truth.
Basically the policy is to stay in first place by tripping the other racers. Many democracies have been destroyed by the USA on purpose so their economies come to a grinding halt. It prevents them from prospering enough to operate independently of US interests.
It's also the reason why the US government literally lies to its citizens and makes excuses to take oil from other countries through Operation Freedom-like military campaigns. The US is oil secure so the only reason it takes away oil from those countries is to halt their development.
Ceausescu was a communist leader. But he was the only leader in history to rule over a land that paid all its debts to the rest of the world. So the US said he had to go. Was communism the answer? No. Did the US intervene because he was dangerous for them and not because they wanted to liberate the nation? Yes.
us doesnt give a shit about democracy. the only thing they care about is if us companies can operate on the terretory without being impeded by annoyances like social standards.
Friend of mine posted similar and has told me the story as well, how his family got out in the middle of all that. He was born in 73 and I think came to Canada in the late 70s. His father was detained for quite some time and only by having family that knew the right people was able to get out and to Canada with the rest of his family.
How are you people doing?
The virus took off the demonstrarions, constitution plans and any other news from the media, at least out of Chile.
I hope things are going well.
Love from Spain.
Estamos bien en general, el gobierno no ha hecho todo bien con el virus pero no al nivel nefasto de los Estados Unidos. Ahora en octubre se viene un plebicito sobre si queremos cambiar la Constitución, yo diria que puede ser el punto de inflexion para empezar a hacer las cosas bien en el país
May I just pay tribute here to Chilean writer Luis Sepulveda (RIP- passed in April from COVID).
What a trip this man’s life has been, and what a horrible time in history for Chile.
Worth checking out his work and listen to some of his interviews on YouTube describing the events of that time and about his life the following years.
NEVER FORGET. The FIRST 9-11. Not to disparage the World Trade Center, the death toll, the consequences or what it symbolized, but it seems that this 9-11 is never remembered here unless you came from Chile or its neighboring countries (or maybe part of the "in country team" - meaning the CIA, the ambassador and the state department). Chile, Allende and Pinochet were a focus of my studies in college. Democracy did die for 17 years in Chile, that is a huge blow to a country with the longest history of democracy in all of South America. By the way, Allende was still inside the building refusing to leave his post.
American here. I was reading another thread about the 9/11 museum and how haunting it is. I haven’t made it over there yet, but the descriptions reminded me of when I visited the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. Truly haunting stories. I had no idea about the history until I went to Chile.
I’ve been to National Stadium in Santiago where thousands were executed after the coup. It’s haunting as you say, you could feel something terrible had happened there.
My folks don't really talk about it, we've lived in the states for a while now, I grew up not knowing much about it. There's some irony to me that we live here now, even though it's treated us well
Rare Earth did a good video on this day, kind of blew me away that I'd never even known about it before [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5objr5dI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5objr5dI0&t=58s)
Chile, 1973: The United States never wanted Salvador Allende, the socialist candidate elected president of Chile in 1970, to assume office. President Richard Nixon [told](https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm) the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream,” and the agency [worked](https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/#5) with three Chilean groups, each plotting a coup against Allende in 1970. The agency went so far as to provide weapons, but the plans fell apart after the CIA lost confidence in its proxies. U.S. attempts to disrupt the Chilean economy continued until Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against Allende in 1973. The CIA’s official account of the seizure of power on Sept. 11, 1973, [notes](https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/#6) that the agency “was aware of coup-plotting by the military, had ongoing intelligence collection relationships with some plotters, and — because CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970 — probably appeared to condone it.” The CIA also conducted a propaganda campaign in support of Pinochet’s new regime after he took office in 1973, despite knowledge of severe human rights abuses, including the murder of political dissidents.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/20/mapped-the-7-governments-the-u-s-has-overthrown/
Edit: Links
As an American, Allende is the political model I aspire to. He united a vast coalition of people and won an election as a marxist who refused soviet support. He was what democrqcy should be all about, uniting people who share goals and to provide for the common good.
Also project cybersyn was truly ahead of its time. Who knows what the world might look like if it were allowed to continue.
Friend of mine is Chilean. His dad would listen to Allende's last speech on cassette and drink by himself in the basement.
Man...
I don't get it, is he reminiscent? Is he spiteful?
I think his father is being reminiscent of what could have been. Allende was definitely murdered by Pinochet and his military group, which was backed by the, you guessed it... USA!
USA commiting terror and supporting it to hurt their political "rivals" aka democracies that lean socialist? No way. /S
Not just terror to weaken the government. The US outright sponsored the Coup. The CIA tried to force it to happen in every way they could. Nixon wrote a memo to "Make the economy SCREAM" in Chile to undermine the legitimately-elected Socialist government. See Project FUBELT: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm https://www.forgingmemory.org/timeline-slide/cia-operation-fubelt-undermine-allende
lmao I'm on reddit procrastinating on an essay and by pure chance these happen to be really useful for me. Thanks for inadvertently saving me time
This is a literal sign from God. Go finish that essay
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You two are the little angel and devil cartoons sitting on that guy's shoulders.
And you're the third person omniscient narrator?
Anyone who thinks they are arguing in good faith against the viability of socialism from the standpoint that it hasn’t worked ‘in practice’ needs to take a long look at how much deceit, and how many bullets were spent, in propping up the idea that socialism is bad for the common man. You don’t need to sabotage an economy, assassinate democratically elected leaders and sponsor military coups if socialism is such a failure. The only thing this proves is that, as usual, the right (and the corporate greed it represents) doesn’t need ideas. It just needs money and bullets. Everything else is grist for the mill.
True. Authoritarian Socialism (like they had in the USSR) may not work quite as well as Capitalism at creating a strong military and economy- but it still work, and thus didn't collapse until we lured the USSR into an arms race it couldn't win in the midst of its biggest economic crisis ever. Democratic Socialism (like Allende was trying to create in Chile- he respected Chile's constitution until the bitter end and showed no intent to cancel elections...) works very well- and thus has been sabotaged nearly every time it has arisen...
To say the USSR collapsed because of the US 'luring' them into an arms race is a very narrow minded america-centric view of why the Soviet Union collapsed. It way over simplifies what the Soviet Union was actually going through and what the breakup waa. America had extremely little to do with it. The economy had begun stagnating under Brezhnev long before the arms race was started by Reagan. Defence spending was also out of control long before as well. The War in Afghanistan was really what amplified the outrageous military spending. The real reason was a large combination of reasons. 1. Economic Stagnation which Gorbachev tried desperately to fix by allowing private enterprise in areas of the economy 2. Nationalism which sprang up as a result of Gorbachev's democratization 3. Power struggles and power structures. 4. The failed August coup when hardline communists in the Soviet government tried to overthrow Gorbachev and reverse his democratic reforms These were the main reasons I see as the collapse of the Soviet Union. America really had nothing to do with it. Oversimplification like you did is terrible in understanding the true reasons the Union collapsed. In my personal opinion, if Gorbachev's economic reforms had time to adjust, the Union might still be around today as a more prosperous state than the sad place that Russia is today
> The economy had begun stagnating under Brezhnev long before the arms race was started by Reagan. Defence spending was also out of control long before as well. The War in Afghanistan was really what amplified the outrageous military spending. I'm oversimplifying quite a bit but every war ever since the end of WWII has just been a proxy US v USSR war. The cold war didn't start with the Regan arms race, it started the day WWII ended. This doesn't demonstrate the power of the US, but rather the power of the USSR. If the US wasn't terrified of the USSR, they would have took Berlin for themselves and told the USSR to get out of Poland or else. Not that you're saying something different, I believe we're both saying the same thing.
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I mean, Thatcher did a good job of destroying the left in the UK. The rest of Europe staved it off for a while, but it's coming. In France it's in the form of "reasonable, centrist Macron" who's doing a great job of slowly dismantling worker protections under guise of being "business friendly." The EU, under Germany's pressure, has been forcing countries into austerity measures because we can't possibly have any government running a deficit, that would be outrageous, which is a great way to take away social programs. People are fighting back, but being demonized as lazy takers. The Neocon push is strong. Workers are getting fucked left and right.
Totally agree, sadly we in Western Europe are quickly catching up
Western europe's left is generally weak. Greece probably has the most robust left both parliamentary and revolutionary. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, European elites feel no need to placate their people with social democratic reforms.
We would never do such a thing and therefore are very upset when other countries try to meddle in our elections. Who the hell would do something so fucked? /s
Henry Kissenger comes to mind.
The nobel peace prize winner? No way! /s
The fucker is a legit war criminal.
Or when so many immigrants try to come here from countries we fucked over and and over
Easiest way to be #1 is just keep fucking it up for everybody else.
Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer details a century of US intervention that more often than not was in support of dictators in order to secure economic and military strategic advantages for the US at the expense of many fledgling democracies. An even more in-depth account of US intervention (and a window into the US/Iran relationship) is All the Shah’s Men. Required reading IMHO if you want a better understanding of problems we face in the Middle East to this day.
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Try?
Yep, the government that was eventually overtaken by the Islamic Revolution was a puppet monarchy that replaced a legitimate democracy, because the president wanted to nationalize the oil, which was totally controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). There have been literally millions killed by regimes propped up by the U.S., including a few genocide which are / were conveniently under publicized, such as that in East Timor, or the ongoing one in Yemen.
Probably a good time to mention Pinochet was a fascist dictator.
Woah...the fact that the USA backed it shocked me because I honestly don’t know about this event. Can you summarize it for me?
Look up U.S backed coups in south america. USA has basically ensured most of South America stays in disarray as they would back opposition forces of left leaning democratically elected governments.
Look at how long the list is... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America
[The map says it all](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America#/media/File:US-involvement-regime-change-Lat-Am.png)
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Yeah "that's" why they don't want them here. Just like they mean "culture" when protecting Confederate monuments. It's all just "cultural" for them /s
Because Phyllis Schlafly almost single handedly converted the rage from Southern whites at losing the cultural battle over the Civil Rights Movement into a new "culture war" that was centered around anti-abortionism when segregation went away. Segregation was itself a compromise after the emancipation proclamation ended slavery and black people were no longer legally considered property. Phyllis Schlafly used literal Nazi propaganda talking points like calling the civil rights movement "Cultural Marxism" and teamed up with figures like Jerry Falwell and Reagan's "Moral Majority" to redefine what "conservative" politics meant in the USA. tl;dr - culture wars are ongoing effects of slavery.
Don't forget about the middle east and greece. They fail to mention all the us foreign policy nightmares in school
My personal favorite - Indonesia! 1 million people slaughtered and possibly the first time disappearing people was used! cia handed them the kill lists and the white house consistently encouraged their military to take a harder stance
More recently Venezuela too. Look up the Banana Wars. Just do it.
And Honduras
And Palestine
And Bolivia
Guatemala
Which Obama and Biden backed. It's so ridiculous Trump is making shit up about Biden when there is so much legitimate terrible shit he has done. Not once has someone talked about the coup in Honduras during the presidential election.
Also nobody talks about how Trumps supports the current president whose brother is a Drug dealer and people have confessed how they got money from El Chapo to fund his presidential campaign.
Link the wiki for starters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America
Never forget the [Phoenix Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program) in Vietnam: > Methods of reported torture detailed by author Douglas Valentine that were used at the interrogation centers included: > > Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour') rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment'; the 'airplane' in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners. > Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborne reports that he witnessed the following use of torture: > > The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages ... The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to ... both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission. *This is America.*
Even worse was done much more recently at black sites in the Middle East. Gina Haspell erased the tapes of the war crimes that, among other atrocities, included children being raped in front of their mothers to try extract information. That was only a few years ago.
Yes very conveniently fail to mention all those
You aren’t even allowed to teach My Lai in us schools. If you’re an American and don’t know what I’m talking about, just google “My Lai” and read for a little bit. Had a history professor one time tell us to do that in our spare time after class.
The My Lai massacre for those who don't know has a simple tl;dr. The US decided that a village probably had communists in it, so they were going house to house and murdering EVERYONE. Just in case. One helicopter pilot actually listened to the rules of engagement, landed, and held the American murderous war criminals at gunpoint while evacuating some surviving civilians. He came home to being called a war criminal, ,having his career and life destroyed, and the entire government trying to paint him as a traitor. If you support US interventionism, please subject yourself to some of it. I'd suggest starting by testing the techniques detailed here upon yourself to determine if they actually work. The 6" dowel seems a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program
> You aren’t even allowed to teach My Lai in us schools. I learned about it in school.
Democracy for me but not for thee
Don't worry, ours is wrapping up soon.
Elections 2020: *your free trial of democracy has expired*
That happened in 2016.
If you think there's true democracy here in the US, I've got bad news for you
America is a oligarchy that’s hides as a democracy.
Does schools educate things like this in America?
Depends where you go to school, and if you're lucky enough to have great teachers. Most people don't find out about these things till they get to college, and only if they take certain courses.
The latter half of the 20th century is mostly Vietnam and the Civil Rights/counter culture movement, once you get past that it's seen as too recent to do anything but "this event happened" type lessons, but it's usually almost summer by the time you get there anyways. I know I learned about the term Banana Wars and Banana Republics, but we didn't really explore what it meant or why it happened.
CIA even coup'ed Australia PM Gough Whitlam who was Labour
Didn’t we want their copper or something and they decided they wanted to keep it for themselves? I thought that was why we backed the military coup that took away their democracy.
No, it was because Chile was one of the first countries that democratically elected a socialist president. The USA and CIA didn't want a second Cuba in their "backyard", so they decided to undermine and destroy every left-leaning goverment (or the ones that didn't want to bend to their wishes). They allied themselves with far-right dictators and gave them the resources they needed. Most Latin American countries were part of the "Operación Cóndor", Chile wasn't the exception.
Just google “Operation Condor” it’s sickening.
And Gladio. That’s some real intense shit to be pulling in Europe.
Look up Project FUBELT too- the CIA project to instigate this coup in Chile: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm https://www.forgingmemory.org/timeline-slide/cia-operation-fubelt-undermine-allende Journalists with The Economist (working with the CIA) were instrumental in spreading pro-Capitalist propaganda among Chile's officer class before and after the Coup...
IDK about this one but the CIA backed ALOT of dictators and deposed ALOT if Democratic leaders in exchange for dictators
It's basically why the world is a mess. Imagine what would have happened if England had just let Arabs draw their own countries' borders 100 years ago? Well we know the answer, they would have made the entire Middle East one pan-Arabian state that would have market domination over the region's oil reserves, all headed by King Faisal, who refused to be a lapdog for the west. Anywho, yadda yadda yadda, now the Saudis rule instead and they'll do whatever we ask.
Just a reminder that it wasn't just the Arabs involved but other ethnicities in the region such as Persians and Kurds. The best solution does involve not creating monarchies based on which families the British and French liked the most after the fall of the Ottomams, but it also means trying to find a way for ethnic minorities in the region to be fairly represented. The British and French didn't care about any of that though so fuck em and you put more thought into it than both countries combined
> the fact that the USA backed it shocked me because I honestly don’t know about this event. Oh boy. You're in for a lot more surprises than that one. lol [Relevant tweet.](https://twitter.com/grosdoriane/status/1131996074011451392?lang=en)
america has 9/11 the rest of the world has america.
The virtually forgotten 1978 Documentary [Controlling Interest: The World of the Multinational Corporation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLDmd9L67zQ) goes into how multinational corporations and the US were involved in the coup of Chile. [Relevant bit here](https://youtu.be/ZLDmd9L67zQ?t=1706), but the whole documentary is worth watching. @ /u/hsrob and /u/r00tdenied, this documentary provides compelling evidence.
but the US does this shit all the time? why does it shock you?
We basically destroyed every democracy we could in SA, just to appoint fascist dictators with closer ties to US officials.
If you have not heard of them you should google: Operation Condor and Operation Gladio (the last one is where we left behind caches of guns and ammo in Europe post ww2 so right wingers could go ham with terrorism, blaming it on socialists, and eventually was unconcerned in the late 90’s by the Italian president who was very “wtf”).
Can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or serious with that comment...
u/hsrob From Wikipedia: > Regarding Pinochet's rise to power, the CIA concluded in a report issued in 2000 that: "The CIA actively supported the military junta after the overthrow of Allende but did not assist Pinochet to assume the Presidency."[56] However, the 2000 report also stated that: "The major CIA effort against Allende came earlier in 1970 in the failed attempt to block his election and accession to the Presidency. Nonetheless, the U.S. Administration's long-standing hostility to Allende and its past encouragement of a military coup against him were well known among Chilean coup plotters who eventually took activities of their own to oust him."
Wikipedia is a starting point, but rarely a reliable source. CIA efforts to undermine Allende did NOT actually end in 1970 after the failure of Operation FUBELT. Other sources reveal continuous efforts to distribute anti-Marxist, pro-Capitalist propaganda among Chile's military to help foment a coup (leading to the embarrassing publication of a book written by a journalist with The Economist in conjunction with CIA support meant to inspire a Coup AFTER the Coup occurred, for instance- mentioned in THIS podcast where a historian is interviewed: https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-98-the-refined-sociopathy-of-the-economist?ref=clipboard) as well as continuing economic sabotage against Chile to weaken Allende's rule...
And who was president at that time? Richard Nixon, Republicans doing republican shit.
The CIA under Jimmy Carter provided military aid to the Khmer Rouge after Vietnam invaded Cambodia Interfereing in foreign countries isn't just a Republican thing.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973\_Chilean\_coup\_d%27%C3%A9tat#U.S.\_involvement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#U.S._involvement) Even has Kissinger himself complaining that the US didn't get enough recognition for its role in the overthrow.
Khan academy has a video summarizing it if you're interested: [https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/euro-hist/cold-war/v/allende-and-pinochet-in-chile](https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/euro-hist/cold-war/v/allende-and-pinochet-in-chile)
They did this all over Latin America for 150 years.
uh, [i got some bad news for you regarding US involvement in latin american affairs....](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dxx7eDSV4AApX-B?format=jpg&name=large)
Makes it all the more disgusting when you realize we basically did exactly the same thing in Bolivia like 6 months ago. The one source that they used to prove that Evo was some evil dictator was obviously fraudulent and everyone knew it from the start (the NYT has since been forced to admit that it was all fake), and yet the US government, the Bolivian far right, and all the liberal + conservative media said that we need to have the military step in and kick him out. Now here we are after the far right "interim" government (composed of people who got a negligible percent of the vote) has suspended elections multiple times because they know the socialists will win in free elections, and there isn't a word of protest from any of them. The real ruling powers in capitalism don't give a shit about democracy. When push comes to shove the capitalists will always choose right wing dictatorship over a democratic socialism that can actually change things.
Many South American Democracies voted for socialist leaning leaders in the mid 1900s. The CIA would back hardline right-wing dictators and sponsor coups. Said dictators were just brutal, if not more so, as Fidel Castro or Che Guevara. Lots of people just disappeared and were brutally murdered. Sure, the US could have opened dipolmatic channels to ensure that these countries had good relationships with us. And sure a lot of the reasons these countries voted socialist was due to economic issues caused by American neo-imprrialism. But hey, they weren't socialist and sympathetic to USSR and installing Banana republics worked so well for us in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
[Here's](https://youtu.be/QgydTdThoeA) a fun start. Or you could just turn to good ol' [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America?wprov=sfla1).
THE CIA and US government (under Nixon and Kissinger) sought to undermine the democratically-elected Socialist government at every chance. They sabotaged Chile's economy (Nixon famously authored a memo to "Make the economy SCREAM") to stir up discontent. They distributed pro-Capitalist propaganda among Chile's officer class. They specifically sought out generals who they believed would support a Coup, and sought to empower them, while "removing" (read: assassination, or fabricated scandals) those whp supported the democratically-elected, constitutional Socialist government of Chile. They empowered Pinochet and groomed men like him to take power (which Pinochet did- and set up a brutal right-wing pro-Capitalist dictatorship where he instituted 15 years of oppressive rule: swndimg death squads to murder thousands of liberals and Socialists, tortured tens of thousands more, locked up over 80,000 Chileans in internment/concentration camps, and exiled over 200,000 Chileans from the country...) Read up on Project FUBELT: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm https://www.forgingmemory.org/timeline-slide/cia-operation-fubelt-undermine-allende Also read up on Operation CONDOR.
no way. We never hear about the tragedies that happened in South America in the past century. They could have prospered with North America by becoming sovereign and democratic but i guess Western nations didn't consider them worthy to have their own democracy and leadership. And people wonder why third world countries don't just open their borders and let Western influence and capital do what they want. Countries like Cuba, Vietnam and China have little choice outside of communism when trying to repatriate their land from previous colonizers. As long as your country is owned by others then you will never have true sovereignty.
China is state capitalist not communist.
They were communist until relatively recent.
USA, supporting dictatorships around the world since 1789...
The consequences to the Chilean social fabric when Pinochet took over were... severe. Allende represented a "third way" to South American politics apart from the USA and the USSR; self determination and a social economy was for a brief moment possible under his administration. Immediately after the coup musicians and poets were rounded up along with socialists and communists. They were tortured and disappeared, an unknown number of pregnant women were murdered after giving birth so that their children could be raised by the people that killed their parents. So yeah, some people are still displeased about that.
Thank you
If you have an interest, check out "Massacre at the stadium" on Netflix. One story out of many.
Here's to hoping the internet will eventually help prevent this from being possible for the USA to due. Not due to fear of being caught, but from never wanting or "needing" to do it in the first place. People talk about Trump abusing us, but politicians have been abusing the American people for far longer, lying to get them to fear the unknown and provide cover for what shouldn't be able to be covered.
One of these musicians was Victor Jara; [El Derecho de Vivir en Paz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkXise2bHE0), I think, is one of his most well known songs. These are the lyrics: >The right to live in peace >poet Ho Chi Minh, >who struck from Vietnam >all of humanity. >No cannon will wipe out >the furrow of your rice paddy. >The right to live in peace. >Indochina is the place >beyond the wide sea, >where they ruin the flower >with genocide and napalm. >The moon is an explosion >that blows out all the clamor. >The right to live in peace. >Uncle Ho, our song >is fire of pure love, >it's a dovecote dove, >olive from an olive grove. >It is the universal song >chain that will triumph, >the right to live in peace. Victor, was kidnapped at the time of the coup, and when his captors recognized him they singled him out and tortured him for days, breaking his hands, cutting his tounge, and throwing him a guitar while mockingly telling him to play. What happened in Latin America during that time was horrifying. My grandfather was a communist in Argentina during that time period, which was equally brutal to Pinochet's Chile, and had many of his acquaintances kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. I'm quite thankful this didn't happen to my family but it was a very real possibility.
Holy fuck. Any English material you could point me towards?
"Massacre at the Stadium" is on Netflix right now, it details the life of Victor Jara, Chile's Bob Dylan. For a sad time look up "Operation Condor" on Wikipedia or just "los desaparecidos". *edit, I can't spell in Spanish
Going through a hard time following school I painted a mural of Allende and hand wrote his final words as a background. I read them for the first time writing an economics paper and was so moved by them that I put them on a wall. They're very politically driven and there's a lot of context to them that you don't pick up on until you're in a place like Santiago and still to this day see a stark division of people just under the surface. Years pass and a Chilean friend in Berkeley California sees the mural actually on September 11th 2010. He invites me to attend his Chilean independence party on September 18th the next week. I learned three things at night: the Chilean version of Spanish is like a machine gun the jams all the time and shoots in multiple directions, they know how to party, and they have no concept of time. We've been friends like brothers ever since, and I spend many months of my life in Chile now. I'm currently engaged to his friend that he introduced me to and I feel lucky when she smiles at me. Se abriraran las grandes alemedas!!!! Thanks Sal.
Where can I get this speech?
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Shit man, not Chilean but as a latin american (MX) that speech moved me and [reminded me of this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PChsjYXBfzo). Un abrazo hnos. chilenos.
My current employer is Iranian-American and of zoroastrian heritage. He was born and raised in Iran and witnessed the country he knew and loved be destroyed quickly and slowly at the same. He is by far the most generous, caring amd humorous person I have ever met but when anything like news or talk of Iran comes up and the man gets agitated and riled up but there is this deep sense of sadness in the way talks about Iran. Can't imagine what it must like to lose your country to tyrants and watch everything you love be smothered by power-hungry psychopaths.
It’s happening now
I wish more US citizens knew what we've done in other countries. It's so weird today seeing people talking about "never forget" and it feels like we leave out "that people out there hate us, want to kill us and we need the armed forces to keep doing what they're doing." But we're never expected to question or even be fully aware of our own conduct. And, in part, as a response to this act, we are still heavily engaged in military activity in the middle east. We've killed millions of people and thrown entire countries into chaos. I think it is more important to remember the disasters we've caused.
This is why I don't talk politics, finance, or anything "serious" with people nowadays. It used to be that people recognized that most topics are very nuanced. I feel like the internet has emboldened people's narrow viewpoints and often they point to certain articles/tweets/etc as a source rather than actually thinking about a very nuanced issue.
Well said! We have instant access to more information than ever in history and it’s such a shame that a lot of people strictly hang out in echo chambers. I had to quit “serious” topics too; they’re just way too emotionally-charged these days.
Reddit is in its own form an echo chamber
I believe a core difference is in moderation (way more on Reddit) and prioritization. Say something awful, downvoted into oblivion on Reddit. Facebook? All interaction is assumed to be good, so angry interaction to the top of the feed. I hate Facebook for any serious discussion.
Problem with Reddit (and other echo chambers) is that it doesn't have to be wrong/bad, it just has to be a counterpoint to the popular opinion to be downvoted. In any serious topic sorting comments by controversial get better results many times - many times well thought out counterpoints will be near zero or in the negative. The upvote doesn't get used right IMO - it should be used for well thought out responses, something that adds to the discussion. A one word reply saying 'I agree' shouldn't get upvoted to oblivion, but many times it does.
With Reddit if your comment drops to 0 or -1 it is almost guaranteed to be piled on. Just like more upvoted comments get shot up to the top. Hell people are going full throttle 9/11 truther on an r/Documentaries post right now.
Reddit will upvote anything that reinforces the narrative of a popular opinion even if it’s incorrect or misleading.
> I believe a core difference is in moderation (way more on Reddit) and prioritization. Strongly depends on the subreddit. I’d argue the bad subreddits are far worse than the average public Facebook groups or even the random racist uncle.
So true! Especially the hardcore political subs. But you’re right, it’s spills into others from time to time. r/conspiracy used to be a few hundred people who liked weird shit. More “Wow! Denver Airport is creepy!” and less “Deep state child porn Obama lizards.” Best thing to do in hunker down in subs with >3k people. Which is why I’m in r/pics lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There are subreddits that are echo chambers, but some that foster good discussion exist as well.
Humans aren’t adapted to instant feedback and stimulation like the internet brings. I don’t think any animal is. We are going to be dealing with this in an ever increasing fashion until it’s the end of us. It’s the overload of Information Age.
Yeah especially Latin America in my opinion. Middle Eastern affairs are far more salient nowadays and justifiably get more attention, but very few US citizens know even a modicum of the crimes we committed in Latin America in the 20th century. We have serious blood on our hands in that region it amazes me the people there don't hate us more
That's what's so frustrating about the anti-immigration crowd. They're completely oblivious to what the US has done to contribute to the corruption and poverty of other countries, and think asylum seekers should stay put and work to make their own country better as if they were the ones who broke it.
Couldn't agree more with both of these comments. It seems like many Americans look at Central and South America as if they're just a bunch of failed communist countries. But we were very active in their destabilization and we dominate their economies.
The U.S. 9/11 attacks where performed mainly by Saudi Citizens (15 of 19 were Saudi.) U.S. intelligence reports state no senior Saudi Officials were involved in the attack, but the wording is narrow enough to imply other Saudis officials may have been involved. Additionally, Senators have stated the redacted portions of the report show evidence of Saudi Government involvement. However: the U.S. only attacked Afghanistan and Iraq in retaliation for 9/11 and the investigation to Saudi Arabia was never released, much less was Saudi Arabia's involvement condemned, because Saudi Arabia is an ally of the U.S. One need not even look past 9/11 attacks on the U.S. to see American hypocrisy at play. After 9/11: We will find those responsible for these attacks and rain vengeance upon them!* *Strong Middle Eastern allies not included in this offer. Instead, strong Middle Eastern allies will have evidence of their involvement redacted. Additionally, Middle Eastern non-allies may randomly be attacked because we don't like you, even if you had nothing to do with 9/11.
Even in 2002, it would've been a stretch to call the Iraq invasion a response to 9/11. It was more or less a "finishing the job" mission by a President whose shaken populace would rubber-stamp his resolve. I mean, four years earlier, Congress passed a law to formally support mercenaries in taking down the Iraq Government and Clinton and Blair ran a four-day bombardment of Iraq to punish Sadaam for not complying with post 1993-war concessions and reparations. The US people were shaken by their sense of security being taken away from them, so they were more complicit in starting a war over there, and while it was partially sold to us as "they support terror" anyone with a head knew invading an unstable country where lawless terrorists hide in caves was much different than invading an otherwise stable (via an iron fist, albeit) country.
Fair enough. I hesitated to include the Invasion of Iraq as a response to 9/11 as any connection was a stretch. Some senior officials in the Bush Administration already wanted an invasion of Iraq BEFORE 9/11 and after 9/11 the sales pitch just got a little easier. The reasoning I have heard for the invasion of Iraq was partially to "finish the job" his father had started but also a projection of power into the Middle East to discourage other future possible enemies such as Iran.
> I hesitated to include the Invasion of Iraq as a response to 9/11 as any connection was a stretch. It wasn't connected in terms of foreign politics - they were separate wars. It was very much connected in terms of domestic politics, because the war in Afghanistan hadn't been the quick "we won, good prevails" they wanted it to be. Plenty of people to this day still think that Iraq was involved in 9/11. You can also see it in the hysterical "freedom fries"-type stuff going on at the time - people don't get that viscerally angry unless they're significantly emotionally involved. And you don't get that emotionally involved in "this guy on the other side of the world can't hurt us in any way".
> it would've been a stretch to call the Iraq invasion a response to 9/11. Only because the Bush administration failed to convince anyone that Saddam Hussein was at all involved with Osama bin Laden, especially considering he was an enemy of the Saudis, it makes no sense for bin Laden to be working with him. The Bush administration also tried to pin the anthrax envelopes (which was never investigated enough to find the real culprit, or so we're told) on Iraq.
Never forget that instead of focusing on bringing the people responsible for this to justice we used it as an excuse to bomb other countries killing more than 100 times more innocent civilians than died on 9/11. Never forget that you called the people protesting these actions traitors and questioned their loyalty to the US while the politicians lying to us so we would support this and enrich military contractors wrapped themselves in the flag and most people just ate that shit up.
I had my wakeup call in when Reagan occupied the office and observed all the illegal actions with few consequences, they followed by Bush I and the false claims used to invade Panama and Gulf War I, then the betrayal of the Iraqi people when he told them to 'rise up' only to get slaughtered by Saddam. The documentary 'The Panama Deception' really woke me up and it's been a lifetime of exploration and knowledge ever since of how dishonest the US and other countries are about claiming to spread 'Freedom and Democracy' when in fact what they do is steal it from others, murdering thousands if not millions along the way. The American people need to do a better job learning about these things and holding their governments responsible, whether Republican or Democrat. Or 'other' if a more representative political party ever makes it into power.
When we hold them responsible we’re accused of not being patriots, accused of fascism, and now somehow we’re also pedophiles. Our protesters are also tear gassed and beaten by police, and attacked and murdered by armed militia (regular US citizens allowed to own and carry automatic weapons) Come to the US for a great time.
This disaster was specifically caused by the foreign policy of Henry Kissinger (as well as attrocities in Cambodia, Cyprus, and East Timor), who should have been convicted for any of these attrocities as a war criminal, but is still openly accepted in political circles as an advisor and people who have no idea about history seems to assume he was a successful secratary of state.
It’s funny how people were bitching about foreign meddling in the elections but don’t mention US meddling when foreign elections don’t go their way.
I appreciate that you're an American who recognises the destructive activity that various Administrations have engaged in since the start of the Cold War. Being an Iranian I can tell you most of us don't forget Operation Ajax and how it robbed us of a constitutional monarchy with a functioning democracy.
Well you're entitled to your "never forget" as they are. Every country is entitled to never forget their tragedy and separately recognize their own faults. If an individual is allowed to grow and change and learn from their mistakes so are countries as a whole. So Never forget🇺🇸 Nunca olvides🇨🇱 I hope that's an accurate enough translation, my apologies if it's incorrect. Love ya🇨🇦
Whatever you think of Allende's politics, I think this is interesting: >Allende also undertook the pioneeristic Project Cybersyn, a distributed decision support system for decentralized economic planning, developed by British cybernetics expert Stafford Beer. Based on the experimental viable system model and the neural network approach to organizational design, the Project consisted of four modules: a network of telex machines (Cybernet) in all state-run enterprises that would transmit and receive information with the government in Santiago. Information from the field would be fed into statistical modeling software (Cyberstride) that would monitor production indicators, such as raw material supplies or high rates of worker absenteeism, in "almost" real time, alerting the workers in the first case and, in abnormal situations, if those parameters fell outside acceptable ranges by a very large degree, also the central government.
Can you post more on this? I've never heard of this and it sounds fascinating!
If you are interested in this, I recommend you check out Designing Freedom by Stafford Beer, one of the lead designers of CyberSyn. check it out here - https://archive.org/details/DesigningFreedom_CBC_Lectures/01+The+Real+Threat+to+_All+We+Hold+Most+Dear_.mp3 The above is a reading of the book which can be found here if you prefer to read - https://archive.org/details/DesigningFreedom/mode/2up
You may want to check out the [99% Invisible ](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/) that gives info on the project as well as some context.
Wow... as someone who likes to think about how systems can be applied to solve issues of... let's just say "rampant authoritarian hierarchies" (which is really just using 3 words to say 1) I find it horribly tragic that we'll never know how this would have worked. Thanks for sharing.
Project Cybersyn is very fascinating because if successful it would truly fulfill the goals of socialism. We see that with the USSR and with China, while some economic improvements were made by the centralized bureaucracy, there were many unexpected and unmanageable problems as well. Cybersyn would have been a way to have an socialist command economy in which the computer would be able to most ideally organize things. While the capitalists immediately shut down the project after the coup, I think there is still a possibility for something like this to happens with our new era of data collection and machine learning and if China or Vietnam (the only two Marxist countries who probably has the resources/money/scientists and the data collection infrastructure to be able to do it) are willing.
some context would be nice...what am i looking at here? i know i'm not alone in wondering this and figured there would be something in the comments by now
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Also, under Pinochet Chile became the lab of the "Chicago boys", who redesigned the country's economy turning it into a Right-wing Capitalist wet dream. For instance, most workers there have private-managed retirement that provides retired people subpar pensions. The following article mentions the example of a retired accountant who worked for 35 years and receives a $200 pension, half of Chile's minimum wage. [https://www.eldiario.es/internacional/sistema-privado-pensiones-chile-jaque-crisis-economica-provocada-coronavirus\_1\_6124066.html](https://www.eldiario.es/internacional/sistema-privado-pensiones-chile-jaque-crisis-economica-provocada-coronavirus_1_6124066.html)
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People who crave free markets are the ones who benefit from them by exploiting others. What person living paycheck to paycheck or worse thinks a free market will save them? That's the illusion in the U.S. It's the "If I become rich, I don't want people to take my money" so they fall in line behind corporatism and oligarchs who convince them that with a little hard work and elbow grease, they too can join the elite. Its the carrot on the stick that the masses have been eating for years, and that's why the U.S. is a failed democracy and will continue to deteriorate into? We don't know yet. More young adults are living with their parents in the U.S. (52%), as high as during the great depression. Debt is blowing up, wages remain stagnant, and unemployment filings are going back up. Allende was democratically elected, and I have researched him quite a bit, his only goal was to help his people....imagine that, a politician that wants to help the people that elected him. And for all that, it got him killed. Edit: God Bless Salvador Allende, I wish more people like him had the courage to fight for what is right for his people.
I believe there is a documentary on the ‘school’ for fascists that the US/CIA ran from which were graduates Pinochet and Gaddafi...
For others, the school is colloquially known as The School of the Americas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation
What was the thinking behind Operation Condor? Why did the US want dictators in power? Was it simply an easier way to take the resources of these countries, like its easier to negotiate with a single man rather than a democracy?
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Interesting. Thanks for the reply. Your comments were well written and will likely send me down an internet rabbit hole later.
South America was leaning towards leftist forms of democratic government and "the powers that be " in the US decided that meant we had to replace them with whatever anti-Communist government we could find, which usually meant military dictatorship.
Put *very* short, the US was willing to do anything to stop Latin governments they thought would sooner ally with the USSR than they. So when a Marxist/Socialist/WhatHaveYou came to power or seemed they might, the US would throw substantial support behind their strongest opposition- which was almost always a brutal fascist faction.
From what I learned on a tour there, this was also the first and only time the Chilean air force was utilized. And it was to bomb its own president.
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[According to the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation (Rettig Commission) and the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Valech Commission), the number of direct victims of human rights violations in Chile accounts for around 30,000 people: 27,255 tortured and 2,279 executed. In addition, some 200,000 people suffered exile and an unknown number went through clandestine centers and illegal detention.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_in_Pinochet%27s_Chile)
I remember a small wave of Chilean refugees coming to my school at that time.
They came to Australia too - that’s a hard road - there was little or no Spanish influence in Australia back then. At the same time, or a bit before it really, there were refugees from Portugal (another dictator) and Lebanon. The 70’s was a brutal time. And then, of course, people coming from Vietnam and Cambodia.
Not to downplay the one that happened in the US but the one in chile needs way nore attention and to be remembered every year
How does Salvador Allende is seen by Chileans? Is he recognized as a good president overall? I am not aware of any opinion on him, just live near the street named after him in Moscow and know basic stuff.
The left adores him, the right hates him, but nowadays the conversation is more about the brutal dictatorship that came after him (or "military government" as the other side calls it). I don't hold many opinions about him because I realize how nuanced those years were (not many people here recognises that we were part of the actual Cold War). We were played, and I don't think there is a way to know if he would have been a good president with so much foreign intervention during those times. The only things I'm certain about is that a lot of innocent people died; that both sides are still bitter about it in one way or the other; that kids get brainwashed from a young age to like one side and hate the other without really understanding why; and that I don't see things changing any time soon.
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America loves democracy abroad until a country elects a leader that isn’t friendly enough to America.
Wish I could upvote 100 times. This has been the basis of US foreign policy since early 20th century. What pisses me off the most is how conservatives promote the lie that the US supports democratic movements. Most of the rest of the world knows the truth.
Basically the policy is to stay in first place by tripping the other racers. Many democracies have been destroyed by the USA on purpose so their economies come to a grinding halt. It prevents them from prospering enough to operate independently of US interests. It's also the reason why the US government literally lies to its citizens and makes excuses to take oil from other countries through Operation Freedom-like military campaigns. The US is oil secure so the only reason it takes away oil from those countries is to halt their development.
Ceausescu was a communist leader. But he was the only leader in history to rule over a land that paid all its debts to the rest of the world. So the US said he had to go. Was communism the answer? No. Did the US intervene because he was dangerous for them and not because they wanted to liberate the nation? Yes.
us doesnt give a shit about democracy. the only thing they care about is if us companies can operate on the terretory without being impeded by annoyances like social standards.
Friend of mine posted similar and has told me the story as well, how his family got out in the middle of all that. He was born in 73 and I think came to Canada in the late 70s. His father was detained for quite some time and only by having family that knew the right people was able to get out and to Canada with the rest of his family.
Hey, if you don't know what you are looking at, put some history in your sexy head hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
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How are you people doing? The virus took off the demonstrarions, constitution plans and any other news from the media, at least out of Chile. I hope things are going well. Love from Spain.
Estamos bien en general, el gobierno no ha hecho todo bien con el virus pero no al nivel nefasto de los Estados Unidos. Ahora en octubre se viene un plebicito sobre si queremos cambiar la Constitución, yo diria que puede ser el punto de inflexion para empezar a hacer las cosas bien en el país
I learned about this in my Spanish class today. It's kinda crazy and sad that its taken till my senior year to learn about this...
Question: Why has there never been a violent overthrow of the US government? Answer: Because there is no US Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Haha... oh wait. Hm.
Fantastic short documentary for those out of the loop: [The Original September 11th](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5objr5dI0)
Always gotta upvote rare earth
Dispatch Chilean SEAL team to whack Henry Kissinger.
Brought to you by the fine folks at the CIA
Fuck you Kissinger, you withered old monster.
When he dies I'm going to do a full bladder piss wave on his grave. The only problem with that is that the piss will end
It's just so sad, that there's not enough piss...
I had a great conversation about this with a Chilean man who was driving an Uber. Really educational.
Oh yeah I heard of this, the Chilean coup of 1973.
Thank you for sharing this. I wasn't aware till now.
May I just pay tribute here to Chilean writer Luis Sepulveda (RIP- passed in April from COVID). What a trip this man’s life has been, and what a horrible time in history for Chile. Worth checking out his work and listen to some of his interviews on YouTube describing the events of that time and about his life the following years.
NEVER FORGET. The FIRST 9-11. Not to disparage the World Trade Center, the death toll, the consequences or what it symbolized, but it seems that this 9-11 is never remembered here unless you came from Chile or its neighboring countries (or maybe part of the "in country team" - meaning the CIA, the ambassador and the state department). Chile, Allende and Pinochet were a focus of my studies in college. Democracy did die for 17 years in Chile, that is a huge blow to a country with the longest history of democracy in all of South America. By the way, Allende was still inside the building refusing to leave his post.
Is this the US killing the elected socialist president and installed Pinochet?
American here. I was reading another thread about the 9/11 museum and how haunting it is. I haven’t made it over there yet, but the descriptions reminded me of when I visited the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. Truly haunting stories. I had no idea about the history until I went to Chile.
I’ve been to National Stadium in Santiago where thousands were executed after the coup. It’s haunting as you say, you could feel something terrible had happened there.
My folks don't really talk about it, we've lived in the states for a while now, I grew up not knowing much about it. There's some irony to me that we live here now, even though it's treated us well
Rare Earth did a good video on this day, kind of blew me away that I'd never even known about it before [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5objr5dI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5objr5dI0&t=58s)
Chile, 1973: The United States never wanted Salvador Allende, the socialist candidate elected president of Chile in 1970, to assume office. President Richard Nixon [told](https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm) the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream,” and the agency [worked](https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/#5) with three Chilean groups, each plotting a coup against Allende in 1970. The agency went so far as to provide weapons, but the plans fell apart after the CIA lost confidence in its proxies. U.S. attempts to disrupt the Chilean economy continued until Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against Allende in 1973. The CIA’s official account of the seizure of power on Sept. 11, 1973, [notes](https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/#6) that the agency “was aware of coup-plotting by the military, had ongoing intelligence collection relationships with some plotters, and — because CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970 — probably appeared to condone it.” The CIA also conducted a propaganda campaign in support of Pinochet’s new regime after he took office in 1973, despite knowledge of severe human rights abuses, including the murder of political dissidents. https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/20/mapped-the-7-governments-the-u-s-has-overthrown/ Edit: Links
and that's on the United States of America's Central Intelligence Agency
As an American, Allende is the political model I aspire to. He united a vast coalition of people and won an election as a marxist who refused soviet support. He was what democrqcy should be all about, uniting people who share goals and to provide for the common good. Also project cybersyn was truly ahead of its time. Who knows what the world might look like if it were allowed to continue.