The monster of 9-11… 1973

These guys uniforms remind you of anything from the late 1930s, early 1940s?

Photojournalist Julio Etchart spent the 70s and 80s documenting Pinochet’s 16-year dictatorship in Chile and, by “keeping a low profile and my head down”, he says he was able to capture much of the rising resistance on camera. This 11 September marks 40 years since the military coup that began Pinochet’s rule, during which thousands of suspected political opponents were detained, tortured, killed or simply “disappeared”. In memory of his victims, Amnesty International UK is hosting an updated version of Julio’s 1988 exhibition Chile’s 9/11 at the Human Rights Action Centre in Shoreditch, London, on weekdays from 9-20 September (Guardian)

“Lily Langtree” (Memory in Latin America) provides links to British and U.S. media reports on the 40th anniversary of the 11 September 1973 blow to Latin American democracy in the name of making Chile safe for I.T.T. … and turning the Chileans — much like the Jews and gays and gypsies in the occupied territories of 1939-1945 Europe into guinea pigs for insane experimenters. In Chile’s case, the made scientist was Milton Freidman. Unlike the Nazi “scientists” went off on a tangent based on the half-baked theories of the long dead Arthur de Gobineau and Francis Galton, Friedman personally convinced the Pinochet regime to implement economic “reforms” based on his understanding of the “philosophy” of screenwriter and fantasy novelist, Ayn Rand, by “whatever means necessary”.

Of course, economics is more a political theory (or perhaps a theology) than a true science, but even so, one assumes it is based in logic and not suppositions. Which is not to say that some of the “reforms” of the Pinochet era weren’t beneficial to Chile (which is sort of like justifying the Nazis because the Volkswagen Sedan was a great car), but at the cost of years of terrorism and mass murder.

Friedman defended his relationship with Pinochet by saying that if Allende had been allowed to remain in office Chileans would have suffered “the elimination of thousands and perhaps mass starvation . . . torture and unjust imprisonment.” But the elimination of thousands, mass hunger, torture and unjust imprisonment were what was taking place in Chile exactly at the moment the Chicago economist was defending his protégé. Allende’s downfall came because he refused to betray Chile’s long democratic tradition and invoke martial law, yet Friedman nevertheless insisted that the military junta offered “more room for individual initiative and for a private sphere of life” and thus a greater “chance of a return to a democratic society.” It was pure boilerplate, but it did give Friedman a chance to rehearse his understanding of the relationship between capitalism and freedom.

At least 3000 Chileans died, and another 40,000 were tortured (and several million lived in abject terror) during the Pinochet era. For a country with a population about 12 million during those years, to compare the damage done on 9-11-1973 to that on 9-11-2001 the U.S. would have had to have seen 75,000 dead and one million tortured as a result of their own 9-11… not there yet, at least with their own citizens.