Doug1943
Platinum Member
- Jan 3, 2016
- 1,243
- 616
- 928
Nah, the American imperialists were perfectly happy to support the kind of mild, tame social-democratic reformist 'socialism' you're talking about in Europe after the war. These sorts of regimes pose no threat to wily capitalists, and in fact may be their best bet against genuine anti-capitalist revolutionaries. (That's why almost every giant corporation in America today is 'on the Left': today's American Left having abandoned its past pro-working class orientatin for an attitude of complete contempt and hatred towards them.)Nixon and Kissinger screwed the hell out of chile and Argentina and supported dictators around the world against an imaginary socialist threat. The communist threat is different from the socialist threat which doesn't exist, is only for always democratic fair capitalism with a good safety net. Which Republicans will do anything and everything to obstruct and stop.
They feared, rightly or wrongly, that Allende, and similar governments like Guatemala's in 1954, would open the door to the Communists, even if they weren't subjectively pro-Communist. And in 1959, they saw that very thing happen in Cuba, where an overtly non-Communist movement ended up going over to Communism, followed a couple of years later by hosting Soviet nuclear missiles in their country.
Now .. whether they were right to believe this or not, and what they should have done instead of supporting really nasty military dictatorships is another argument. (It would be an interesting one to have, on another thread.)
But that's what they believed. And, yes, there were other factors too -- like the personal material interests of various people high up in the American government, which would have made them hostile to any Leftist government that nationalized their overseas investments. United Fruit in Guatemala, copper interests in Chile.
But the bourgeoisie is a politically-organized class: it was fighting a world-system, international Communism, as they saw it.
These people are not stupid. They know that sometimes the interests of particular capitalists have to be sacrificed for the good of the system as a whole.
When Mexico nationalized all the foreign-owned oil companies in 1938 -- and all Mexican oil was owned by foreigners -- of course the US opposed this. But when there was a right-wing rebellion against the leftist national government in one of Mexico's provinces, the US did not support it.
They were worried about broader questions -- the spread of fascism and communism from Europe to Mexico and Latin America generally. They finally worked out a deal with the Mexican government.
[ Mexican oil expropriation - Wikipedia ]
And that's also why the US pressured the Pinochet regime to accept the results of a national referendeum in Chile in 1988, which, after a year, brought an end to the dictatorship. There have been several rather Leftist governments in Latin America since then, but the perceived threat of international Communism has pretty much vanished with the going over of China to capitalism, and the outright collapse of the USSR.
Another thing Leftist dogmatists misunderstand about the terrible right-wing repression in Latin America in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, is that the military governments had significant popular support among the middle classes. Leftist invariably pose those struggles as 'the people' vs 'the dictatorship', but it was not that simple.
As memories have faded and new generations -- with no memory of the fear of communism that their parents and grandparents had -- have entered the political scene, the popular attitude towards the military dictatorships and their crimes hardened. Pinochet won a referendum in 1980 with 75% of the vote, but lost the 1988 one.
The Wiki article on this period in Chile, while written by people with sympathy for the Left, is not bad, and should be read by anyone interested in this subject.
[ Military dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990) - Wikipedia ]
There are idiots on the Right who like to torment liberals with the slogan "Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong!" I hope they are ignorant of what really happened in Chile, but if they are not, then they are no conservatives and no patriots, and should be shunned by all genuine conservatives and patriots.
And before leftists get too self-righteous about mass murder, please note that tens of thousands of American leftists -- and hundreds of thousands of European leftists -- maintained their total devotion to Joseph Stalin for nearly three decades, until Khruschev himself denounced Stalin in 1956. The liberals of the New York City Council honored one of these people, Ethel Rosenberg, a spy who helped Stalin get the atom bomb more quickly than he would have.
We must not be like them.