Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

A view of the world from an Irish hole

Category: Chile

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9/11

We all know what happened on September 11th, 2001. But for the people of Chile the date has a different, though related resonance. It is the anniversary of the seizure of power by the military, working hand-in-glove with the American Central Intelligence Agency. This led to the unleashing of the Chilean military’s blood lust upon the country people, whom they were supposed to protect. 

President Salvador Allende

Riddle me this: surely the overthrow of a sovereign nation’s democratically elected government by that of another, using disaffected internal thugs simply because it didn’t like its economic and social policy; the murder of that country’s president (also democratically elected), as well as the killing, disappearance and torture of thousand of people, surely all these were acts of terrorism as heinous as the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York? George Bush St was a senior CIA operative at the time, though as for George W. Bush he was probably sizzled somewhere, and he probably didn’t know where Chile was anyway.

 The events of 9/11 were carried out by a small terrorist group, yet the events I have just outlined above were perpetrated on Chile in 1973 by the government of the United States. Chile’s greatest enemy was the then US president, “Tricky Dick” Nixon, a liar and a cheat – “there’ll be no whitewash at the White House.” !

 I sometimes think the US government’s attitude towards Al Qaeda stems not from moral revulsion or righteous outrage, but from plain jealousy. They are both, more or less in the same line of business, but Al Qaaeda  does it far more efficiently and cheaply, using fewer men and resources. If we ever find out how much Al Qaeda spent on the logistics and planning of 9/11, I think it will be shown that it was less than the cost of one day of George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism.

 Let us remember all the innocent victims of 9/11, both of 1973 and 2001.

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The poetry of Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda’s Cien Sonetos de Amor rank among other sonnets as those of Petrarch or Shakespeare. They are pillars of a literature

Matilde and Pablo

 of the world, timeless in their humanity. The breathless beauty with which they describe the changing aspects of Neruda’s love for his wife Matilde make each one a veritable kaleidoscope, a miniature in painted with words.

Poor Neruda died as the socialist experiments in Chile were being brutally snuffed out by the CIA-backed military. These events not only witnessed the murder of his hopes, but the physical murder of so many of his friends, such as President Salvador Allende and the musician and song writer Victotr Jara, not to mention the torture and imprisonment of many others/ Although he had not long to live the fascist military conducted a search of his home at Isla Negra, to which Neruda responded “You will find nothing here but poetry”. He died eleven days after the putsch led by the blood-stained monster Pinochet, a personification of wickedness with whom Mrs Thatcher sipped tea. Of course she yearned of being to deal with “lefties” with the same dispatch as Augusto Pinochet, but she was able to do it through manipulation of the media, the brainwashing of the British public and their transformation into senseless materialist morons, a process continued so adeptly by her spiritual heir Tony Blair.

Neruda’s One hundred Sonnets of Love are divided into the four parts of the day: manana, mediadia, tarde and noche. I translate here Sonnet XXIV.

Love, love, the clouds to the tower of the sky
climbed like triumphant washerwomen
And everything glowed in blue, all was a star:
The sea, the boat, the day were exiled together.

Come and sea the cherries of the water in constellation,
And the round kea of the fast universe.
Come and touch the fire of the instantaneous blue
Come before its petals are consumed.

There is no water but light, quantities, cluster,
Space opened by the virtues of the wind
Until liberating the last secrets of the foam. 

And between so many blues- heavenly, submerged
Our eyes are lost, divining with difficulty
The powers of the air, the keys under the sea.

 

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May 29, 2009

Tea for two

In Chile a former conscript has been charged with the brutal murder of popular singer Victor Jara in the immediate aftermath of General Augusto Pinochet’s fascist putsch in 1973. Victor Jara, among with hundreds of others, was brought to Chile’s National stadium where he was subjected to an orgy of mindless thuggery and violence before being shot forty-four times.

And the man who masterminded the coup and who was the intellectual author of Jara’s murder and that of thousands of others sipped tea in the cosiest of tete-a-tetes with that rabid bitch Margaret Thatcher. He was also the darling of members of the Catholic right in England and Ireland, such Norman Lamont. I remember how I was told by a member of the Knights of Columanus that Pinochet had “rescued Chile from communism” and that most of those who were murdered by the military were communist sympathisers who deserved what they got.

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October 16, 2008

Justice of a sort for the victims of the Caravan of Death

I see that the leader of Chile’s notorious Caravan of Death, Gen Arellano Stark and five of his underlings have received jail sentences for the extra-judicial killing of people whose politics they didn’t like during the rule of Augusto Pinochet.

The Caravan of Death was like a mobile execution squad who went up and down the country seeking out victims whom the authorities were just too squeamish to wipe out themselves. Their actions were known to Pinochet, the man with whom the former British Prime Minister sipped tea and ate cake. If only she had been able to use the Caravan of Death against the miners, the Militant Tendency, Irish terrorists and their synpathisers in Eire and the CND.

Of course, here in leprechaun land General Pinochet had a considerable fan-club, especially amongst those who were on the way to doing God’ s work. True, he had murdered a democratically-elected president and murdered hundreds, if not thousands of innocent people, but hadn’t he saved Chile from “Godless communism?” The fact that Salvador Allende (pronounced Ayende or Azhende and not Allendy as some conservative politicans believed) was never a communist, or that he had the support of many members of the country’s hierarchy, is forgotten. Pinochet’s supporters point to the fact that when he survived a leftist assassination plot the bullets left the impiression of the Virgin Mary on the car window. They point to the extraordinary economic success enjoyed by Chile thanks to Pinochet, but that ignoramus knew nothing about economics; any economic success was the work of technocrats like Buchl the finance minister.

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