(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . 50 years ago on 9/11, Nixon and Kissinger killed Allende and Chile's Socialist Democracy [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-11 It’s hard to believe that Henry Kissinger is still alive. He is 100 years old now. For some reason, war criminals live to ripe old ages. Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled Chile with a tyrannical iron fist for decades after the coup, lived to be 91. Kissinger and Nixon orchestrated the coup that killed Salvador Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile and replaced him with Pinochet, as declassified documents show, “Because Kissinger thought that Allende’s 'model' effect can be insidious." Kissinger overruled aides on military regime's human rights atrocities; told Pinochet in 1976: "We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende." Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize after Nixon committed treason by subverting the Paris Peace Talks before the 1968 election. Is “treason” too strong a word? LBJ used it on November 2nd, 1968 in a conversation with Senater Everettt Dirksen: President Johnson: Now, we told Nixon, as we told you, that . . . well, let me get the transcript.[paraphrasing] “While this was going on, we went out to Thiệu and talked to him and all of ourallied countries. And they all tentatively agreed.” Dirksen: Yeah. President Johnson: “Now, since that agreement, we have had problems develop. First, there’s been speeches that we ought to withdraw troops.” Dirksen: Yeah. President Johnson: That was [Hubert H.] Humphrey [Jr.] and [McGeorge “Mac”] Bundy. Dirksen: Yeah. President Johnson: “Or that we stop bombing without any . . . obtaining anything in return.” Dirksen: Yeah. President Johnson: “Or some of our folks, including some of the old China Lobby, are going to the [South] Vietnamese embassy and saying, ‘Please notify the President that if he’ll hold out till November the 2nd they could get a better deal.’” Dirksen: Uh-huh. President Johnson: Now, I’m reading their hand, Everett. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. Dirksen: That’s right. President Johnson: And they oughtn’t to be doing this. This is treason. [emphasis added] Dirksen: I know. Yet Nixon became President, because Humphrey didn’t know how to use this information in the last week of the election, or chose not to. It has been suggested, with evidence, that the reason why Nixon tried so hard to prevent the Pentagon Papers from being released, even though they showed Kennedy and Johnson in an ill light, is that Nixon was mortally afraid that his treason would be exposed in the papers. That’s why the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s therapist was broken into. But back to Allende. NPR has an article up yesterday, The U.S. set the stage for a coup in Chile. It had unintended consequences at home. The Nation has a piece on 50 Years After “the Other 9/11”: Remembering the Chilean Coup. And the NY Times had an op-ed yesterday “I Watched a Democracy Die. I Don’t Want to Do It Again.”, written by Ariel Dorfman. Dorfman “a former cultural adviser in President Salvador Allende’s government, is the author of the novel ‘The Suicide Museum.’” Dorfman’s piece starts: For 50 years, I have been mourning the death of President Salvador Allende of Chile, who was overthrown in a coup the morning of Sept. 11, 1973. For 50 years, I have mourned his death and the many deaths that followed: the execution and disappearance of my friends and so many more unknown women and men whom I marched with through the streets of Santiago in defense of Mr. Allende and his unprecedented attempt to build a socialist society without bloodshed. I can pinpoint the moment I realized that our peaceful revolution had failed. It was early on the morning of the coup in the nation’s capital, when I heard the announcement that a junta led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet was now in control of Chile. Later that night, huddling in a safe house, already being hunted by Chile’s new rulers, I listened to a radio broadcast that Mr. Allende had been found dead at La Moneda, the presidential palace and seat of government, after the armed forces bombed it and assaulted it with tanks and troops. My first reaction was dread. Dread of what could happen to me, to my family and friends, dread at what was about to happen to my country. And then I was overcome by a sorrow that has never quite lifted from my heart. We had been given a unique, luminous chance to change history — a left-wing, democratically elected government in Latin America that was set to be an inspiration to the world. And then we had blown it. Not only did General Pinochet end our dreams; he ushered in an era of brutal human rights violations. During his military rule, from 1973 to 1990, more than 40,000 people were subjected to physical and psychological torture. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans — political opponents, independent critics or innocent civilians suspected of having links to them — were jailed, murdered, persecuted or exiled. More than a thousand men and women are still among the desaparecidos, the disappeared, with no funerals and no graves. How our nation remembers, 50 years later, the historical trauma of our common past could not be more important than it is now, when the temptation of authoritarian rule is once again on the rise among Chileans, as it is, of course, across the world. Many conservatives in Chile today argue that the 1973 coup was a necessary correction. Behind their justification lurks a dangerous nostalgia for a strongman who supposedly will deal with the problems of our time by imposing order, crushing dissent and restoring some sort of mythical national identity. You can read all the sordid details in the links above. As for me, as a young college DJ on WESU, 88.1 FM, the radio voice of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and later on WRUV, UVM’s station in Burlington, Vermont, while Berne was Mayor, playing music to commemorate the coup. I would play Arlo Guthrie’s song “Victor Jara,” about the young musician activist killed in the coup. I would play Pete Seeger reading what was reported to be the last poem written by Victor Jara, smuggled out of “Estadio Chile” where he reportedly was killed. I would play Holly Near singing “It Could Have Been Me,” the second verse of which is about Victor Jara, and “Hay Una Mujer Desaparacida”, a woman disappeared in Chile. And I would play Tom Paxton, singing “The White Bones of Allende.” The song begins with Paxton reciting “Mr. Blue,” a song about life in a totalitarian regime (It begins: “Good Mornng Mr. Blue/We have our eyes on you…. The last verse includes, “But never think again, that you can think again/or you’ll get something you’ll remember.”). he then seques into the searing song about, not Allende, but Kissinger. Which is where we came in. It begins with this first verse and chorus: You are flying to Vienna, you have phones aboard your airplane, You sit at oaken tables, and you speak in solemn tones. While the leaders of all nations keep a deep respectful silence You’re moving pawns and bishpps made of flesh and blood and bones. But the white bones of Allende and the scattered bones of Chile Are the scream that breaks the silence of the thousands blown away. Oh the white bones of Allende and the scattered bones of Chile Are not silent, they are screaming, they’re your Peace Prize, Doctor K. [emphasis added] Steve Goodman, incidentally, who wrote “The City of New Orleans” is on guitar and backup vocals for this live performance. I would play this every year on the day closest to September 11th, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, until I aged out of college radio. I did so because I felt it important to remember what this country did, and who did it. *** 22 years ago, my wife and I drove into work from Brooklyn, through what was then called the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and drove up West Street, directly alongside the Twin Towers, passing them 15 minutes before the first plane hit. I volunteered as a grief counselor that night at a makeshift morgue set up by the Red Cross. We had to return to Brooklyn over what was then the Triboro Bridge, and there were greasy ashes on the street outside our building where the wind blew, burnt-edged fragments of ledgers and other documents, and the unforgetable smell of death. I write this in no way to diminish the anniversary of that day, or the grief or the loss on that day and the days to come, but instead to remember that 50 years ago, America took down a democratically elected democracy. From the declassified NSA documents: Among the key revelations in the documents: On September 12, eight days after Allende's election, Kissinger initiated discussion on the telephone with CIA director Richard Helm's about a preemptive coup in Chile. "We will not let Chile go down the drain," Kissinger declared. "I am with you," Helms responded. Their conversation took place three days before President Nixon, in a 15-minute meeting that included Kissinger, ordered the CIA to "make the economy scream," and named Kissinger as the supervisor of the covert efforts to keep Allende from being inaugurated. Since the Kissinger/Helms "telcon" was not known to the Church Committee, the Senate report on U.S. intervention in Chile and subsequent histories date the initiation of U.S. efforts to sponsor regime change in Chile to the September 15 meeting. Kissinger ignored a recommendation from his top deputy on the NSC, Viron Vaky, who strongly advised against covert action to undermine Allende. On September 14, Vaky wrote a memo to Kissinger arguing that coup plotting would lead to "widespread violence and even insurrection." He also argued that such a policy was immoral: "What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets .… If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us, e.g. to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.? It is hard to argue this." After U.S. covert operations, which led to the assassination of Chilean Commander in Chief of the Armed forces General Rene Schneider, failed to stop Allende's inauguration on November 4, 1970, Kissinger lobbied President Nixon to reject the State Department's recommendation that the U.S. seek a modus vivendi with Allende. In an eight-page secret briefing paper that provided Kissinger's clearest rationale for regime change in Chile, he emphasized to Nixon that "the election of Allende as president of Chile poses for us one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere" and "your decision as to what to do about it may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will make this year." Not only were a billion dollars of U.S. investments at stake, Kissinger reported, but what he called "the insidious model effect" of his democratic election. There was no way for the U.S. to deny Allende's legitimacy, Kissinger noted, and if he succeeded in peacefully reallocating resources in Chile in a socialist direction, other countries might follow suit. "The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it." The next day Nixon made it clear to the entire National Security Council that the policy would be to bring Allende down. "Our main concern," he stated, "is the prospect that he can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success." [emphasis added] In the days following the coup, Kissinger ignored the concerns of his top State Department aides about the massive repression by the new military regime. He sent secret instructions to his ambassador to convey to Pinochet "our strongest desires to cooperate closely and establish firm basis for cordial and most constructive relationship." When his assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs asked him what to tell Congress about the reports of hundreds of people being killed in the days following the coup, he issued these instructions: "I think we should understand our policy-that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was." The United States assisted the Pinochet regime in consolidating, through economic and military aide, diplomatic support and CIA assistance in creating Chile's infamous secret police agency, DINA. At the height of Pinochet's repression in 1975, Secretary Kissinger met with the Chilean foreign minister, Admiral Patricio Carvajal. Instead of taking the opportunity to press the military regime to improve its human rights record, Kissinger opened the meeting by disparaging his own staff for putting the issue of human rights on the agenda. "I read the briefing paper for this meeting and it was nothing but Human Rights," he told Carvajal. "The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there are not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State." As Secretary Kissinger prepared to meet General Augusto Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976, his top deputy for Latin America, William D. Rogers, advised him make human rights central to U.S.-Chilean relations and to press the dictator to "improve human rights practices." Instead, a declassified transcript of their conversation reveals, Kissinger told Pinochet that his regime was a victim of leftist propaganda on human rights. "In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here," Kissinger told Pinochet. "We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende." We commemorate 9/11 every year. 22 years ago, Towers toppled here in New York City. 50 years ago, the US toppled a democracy and replaced it with terror. It’s important to remember how fragile democracy is. The architect of this coup is still alive. And, as of yet, unscathed. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/11/2192658/-50-years-ago-on-9-11-Nixon-and-Kissinger-killed-Allende-and-Chile-s-Socialist-Democracy Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/