Another September 11th

Today, September 11th, marks 22 years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the U.S., the cowardly acts of terror of a band of Islamic jihadists. Today also marks 50 years since the infamous coup d’état that deposed Chilean President Salvador Allende. 

Led by General Augusto Pinochet, a group of military officers executed a well-planned attack on the presidential palace of La Moneda, after securing strategic parts of the city of Santiago. The palace was bombed and, eventually, Allende died by his own hand (though for decades the myth spread that he was assassinated by the Chilean army). Inside, stockpiles of Soviet weapons and documents linking Allende to Cuba’s regime were found.

None of this, of course, is ever mentioned by the mainstream and left-wing press. The simple fact is that the International Left and its accomplices have never forgiven Pinochet—or the conservative, Catholic, and working-class Chileans who supported him and his authoritarian government (or President Nixon and the U.S. government, who provided assistance)—for having thwarted what was to have been, effectively, another bloody Cuban-style revolution. 

(In the years and decades that followed, reams of documents were made available to the public indicating that there was an immense degree of coordination between Allende’s government and the Castro regime in Cuba, as well as other sinister revolutionary left-wing forces across South America.)

So, why would we, The European Conservative, devote any pages to a country in South America—or to a person as notorious and divisive (and defamed) as Pinochet? In part, it is because we think the coup was necessary, and that he and his officers were on the correct side. For months, they watched the government of Allende’s Unidad Popular mismanage everything, create economic chaos, instigate social unrest, and allow crime and insecurity to skyrocket. We should not forget that these are the tried-and-true tactics of totalitarian governments everywhere (Venezuela, most recently). The army was compelled to act.

Additionally, we firmly believe that Chile, like so many other countries outside of Europe, is an extension of the very best of the West, having benefitted from the influences of the Spanish, the English, the Germans, and others. Despite being located on the other side of the world, the country, in many ways, represented the greatness and true diversity of Western Civilization—in the same way that the United States, too, reflected some of the best of Europe, as Russell Kirk and others have written. 

These are facts now forgotten. Our job is to remind others about this august European legacy.

Finally, to speak favorably of such a presumably scandalous event as the coup in Chile on our website (and in the pages of our forthcoming Fall edition: available in a few weeks!) is to push back against all those in the media, academia, and elsewhere who express outrage over what happened 50 years ago in Chile on September 11th, and who have blindly swallowed the line that the only thing to have come of that event was years of torture and murder. Not so. The violent regime change ended an inchoate revolutionary process, and later brought prosperity and riches to the country. It led to the creation of a pension fund system for all Chileans (later undermined by center-left governments) and to security on the streets of its cities. (This is now being reversed under President Boric, an avowed Communist.)

Too often, our cultural elites are quick to point to the missing and the dead but ignore the plight of millions who have suffered under the boot of Marxist-led totalitarian regimes. They are quick to express outrage over conservative or military governments, accusing those who deposed Allende of trampling on a “democratically elected government.” They ignore the fact that this was merely a leftist totalitarian regime in a democratic disguise—and that, left unstopped, Allende would have ushered in a revolution that surely would have brought even greater misery and death to untold numbers of Chileans.

Enough of the hypocritical outrage of the Left and their accomplices. Let’s instead look at what happened in Chile 50 years ago soberly, carefully, fairly—and through the lens of civilization, recognizing the many actors (in Chile and elsewhere) who tried to do what was best for the preservation of political order, of the good, and of the beauty of their country.