Venezuela and the hypocrisy of US imperialism
11 September 2018
Tuesday, September 11 marks the 45th anniversary of one the bloodiest and most tragic events of the second half of the twentieth century: the US-backed fascist military coup that ushered in a quarter-century of police-state dictatorship in the South American country of Chile.
Tens of thousands of Chilean workers, students and left-wing intellectuals were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured and murdered on the orders of a military cabal headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The Pinochet regime carried out these crimes in the closest collaboration with the Nixon White House, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.
What had been a situation of immense revolutionary potential, marked by mass workers’ mobilizations, strikes and factory occupations, was turned into a bloody defeat, a nightmare of killing and repression. This was thanks to the betrayals of the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, backed by the Stalinist Chilean Communist Party, which sought to suppress the offensive of the Chilean workers and brought General Pinochet into Allende’s cabinet.
That these crimes are not merely a regrettable legacy from some long distant past was driven home by two events within the past two weeks.
The first was the delivery of a eulogy at the funeral of Republican Senator John McCain by the 94-year-old Henry Kissinger, America’s preeminent surviving war criminal. As national security adviser and then secretary of state under Richard Nixon, Kissinger was intimately involved in both the planning of the Chilean coup and the support given by Washington to the atrocities carried out by Pinochet. It was Kissinger who made the infamous statement, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go…