Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Why Allende had to die (1974). Marquez analyzed the coup plots of the Chilean army, the US imperialists and the Chilean oligarchy. A wonderful tribute to Salvador Allende and his tragic martyrdom, but also giving important insights/criticisms into the gradualistic or reformist road to socialism. In that final battle, with the country at the mercy of uncontrolled and unforeseen forces of subversion, Allende was still bound by legality. The most dramatic contradiction of his life was being at the same time the congenital foe of violence and a passionate revolutionary. He believed that he had resolved the contradiction with the hypothesis that conditions in Chile would permit a peaceful evolution toward socialism under bourgeois legality. Experience taught him too late that a system cannot be changed by a government without power... ...He resisted for six hours with a sub-machine gun that Castro had given him and was the first weapon that Allende had ever fired. He would have been 64 years old next July. His greatest virtue was following through but fate could grant him only that rare and tragic greatness of dying in armed defence of an anachronistic booby of bourgeois law, defending a Supreme Court of Justice that had repudiated him but would legitimise his murderers, defending a miserable Congress that had declared him illegitimate but which was to bend complacently before the will of the usurpers, defending the freedom of opposition parties that had sold their souls to fascism, defending the whole moth-eaten paraphernalia of a shitty system that he had proposed abolishing but without a shot being fired. The drama took place in Chile, to the greater woe of the Chileans, but it will pass into history as something that has happened to us all, children of this age, and it will remain in our lives for ever. newstatesman/world-affairs/2013/04/why-allende-had-die
Posted on: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 20:44:50 +0000
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