On the Other 9/11: Kissinger, Pinochet, Obama

Pinochet didn’t cough up either, of course.

from an American perspective – well, there’s no excusing the immorality of undisguised imperialism. From the perspective of a Non-Aligned Movement nation that must contend with the reality of superpowers brawling for control, Allende’s sheer incompetence at foreign policy is pretty stunning – as with Pinochet and Park, the sensible course was to nod at everything the American ambassadors ask for, make some nominal changes, then ignore them once they leave the room. It’s humiliating, but that’s the fate of weak countries, and it’s more survivable than confrontation – if you’re not prepared to take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

It’s not as if US or Soviet foreign services are superhuman geniuses, especially operating at vast distances and seeking conflicting agendas – manipulating the emperor’s envoys is, you know, your job.

many socialist leaders in the postcolonial 60s and 70s didn’t seem to realize was that their fellow socialists in the developed Western or Soviet world, promising them international solidarity and foreign aid, were lying to their face. Even assuming their colleagues could achieve and maintain office – rare in itself – domestic political maneuvering would always trump foreign solidarity. But that’s sort of understandable in a lot of Afro-Asia, dominated by fellow socialist postcolonial governments who are understandably confused about the UK Labour Party’s real priorities (hey guys! Please hold a lot of sterling. I promise not to devalue it. Good, now I’m going to devalue it. It’s the IMF’s fault, you see. Now I’m going to join the EEC and abolish imperial preferences, in a obscure domestic struggle over French agricultural subsidies that will utterly shatter your export industries, but nobody in Britain will notice or care. Have fun! Isn’t independence grand?).

But what is Allende’s excuse, as a historical actor? It’s not like Chile had just broken away from Spain and had no foreign affairs experience

Hopefully, either I really closed the blockquote, or

this

will fix it.

oldster 09.11.15 at 3:22 pm @ 7:
‘… I find it hard to believe that this is being fairly represented, or represented in full. Why would Obama advocate for this? …’

How about he’s a slick operator who talks out of both sides of his mouth?

To clarify: there is more than enough to indict neoliberal economics on their own merits, not through guilt by association.

to make Murc @11 concrete, the weasel phrase is in dispute settlement treaties in recent cases has been the “legitimate” public interest, where first-world sense of democratic mandate get to determine the legitimate powers of states, but third-world priorities are given little credibility.

First-world populations with governments that have deep pockets for transitory assistance and generally functional judicial and public services tend to have different priorities from third-world populations, of course. Privatization that is merely annoying to a middle-class white-collar union may entail starvation elsewhere.

this is, if anything, a logical extension on how human rights more generally are normally defined (anyone feel like polling the 23% of the world’s population that is Muslim on GLBT rights…? No…? How about the 15% of the population that is African, 90% of which is Christian or Muslim? So one day the World Bank goes to Uganda and says, you know, we don’t like these anti-gay laws you have…). We say: democracy is tempered by liberalism. Well, takings laws and empty-shell jurisprudence are part of bourgeois liberalism. Was this ever surprising?

my guess is that these ISDS mechanisms will be rammed through somehow in the near future, and two generations from now, political movements in the periphery will have become extremely practiced at finding sympathetic political partners in the center – picking a battle in Bogota based on sentiment in Maryland.

Allende’s actions relating to Anaconda and Kennecott are why ISDS is useful to poor countries. In order to give foreign investors the confidence to invest in a country they would prefer to know that their assets won’t simply be seized without compensation. His government had retrospectively decided that some of the profits had been ‘excessive’ and retroactively taxed it. That sort of thing makes mining companies reluctant to invest, and largely stops other companies altogether. The miners will only mine and will set up their processing operations in more reliable countries. ISDS provides poor countries with a way of reassuring investors that the government will not behave lawlessly. Basically there can be a real benefit from tying your hands.

A chronic problem in Latin America has been populist politicians expropriating the property of unpopular foreign corporations.

“A chronic problem in Latin America has been populist politicians expropriating the property of unpopular foreign corporations.”

Perhaps it is the foreign corporations that are the problem. What makes them unpopular in the first place? It is not simply that the profit.

The problem is that fear of future expropriation deters foreign investment in the fist place. The fear of the regime, or a future regime, seizing their property or arbitrarily changing regulations in an unfair manner, can deter investment.

Companies can be unpopular for many reasons, some good some bad. Monsanto for example is hated by a lot of people for no apparent reason. Simply not liking a victim is no reason to deny them justice. Being rich and foreign was often enough to favour a politically well connected local business against you.

ISDS facilitates the transfer of capital intensive work to poor countries. Things like oil refineries are generally based in rich countries which tend not to seize property in this way.

ISDS tribunals have tended to be very negative on discriminatory regulations that appear to have been brought in with the real intent of favouring domestic businesses. E.g. Canada lost a case under NAFTA over it banning the import of a fuel additive MMT. There were legitimate safety concerns but the domestic manufacture and use was not banned so the claim that safety was the real reason wad not convincing. It was clearly protectionist.

On the contrary, the reasons some people hate Monsanto are discernible; and that hatred doesn’t seem prevent Monsanto from engaging in foreign trade.

Is there any evidence that fear of appropriation has significantly impacted foreign investment? Do you have examples in mind – which companies and which countries?

When you actually look into it the reasons people give for hating Monsanto are mostly lies. Firstly there’s the claim about it suing farmers. Monsanto isn’t litigious frankly it is if anything excessively reluctant to sue. It has sued farmers who wilfully breach licences.

The agent orange and PCP claims connect with stuff made by the chemicals division that old Monsanto sold off in 1997 as Solutia and was bought by Eastman in 2012. After Monsanto merged with Pharmacia & Upjohn in 1999 the combined group sold off its agricultural division as a new company also called Monsanto in 2000. Pharmecia, the legal successor of the old Monsanto, was bought by Pfizer.

Given that the ostensible reasons are either outright lies, exaggerations, misrepresentation of normal practice, insane conspiracy theories or have a fairly tenuous connection to the current business. The actual level of hatred seems utterly irrational. Monsanto has been deemed evil for thinking that GM might actually be a safe and effective means of producing seeds with desirable traits and selling those seeds to farmers.

Put another way, you think the reasons some people don’t like Monsanto aren’t good enough. So what? Is there some Monsanto-Allende-Pinochet nexus you’re going to expound? Or is Monsanto unrelated to the matter, and you just picked them because you think they’re unfairly maligned? Surely you don’t claim that companies commit no sins as foreign investors?

> Put another way, you think the reasons some people don’t like Monsanto aren’t good enough.

Not at all: he’s not calling them mistaken, he’s calling them liars. Everyone agrees with him, really, it’s just that some people deny it. There’s only one proper conclusion: any apparent disagreement is comes not from different values or knowledge, but wickedness. No real differences between people, just lies to stir up trouble.

As always: cognitive problems with theory-of-mind and empathy. Next we’ll get the passionate emotional outburst that he’s the only one thinking rationally.

Seeds with royalties is a ridiculous concept, and canola with royalties is a bigger insult given that canola itself is a product of public research.

How do you think seed companies work?

Seed patents were introduced so that companies could recoup the considerable time and effort they put into developing new varieties. For many crops they are F1 hybrids which as they don’t breed true must be bought annually. Potatoes are normally bought as the seed potatoes are grown in places with soil inhospitable to blight. A few crops like soya do breed true and the seed can be kept patents allow seed companies to invest in development. It’s not as if the old varieties aren’t available.

The anti-GM movement is the left wing equivalent of climate change denialism.

And yet the copper mines remained nationalized. I believe, in fact, that they still are. I guess it all comes down to whose hands and what hands are to be trusted…

How about the possibility that the charge of excessive profits (iow, exploitation) by Anaconda was justified and well documented? Just as say Equador’s charges against Chevron are completely justified and fully documented, have been found valid by the Equadorian court system and yet Chevron is never going to pay a cent. There is no way that a third world country will ever be able to enforce its domestic laws against foreign corporations if corporate sponsored outsiders are allowed to strike down national laws and declare national court orders invalid, just like that.

Also: There is quite a bit of irony in arguing that Allende’s expropriation was unjust and illegal but a military coup to protect the interests of foreign companies by killing thousands of people and imposing a brutal dictatorship is a-okay. Few Pinochet apologists are willing to say it explicitly but that’s what it boils down to (and that’s how Western governments talked about the matter although mostly in secret).

Do you seriously think developing seed varieties is cost free?

The farmers believe that the advantage of the seeds to the farmer exceeded the licence fee. The fees cover the development costs and provide the company with a share of the profits. The farmer also gets a share of the profits, the margin between the benefit from using the seed and the cost of the seed.

If they didn’t have a licence fee they would have to use another technique of getting paid, either only develop F1 hybrids or use terminator genes.

Incidently one of the other lies about Monsanto concerns them Dow developed them Monsanto acquired them when it bought the biotech interests of Dow. Monsanto has stated it has no intention of commercialising them. And it is really hard to imagine any way terminator genes could harm the environment, they are self-limiting by definition they are either lethal or only allow survival under artificial conditions, so cannot escape into the environment.

Look feeling that Allende was pursuing some policies that were seriously counterproductive and he was associating with despots like Castro does not mean that I found the coup in any way acceptable or think of Pinochet as anything other than a mass-murdering tyrant.

People talk about what they care about.

[your actions reflect your thoughts… and in a reflection you can see the original.]

Do you seriously think developing seed varieties is cost free?

No. Do you seriously believe that Monsanto is just “recouping” costs?

The other, other 9/11: Theodor Adorno’s birthday.

Independent of the various parties to the dispute, the normal objective with courts. ICSID, run by the World Bank, for example uses a three member tribunal each party appoints one arbitrator and the president is jointly chosen. None can be a national of or the same nationality as either party.

Monsanto are a business. Their product is worth more to their customers than it costs their customers. They are perfectly legitimately making a profit. To give some perspective Monsanto is slightly smaller than Starbucks. Selling herbicide resistant seeds and a very low toxicity herbicide to use with them in a less labour intensive form of farming probably does more for human welfare than selling coffee.

Plume; I’m not going to read a book on economics on your recommendation. You can’t even grasp marginal price theory, elementary supply and demand or how prices act as a signal.

I recommend you try reading some decent popular economics. Tim Harford is pretty good. The Undercover Economist covers microeconomics while the Undercover Economist Strikes Back covers macroeconomics.

Brett @48,

I understand all of those concepts. Your problem is you think mainstream economic theory works in the real world. It doesn’t. It’s never worked according to Hoyle.

And I was likely reading advanced economic texts before you were even born.

Btw, google the effects of Monsanto’s Roundup on humans, bees and the environment overall. That you would try to suggest they make low toxicity pesticides is ridiculous. Roundup causes cancer and a host of other dangerous maladies in humans, and is wiping out the bee population in America and elsewhere by the tens of millions.

Please put down your pom poms. I feel embarrassed for you.

Oh, and if you’re referring to our discussions about alternatives to capitalism, it is you who needs serious remedial classes in logic.

I understand the way capitalism works, backward and forward, and I understand mainstream capitalist theory. I also understand that when the economic system is replaced by something radically different, the old rules no longer apply. Your entire argument against alternatives was to say, “Well, that’s not how it works in capitalism.” But it’s not capitalism any longer. It’s something radically different.

Again, it’s absurd to criticize a move in Chess because it doesn’t work in the game of Risk. All of those mainstream micro- and macroeconomic theories are null and void, once the game is entirely different. They don’t even work well within the context of their own game (capitalism), and they don’t apply in any way, shape or form when the game is 100% different.

Plume

You may have been reading advanced economics, but you don’t seem to have enough grasp of the basics to understand them.

The 2012 Seralini paper is awful and has been retracted (the rats used have a strong tendency to develop cancer), glyphosate is about the least toxic herbicide that we know of, its primary effect is on a chemical pathway only present in growing plants, it doesn’t seem to have any significant toxicity outside that. Most of the anti-GM articles are based either on that paper or a handful of other dubious studies.

The claims about bees are linked to neonicotinoids not glyphosate.

The Temporary Name

I said that seed patents were introduced only so that companies could recoup their investment. I didn’t say that that was all that the companies used them for. Just that that is at a least part of the reason they were introduced.

I said that seed patents were introduced only so that companies could recoup their investment. I didn’t say that that was all that the companies used them for. Just that that is at a least part of the reason they were introduced.

It takes talent to contradict oneself so purely and clearly in the space of twenty-five words.

Coup and recoup.

—-

This is an excellent post, Corey.

Brett Dunbar:

‘Monsanto isn’t litigious frankly it is if anything excessively reluctant to sue.’

‘If anything, our corporate overlords take too much pity on us’

@61 Twill be very interesting. The Labour ‘brain trust’ sees the victory as a ‘disaster,’ which evidently means getting wiped out in Scotland and losing an ‘austerity-light’ campaign represents success? What happens if the public actually rallies to Labour? The coup plotters must be dancing on eggshells right now. Refusing to rally around the leader isn’t the best way to build a position as a viable alternative.

Brett @54,

We could trade barbs back and forth, but I won’t keep this going. Suffice it to say, yes, I grasp the basics and moved beyond them decades ago. They aren’t difficult in the slightest. Capitalist economic theory is easy, though cheerleaders like to pretend that it’s complex and only certain people can really understand it. They invent a lot of nonsensical jargon to build up the myth that this is esoteric knowledge, and only accessible to a few special initiates.

Nonsense. It’s easy and it’s boring.

Where you go wrong is to mistake criticism of how capitalism actually works in reality with failure to grasp capitalist theory. Where you go wrong is to conflate that theory with real world impact of our current system. For you, if someone doesn’t buy into the myths, they’re not understanding the system. Sorry, but it’s you who clearly don’t understand how our system actually works. You’re far too busy clinging to its myths to do that.

But you’re not alone. In general, those myths basically overwhelm conservatives and turn them toward child-like adoration. Move a bit further left, to the center and center-left, and you still get the silly myth-clinging, but it comes with some ambivalence. One has to get well outside the box, to the left of “liberal,” before we see economists stop the clinging. Marxian economists and non-aligned leftists don’t cling to those myths. They debunk them and show capitalism for what it is. Cheerleaders can’t do that. They’re too blinded by capitalist fictions.

You can have the last word.

TM @65,

Very well said.

The book I recommended above, The Making of Global Capitalism, details this, extensively. Its two authors don’t pass judgment. They just present the facts. The facts scream out for the judgment you render, etc.

Another aspect of these tribunals. More and more of them are using international trade agreements to prevent even dissent, to make it illegal to even discuss what they’re doing on behalf of MNCs. It’s illegal in America, for instance, to film the despicable practices in our beef produce factories. And through “trade secrets” legislation, backed by these tribunals, the EPA can’t even study the vast majority of chemicals being used in our environment. They are currently roughly 80,000. Well over 60,000 are off limits for even government study . . . . which has led to this:

The EPA has only had in-depth studies done on a few hundred, and has only banned five in its entire history. It’s actually quite amazing that we know any of the hazards MNCs dump into our water, our land, our air. They’ve rigged the system to prevent exposure to the nth degree.

The paranoia about ISDS procedures is fairly astonishing. I actually told you how ICSID chooses the three member panel. The complainant choses one member, the respondent choses one member and the president is chosen jointly. The tribunal members must not be a national of or of the same nationality as either party. The tribunal members are chosen from an international panel to which each member state may nominate up to four members.

There is a reasonably extensive case history as these provisions have existed for decades in various bilateral and multilateral treaties. They have a real benefit in increasing investment.

Capitalism is global. It doesn’t worry about borders. It’s not saying anything to claim that international tribunals are supposedly careful about representing different countries. And even that isn’t true. It works for just one. The nation of capital, with America being its war machine.

Plume it is abundantly clear that you do not grasp the basics. Simple microeconomics like prices functioning as a signalling mechanism. You do not seem to grasp how competition limits profit margins, or how the market matches desired production to limited available resources.

Brett,

See #64.

@74,

:>)

Daragh,

You try to make it sound like he didn’t win the election. He won a plurality, which was all he needed. And he likely would have won more than that, if not for American influence.

Here’s Wiki on earlier attempts to control Chile’s political system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende

Declassified documents show that from 1962 through 1964, the CIA spent a total of $2.6 millions to finance the campaign of Eduardo Frei and spent $3 millions in anti-Allende propaganda “to scare voters away from Allende’s FRAP coalition”. The CIA considered its role in the victory of Frei a great success.[22][23] They argued that “the financial and organizational assistance given to Frei, the effort to keep Durán in the race, the propaganda campaign to denigrate Allende—were ‘indispensable ingredients of Frei’s success'”, and they thought that his chances of winning and the good progress of his campaign would have been doubtful without the covert support of the Government of the United States.[24] Thus, in 1964 Allende lost once more as the FRAP candidate, polling 38.6% of the votes against 55.6% for Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei. As it became clear that the election would be a race between Allende and Frei, the political right – which initially had backed Radical Julio Durán– settled for Frei as “the lesser evil”.

Brett Dunbar @68

The paranoia about ISDS procedures is fairly astonishing. I actually told you how ICSID chooses the three member panel. The complainant choses one member, the respondent choses one member and the president is chosen jointly. The tribunal members must not be a national of or of the same nationality as either party. The tribunal members are chosen from an international panel to which each member state may nominate up to four members.

Brett, does the ICSID Convention allow parties to bring claims for “expected future lost profits” as opposed to claims based on damages that have (allegedly) already occurred? If not, then ICSID is not substantively comparable to ISDS (at least as reported in the OP). If you look at the Wiki page on ICSID under ‘case studies’, you’ll see that the typical ICSID case is a (crushingly boring, btw) claim of the sort “multinational company X claims host country Z did something naughty in violation of their contract and seeks damages and/or compensation in the amt of Y millions.” IOW, it’s backward-looking. Not about future expected lost profits.

Corey – while I’ll concede your knowledge of Chilean history is inarguably more in depth than mine, I don’t think the above is demonstrative of Allende’s democratic credentials, so much as his commitment to non-violence. Ditto with the moderation – and when your platform consists of seizing private property and sending those affected a bill for the trouble, ‘moderation’ is always going to be a relative term.

@Layman – “Despite high inflation and a recession, Allende actually increased his party’s electoral performance in 1973; however by this time, landowners and other wealthier elites had broken his coalition with the next-largest party, who in turn joined the opposition.”

That more or less contradicts what you say beforehand, and an initial growth spurt followed by over 5% contraction in GDP annually in 1972 and 73 isn’t much of an advertisement for Allende’s economic policies. That Popular Unity increased its share of the vote does not change the fact that the opposition CODE won an absolute majority in 1973 (and beat Popular Unity by over 10 points). To argue that these results represents a democratic mandate for Allende and PU is not terribly convincing IMHO.

As a broader point before retiring – yes Allende showed an admirable commitment to non-violence, and his election was perfectly constitutional under Chile’s system. And yes Pincohet’s coup and subsequent reign were barbarous and inexcusable. But the policies Allende implemented were both a) opposed by a broad coalition of political forces with their own democratic mandates, which heavily outweighed his b) utterly unworkable and soon catastrophic in their practical effect.

Point b is the more important one in my mind – the reason that state socialism has almost universally been accompanied by political authoritarianism is that it leads to such terrible economic results that its proponents cannot stay in power through democratic means. This can range from out and out Stalinism to Chavez’ much milder soft-authoritarianism (though without high commodity prices, Maduro is increasingly reliant on out and out thuggery), but all experience to date suggests that ‘democratic socialism’ is probably an inherent contradiction in terms.

. . . the reason that state socialism Chicago-style free market neoliberalism has almost universally been accompanied by political authoritarianism is that it leads to such terrible economic results that its proponents cannot stay in power through democratic means.

Thus, history may be written as a series of emendations.

Stephen @84
in the three decades before Allende’s election, Communist coups or military intervention had occurred in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Jugoslavia, Albania, China, Tibet, North Korea, Cuba

China and Cuba were indigenous revolutions; they got external assistance but the main impetus was internal. That is prob. most obviously the case w/r/t China. The Chinese Communists coming to power in 1949 was a result of a prolonged, costly civil war (and, more broadly, a successful peasant-based revolution). Regardless of how one feels about the outcome (and there’s no question that Mao’s rule killed millions of people), to lump China in with some of these other examples of externally arranged coups or invasions is not accurate.

The most ‘mainstream’ textbooks on China — written by non-leftist scholars in the capitalist West — do not characterize the Chinese revolution as anything other than a revolution. I don’t know where you’d find the rather absurd notion that it was a ‘coup’ (i.e. a swift, forceful change of govt carried out at the top w/o need for much or any popular support), except possibly in some archive of Kuomintang propaganda or in the archives of right-wing US groups during the “who lost China” hysteria of the ’50s.

Do I want to spend the rest of the day on which Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour party leadership election reading the likes of Daragh McDowell’s and Brett Dunbar’s qualified defences of mass-murdering Chilean para-fascist dictatorships? Somehow I think I’ll pass.

What part of Pinochet was scum is giving you difficulties?

I was commented that one of the reasons for ISDS was that some third world governments had a history of seizing assets of unpopular foreign corporations. So that if they wanted to attract investment in future a way of making a credible commitment not to do that can help.

Why should a sovereign country, responsive to the needs of its people, allow foreign investment in the first place? The answer, of course, is that it should if it is ultimately beneficial to the people. If it is not beneficial to the people – if it is instead exploitative – why would it be a good thing for the court system to be ‘impartial’ about that, when by ‘impartial’ you mean ‘give equal weight to the property rights of the foreign investor’?

It’s more interesting than that. See, ISDS provisions only apply to non-citizens, explicitly grant foreign investors greater enforceable rights than locals have: because foreign investors still have access to domestic courts in addition to the ISDS provisions, it’s not even “separate but equal”, but giving foreigners strictly superior and greater rights.

You could argue, “oh but foreigners aren’t members of the polity and have special reason to fear that courts will disregard them”. But there’s nothing unique to foreigners: citizens can be disregarded too, if they’re the wrong sort of citizen.

In the thirties, jews in germany or blacks in the US or kulaks in russia. Today, women in arabia or arabs in israel. For example. These aren’t dead issues. There’s nothing about ISDS that requires that these people be excluded. I mean, that’s how the european human-rights laws work, there’s an international review court established under treaty, and adherence to its judgements is a requirement to keep the benefits the treaty gives each country. There’s no reason — apart from not caring — that you couldn’t make the ISDS provisions work that way, and in fact the only change you’d have to make is to make the ISDS tribunal open to actions by people against their own government.

It never occurs to them. Like I said, people write what they care about, and Brett doesn’t care about marginalised locals. I mean, no doubt he’ll come on and say, “I do! I do really [just not enough to mention it until now for Reasons, yes Reasons]”. And he’ll probably be right. He just doesn’t realise that this has the same real-world end results as not caring at all.

[brett: you could argue it now, but it’s too late. Like I said, people write what they care about. The question is about your motivations, and your motivations show in what you support unprompted. If “people could have their rights disregarded by courts that didn’t regard themselves as accountable to them” were your motivation for supporting ISDS provisions, you’d have acted in accordance with that motivation and raised the issue. You haven’t, so what motivates you isn’t concern for “people”, but concern for “foreigners”.

You don’t probably appreciate this, but we know you better than you know yourself. It’s not hard: you don’t know yourself very well.]

@92 The consequences of a Corbyn win: SNP announces plans to schedule another vote on Independence. http://news.yahoo.com/scottish-nationalists-plan-independence-vote-230853982.html

I realize the Corbyn win is off-topic, but only by degrees. Corbyn was around throughout the time Thatcher welcomed Pinochet and will be well-versed in a lot of the less savory deals Britain had made with dictatorships over the last 50 years. His election, political allies, and plans will be noted by a great many interested parties. I very much hope that after going through the kabuki of resigning on mass, the entire Labour party can start to really debate a wide-range of policies. If Corbyn keeps his feet on the ground and continues to engage in fair-minded dialogue he may yet do very well. It would be wonderful to have a leader who let the party set the actual policies democratically, rather than by focus group.

In retrospect, and regardless of the reasoning of the comment, I feel that I do have to apologise for mentioning the names of Mssrs Putin and Lukashenko, on the one hand, and of Corbyn, on the other, in the same paragraph. The man certainly deserves better. Should have separated them by pressing enter, at least. :) Good luck to him.

A practicing Russianist. Very interesting.

Here’s Ralph Milliband responding to the coup at the time:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/chile-coup-santiago-allende-social-democracy-september-11/

(Poor old dead man! He must have been spinning in his grave at accelerating RPMs these last few years).

It’s long, so I only read half of it due to time constraints, but it’s fairly lucid AFAICT.

@Harold – Technically a ‘political risk analyst’, but Russia/FSU is my main area of focus and I prefer my term.

98: “In order to retain power, it [Venezuela] has just sentenced Leopold Lopez to 14 years in the clink for the crime of demonstrating against government policy.”

The charge under which Lopez was tried and sentenced was incitement of riots. Obviously, trumped-up political charges against a opposition leader. This would never happen in a truly democratic country!

Baltimore police arrested many protesters against police, including several protest leaders.

“Pastor Westley West, 27, of Faith Empowered Ministries, was charged with attempting to incite a riot, malicious destruction of property, disorderly conduct, disturbance of the peace, false imprisonment, and failure to obey, police said.” What has he done? He blocked a street, holding a megaphone. The incident is on video and it is clear he didn’t commit any violent acts, just peaceful blockage. ““Mr. West appeared to be agitated and his observed actions were violent and hostile in nature,” police said.” Mr West is facing a multi year prison sentence.

I don’t think anybody who has followed the news from Venezuela will deny that the opposition has employed protest tactics far more militant than any Baltimore protesters have done, certainly including blocking streets. And nobody will deny that opposition leaders like Lopez incited these events. Yet not a single relevant political actor in the US has even expressed concern over the arrest of peaceful American protesters for blatant political reasons. And not a single national media outlet has even covered West’s arrest or those of other protesters. That is why the US is a democracy and Venezuela isn’t, in case y’all were wondering.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/freddie-gray/bs-md-ci-westley-west-arrest-20150909-story.html

United Russia/Putin is a pragmatic centrist institution. There are three opposition forces: the Communists on the left, also pragmatic, advocating minor tweaks (higher pensions, progressive taxation, etc), nationalists on the right (traditionalism, opposition to both economic and especially social liberalism), and the pro-western liberals. The last one doesn’t even deserve mentioning, as it got no chance whatsoever. It’s hated by everybody, because of experiences of the 1990s. But nationalists have a good chance to advance, if the current western geopolitical bullying and sleazy demonization campaign continue. Siege mentality and all that.

I long wondered why the left wing response to Pinochet is so hysterical. On the scale of objectionable american cold war behavior, no rational analysis would put Pinochet at the top of anyone’s list. After all, let us examine the facts.

First, it’s hardly a demonstration of the ruthless efficiency of the American cold war machine, the CIA’s efforts there were comically inept. The coup that the US actually supported, which took place a few months before Pinochet’s, failed miserably. Repeated investigations, most notably the church committee have shown absolutely no direct American involvement in the successful coup, which is, of course, what you would expect. No sane coup plotter would want anything to do with the clowns that had failed a few months previously.

Second, Allende is hardly a sympathetic character. Pinochet’s coup, it must be remembered, was launched only after the chilean supreme court unanimously condemned Allende, and 2/3s of the parliament outright called for the military to intervene. Allende responded to this massive rejection by labeling it sedition, then blaming congress for the economic problems the country was facing.

Third as far as nasty dictators go, Pinochet would almost certainly be found on the short list of contenders for least nasty. Total body count for his regime is usually considered to be around 3500. There are dozens of other american supported figures who far exceeded that total who get far less attention, even a few that were ruling in LA at the same time.

Despite this, though, Pinochet remains the great bogeyman. The reason, I fear, is depressingly revealed in Corey’s absurd claim that people died “to protect the “future profits” of multinational corporations.” This absurd line must be repeated (And Corey is far from the only one I have seen repeated), like a mantra to ward off evil spirits, because that is precisely what it is. Pinochet is the subject of such disproportionate criticism because he did not build a charnel house the way so many other dictators did, because he did loot his country or allow others to do so, because he did not establish a cult of personality, because he, in the end, stepped down peacefully. He is attacked because if those of a certain world view did not constantly repeat absurdities like “neoliberalism rests atop a graveyard” (ignoring, of course, the much larger graveyards socialism has dug) then they might start to notice that the vast majority of those murdered by their governments in the 20th century were murdered by left wing governments, not right wing. They might start to notice that under Pinochet’s polices, Chile’s standard of living has massively improved, in both absolute and relative terms, and even when using left wing metrics like the HDI, where chile has gone from 85th to 40th, from about average in LA to the top of the heap. In short, he’s savaged because to a certain sort of person, the only thing worse than a right wing dictator who makes his people worse off is a right wing dictator that makes them better off.

This explanation is, of course, not charitable. And normally, I would say that the right is, of course, guilt of the same sort of human weakness and that it too attack the more successful left wing dictators because they threaten the worldview of the people doing the attacking. The trouble is, every single left wing dictatorship of the 20th century I;m familiar with left behind more bodies and less success than Pinochet did. That must have been more of that bad luck you guys are always going on about…..

Where do these people come from?

Collin, you mean that as an insult. Now think about that. Whom are you exactly insulting? You are obviously using the word “autism” as a synonym for the word “stupid”. You are not only being a jerk but a very offensive crude one at that. Do you really wish to parade your ignorance and… actual stupidity, in public like that?

BY spotting. Sorry.

I’m possibly going to regret asking this but does your ‘trolls have autism’ theory have any scientific basis Colin or have you just arrived at it through personal observation? (On the face of it it seems likely to be quite offensive to people with autism, and to those who don’t whom you are misdiagnosing with it.)

Fwiw I have seen studies reported that claim trolls tend to possess certain personality traits – the ‘dark tetrad’ of sadism, machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy:

http://www.dailytech.com/Study+Internet+Trolls+are+the+Prototypical+Everyday+Sadists/article36091.htm

@118 No, I can’t be bothered.

Incidentally are you the same Daragh who gave us the benefit of your wisdom on this thread?

https://crookedtimber.org/2015/05/13/britains-new-government/

So I take it you are the same Daragh. Much is explained.

Colin 112: I’m gonna express my disapproval in the strongest possible terms.

118: What I wrote is word for word demonstrably true and it was easy for you to confirm. A google search for Wesley West does bring up a few hits but none of them in connection with his arrest and charges. The media don’t care about it and none of our politicians care. You predictably claim that the cases are not comparable but they are. The charges against West rely on the same kind of laws that the charges against Lopez rely on. West wasn’t just harassed by the police but officially charged by the prosecutor with charges that carry at least 8 years of prison. I have no doubt that the prosecutor would have no trouble whatsoever to secure a conviction given the way the US judicial system works. Furthermore, and perhaps more to the point, I have no doubt that if there existed an opposition movement in the US comparable in radicalism and militancy to the Venezuelan opposition, then the response by the US state would be every bit as severe as it is in Venezuela. BlackLivesMatter doesn’t even aim at bringing down the government let alone system change – they just ask he police not to kill them, and yet the state has responded with hundreds of arrests. If the US hasn’t currently locked up any radical opposition leaders, that is because we don’t have any radical opposition leaders, not because the US doesn’t do political repression.

TM @123,

This is very, very insightful (and spot on):

I have no doubt that if there existed an opposition movement in the US comparable in radicalism and militancy to the Venezuelan opposition, then the response by the US state would be every bit as severe as it is in Venezuela. BlackLivesMatter doesn’t even aim at bringing down the government let alone system change – they just ask the police not to kill them, and yet the state has responded with hundreds of arrests. If the US hasn’t currently locked up any radical opposition leaders, that is because we don’t have any radical opposition leaders, not because the US doesn’t do political repression.

It’s kind of like a national “no broken windows” policy, with regard to dissent. Since it’s met immediately, at its lowest level, it tends not to ever get beyond the embryonic and particular . . . never against the entire system. As you mention, the government really never even has to go to full bore repression. The system itself pretty much cleanses this automatically before it can develop critical mass. And America’s bizarre love for “the center” has a buttressing effect to keep dissent at bay as well. The media, our educational system, our marketing and ad campaigns, paint centrism, compliance and acquiescence as the norm, to be sought after, pursued, supported . . . . as if all “good Americans” follow that path.

We also have perhaps the most mainstreamed right-wing in the developed world, which acts as another government wing in crushing dissent before it can ever break free of the containment grid. Ironically, conservative “dissent” is allowed, because it’s really a kind of echo of Establishment complaints. That the rich should have even more “freedom” to do as they please than they already do. Only in America is it considered legitimate for the extremely rich and powerful to claim martyr status as the victimized and oppressed. We have a major political party devoted to this meme, this trope throughout the nation and makes sure Americans are bombarded with it 24/7.

In short, American society has been thoroughly colonized by its ruling class, to the point where its own dissent is pretty much the only kind tolerated. Perversely, hypocritically, ironically . . . billionaire dissent is the only kind that gets to live outside the containment grid created by those plutocrats and oligarchs.

@Barry – Allende’s program did receive support initially. Then it turned south and supermajorities demanded he stop. Your characterisation of my criticism is literally the OPPOSITE of what I said.

And as to a ‘superpower deliberately trashing you’ – I don’t see why the US government is obliged to send aid to a country, or US companies to invest in, when the government has made extremely clear that the security of those investments is dubious, at best. You might not like this reality, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

@TM – Perhaps we’re reading different media, but I’ve been struck by the support for Black Lives Matter in much of the press, and the fact that militarisation of the police has entered, however tentatively, into the political debate. I hope you’re wrong about Westley’s prospects in court, and I suspect you will be. But to compare the US Federal Government with Venezuela’s here is just wrong – Obama isn’t directing these prosecutions, nor is the Congress. Separation of powers means just that. Venezuela – not so much.

@Corey – Thank you.

@ 109

None of that excuse making for Pinochet excuses the biggest problem with attempting to justify his tyranny.

Why didn’t he call fresh elections?

Why, did he torture and murder political opponents?

Chile had a long history of constitutional rule, while Allende’s regime had exposed some serious weaknesses in the existing constitution, it had however more or less worked for decades. Drafting a new constitution was something that looked necessary at that point, near two decades of rule by a thug was not.

Some of the weaknesses were thing inherent in the structure of Presidential and Semi-Presidential systems. The Legislature and the President both have an independent popular democratic mandate so neither feel they have any need to back down if they disagree. In Chile as both sides believed the other was defying the will of the people both started acting in extra-constitutional manners.

Daragh 127, US congressional majorities have disapproved of everything Obama has done, including repealing Obamacare more often than anybody can count. Opinion surveys have also reported a majority of Americans disapproving of Obamacare. Still we don’t accept the claim that Obama’s government is illegitimate and his opponents would be justified to orchestrate a coup d’etat to remove him.

Regarding BLM, can you explain why there hasn’t been a peep in the national media about the prosecution of a political activist for mere speech? Why do we hear about any such thing happening in Russia or Venezuela but not in the US? American liberals won’t face reality. They prefer to live in a fantasy world where America is a functioning democracy with ironclad separation of powers and a justice system that is actually just, when all the evidence points to the opposite. As a reminder, the US incarcerates 2 million people, many more in both relative and absolute terms than any other country and 4 times Venezuela’s rate. We know with some confidence that tens of thousands of these prisoners are innocent and many more have been punished more harshly than white affluent defendants would have been because they are minority and/or poor. These facts are not unknown and in their better moments, the US media (in this case particularly the NYT) do report on them. BLM has helped shine a spotlight on these issues and has received some sympathetic attention. But let’s not kid ourselves – human rights abuses happen in this country every day and they happen with the consent and support of a majority of Americans and with the complicity of all branches and levels of the political system. In an honest, fact-based comparison between American and Venezuelan democracy, it would be impossible to conclude that America is the good guy.

Brett, I didn’t say there aren’t important differences between Britain, Russia and Singapore, just that they’re all places that are in practice governed by an elite, not their own people, and hence they are not democracies. On specific parallels, see Chris’ recent post, which predictably provoked Daragh’s ire.

Basically beyond assertion you have nothing. Britain is a democracy as it has real competitive elections. Britain does not prevent the opposition organising effectively. There are a number of states which have formal democracy and legal opposition parties but through manipulation of the media and other practices prevent the opposition being effective. Britain is not one of them.

The existing boundaries overrepresent poorer urban areas with declining populations which are mainly Labour voting. Wales again Labour voting is systematically overrepresented. The boundary changes are expected to reduce the bias against Conservative voting areas.

“Britain is a democracy as it has real competitive elections.”

Odd. Britain is, officially, a constitutional monarchy.

Constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy are perfectly compatible. The government is elected, the head of government is accountable to parliament. The head of state is purely symbolic; all the power has ended up with the House of Commons.

@TM – This is getting tiresome and I’m going to bed, but let’s wrap up.

There’s a massive degree of difference in the treatment of the political opposition by the Venezuelan state and the US. I would also suggest you consider the fact that the Venezuelan state is in such disarray that it has had to introduce rationing of basic foodstuffs and can no longer protect its citizens to the degree that it now has the second-highest homicide rate in the world, when considering the tactics Lopez has adopted or the legitimacy thereof. This is before we get into the fact that in Venezuela, unlike the US or UK, purely electoral politics does not offer the opposition a credible path to power given the authoritarianism of the government.

In short – if you’d like to make like-for-like comparisons between politics Venezuela and relatively stable, well consolidated democratic states, you are free to do so, but you are unlikely to come up with anything of intellectual value in the process.

“all the power has ended up with the House of Commons”

All the power within the constitutional order, as interpreted by the establishment (a major part of which is hereditary royalty/aristocracy). Which is a rather narrow spectrum. Far too narrow to encompass anything that could be reasonably called ‘democracy’.

Daragh, all you do is starting from a negative opinion of Maduro and concluding with a negative opinion or Maduro. There is no actual analysis going on. This incidentally pretty much sums up how most of our MSM media report about Venezuela. It precludes actually learning anything about both Venezuela and your own favorite “democracy”.

The aristocracy has very little political power it’s a remnant. The Lords have fairly limited delaying powers, and given it is mostly appointed, rarely feels justified in using them. The Commons is firmly in control. Nothing else in the constitution matters very much. The PM became definitively a choice of parliament in the 1830s, when William IV was forced to re-appoint Melbourne. The British constitution looks kind of messy as it was improvised over many centuries on a medieval structure without any theoretical structure. Britain is a democracy because enough people in charge of vital parts of the state believe it is a democracy and would obey parliament.

@There’s a massive degree of difference in the treatment of the political opposition by the Venezuelan state and the US.

There’s political opposition in the US? :)

@I would also suggest you consider the fact that the Venezuelan state is in such disarray that it has had to introduce rationing of basic foodstuffs and can no longer protect its citizens to the degree that it now has the second-highest homicide rate in the world, when considering the tactics Lopez has adopted or the legitimacy thereof.

So now economic problems and poor law enforcement automatically make a government, elected or not, illegitimate, and any action against it legitimate? Wow.

@This is before we get into the fact that in Venezuela, unlike the US or UK, purely electoral politics does not offer the opposition a credible path to power given the authoritarianism of the government.

Nonsense. The opposition is not banned and is not excluded from the media. Private media are overwhelmingly pro-opposition. Maduro won by as little as 1% of the vote. He may well lose the next one.

@In short – if you’d like to make like-for-like comparisons between politics Venezuela and relatively stable, well consolidated democratic states, you are free to do so, but you are unlikely to come up with anything of intellectual value in the process.

So we can’t judge the actions of right-wing oppositionists in 3rd world countries by Western standards, but we certainly can judge the actions of left-wing governments in 3rd world countries by Western standards. The intellectual value – and intellectual honesty – in your comments is mindboggling.

@F. Foundling –

Thanks for the blatant mischaracterisations and lack of interest in engaging. For the record, yes, when a government does such a poor job of administering the state that the result is near social collapse, that does indeed effect its legitimacy. My argument is that the social and political context in Venezuela is extremely different from that in the US (not to mention that same said opposition media has faced continuous harassment in the past IIRC, or that your confidence in Maduro’s commitment to democratic norms). I also didn’t use the patronising, and simply incorrect, descriptor of ‘third world’.

But then again, my political persuasion is one that if your economic policies result in the poorest in society having to line up to buy rations of flour and vegetable oil, something has gone deeply wrong and should be changed. I guess that makes me a neo-liberal shill who hates the poor, rather than principled radicals who are content to ignore the god-awful consequences of their politics for the people they claim to care about.

@F. Foundling

As to what’s going on in Russia – the authorities have only recently even deigned to let Parnas on the ballot in the Kostroma local elections – and engaged in all sorts of chicanery to keep them from gaining a seat – so your claim that people can ‘vote for their candidates’ is patently untrue. And official tolerance of a couple of newspapers and a radio station, combined with a near total blockade on access to television (which is where most voters, particularly in the provinces get their news) does not strike me as providing for ‘ready access’ to opposition views (and that’s before we get to the notorious ‘blogger’s law’, the law on ‘Undesirable Organisations’, and the frequent prosecution of those who object to Kremlin policies such as the annexation of Crimea for ‘extremism.’) Finally I’d note that Sergei Udaltsov does not strike me as “rabidly pro-market, pro-US and anti-democratic”, but is still cooling his heels in prison for the crime of protesting against Putin.

If being ‘right wing’ means not supporting policies that consistently produce hyperinflation, economic collapse and social chaos, or making incredibly ill-informed apologies for autocratic police states, then I’ll happily accept the label.

@152

Being right wing literally means never having to say you’re sorry about your own governments, policies, positions, histories. It means if you do feel shame for any of your past, you just flip the switch, flip the tables, go full on opposite day and call all of that “left-wing.” It also means that you get to hold that historical rare set, left-wing governments, policies, histories or potential alternatives, to standards far exceeding your own tribe’s. It means that leftists must create perfection, solve absolutely all the problems the right continues to create, before they get their chance in the sun.

And it means that despite the unending, vicious attacks on pretty much everyone but the white ruling class, you get to claim the label of “populism,” and in America, the flag, Mom and the title of “real American.” It means you get to simultaneously shill for the steepest of hierarchies which shutdown actual freedom and liberty, while claiming the mantle of freedom fighter for yourself. And the media, which you own, which you control, help you get away with all of this, while you also claim that they always display “liberal bias.”

In short, it’s a really nice gig to be a right-winger. Virtually all the power in the world without any of the responsibility.

Daragh,

I didn’t attribute any positions to you. I just riffed off your comment about the right. I have no idea what your personal stance is on the topics at hand, and the comment was a general one. Why the defensiveness?

“a near total blockade on access to television”

That is not true. Pro-western liberals are routinely invited to political talk shows on Russian TV, including Channel One (Structure Of The Moment, for example). Some shows are structured as two panels, 4-5 speakers each, arguing against each other, with one panel often comprised entirely of pro-Western liberals (or Kiev regime apologists, depending on the topic) (Right to Speak on TVC). In fact, their media access is so great, it’s completely disproportional to their popularity. Below 5%, I’d imagine.

@Layman –

That’s very gracious of you – please forgive me as well for losing the rag a bit afterwards.

I was referring to Venezuela, but I would argue a) yes it does affect legitimacy insofar as a government has basic responsibilities to its citizens re: public order, and basic goods and services, but that b) the manner in which such a government is removed and what replaces it are also extremely important. A military coup followed by mass executions is clearly morally unacceptable. Popular protests leading to government resignations, interim administrations and fresh elections (broadly Lopez’ strategy as far as I can see) are fair play IMHO. And for the benefit of Ze K above, when your police force starts firing sniper rounds into the crowd, murdering dozens while you fill a helicopter with so much ill-gotten loot it struggles to get off the landing pad, all bets are off.

Oh and while I’m at it Ze K – when’s the last time Navalny was on Russian TV? Or Putin wasn’t given extensive, fawning coverage on the news broadcasts? Or why for that matter, why was the law on advertising changed in order to cut Dozhd TV’s funding off at the knees? Your attempts to defend Russian state media is literally identical to Fox News old ‘but we’ve got ALAN COLMES!’ defence, and about as convincing.

@Harold

As opposed to one that holds on to power by rigged elections, corruption and physical force? The Ukrainians deposed Yanukovych at the end of February (who rigged the 2012 elections, and the imprisonment and violent harassment of the opposition even before the Euromaidan started) and had full and fair presidential and parliamentary elections before the year was out, despite an ongoing military invasion of their country. I think that’s far more legitimate than ‘Well Yanukovych won an election, so I guess he can do whatever he wants and we just have to take it.’

Put it another way – if I was to argue that street demonstrations and other extraparliamentary activity designed to discourage the passage or implementation of some of the particularly objectionable elements of Tory policy, even in the case of manifesto commitments which have a democratic mandate, was somehow illegitimate, you’d tell me to get knotted. And rightly so.

@Harold

It was an example of a legitimate coup in response to your claim that coups can never be legitimate. Could have equally been Ceaucescu (though the aftermath of that was considerably uglier.

And you should have connected this to the OP by adding, “just as the coup in Chile, IMO…” Fine, that’s your opinion.

@the authorities have only recently even deigned to let Parnas on the ballot in the Kostroma local elections

It’s true that PARNAS was denied registration between 2007 and 2012, but that didn’t prevent people from voting for the equally ‘liberal’ SPS in 2007, which got 0.96% of the vote in the Duma elections of that year and failed to get a single seat. Likewise, in the Duma elections of 2011, people could vote for the successor of the SPS, Pravoye Delo, headed by Prokhorov. Again, they got 0.6% and failed to get a single seat. Long before the denial of registration to PARNAS, both parties had been getting the same dismal results. As early as in 2003, SPS failed to win a single seat the Duma; in the same year (2003), PARNAS got 2 MPs out of 450. All of this predates the 2014 blogger law. Udaltsov is a case somewhat similar to Lopez – whatever you think of the merits of the case against him, he was sentenced to prison not for merely protesting, but for organising and inciting riots (in order to effect regime change). The law on undesirable organisations basically prevents foreign NGOs from funding political activities aiming at regime change – this does not infringe on any freedom, unless you mean the freedom of the US to hire local mercenaries and the freedom of local mercenaries to work for the US against their own country. Indeed, US-sponsored NGOs have been a major tool for influencing policies, effecting regime change, and subverting democracy in many countries. Concerning the TV, the fact that Dozhd TV exists at all contradicts your claims.

As for Ukraine – it’s not true that the 2012 elections were rigged (and international observers didn’t claim that), whereas there certainly have been reasons for doubts about some of the post-Maidan ones (great differences between polling and results). If Yanukovych had been serious about imprisonment and violent harassment, the opposition leaders would have been in prison and not on the street presiding over a crowd erecting barricades and throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. The snipers stuff remains a mystery to this day, and it is still unclear who fired and who ordered the shooting.

As for ‘hyperinflation, economic collapse and social chaos’, that description doesn’t fit the condition of the state socialist countries in the decades between the end of WW2 and the fall of Eastern bloc communism (perhaps with the partial exception of East Asia), but it certainly does fit the following experience of capitalism in many of them. You keep mentioning as something self-evident that the current economic troubles in Venezuela and those in Allende’s Chile are due to nationalisations and other left-wing policies of their governments (most of which precede the crises by years): again, I’m not convinced.

As for your doctrine of ‘legitimate coups’ and your theory that a sufficiently intensive economic crisis legitimises a violent overthrow of the government – well, obviously, it’s very convenient. I don’t have much to add.

Done here.

Very off-topic, but since what I said in passing about the ‘mystery’ of the snipers can easily sound like a Putinist crackpot conspiracy theory, here are a couple of links concerning various odd aspects of that particular case:

Investigations by the BBC:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31359021
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02jcrf3

Statements of the Ukrainian post-Maidan investigative commission, reported by a Ukrainian news agency (in Ukrainian):

http://www.unn.com.ua/uk/news/1341907-g-moskal-kuli-znaydeni-na-maydani-vipuscheni-ne-zi-zbroyi-berkutu

In the link, Gennady Moskal, the head of the Ukrainian commission investigating the Maidan shootings, is quoted as stating that the bullets found on the scene could not have originated from Berkut and that the first shot was fired at the police, and enunciates three theories about who shot on the Maidan. The first version is that it was agents of the Secret services or the Interior Ministry, disguised as protesters; the second version is that it was members of the Secret services or the Interior Ministry, who may have had various types of clothing; the third version is that it was ‘citizen organisations’ that had gone out of control – but he wouldn’t specify which ‘citizen organisations’. (My translation – it was either protesters or someone who looked very much like protesters). Moskal also says it could end up being a perpetual mystery like the JFK assassination.

So, yeah, it’s not exactly a very clearcut case.

@ Daragh

“I was referring to Venezuela, but I would argue a) yes it does affect legitimacy insofar as a government has basic responsibilities to its citizens re: public order, and basic goods and services, but that b) the manner in which such a government is removed and what replaces it are also extremely important.”

I gather you’re not an American, so I’ll assume you may not know that Republicans have long argued, vociferously, that the Obama administration is illegitimate because it does not live up to its basic responsibilities to its citizens re: public order, basic goods and services; to say nothing of national security. Thus your (a) above strikes me as problematic – who gets to say whether the government is meeting those responsibilities, and how do you settle such a dispute? If you mean to say that voters should vote out such a government; or should protest or strike in an effort to induce resignation; or that constitutional processes (e.g. impeachment) should work to remove such a government, then fine. But a government which holds power as a result of a lawful, democratic process is, by definition, legitimate, even if it governs badly.

To say that a government should fall, or resign, or be turned out by the voters, is not to say it is illegitimate. In the OP’s example, it is the Allende government which legitimately held power, and the Pinochet government which was illegitimate, regardless of how you feel about the efficacy of their respective policies.

Harold@169: coup d’etat: “a sudden and decisive action in politics, especially one resulting in a change of government illegally or by force”.

Query how this applies to Monck’s overthrow of the Rump parliament; William III’s/John Churchill’s overthrow of James II; the American Revolution; Lenin’s or Mao’s revolutions; Mussolini’s revolution?

@Layman –

Yes, many crazy GOPers have said unacceptable things about Obama, leading to a situation where a racist buffoon is currently leading the party and a majority of its members believe the President is a Muslim who should be turfed out by military coup. However, the fact that people AREN’T having to queue for sacks of flour and soap is a testament to how ridiculous the claims to illegitimacy are, compared with Venezuela where people are. The epidemic of gun crime in the US, and the inability of the political system to address it, IS a nice example of the state failing in some basic duties and I’d be quite happy to see the second amendment quietly forgotten so that it could be addressed. And for the last goddamn time – I’ve said repeatedly Pinochet’s coup and his government were illegitimate. Please stop implying otherwise.

@F. Foundling – it’s tempting to link to OSCE reports demonstrating just how wrong you are on Ukraine’s elections, but your faith in the integrity of the Russian electoral process leads me to believe that ‘facts’ and ‘objective reality’ are not how you form your opinions on such matters. For the benefit of others, here’s David Marples demolishing the ridiculous and offensive ‘false flag’ theory of the Maidan. For my part, I also have very little desire to continue spending my time in this particular treehouse.

@Layman – I’d argue it lost a certain degree of legitimacy when it governed so poorly that it brought the nation close to economic collapse, and THEN ignored other institutions of state with their own legitimacy (namely the Congress and the Supreme Court and the electorate which gave a decisive victory to CODE in 1973) when they challenged both the wisdom and legality of its policies by large margins, yet carried on regardless. Again – that doesn’t justify the coup, and I think Chile’s political and economic development would have been better served by Allende’s removal through constitutional and legal means.

cassander way back in 109 raised the question “why the left wing response to Pinochet is so hysterical” given that there have been worse monsters in recent history. It may not be advisable to take this line of argument seriously but I’m going ahead anyway because I’m equally mystified: why is the right wing response to Fidel Castro so hysterical? Castro has been an authoritarian ruler I grant that but compared to Pinochet, he hasn’t killed or tortured thousands – and even Pinochet’s crimes (as cassander hints) pale in comparison with figures like Montt or Suharto, who with US backing murdered hundreds of thousands.

And while Cuba is still poor, it has under Castro reached first world levels of life expectancy, literacy, child mortality and other social conditions that neighboring countries under pro-Western governments/dictatorships could only dream of. Yet Castro has been more severely condemned by the US right wing consensus than any other ruler ever, living or dead, and of course the hostility of the US government towards Cuba, involving failed invasions, murder attempts, and a 55 year all-out economic war, is historically without precedent. Speaking of hysterical responses, cassander, perhaps you’d like to offer some insight into why Castro has had such a huge impact on the right wing imagination, an impact totally out of proportion with whatever he may be blamed for? To use your words, shouldn’t even right-wingers agree that Castro belongs “on the short list of contenders for least nasty”?

And recently of course Chavez (and then Maduro) has gotten some of the same treatment although he won those elections fair and square and was undeniably a genuinely popular president. Why so much hysterical attention to Venezuela? It is impossible to believe that those responses are born of genuine concern for democratic principles. Let’s grant that Venezuela’s democracy isn’t perfect (and neither is America’s as Daragh deigned to informed us) but as I’m sure everybody here will agree, it is nowhere comparable to the dire situation in places like Thailand or Egypt, both of which are getting huge US support and their descent into open dictatorship is an absolute non-topic in the American media. Why?

In spite of being ‘done for good’, I realise that I do need to add a clarification to my earlier post, at 169. When I talk about performances and denial of registration of PARNAS before 2010, I mean its most important component, RPR, which joined it in 2012. The other components have never won any seats and were mostly established much more recently, so it’s difficult to talk about their earlier performance (even though many of the individual leaders have held government posts in the Yeltsin or early Putin years). As for the more recent failure to register PARNAS in the other couple of regions besides Kostroma in 2015, the authorities simply say that they haven’t collected enough valid signatures, which could be false, but doesn’t seem impossible in view of their (un)popularity. (In Kostroma at the moment, their performance seems to have been as bad as usual – 1,33 %). In any case, the overview in 169 shows that the liberals’ problems with the electorate started much earlier. That is not to say that the authoritarian tendencies of the Putinist establishment aren’t real and increasing, but I don’t think that any competent *and* sincere ‘Russianist’ could claim that they are the primary cause of the longstanding unpopularity of the pro-Western opposition.

And finally, to compensate this by adding something more on-topic – you’ve got to love prominent Russian ‘liberal’ publicist Yuliya Latynina writing in 2012: ‘I am a great fan of General Pinochet not because I like dictators – I don’t – but because when I see the country of Chile, which feels best in Latin America, I realise that the man who did this to Chile, did the right thing’ (‘человек, который это сделал с Чили, сделал правильную вещь’, http://volgograd.yabloko.ru/politics/print.phtml?id=2602). She has also argued against democracy in general, in 2014, on the grounds that the Russian majority voluntarily supports Putin and the Communists rather than the ‘liberals’ (http://www.novayagazeta.ru/columns/64625.html) – a fact that she doesn’t doubt, unlike so many Western commentators. So yes, if we agree with her and assume the illegitimacy of democracy in general, then the US was probably right to covertly sabotage the Chilean economy by ‘intervening at the World Bank, IDB, and Export-Import bank to … terminate credits … to Chile’, so that the likes of Daragh could then also declare Allende illegitimate.

> why is the right wing response to Fidel Castro so hysterical?

Because, like Pinochet, he is the outermost edge of the group that a meaningful number of English-speaking people of the matching political alignment will offer (suitably-qualified) support for.

You can’t have an argument if there is no-one to disagree with you.

Daragh @ 179: “I’d argue it lost a certain degree of legitimacy when it governed so poorly that it brought the nation close to economic collapse, and THEN ignored other institutions of state with their own legitimacy (namely the Congress and the Supreme Court and the electorate which gave a decisive victory to CODE in 1973) when they challenged both the wisdom and legality of its policies by large margins, yet carried on regardless.”

There are two problems with this.

First, it confers illegitimacy on any executive involved in a dispute with another branch of government, or carrying out an unpopular program. Thus Obama’s administration is illegitimate because a majority in Congress have voted to end the ACA, and polls show more people disapprove than approve of it; yet he refuses to heed them.

Second, it uses the same term to describe a government involved in such an internal dispute, as it does a government created by a violent coup and maintained by murder. They’re both ‘illegitimate”. They’re both the same.

Daragh@177

“@F. Foundling – For the benefit of others, here’s David Marples demolishing the ridiculous and offensive ‘false flag’ theory of the Maidan. ” [Insults deleted.]

CT and its commentariat accepts and promotes the official version of the Maidan events. If anyone somehow still feels a need for a rebuttal though, the proper source for said rebuttal is the evidence produced and tested in the official trials of the perpetrators, not some blogger. Since the Maidanis have been in power, they have had all the resources and every reason to parade the evidence proving their version of events…if there was any truth to their version. I say they can no more provide evidence for such prosecution than the state of Louisiana could provide evidence for the trials of the perpetrators of the atrocities in the SuperDome in the aftermath of Katrina.

But it’s not really a matter of the evidence, is it? It’s about what side you’re on. Accepting and promoting the official version is taking sides, and you people have chosen the wrong side.

The “illegitimacy” test needs to be consistent. To me, Chomsky supplies the basis for that in this video — and in his books.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?316460-1/book-discussion-anarchism

It has nothing to do with being elected and then failing to govern “effectively.” It also has nothing to do with failing to give opposition groups the chance to stifle your programs. Ironically, to do the latter ensures the former.

A system is “illegitimate” if it does not meet the needs of the citizenry, if it does not work solely on their behalf, if it is not owned and operated by the citizenry. Since the system in place in so-called “liberal democracies” works on behalf of the power elite, the financial elite, the less than 1%, it is, by definition, “illegitimate.” Its elections are illegitimate, because they just continue this process of shilling for the superrich, protecting and expanding the power of the financial elite.

Yes, crumbs and various spoils are handed down the hierarchy to the non-rich, and this is done primarily to keep the upper 20% in support of the ruling class — to do its bidding, like so many well-trained and decently compensated Igors. But none of it is “legitimate” and the “democracies” involved are shams. Politicians choose voters, not the other way around. And the less than 1% chooses the politicians.

America, the UK, Venezuela, Chile, China, Russia, wherever . . . . the modern world has never seen a “legitimate” governing body. Ever. Nor has it seen a legitimate economic system. Until “the people” own, control and run these systems — and not through proxies of any kind — it never will.

In addition to Layman’s demolition, it’s fun to also point out that both Tony Blair and David Cameron were considered legitimate election winners after winning about one third of the vote (and they didn’t have to face a hostile parliament or in Blair’s case listen to millions of people protesting against his conducting an illegal war of aggression – that’s the beauty of the British electoral system). From a legalistic standpoint, Allende has *exactly the same* legitimacy as Obama, Blair or Cameron had and the fact that Congress at times disagreed with Allende’s policies is completely irrelevant for that determination. From a perspective of democratic fairness, Allende’s government was *more* legitimate than Bush 2000 because he actually won a plurality of the votes.

Your tirades are tiresome, Daragh.

Layman @192,

Would you also agree that pretty much every single time even a nominally “leftist” government takes power, the US and most of the West come down like a ton of bricks on them? To me, anyone who thinks the economic failures of leftist governments are all about their own incompetence, bad ideas or internal contradictions . . . . simply ignores the 800 pound gorilla in the room. The US, the largest economy in the world for nearly a full century now, has immense impact on every economy in the world, and can make or break them. And whenever the US and the West go into full attack mode — sanctions, embargoes, freezing of assets, freezing out trade partners, etc. etc. . . . . not only does this wreck economies, it tends to make countries under the gun turn inward and generally more autocratic. It puts them on a permanent war footing, which all too often leads to paranoia and sometimes harsh domestic measures.

This occurs in all countries during wars, including our own, including Europe’s. Constitutions are put aside. Fiat rule is at least temporarily and selectively applied.

Americans seem to want to believe its attacks on other nations — covert and overt — are without consequences. Or at least without negative consequences. That we’re forever virgin as hegemon.

It’s time for a major reassessment.

“Would you also agree that pretty much every single time even a nominally “leftist” government takes power, the US and most of the West come down like a ton of bricks on them?”

Yes, of course.

@Plume – So the old ‘socialism can never be failed, it can only be failed’ argument. Even if your argument was true, (and it isn’t) isn’t it then spectacularly wrong-headed, not to say immoral, for leftist government’s to put their citizens through the inevitable impoverishment and misery that results?

@Layman – No, I’m not. I’m debating legitimacy. You might not like the arguments I make with the facts as they are, but the handwaving and the attempts to compare the economic situation in 1973 with the Teabagger protests seem equally silly to me.

“the handwaving and the attempts to compare the economic situation in 1973 with the Teabagger protests seem equally silly to me.”

Yes, this is precisely the point. It is the policies, and the results you think they cause which, in your view, confers illegitimacy. The rest of the stuff about democratic or anti-democratic process is just (inaccurate) window-dressing. You didn’t like his policies, and you blame them for the economic situation, so he was illegitimate, whether he was in fact acting within the rules or not.

Let’s remember what happened to the Sandinistas when they toppled a dictatorship and implemented popular policies. Hint: the US initiated a dirty war by arming terrorist organizations (terrorist by the current definition of the State Department), who murdered thousands (this is also fitting to the other thread on which you can’t stop frothing about the IRA), in addition to illegally mining Nicaragua’s harbors, an act that was recognized as a war crime by the International Court of Justice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States).

It just amazes me where you Daragh get the energy from to go on and on like a broken record about how Allende did everything wrong when he was one of very few players in the hemisphere who actually tried to play by democratic rules, and then to go on to claim that the democratic credentials of the USA must not be questioned under any circumstances. But I realize this is fruitless and we should really just stop feeding this beast.

Socialism has been tried very hard. You can tell they were really trying by the size of the piles of skulls built up by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al. They attempted to abolish markets and both found that it was far less effective.

We have tried other economic systems, capitalism works rather better than anything else we’ve tried. When Russia and China de-collectivised farming they got a rapid increase in output. It turns out that self interest is an effective motivator. Capitalist states include all of the places that you might actually want to live.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages

Daragh@190 “…leaving aside the fact that the Berkut fled Kyiv en masse, as well as the difficulty of collecting forensic evidence in the aftermath of Yanukovych’s ouster…”

In the aftermath of Yanukovych’s ouster, the Maidanis were in control. There was no difficulty in collecting forensic evidence. And that applies to finding witnesses, even those who supposedly fled past Kyiv city limits. Why the Berkut who were not involved in the sniper shooting would care to flee the entire country lest they incriminate the guilty parties is of course a question that has no answer, beyond its convenience for your reply.

As for “meaningless show trial,” the notion that evidence presented is meaningless show explains your notions of argument.

Last and least, all Soviet and Russian studies in academia have been extensively corrupted by service to the state in the Cold War. Mere possession of credentials is worthless. You have to look at the work. People unsympathetic to the Soviets or Russia have done sound, in depth work. Marples has no claim.

I’m not attributing views to you, I just note that your standards of what is democratically legitimate are way off the mark judging by the amount of effort you invest into finding fault with Allende, especially when the faults you blame on him can be found with a host of other politicians whom you nevertheless don’t see fit to put down in the same way.

I mentioned the dirty Contra war and could have mentioned many others because you have claimed that a politician is utterly disqualified by having said something sympathetic about the IRA many years ago, and yet it would be easy to point out that a host of other supposedly democratic mainstream politicians have once been sympathetic to or even actually supported terrorist organizations (and some still do). I’m just sick of these blatant double standards.

Daragh, here’s the O Leary link promised on the other thread. (The one titled Brendan O’Leary, “Mission Accomplished? Looking Back at the IRA”)

http://fieldday.ie/field-day-review-1-2005/

“Who volunteered to join the IRA? Here there is fair degree of consensus. First of all,
most volunteers have been young males, although there are female members, and
there is a long-standing women’s republican organization, Cumann na mBan. Secondly,
the founding membership of the Provisionals was from families with long ties to the IRA, dating back to the 1920s, and in some cases back to the Fenians of the 1860s.59 This core provided the nucleus around which the IRA had survived after the 1940s. (Familial socialization, of course, is not pervasive: many males with such
relatives did not become volunteers.)

Thirdly, IRA recruits are nearly all young males, of Catholic origin, who are mostly
from working class, small farmer or lower middle-class occupations. The list of the
occupations of ninety-five IRA prisoners, imprisoned for more than three years in
Belfast Prison between 1956 and 1960, is revealing.60 It included just one
businessman. Construction workers, farmers, clerks, and industrial apprentices
predominated. They were neither prosperous professionals, nor ‘lumpenproleterians’.

Twenty years later the Glover Report (1978) stated: ‘Our evidence of the
calibre of rank and file [IRA] terrorists does not support the view that they are mindless
hooligans drawn from the unemployed and the unemployable.’61 Two surveys of
republican offenders coming before the courts found that the data ‘beyond
reasonable doubt’ established that the bulk of them were young men and women
‘without criminal records in the ordinary sense, though some have been involved in
public disorders [but] in this respect and in their records of employment and
unemployment they are reasonably representative of the working class
community of which they form a substantial part [and] do not fit the stereotype of
criminality which the authorities have from time to time attempted to attach to them’.62

IRA recruits are therefore not criminals, gangsters or mafiosi, despite the
aforementioned auxiliaries involved in punishment squads. The gangster motif, as
the former IRA volunteer Patrick Magee, known as ‘the Brighton bomber’, shows in
an intelligent published doctoral thesis is the most stale cliché in the popular or pulp
fiction generated by the conflict.63 It is also a theme highlighted in British press and
broadcasting reportage, and cartoons. Journalist Scott Anderson wrote under the
heading ‘Making a Killing’ to popularize the gangster idea in the US.64 It is more
startling to find the contention reproduced by a thoughtful liberal intellectual, my
friend, Michael Ignatieff, who has lived in the UK and reported on Northern Ireland.

His The Lesser Evil maintains ‘there will always be a gap between those who take the
political goals of a terrorist campaign seriously and those who are drawn to the
cause because it offers glamour, violence, money and power. It is anyone’s guess how
many actual believers in the dream of a united Ireland there are in the ranks of the
IRA. But it is a fair bet to suppose that many recruits join up because they want to
benefit from the IRA’s profitable protection rackets’. He footnotes Taylor’s Provos and
Coogan’s The IRA, without pagination, before continuing, ‘The IRA bears as much
relation to the Mafia as it does to an insurrectionary cell or a radical political
party and the motivations that draw young people into the movement are often as
criminal as they are political … The criminal allure of terrorist groups and the cynicism
of those who join them are additional reasons why it is a mistake to conciliate or appease a group like the IRA with political concessions’.65

There is no serious empirical warrant for these views, certainly not in the books of
Coogan and Taylor. ‘Believing in the dream of a united Ireland’ is not an impartial
characterization, and while this belief may not be the primary motivation for all
members to join, affirmation of the goal is a condition of membership. Ignatieff’s
assumed knowledge of volunteers’ private inner desires is just speculation, and he
appears unaware that experience of state repression or of attacks by loyalists is the
most widespread shared feature of post- 1969 IRA recruits.66 These considerations
undermine the ‘criminal’ characterization of the IRA’s volunteers. Robert White’s
interviews, and statements by republican leaders, show convincingly that surges in
applications to join the IRA are directly linked to political events, rather than to
‘rent-seeking’ opportunities.
Attacks on the civil rights movement, loyalist mobs burning-out Catholics from their homes in Belfast, the Falls Road curfew by the British army, internment without trial, Bloody Sunday, and the British government’s response to the hunger strikes of 1980–81, were more potent sources of recruitment than the meagre material ‘rewards’ facing volunteers. The evidence is in fact strongly against the criminal motivation thesis.67
IRA ‘surpluses’ do not enrich its leaders, and if they did, this would be a major UK
media theme. Gerry Adams has doubtless become prosperous, after the peace process,
but from his published writings. There is no evidence that he was enriched through his
IRA or Sinn Féin roles. IRA members do not personally profit from takings; if they
do, they are excluded from the organization, punished or suffer moral disapproval. This
can be seen in the critical accounts of McGartland (1997) and Collins (1997).
Volunteers in ASUs rely on minimal support, as do those ‘on the run’; and the
auxiliaries’ role is to punish petty criminals, not to lead them — though, of course, some
may behave contrary to the organization’s norms. Earning respect from local peers
rather than profits is a better explanation of membership of vigilante and punishment
squads.68
The IRA’s resources, however dubiously or criminally obtained, are
overwhelmingly channelled back into mission-related activities. The IRA recruited
those willing to risk their lives or long jail sentences for what they warned would likely
be a dangerous and short career.
In short, group-oriented, non-pecuniary and nonegoistic motivations have been key, both to recruitment and retention. The costs of
membership have been high: the risks of death or of long-run imprisonment plain,
and the costs have also been borne by family and loved ones, even if support is
provided to the families of imprisoned volunteers. Famously, IRA volunteers have
been resistant to prison management techniques that ‘ordinary criminals’
generally accept without organized protest or rancour.69

This is not to say that all IRA recruits epitomize austere republican virtue,
merely to affirm that personal criminal opportunism amongst volunteers is
punished. The IRA, famously, does not ‘do drugs’, and has attempted to ‘close down’ a
rival republican organization, the INLA, when it started this mode of ‘self-financing’.
Northern Ireland, by contrast with the rest of the UK and Ireland, as many have
observed, has been politically rather than criminally violent.”

Ach! Link here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Murphy_(Irish_republican)

Cool

@Ronan(rf)

I think we’re talking at cross-purposes here and there’s not going to be a lot of value in further extending the thread. As I said, the article looks very interesting and will put it on my (currently very long) reading list.

-DM

@Ronan(rf) – don’t think it its a tangential rant, nor do I disagree with you about the vagueness of ‘improving state capacity.’ You’re dead right that people generally don’t fight and kill for a more efficient state bureaucracy or moderate technocratic improvements to redistributory welfare schemes. The flip side is that when the polity becomes sufficiently settled that good governance and competent economic stewardship become the dominant subject of politics (which the debate on Mair notwithstanding I still think is the case for roughly 65-70% of the UK electorate, at least) very few people feel motivated to fight and kill.

Good discussion! Thanks.