Tomorrow morning brings the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile and the death of Salvador Allende [Le Monde has that photo], a coup which was, of course, followed by mass incarcerations, witch-hunts and murders and by the exile as political refugees of many Chileans of the left. (In today’s climate those exiles would have struggled to find sanctuary. Perhaps Sunak and Braverman would have put them on the Bibby Stockholm, a marginal improvement on a Santiago football statium.) I remember the coup, sort of, as a teenager. But not clearly: it was something shocking and far away. But the years of aftermath I do remember: meeting exiles, Latin American solidarity campaigns with them, the showings of films like The Battle of Chile and, later, Missing.
I have nothing particularly insightful to say now about the coup itself, or the later, shameful failure of the British to hold Pinochet to account for his crimes (“he was only giving orders”). But, in an atmosphere where the political right from Fox News to the British Daily Telegraph to France’s C-News whip up paranoid fantasies that might serve to legitimate “pre-emptive” action even against liberal democracies, and where Donald Trump remains a threat, it is worth re-reading Ralph Miliband’s essay from 1973, and particularly his thoughts about the editor of the London Times:
In so far as Chile was a bourgeois democracy, what happened there is about bourgeois democracy, and about what may also happen in other bourgeois democracies. After all, The Times, on the morrow of the coup, was writing (and the words ought to be carefully memorized by people on the Left): “… whether or not the armed forces were right to do what they have done, the circumstances were such that a reasonable military man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene”. Should a similar episode occur in Britain, it is a fair bet that, whoever else is inside Wembley Stadium, it won’t be the Editor of The Times: he will be busy writing editorials regretting this and that, but agreeing, however reluctantly, that, taking all circumstances into account, and notwithstanding the agonizing character of the choice, there was no alternative but for reasonable military men … and so on and so forth.
{ 65 comments }
Phil 09.10.23 at 9:45 pm
Here’s my September 11th post from 2021. I stand by every word – indeed, can’t imagine not doing so.
https://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2021/09/11/anniversary/
JPL 09.11.23 at 1:39 am
The term ‘bourgeois democracy’ (as opposed to, e.g., ‘liberal democracy’) is one that is interesting, but that I am not familiar with. I wonder if we might have a clarification of what kind of a phenomenon exactly it refers to. To me the term would seem to refer to the understanding of a system of principles of governing that is restricted to a certain social class, as opposed to being a system, the general understanding of which may not be complete, of ideal principles understood as applying universally, in the manner of the “rule of law” principle. It seems, to me anyway, that the global episteme has finally gotten beyond the idea of a system of principles of governance that is restricted in application or understanding to a particular social group, e.g., ethnicity, religion, class, etc. (to the inevitable detriment of others), to one that is included under a general universally applicable system of ethical principles. We seem to be edging toward a realization that the idea of “the will of the people” (heretofore part of the definition of ‘democracy) has to be subordinated, as a preliminary condition in any system of governance, to such general ethical principles, since it appears that sometimes “the people” want things that are not good to want.
Ray Vinmad 09.11.23 at 4:13 am
The murder of Allende and the Pinochet regime is still flagrantly celebrated by the right. You can find many laudatory articles about Pinochet to this day, and the ‘great economy’ Chile had after the murder of Allende. Those on the right and in the center who don’t celebrate him, make excuses.
Chile did not always have a great economy under Pinochet. Even that bit is false. It’s important to people to keep that part going perhaps because there’s a whole economic ideology that is propped up by this fable. And there are still foreign policy figures whose reputations must not be damaged lest it tarnish other people’s reputations.
I hope the declassification of some of the coup planning on the part of the US and UK can at least get the story of the atrocities in the public record, and dispel some of the starry-eyed propaganda that still surrounds this shameful period. But I am not holding my breath. It may be harder to break the illusions about the economic necessity of mass murder and torture so that things can be slightly cheaper in the shops and so international investors can be happy (for a certain period—there was a lot of inflation under Pinochet).
John Q 09.11.23 at 5:58 am
Not just the Editor of the Times, but also FA Hayek, a point that’s been discussed here many times, but which his admirers (like Heidegger’s) still try to avoid.
Chris Bertram 09.11.23 at 7:10 am
@RayVinmad yes indeed. One of the shocking things about coming across US “conservatives” in the wild (in the blogosphere post-the-later-9/11) was that their declared commitment to liberal democracy, such as it was, seemed to go along with support for Pinochet and even for Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
TM 09.11.23 at 8:40 am
What is especially revealing is the open Pinochet admiration of self-describned libertarians.
Milliband’s criticism of the London Times is appropriately scathing. We are now witnessing the normalization of fascism by what used to be the center right (especially in Germany now with the embrace of a vice head of government (Aiwanger) with a Nazi activist past) and a large contingent of the mainstream “liberal media” at a breathtaking speed. The methods and conditions are different but the basic meachanism remains the same it ever was: fascists win by coopting the non-fascist right.
Salem 09.11.23 at 10:30 am
What is the proper role of institutional, non-political actors in a constitutional crisis? Not just the military, but one might also think about the police, the civil service, (where applicable) the monarchy, etc. Their obligation to law means they must refuse to follow illegal orders, but their institutional duty rejects a free-roving commission to uphold the law. Moreover, we expect them to defer to other institutional actors in terms of what is illegal. But a constitutional crisis is, almost by definition, when this system breaks down.
Example (controversy, but not crisis): UK govt proposes perhaps-illegal deportations to Rwanda. The civil service is obviously unhappy about this, but executes the plan, and both govt and civil service defer to the courts on legality.
Example (crisis): UK govt ignores court orders blocking deportations to Rwanda, and works outside the civil service for processing. What is the civil service’s responsibility? They aren’t being asked to do anything illegal! Continuing business as usual will simply facilitate the illegality. Maximal obstruction to the govt’s unrelated policies until they return to the law is well outside their institutional role. There’s no obvious answer, but I guess that’s what makes it a crisis.
This isn’t fanciful, either. E.g. US military leadership post-Jan 6th taking Trump out of the chain of command (and rumours regarding Nixon in 1974). That’s not the military’s institutional role, but probably a good call. But they could have gone further. They could have (e.g.) deposed Trump. That would have been a major mistake in the circumstances, but I can envision circumstances where they should (e.g. if Trump had launched a serious coup).
Such action would be, of course, completely illegal, and outside the military’s normal institutional role. Even the much more limited actions they took are almost certainly illegal. But I would justify what they did in pragmatic terms.
In the example above, I wasn’t necessarily saying the civil service should try to resist a govt bent on illegality. Going too soon, when normal political action would be effective, would be counterproductive. Pulling in a different direction from other institutional actors would be disastrous. I would argue this is a situation for the monarch to exercise his reserve powers. Certainly, if anything like the assassination of Calvo Sotelo happened in the UK (it seems like a fever dream even typing it out!) I would expect the monarch to dismiss the govt. But of course that is not an option in these countries.
Bob 09.11.23 at 5:27 pm
I have nothing to add to what Chris and others have so eloquently pointed out concerning the Coup.
But like JPL @2 above, my ears pricked up at the use of the term “bourgeois democracy.” It stirred up old memories of when the term was in quite wide use by a certain more radical segment of the left. It was always used with contempt. And there was always a hint of a suggestion, I thought, that bourgeois democracy was something that could be dispensed with at no great loss, since it wasn’t “true” democracy. I know next to nothing about Milliband, but I felt that the people that I heard using the term at the time could, given half a chance, be every bit as “expedient” as Pinochet in imposing their will on a recalcitrant public.
Bob 09.11.23 at 6:42 pm
Re John Q @ 4, the other case of extreme hypocrisy among economists is Milton Friedman, the man who wrote “Free to Choose” (!), who was quite happy to advise Pinochet, someone who didn’t seem to think that the Chilean people deserved much choice at all.
hix 09.11.23 at 8:11 pm
Yelling communism works quite well even today on some people to justify just about anything. Once every left wing government is on the verge of becoming the new stalinist regime, naturally a right wing coup is justified.
Had one Prof who suddenly started to justify the 1967 coup in Greece on the grounds of evil communism – in about 2016. The Prof was barely older than me. Oh well, this is Bavaria after all (Aiwangers poll numbers are 30% up now…)
Phil 09.11.23 at 11:25 pm
IANRM (if only), but it seems to me that what he might have meant by ‘bourgeois democracy’ is a formally democratic society whose democracy is circumscribed and limited by the power of the bourgeoisie as owners of capital – in other words, one in which democratic control ends where property rights begin. By contrast a socialist democracy, or a democracy sans phrase, would be a society in which democratic control extended to the means of production and distribution.
Ebenezer Scrooge 09.11.23 at 11:51 pm
To a conservative, “liberal democracy” means the people may pick the rulers, but Hayek picks the rules.
J-D 09.12.23 at 12:07 am
Anybody who is interested in familiarising themselves with the term ‘bourgeois democracy’ and how people use it can easily do so by searching the Web for it and finding two or three informative results.
My personal summation (but I would advise anybody interested to do their own research) would be that people who refer to ‘bourgeois democracy’ are referring to the same systems that other people refer to as ‘liberal democracy’ and that the reason they use the term ‘bourgeois democracy’ in preference to ‘liberal democracy’ (or just ‘democracy’) is that they (helpfully) want to signal their attitudes to such systems and, in particular, what they consider (with at least some justification) to be the discrepancies between the justifications typically offered for such systems and how they really operate.
In particular, I would guess that a lot of the people who refer to ‘bourgeois democracy’ (although probably not all of them) are Marxists, with Marxist attitudes towards democracy, and that can be helpful to know.
Personally I would avoid using the term ‘bourgeois democracy’ because I don’t think it would be helpful in communicating what I think, but then I’d avoid using the term ‘liberal democracy’ for exactly the same reason.
Austin Loomis 09.12.23 at 2:14 am
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blockquote>And there are still foreign policy figures whose reputations must not be damaged lest it tarnish other people’s reputations.
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blockquote>
You can say “Kissinger”, Ray. It’s all right. Just because none of us will ever have the opportunity, so cruelly denied the Mad Chef, to beat Super K to death with our bare hands, the way he deserves at least as much for Chile as for Cambodia, doesn’t release us from obedience to the weight of this sad time.
Chris Bertram 09.12.23 at 5:51 am
Slightly strange, to me, that people have fixated on Miliband’s use of the phrase “bourgeois democracy”. It certainly expresses an attitude to such a form of democracy, namely, that it is not fully adequate, and that was an attitude Miliband himself shared, and the article draws on his well-known views as expressed in works such as Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society (that every British politics undergraduate in the 1970s would have read). But here, its primary use is as a label to refer to a form of political organization (that people usually call liberal democracy), because that label is the one that the readers of The Socialist Register would have been familiar with. “Liberal democracy” would have been jarring to those readers and would have been perceived as Miliband making a point, whereas they would have read right past “bourgeois democracy”.
engels 09.12.23 at 9:07 am
there was always a hint of a suggestion, I thought, that bourgeois democracy was something that could be dispensed with at no great loss, since it wasn’t “true” democracy. I know next to nothing about Milliband, but I felt that the people that I heard using the term at the time could, given half a chance, be every bit as “expedient” as Pinochet in imposing their will on a recalcitrant public
So, in a sense, the real danger here isn’t Pinochet, for overthrowing the Chilean elected government and installing a dictatorship, but Ralph Miliband for criticising this using a left-wing conceptual vocabulary…
engels 09.12.23 at 9:15 am
Even if the only paragraph of Miliband you’ve ever read is that quoted in the post it’s obvious he doesn’t think bourgeois democracy is of no value (otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense).
J-D 09.12.23 at 9:46 am
Lots of people weren’t British politics undergraduates in the 1970s. Lots of people have never been politics undergraduates in any country in any time period. I myself don’t recall ever having previously read anything Ralph Miliband wrote–although in my case that might be part of the reason I am grateful to you for drawing this essay to my attention, as I certainly found it worth reading.
steven t johnson 09.12.23 at 4:21 pm
Phil@11 is correct. As ever, there are other ways of expressing the same idea. To me, the phrase “liberal democracy” indicates a form of government where civil society is regarded as being more or less the same thing as a free market society and this civil society, the free market, is regarded as prior to the political state. It is the market that validates the government in effect. Thus, no state is legitimately democratic, i.e., a liberal democracy, if the human rights are violated, regardless of what elections have been won. No mere numerical majority can violate human rights, of which perhaps the most essential is property, and its security from the majority. The use of mere majority votes to oppress the minority, such as the rich, by violating their human right to own property, is inherently undemocratic. Indeed, it is commonly regarded as totalitarian.
I personally think the concept of totalitarianism is tendentious nonsense, but so far as I can tell the militant rejection of totalitarianism is very much a critical principle held by pretty much everyone else. That’s why there is this pushback against the phrase bourgeois democracy, because it implicitly supports Allende’s program on principle, not just because of the formal legitimacy. And I think that’s why Venezuela is usually assumed to be a dictatorship. Widespread paramilitary violence, lawfare coups etc. disqualify not one other government in Latin America. Liberal democracy does not necessarily entail that the majority of voters determine policy. That’s why the US was always a liberal democracy and John C. Calhoun was always a liberal democratic political theorist.
Stephen 09.12.23 at 4:53 pm
AsI remember the late 60s and early 70s, the contrast according to a good many of the sort of people who read journals like The Socialist Register was between bourgeois democracy, which involved power going to parties that supported or at least accepted capitalism, and proletarian democracy, in which the Communist Party would hold all the real power (though for cosmetic reasons powerless fellow-traveller parties might be permitted), capitalism would be abolished and its supporters suppressed.
I appreciate the link to Miliband’s article in the Socialist Register. It includes the statement that “A major change in the state’s personnel is an urgent and essential task for a government bent on really serious change; and that this needs to be allied to a variety of institutional reforms and innovations, designed to push forward the process of the state’s democratization … What this means is not simply “mobilizing the masses” or “arming the workers”. These are slogans – important slogans – which need to be given effective institutional content. In other words, a new regime bent on fundamental changes in the economic, social and political structures must from the start begin to build and encourage the building of a network of organs of power, parallel to and complementing the state power, and constituting a solid infrastructure for the timely “mobilization of the masses” and the effective direction of its actions. The forms which this assumes – workers’ committees at their place of work, civic committees in districts and sub-districts, etc. – and the manner in which these organs “mesh” with the state may not be susceptible to blueprinting … Terror may become part of a revolutionary struggle. But the essential question is the degree to which those who are responsible for the direction of that struggle are able and willing to engender and encourage the effective, meaning the organized, mobilization of popular forces.”
It does seem to me that anyone who accepts terror as a part of the revolutionary struggle has lost the moral right to complain about the counter-revolutionary use of terror.
J-D 09.13.23 at 12:12 am
I am not in favour of the use of terror, but not because of reasoning like this, which is faulty.
Is the use of violence moral? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. The fact that I recognise some uses of violence as immoral does not make me hypocritical if I endorse other uses of violence. Circumstances alter cases.
It’s the same with ‘major change in the state’s personnel’, mentioned earlier. Is major change in the state’s personnel justified? There’s no valid general answer. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.
JPL 09.13.23 at 12:29 am
So the term ‘bourgeois democracy’ is an alternative term for referring to a form of political organization that was generally called (presumably by the “bourgeoisie”) “liberal democracy”, but with a difference in sense: that its use implies that the user considers that system to be “not fully adequate”, because, presumably, it is restricted to embodying (perhaps unthinkingly) the views and values of a particular social class presently holding power (to the detriment of groups not included); and so, while the Allende regime was, in this view, nominally “socialist”, it was embedded in an essentially “bourgeois” wider system that still held effective power to impose its own will. So the possible inference would be that, hopefully, “Miliband” (I don’t know his actual views) would consider a more adequate system to be one where the press would not feel it acceptable to try to justify a coup in those terms which the Times used, and where, perhaps it would be prohibited or made impossible for anyone to accumulate or control excessive wealth, such that they could impose their own will on political events. (I may be wrong about whether that inference would be true.) Thanks for the clarification. (Do I have it right?) If so, that would be an example of the trend I was taking about. Whether it’s a “tyranny of the majority” or a “tyranny of the minority” (which some say we now have in the US), it’s the “tyranny” (use of de facto power to seriously violate ethical principles) part that needs to be made not possible. (And in the quest to move toward a better system, perhaps we needn’t think that the “liberal” part of the term ‘liberal democracy’ is necessarily doing anything to inhibit our at least intellectual progress. As usual, the problem is an open-ended one, and the contribution of that modifier, if it is not considered fixed by its history, could probably at least be on the right track. (The term ‘liberal’ I think at least aspires to be descriptive of an ideal system of values.))
Harry 09.13.23 at 2:33 am
Rees-Mogg?
Harry 09.13.23 at 2:40 am
Indeed, the editor at the time was William Rees-Mogg, though he may not actually have authored those words, as the editorial is not always written by the editor.
LFC 09.13.23 at 3:32 am
steven t johnson
The concept of totalitarianism commonly denotes a regime that has none of the
forms of democracy, none of its substance, and tolerates basically no dissent while v often incarcerating or killing opponents. Power is concentrated, e.g. in a single party or small group or single ruler. Citizens’ daily lives are typically constrained in various ways. Full blown totalitarianism by these criteria is quite rare. Authoritarianism is, I think, a more useful category, allowing for degrees and for variation.
Your notion that people commonly label regimes totalitarian simply because they violate property rights is bizarre. At any rate I’m sure that scholars of comparative politics don’t use the term in that way.
The Stalinist USSR was totalitarian not because it violated property rights but because it murdered opponents en masse and operated the gulag, while also engaging in ethnic cleansing of disfavored minority groups.
LFC 09.13.23 at 3:41 am
P.s. And btw Calhoun was not a liberal democratic theorist. That is complete nonsense.
MisterMr 09.13.23 at 6:25 am
Clearly the real danger in the 70s were the marxists, the great fault of Pinochet was that, by killing a lot of people from the right, he sorta made the marxists look good.
This is sarcasm of course.
I don’t know much about Allende but, skimming the Wikipedia page about him, it seems to me that his policies were more like eurocommunism, so basically in pratice social democracy, so we should remember that in Chile the equivalent of Bernie Sanders or Corbyn won the election and this caused a fascist coup and decades of dictatorship, sponsored by the CIA, so it is natural that lefties of the times had some doubts about “borgeouise democracy”.
engels 09.13.23 at 11:08 am
Imho the main point of calling it “bourgeois democracy” is to be clear that the bourgeoisie is the ruling class (which it couldn’t be in a democracy sinpliciter). “Liberal democracy” (the standard academic term) pussyfoots around this elephant by referring to features of the system (representation, limited government) rather than the underlying power dynamic (as academic terms are wont to do).
MisterMr 09.13.23 at 11:17 am
Maybe I’m wrong but I allways tought that a “totalitarian” regime is totalitarian in the sense that it tries to control the life of its citiziens even on private matters, so for example trying to enforce the “new men” or something like this.
So examples would be stalinism, but also fascism/nazism, but also strongly religious governments (in fact strongly religious governments should be the basic example).
Real life totalitarian regimes also murder citiziens a lot, because they have to mantain the internal discipline, but my understanding is that the term “totalitarian” specifically refers to the fact that a regime is very ideological and thinks its job is to impose said ideology and to form citiziens to follow that ideology.
Also, “human rights” in general is something different than “current specific theory of human rights”. Presumably if at some point we have some democratic socialist countries, they will have also a belief of human rights, but this belief might be different from that of capitalist democracies (e.g. if there is a human right to a decent job, or at least a decent income).
Salem 09.13.23 at 11:20 am
@MisterMr:
The issue with Allende isn’t so much the content of his policies as the way he pursued them. When Allende lost support in the legislature, he governed by executive fiat and ignored court rulings to the contrary. This caused a political crisis. Both Congress and Allende claimed to represent democratic legitimacy – a common weakness of Madisonian systems!
In other words, the analogy is not so much Bernie Sanders as President, the analogy is with President Sanders losing the support of an initially friendly Congress, governing by decree, and ignoring Supreme Court rulings against his measures. That would definitely provoke a crisis too. No doubt some would consider President Sanders to be in the right on a policy or political level, but in an institutional sense, he would be completely in the wrong. The President is supposed to follow the law as determined by the other branches.
If you think the institutions of “bourgeois democracy” are bogus, and you’re happy for a President to ignore legal constraints on his power to bring about his policy agenda, then don’t be too surprised if your opponents also turn to force outside the laws. In the Chilean case, Congress called for a coup, and the military obliged. I think a sufficiently lawless US President, whether left or right, would at least risk getting the same treatment. Indeed, the obvious candidate isn’t Bernie Sanders, it’s a re-elected President Trump.
steven t johnson 09.13.23 at 3:46 pm
LFC@25 confirms that everyone else is committed to the repudiation of totalitarianism, which is quite rare. LFC hedges by offering up the alternative term “authoritarianism,” but Jean Kirkpatrick usefully explained the difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. And the difference is not a matter of degree but of respect for human rights in their essence as property rights. The alternative terms of police state, personal dictatorship or reign of terror are not even considered, even though the French Revolution is deemed to be totalitarian. By contrast, Napoleon’s consulate and his empire are not, which I think is a good real world example of the uselessness of counterposing authoritarian versus totalitarian. And I have no idea how sumptuary laws or church courts fit into this schema. My strong suspicion is they don’t, because “totalitarianism” is an ad hoc insult, not an idea.
But I suppose all that takes us too far into debates on fundamental issues for which disagreement is unacceptable. A government that operates a massive prison system which holds an appreciable fraction of an ethnic minority is not, contra LFC, suspected of being totalitarian. It is strange that a commenter in a blog with a strong US component to its dares to cite ethnic cleansing as the substance of totalitarianism. That suggests to me not even its proponents truly take the notion of totalitarianism seriously. They know who the targets are and that’s the only real content to the term.
On the other hand, LFC@26 is completely and embarrassingly wrong about Calhoun, unless it was merely a bungled attempt to complain there were other liberal democratic theorists than Calhoun. That is certainly true. But Calhoun’s belief that security of property is a human right is a liberal democratic principle. And the principle that the majority has no right to violate the human rights to security of property of the minority is also a liberal democratic principle. Majority rule is not an agreed principle of liberal democracy, indeed the deliberate thwarting of majority rule can be deemed a key principle of liberal democracy. Calhoun most certainly was a a liberal democratic theorist.
steven t johnson 09.13.23 at 3:49 pm
PS Liberals of the nineteenth century, who certainly knew who they were, favored the Confederate struggle for liberty. Mill was an exception in favoring the North.
TM 09.13.23 at 4:07 pm
MisterMr: I would object to calling Allende “the equivalent of Bernie Sanders or Corbyn”. But it is true that many of the governments that during the cold war were considered as “Communist menace”, and were often covertly or openly attacked by Western agencies, were far from doctrinaire communists. And these governments often ended up in the “Moscow camp” not by their own preference but because the West gave them no choice.
LFC 09.13.23 at 6:38 pm
steven t. johnson @31 and in earlier comments insists that property rights are the “essence” of human rights as those are understood by liberal democratic theorists.
My view is that property rights are only one on a list of rights that the liberal tradition considers important. The U.S. Declaration of Independence, after all, refers not to “life, liberty, and property” as inalienable (or did it say “unalienable”) rights, but rather to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (The 14th Amendment does refer to “life, liberty, and property.”)
The Declaration also said that “all men [sic] are created equal,” a statement written by someone (Jefferson) who held slaves and a statement that has to be read in its historical context. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to think that current liberal democracies are committed to at least formal political equality (i.e., one person, one vote). This is not the same as a commitment to property rights.
Liberalism tends to be associated with an admittedly amorphous idea of “progress” and with an (also perhaps amorphous) belief in the fostering of individual “potential” (cf. the 19th cent. idea of “the career open to talent”). These ideas don’t mesh w the belief that some people are destined from birth to be “inferior.” Calhoun, esp after his views changed early on, was a reactionary committed to upholding “ideals” of hierarchy and human inequality and seeing slavery as a “positive good.” In his famous “cornerstone speech,” Alexander Stephens, who became the vice president of the Confederacy, explicitly repudiated the statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” Calhoun, who had died in 1850, would have agreed with Stephens. So no, he wan’t a liberal democratic theorist.
Critics of liberalism, or of any other “ism,” are more effective if they make an effort to characterize accurately the target of their criticism. I don’t think steven t. johnson has done that.
Stephen 09.13.23 at 7:17 pm
J-D
I think we should distinguish between the use of violence and the use of terror.
The first is simply a matter of using force, either by individuals or by the state, to make others do what they do not want to do. There is no hypocrisy in arguing that in some cases, that is justified, in others not. Obviously, there are many cases where there is scope for disagreement.
Terror has more diverse shades of meaning. Any kind of violence, even when justified, may terrify its victims; but in the context of politics, terror means events resembling the “reign of terror” in revolutionary France up to 1793, with extreme and lawless violence directed against large numbers of those who opposed, or were thought to oppose, or might have been about to oppose, or were simply disliked by the faction in power. Subsequent periods of red revolutionary terror, or white counter-revolutionary terror, or Nazi terror (they would have regarded themselves as revolutionaries, but not red) should be too well known to need mentioning. I trust you do not accept one while rejecting the others; but Miliband did, at least in principle.
I would quite agree that Pinochet’s coup was an example of white terror, and I hope you do not think I approve of its murders.
marcel proust 09.13.23 at 8:25 pm
@steven t johnson wrote:
1) No mere numerical majority can violate human rights, of which perhaps the most essential is property, and its security from the majority.
2) That’s why the US was always a liberal democracy and John C. Calhoun was always a liberal democratic political theorist.
With regard to (1), I have long thought that the most essential human right is physical security — security from violence and from detention — and bodily autonomy. Next might be protection of intimate relations from state interference (including the parent-child relation) without good cause (e.g. child abuse): freedom of speech & assembly, religion, travel. Eventually somewhere down the list I would come to security in property, recognizing that property rights are defined differently across different societies, and that they change over time. But I would never think it the most essential right. That strikes me as a perverse value.
With regard to the second sentence, the standard qualifications about the US & “always” should be kept in mind, including that in some states married women could not open bank accounts or credit cards without their husband’s permission as recently as 60-65 years ago. Blacks were too all effects and purposes denied the franchise throughout the South until roughly the same time, and without that, their security in persons and property were quite limited. And Calhoun, purportedly a great liberal democratic theorist, believed and forcefully argued that not only did they not deserve any better, they deserved to be enslaved, subjected to coerced copulation (since “rape”, is a legal term, and according to the law as it existed and was applied at the time, it was irrelevant to relations between masters and the slaves), denied any property rights.
Well, different strokes for different folks I suppose, but ST Johnson’s notion of liberal democracy strikes me as either too constrained and limited, or is perhaps precisely the reason that some on the left prefer the phrase bourgeois democracy.
JPL 09.13.23 at 11:25 pm
A clarification of my earlier comment (22 above). Given the Miliband 1973 article quoted by Stephen above (20), which was not on the CT screen at the time I posted my comment, the sentence in my comment that starts, “If so, that would be an example …” should read, “If so, that would be an example of the problem I was talking about (not the positive trend)”. The understanding of general principles of good governance reflected in that passage belongs to the old view, where there is “bourgeois democracy” and “proletarian democracy”, depending on which social group holds power in an overall system where the rule of law principle (and related principles) are not fully applicable, and thus the fact of power (as opposed to the quid juris of ethical principles) is able to determine governing decisions. And btw, under such a system of ideal ethical principles applying universally, the notion of “property rights” can not be absolute, but rather must be subordinated to principles of practical application that regulate the negative effects of excess wealth. To the extent that a governing decision is determined by money (and as opposed to rational argument) it is determined by the power principle, not ethical principles. (So perhaps remove “property rights” as a criterion essential for the definition of the modifier ‘liberal’. Speech and discourse are governed by principles of rationality; the use of money is often not, and may negate results arrived at rationally.) Israel has been a case where these intellectual struggles and conflicts concerning the evolving conception of ‘democracy’ have been playing out.
J-D 09.14.23 at 12:16 am
If you think about it, it should become clear that the purpose of the coup was not to stop government by executive fiat, since the people who made the coup did so precisely so that they could govern by executive fiat.
That said, when people govern by executive fiat, sometimes it’s a bad thing and sometimes it’s a good thing; when people ignore court rulings, sometimes it’s a bad thing and sometimes it’s a good thing. So if somebody said that the government was ruling by executive fiat and ignoring court rulings, I would say that even if those things were true, those facts by themselves would not be sufficient to justify attempting to remove the government.
I’m not sure what it would mean to say that they are ‘bogus’; I think I made an observation earlier to the general effect that Ralph Miliband was probably suggesting (correctly) that there is a discrepancy between how they operate in reality and the idealised version of them which is sometimes used to justify them.
If you tell me that a President is ignoring legal constraints on his power to bring about his policy agenda, and asking me how I evaluate that, then my response would be that you have not given enough information for any sensible person to evaluate the situation. I would say that people (including Presidents) should not ignore legal constraints without good reason, but it would be wrong to say that it is impossible for there to be good reasons to ignore legal constraints.
I am rarely surprised by people turning to force outside the laws–that’s a common phenomenon–but the distinction between ‘surprising’ and ‘unsurprising’ is not the same thing as the distinction between ‘unjustified’ and ‘justified’. The fact that some people are justified in some instances in resorting to force and/or going outside the law is not a demonstration that all people are justified in all instances in resorting to force and/or going outside the law. There is no inconsistency in holding that resort to force and going outside the law are things which are justified in some instances and not in others: there’s no sensible alternative to that position.
engels 09.14.23 at 11:11 am
I would object to calling Allende “the equivalent of Bernie Sanders or Corbyn”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-army-could-stage-mutiny-under-corbyn-says-senior-serving-general-10509742.html
Robert Weston 09.14.23 at 1:41 pm
#25 and #29: Another way to categorize “authoritarian” vs. “totalitarian” regimes is to look at the degree to which the regime wants the people in, or out, of politics.
A totalitarian regime incorporates people into the political system for propaganda and surveillance purposes. It compels the people to join party-controlled youth or student organizations, trade unions, pretend opposition parties, street- or block-level citizens’ groups. Sports clubs served the system. I seem to remember every East German belonged to 1.7 party-controlled organization on average.
A more classic dictatorship tends to want people to stay out of politics. Live your life, raise your kids, run your business, but don’t criticize the regime, and nothing will happen to you.
hix 09.15.23 at 12:36 am
The GDR still had independent churches. Going to those churches that remained outside the party hierarchy sure was bad on many levels, but it did not make you lose a bad job, go to prison or worse. As little as it may be, that alone puts the GDR outside the narrower totalitarism definition and i think it is wise to use the narrower ones, as the broader ones tend to have a bad taste of hysterical anticommunism. The concept is called totalitarism after all, so better limit it to total control of all lifespheres.
J-D 09.15.23 at 1:03 am
I agree. If I gave the impression that I was conflating the two, then I wasn’t expressing myself clearly enough.
I am not saying that the deliberate use of terror is justified in some instances but not in others. However, if somebody said that the deliberate use of terror is justified in some instances but not in others, that would not automatically be inconsistent or hypocritical and therefore if you wanted to argue against their position you need a different argument (or, at least, something more added to the one you have). ‘If you use terror, other people will also use terror’ is not (or, at least, is not enough by itself) a good reason for people not to use terror; there are good reasons for people not to use terror, but this (or, at any rate, this by itself) is not one.
J-D 09.15.23 at 1:05 am
Absolutely. Some people are interested in explaining themselves so that other people will understand them, while other people do not have such an interest.
Salem 09.15.23 at 10:56 am
It is important to distinguish between Congress, who called for the coup, and the military, who carried it out. Congress wanted the military to swiftly hand over to civilian leadership, and were assured that is what would happen. Their purpose was not to govern by executive fiat, but to restore the status quo ante. In other words, they got played.
Of course, getting played like that is probably the norm. Once power gets reduced to force, it’s very hard to put the genie back in the bottle – General Monck is notable because he’s the exception, not the rule. It’s a very risky move to call for a coup. It therefore follows that it’s very risky to put your opponents in a situation where they feel they have to call for a coup.
For sure. But I didn’t use the language of justification, just of likelihood. But if you want to talk about justification, here’s how I see it:
– Allende’s actions were institutionally unjustifiable.
– Allende’s actions predictably and foreseeably led to a coup.
– The coup predictably and foreseeably led to mass killings and the loss of democracy for many years.
If you want to say that, in your value system, Allende’s policy agenda was so wonderful that the upside of success was worth both the institutional damage, and the downside of failure, then I’m not going to argue with you. It’s not my value system, but OK.
But I don’t understand the position that Allende was “justified” in the abstract, without reference to either the institutional perspective, or the likely consequences of his actions.
Congress were in a more difficult position than Allende, because (1) it’s not a unitary actor, (2) they were reacting to, not causing, the lawlessness, and (3) the crisis would have continued, potentially very badly, had they done nothing. But calling for the coup was institutionally unjustified, and predictably and foreseeably led to a disaster. In my value system, they shouldn’t have done that, but again, if you have a different value system, I’m not going to argue.
More interesting to me is the question Miliband implicitly raises, of how should the military respond in such circumstances. And note that the military is not a unified actor either. It’s not just the perspective of the C-in-C that matters, but other senior military leaders, middle-ranking officers, all the way down to the rank and file. After all, coups are often led by colonels, and have been defeated by appealing directly to the ordinary soldiers. And there are no easy answers – if most of the military start a coup, and we stay loyal to the govt, did we just defeat the coup, or start a civil war? Hard to tell! On the other hand, you may think you’re carrying out a coup to restore democracy, only to find that your C-in-C makes himself a military dictator. Or maybe your C-in-C really is just trying to restore democracy, but unleashing military force has a worst-get-on-top dynamic. Or…
For all the horror of coups, it’s easy to see how you can walk up to them bit by bit. Particularly in a country like Chile, where there had already been a failed coup earlier that year.
I have the very boring normie position that politicians should follow the law. I’ll happily grant that with enough creativity, you can posit an incredible hypothetical where they should go outside the law, but it’s not practically relevant.
If you think it’s OK for politicians to go outside the law if they have “sufficiently good reason,” then so be it, but aside from all the other reasons to keep to the law, breaking the law puts the other institutions in very difficult positions. To bring it back to the present, it is appalling that Trump behaved so badly that the military felt obliged to take him out of the chain of command. And that in no way depends on what his “reasons” might have been. No, Trump didn’t cause 17 years of military rule, but the US has a very strong culture that will take a long time to degrade. But keep forcing the military to intervene in politics, keep ramping up the lawlessness, and we’ll see what happens.
engels 09.15.23 at 11:57 am
Did somebody say totalitarianism?
LFC 09.15.23 at 1:05 pm
For an analysis of the conflict/clash between personal rights and property rights in “liberal democratic capitalism,” see S. Bowles & H. Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism (1986 and later ed.).
Tm 09.15.23 at 1:13 pm
Stj’s characterization of liberal democracy as being concerned only with property rights is a caricature but alas there is no shortage of „liberal“ politicians behaving exactly like their worst caricature.
Case in point: Christian Lindner, the German finance minister and leader of the „liberal democratic party“ FDP, recently spoke at an event commemorating the failed liberal revolution of 1848. He stated the view that liberalism is exclusively about property (which the revolutionaries of 1848 would have vigorously rejected) and dismissed the German constitution as an irrelevant narrative. Art. 14 states:
„Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good. Expropriation shall only be permissible for the public good.“
Lindner‘s statement:
‚Daraus könne man lernen, dass „Eigentum, und der Wunsch, Eigentum zu bilden und zu mehren“, Ausdruck „der menschlichen Natur“ seien. Ganz im Gegensatz zur Ansicht jener, die heute dem „Narrativ“ anhingen, „dass Eigentum verpflichte“.‘
Iow imiting property rights, as the constitution does, is against „human nature“.
The FDP was a liberal democratic party for a few decades between the 1960s and 1980s. Today it is simply a right wing party now playing the role of SineManchin in German politics.
The speech was apparently mostly ignored but interestingly, the conservative newspaper FAZ published a detailed takedown:
https://m.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/geist-soziales/christian-lindner-und-seine-eigentuemliche-interpretation-von-eigentum-19167358.html
steven t johnson 09.15.23 at 2:55 pm
steven t johnson@32 is wrong, it was English liberals like Gladstone who approved the defense of liberty, meaning security of property (including human property,). There were many liberals in the North who disagreed most strenuously, even if there were the Clement Vallandighams and Fernando Woods who heartily disapproved the Federal government’s authoritarian overreach.
LFC@34 arbitrarily selects the Declaration of Independence, a manifesto designed to put the best face possible on the American Revolution—which is by the way being recognized as the Counterrevolution of 1776 against the true liberal democracy of the British Empire (sic, by my lights, but then LFC thinks my lights radiate darkness.)—written largely by a remarkably slippery and cunning politician. I suggest that liberal democratic theory in the US has more to do with Blackstone, John Locke and “CATO” (aka Gordon and Trenchard,) in the US. Treating the Declaration as a promise to live up to is one thing. But the phrase was “life, liberty and property” before the Declaration and the substance thereafter. It is I think LFC who misrepresents.
If anyone is interested, when I referred to the notion that civil society is a market society and that it precedes the state proper, that implies the necessity for security of property to be upheld. This belief is why many people still hold that a government shouldn’t intervene in the operations of the free market, that the free market is freedom. Government property is intrinsically a violation of freedom. By ignoring this, LFC misrepresents me personally I think. Along those lines, marcel proust@36 seems to imply I said Calhoun was a great liberal democratic theorist. I did not say this. I do think he was more honest and more consistent than Jefferson or even Randolph or Roanoke. And Calhoun was greatly influential. But none of these I think are “great.”
I wrote “But Calhoun’s belief that security of property is a human right is a liberal democratic principle. And the principle that the majority has no right to violate the human rights to security of property of the minority is also a liberal democratic principle. Majority rule is not an agreed principle of liberal democracy, indeed the deliberate thwarting of majority rule can be deemed a key principle of liberal democracy. Calhoun most certainly was a a liberal democratic theorist.” I believe marcel proust is inclined to deny the US was a liberal democracy until a later enlightened generation blessed the Earth. That is very flattering to those marcel proust’s admits to the club of morally superior persons but it is a bold claim nonetheless.
And that point takes us to the carefully diplomatic pushback against Allende. I think those criticisms of Allende as a mere politician waving a mandate around against the parliament etc. are a kind of recasting in different language. Allende, despite popular support, was and is held to be illegitimate because he was using state power against civil society. And the real distinguishing thing about a free market. aka civil society, is the notion private property is freedom. Civil society is where we’re human, free, as opposed to the political state, where majority rule is tyranny when it threatens civil society, that is, property.
The excursions into defining “totalitarianism” I think are guaranteed to fail, however entertaining the participants may find it. MisterMr’s suggestion that the Roman Catholic Church could be regarded as medieval totalitarianism will necessarily fail. I don’t think there’s any way to salvage the concept, which is purely ideological animus made pompous.
Stephen 09.15.23 at 7:00 pm
J-D @ 42/43: trying to explain myself so that you can understand me. I trust that you do not disagree with my definition above of political terror, from the Committee of Public Safety onwards.
If somebody said that deliberate use of genocide is justified in some instances but not in others – as it might be. a hypothetical Turkish supremacist arguing that the genocide of Armenians was justified because it was intended to benefit the Turkish nation, whereas the genocide of Jews by the Nazis was not justified because it did not benefit Turkey – I would agree with your judgement in the case of the deliberate use of terror. That statement would be neither inconsistent nor hypocritical; and one would need some other reason for opposing genocide.
It would, however, by my standards be enough to disqualify the speaker from being taken seriously as a decent human being.
Similarly with Miliband’s belief that terror in the cause of revolution could be justified, terror against the revolution can’t. I’m not sure that this is in fact your position, but you do seem to me to. be edging towards it. I hope I’m wrong.
engels 09.15.23 at 10:11 pm
Just when you think this board can’t sink any lower… the comparison between Allende’s elected and constitutional presidency and (a hypothetical attempt to hold onto power after losing the election by) Trump is batshit insane.
Sashas 09.15.23 at 10:32 pm
@stj (48) I will admit that both “bourgeois democracy” and “liberal democracy” are terms I just don’t use (thus my lurking so far). However, isn’t what I’ve quoted from you just a definition of libertarianism? I think I’m fairly familiar with that concept, and I believe it is defined by the beliefs that (1) government property is intrinsically a violation of freedom, (2) markets are naturally free, and therefore (3) governments should not intervene in the market. It is furthermore as I understand it a tenet of libertarianism that property rights are one of the most basic human rights, possibly the most basic.
Is the point here that “liberal democracy” is a political system following libertarian ideals? Am I missing something else?
engels 09.15.23 at 11:36 pm
…my definition above of political terror, from the Committee of Public Safety onwards. If somebody said that deliberate use of genocide is justified in some instances but not in others…
Umm just to retrack this… we’re talking about Allende… the Chilean road to socialism etc… not Robespierre or Pol Pot.
J-D 09.16.23 at 12:49 am
This is the classic abuser’s excuse: ‘it’s very risky to provoke me!’ In a sense, ‘it’s risky to provoke a domestic abuser’ is a true statement, but even as a true statement it can only be relevant to mention if the abuser’s framing of the situation has been at least partially accepted, which it should not be! The abuser felt provoked, did he? Well, he shouldn’t have felt provoked! The Congress felt they had to call for a coup, did they? Well, they shouldn’t have felt that way! They didn’t have to call for a coup, they chose to call for a coup, and it was a bad choice, one which was not justified.
I still don’t know which actions are being referred to. I didn’t before, and I still don’t now. If I knew which actions were being referred to, I might be able to form an opinion about whether they were justifiable, but without that information it’s obviously impossible. I’ve got no reason yet to accept that these actions were unjustifiable because I don’t even know what the actions were, let alone the relevant context.
I’ve got no reason to accept this, either, because I still don’t know what actions are being referred to–and also, relevantly in this context, what the alternative possible courses of action were that provide the necessary point of reference.
But I haven’t said that and I don’t want to say that. What I’m saying is that, in this discussion so far, not enough information has been provided about the government agenda and its implementation to form the basis for the relevant assessment.
I agree that Congress shouldn’t have called for a coup, but I have to point out that saying that the disaster was predictable and foreseeable undercuts the significance of the earlier suggestion that Congress was ‘played’: to say that they were played means that they were induced to believe something that wasn’t true, but to add that the disaster was predictable and foreseeable means that they were induced to believe something which they could and should have known wasn’t true. ‘They lied to us’ loses exculpatory value if the lie was one that could and have been detected as such (at the time, not just in hindsight).
Well, that depends on what the relevant circumstances were. For the military to act against the government is justified much less often than the military and its supporters think it is, but this is not the same as saying it can never be justified. The default presumption when the military stages a coup is that they shouldn’t have, in the absence of cogent reasons to the contrary; therefore, I take it that what the military should have done in Chile in 1975 was ‘not stage a coup’, unless cogent reasons to the contrary are presented. (I could easily give a real historical example in which there were cogent reasons for the military to act against the government, but I know those reasons weren’t applicable to the case of Chile in 1975.)
I can easily give you real examples of terrible laws which people were or are right to break, and which politicians, too, were right to break (or would have been right to break). I am happy to mention these examples, but I don’t want to do that before I’ve seen a justification given for the contraposed position that laws should never be broken (because what I’m interested in here is the general argument about whether people should ever break the law, not specific arguments about the specific examples I have in mind). I don’t know of any good argument in support of the position (whether it’s ‘boring’ and ‘normie’ or not) that people should never break the law, or even that politicians should never break the law.
Where there are bad laws, laws so bad that they should be broken, then it is the people who chose to make those bad laws (and the people who do not choose to change them) who have chosen to create difficult situations, not the people who choose to break them. For example …
… people chose to make bad laws which have produced an over-powerful Presidency, and people have not chosen to change those laws. Those were bad choices, partly responsible for some of the difficult situations which arose during the Presidency of Donald Trump. However, individual acts of defiance are not going to be enough to reduce the power of the Presidency as it should be reduced, and therefore can’t be justified on those particular grounds.
‘We’ll see what happens’ is something which is true for everybody all the time–until we die, that is. But nobody forces the military to intervene in politics: when the military intervenes in politics it is by choice, sometimes for good reasons but mostly for bad ones.
I don’t know what gave the impression I might be edging towards support for the use of terror. It is wrong to support the use of terror! People should not support the use of terror! I hope this is clear enough to remove doubt about my position.
What I am concerned with is the giving of bad reasons for good conclusions. There is no need to give me reasons why supporting the use of terror is wrong, because that is something I already know. However, if somebody appeared who was asking for reasons why they should not support the use of terror, and the response was ‘Because it’s inconsistent’ or ‘Because it’s hypocritical’, that would not be a good reason. There are good reasons not to support the use of terror, but not those ones.
engels 09.16.23 at 9:33 am
The victim-blaming and fact-free smearing of Allende on display on this thread are really depressing (if not surprising).
Salem 09.16.23 at 12:44 pm
J-D:
If you wish to remain aggressively (performative?) ignorant about the Allende Presidency, that is your prerogative. Sensible discussion requires a baseline familiarity with the events of his Presidency. This thread is not the place for a history textbook on exactly what happened in Chile in 1970-3. Go look that up, then come back, if you are operating in good faith.
Two key points, however:
“Keep dressing that way and I’ll beat you,” and “Keep beating me and I’ll stab you,” are very different threats. We have the right to dress as we want, but not to beat our partners. That is not to defend carrying out the latter threat. It could amount to murder. But a man who starts beating his partner risks getting stabbed, and in some sense that is a good thing, as it discourages domestic abuse.
This is why institutional justification matters to most people. Allende had no right to defy the law. I hesitate to say he was the abuser and Congress was the battered wife who overreacted, because the analogy only goes so far. But that is closer to the truth than your ridiculous view.
In a democracy, elected politicians are the ones who make and enforce the laws. There is a massive difference between private citizens, subjected to an unjust law, choosing to break it, and politicians choosing to disregard the restraints on their power. Allende defying the other co-equal branches is fundamentally anti-democratic. He was not elected to the legislative or judicial power! If politicians are free to seize powers to which they are not elected or entitled, then what is the problem with generals doing likewise? Pinochet was exactly as entitled to rule by decree as Allende – which is to say, not at all.
Is the difference that Allende was “good” and Pinochet was “bad?” That is not how democracy works. Representative democracy is the most successful political system yet invented because it doesn’t rely on cosmic notions of good or bad, just counting the votes, and thereby keeps today’s losers inside the system, by giving them the chance to win tomorrow. Your juvenile view, walked up to but never quite stated, that virtue needs no restraint and error has no rights, is a recipe for eternal civil disorder.
In a democracy, we settle things by elections and laws, not by politicians opportunistically attempting to seize power and overturn laws they deem bad. Such actions are destructive regardless of the goodness or badness of the laws in question. Chile 1973 is a case in point.
steven t johnson 09.16.23 at 1:03 pm
Sashas@50 “Is the point here that ‘liberal democracy’ is a political system following libertarian ideals? Am I missing something else?” The libertarians say they are still following the liberal tradition abandoned by progressives and other statists, still true to the honored legacy of the unread Adam Smith and the oft-read de Mandeville and the glorious Bastiat.
In practice, libertarians don’t actually stand for decriminalizing drugs and deviant sex but do stand for guns in a way the founders of liberal democracy did not. But they claim to, and those purported politics are in fact quite different from classical liberals. But libertarians still are strongly committed to the old, old principles of liberal democracy. That’s why the Liberty Fund, for one, reprints such stalwarts as Algernon Sidney or Gordon and Trenchard. My judgment is that this is entirely legitimate in one respect, as they are indeed heirs, but not the only legitimate heirs with the true claim to the intellectual estate. I think their main origins are fairly recent, in the resistance to the New Deal, the welfare state and Communism. See, von Mises, von Hayek, Rand and Leonard Read’s whole FEE stable, including the Henry Hazlit JQ respects. But then, my view is hostile, so my judgment is no doubt colored.
Tm 09.16.23 at 2:04 pm
Engels 53: let’s be clear that only one person in this thread is doing that.
At the German university where I studied, several right wing professors (now deceased) were open Pinochet supporters. One of them by the name of Blumenwitz taught constitutional law and had written a legal opinion defending the coup, claiming that it wasn’t unconstitutional for Pinochet to overthrow the legitimate government and suspend the constitution. You need to have special powers of legal reasoning (comparable to Trumpist judges in the US) to maintain such an incoherent position. If one claims, as Salem does, that Allende acted outside the constitution and therefore deserved to be overthrown, one still has to acknowledge that the purpose of the coup was not to restore constitutional government but to destroy it. One can in the abstract argue that under certain circumstances a coup against an elected government might be justified, but certainly not this coup, which resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of people and a brutal, decadelong dictatorship.
Fascist enablers like the above mentioned Blumenwitz were in good graces with the then government and held positions of power with little blowback. Although in his later years, he got little respect outside of his right wing circles. But there are still plenty of enablers around I’m afraid.
Tm 09.16.23 at 2:09 pm
Engels 51: to be fair, the dispute (as far as I understand it) is about whether terror can ever be a justifiable means of politics, not whether Allende employed terror (which unless I missed it nobody alleges).
engels 09.16.23 at 6:58 pm
Maybe the Pinochet understanders could name the most illegal/undemocratic/unconstitutional/terroristic thing Allende did before he was militarily attacked and his supporters murdered and tortured en masse and we can take it from there?
Salem 09.16.23 at 10:06 pm
What an absurd thing to say. Naturally I have never said anything of the sort. In fact, I said repeatedly in this thread that Congress acted very wrongly in calling for Allende to be overthrown. What I instead said is that by acting outside the constitution, Allende predictably risked – not just being overthrown, but ending democracy in Chile. And never mind Allende, the Chilean people certainly didn’t deserve that.
But that’s what they got.
engels –
That you label me a “Pinochet understander” disgraces you, and I will not respond to you any further. But for the benefit of others, I urge you to read the resolution of the Chamber of Deputies against Allende, which pointed out his serious crimes – supporting illegal armed groupings, arbitrary arrest, torture, muzzling the press, forbidding people from leaving the country without any legal justification, illegally seizing private property, sedition, and usurping the powers of the other branches.
And how did Allende respond to these allegations? Did he deny them? Or did he release a statemeng rejecting the “Rule of Law” as a bourgeois institution, and claim that he served a higher, more authentic level of “democratic legality”?
(“Por ello me es posible acusar a la oposición de querer impedir el desarrollo histórico de nuestra legalidad democrática, elevándola a un nivel más auténtico y alto. Pretenden ignorar que el Estado de Derecho sólo se realiza plenamente en la medida que se superen las desigualdades de una sociedad capitalista.”)
Or go read the letters the Chilean Supreme Court sent to Allende, condemning his “illegal interference in judicial matters… [and] open and willful disregard for judicial verdicts.” And go read his response:
“In a time of revolution, political power has the right to decide, at the end of the day, whether or not judicial decisions correspond with the higher goals and historical necessities of social transformation, which should take absolute precedence over any other consideration; consequently, the Executive has the right to decide whether or not to carry out the verdicts of the Judicial Branch.”
Now, to re-iterate, despite Allende’s many crimes, Congress still shouldn’t have called for a coup against him. But where does this weird pretence that Allende was a law-abiding President come from? He was a serial law-breaker who – like Trump – had just enough support in Congress to block a successful impeachment.
engels 09.17.23 at 11:10 am
Sorry Salem, that doesn’t cut it: you need a factual and legally based justification for your claims of illegality, not a resolution from the right-wing coupmongers in congress (itself of dubious constitutionality owing to its small majority). And you are wrong to say that Allende didn’t rebutt it in full or reiterate his commitment to democratic principles.
https://www.elciudadano.com/memoria50anos/la-respuesta-del-presidente-salvador-allende-ante-el-proyecto-de-la-camara-de-diputados/08/22/
engels 09.17.23 at 3:06 pm
I said repeatedly in this thread that Congress acted very wrongly in calling for Allende to be overthrown
And yet you are taking their opinions on Allende and constitutional law as gospel: funny.
engels 09.17.23 at 11:41 pm
Oh and “Pinochet understander” seems a reasonable label for the author of musings like this:
…there are no easy answers – if most of the military start a coup, and we stay loyal to the govt, did we just defeat the coup, or start a civil war? Hard to tell! On the other hand, you may think you’re carrying out a coup to restore democracy, only to find that your C-in-C makes himself a military dictator… For all the horror of coups, it’s easy to see how you can walk up to them bit by bit. Particularly in a country like Chile…
Others can decide who, if any of us, has “disgraced” himself.
J-D 09.18.23 at 12:59 am
If the question I am asking were ‘What is a list of actions taken by the Chilean government under the Presidency of Salvador Allende?’ then I could easily find an answer–I wouldn’t have to go further than Wikipedia.
But that is not the question I am asking!
The question I am asking is ‘Which are the actions of the Chilean government under the Presidency of Salvador Allende which are evaluated negatively by Salem and considered by Salem to have contributed to provoking the coup against that government?’
Wikipedia can’t answer that question; no website can answer that question; no academic library can answer that question; a PhD in twentieth-century Chilean history can’t answer that question. There’s only one possible source for the answer to that question, and that source is Salem; if the answer isn’t provide from that source, it must remain forever unknown.
This is true, but how is it relevant? In this history, there is a government which had its opponents beaten (and worse), but it was the post-coup government, not the pre-coup government.
When generals act outside their legally defined powers, it’s usually wrong but it can occasionally be right–I mentioned previously that I can easily supply a real historical example. If the military acts against the government, the default presumption should be that this is a bad thing, but that is not universally the case. So if somebody asks ‘What is wrong with generals acting in this way?’, it’s not possible to answer the question if it’s not clear whether we’re discussing what is usually the case or what is invariably the case. If we’re discussing what must invariably be the case, then the answer to the question ‘What is wrong with generals acting in this way?’ has to be ‘Actually, it isn’t always wrong?’, and the same is true if we’re discussing action by civilian politicians. In this particular instance, even if we can reach agreement that Salvador Allende was acting outside the law, that information by itself is insufficient to reach the conclusion that his actions were unjustified.
On the same principle, my conclusion that the actions of those who made the coup were unjustified is not based solely on the observation that they were acting outside the law.
If somebody said to me ‘Every use made of a lawful power obtained by victory in a democratic election is justified’, I would respond ‘I do not accept that as the only evaluative standard, and you have given no reason why I should’. It follows that I do not accept that it is always wrong to resist the lawful use made of democratically obtained powers, and, again, no reason has been given why I should.
engels 09.20.23 at 7:36 pm
Phil’s anniversary post (#1) is a better statement on this than my bickering.
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