talkpolitics | Entries tagged with history

In 1970 the people of Chile had the temerity to elect the radical socialist Salvador Allende as their President, through a coalition of Christian leftists, social democrats, democratic socialists, radical liberals, and communists. The Allende government sought to nationalise major (and often foreign-owned) industries, engage in agrarian reform, increase minimum wages, employment, enhance social security, education, and public health. Three years later the military, under General Augusto Pinochet, organised a coup against the Allende government, ushering in seventeen years of a fascist dictatorship where tens of thousands would be executed, "go missing", imprisoned, tortured, and raped.

With declassified documents it is evident that the coup against the Allende government was encouraged and supported by the U.S. government, despite claims to the contrary by public officials for years. Further, the U.S. government supported the Pinochet régime, especially through Operation Condor, a U.S. campaign of assisting state terrorism against left-wing and democratic activists in South America. At least 60,000 deaths have been attributed to Operation Condor. Under the influence of anti-public economists, such as Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, the Pinochet régime banned trade unions, and privitised social security and public enterprises, with many of the latter being sold below market price to politically-connected buyers.

Always following as a subservient second-ranked imperial power, Australia too supported the murderous coup and all that followed with our own operatives in Chile. Now former Australian military intelligence officer and academic Clinton Fernandes is seeking the release of classified documents relating to the role Australia played in helping the military regime of General Pinochet. Most of these documents are around fifty years old, but nevertheless the Australian government is resisting the release of these documents, arguing "national security" issues, as is always done. It stands in stark contrast that other countries involved, including the United States, that have already declassified information relating to their involvement.

On a personal note the events in Chile had a profound and formative effect on own political thought. Through the movie "Missing", which traced a family's attempts to find their murdered son (Charles Horman) after their coup. It was a fair film, carried well by Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. The haunting soundtrack by Vangelis was never released, however a kind person has put it up on Youtube. Whilst the film concentrated on the loss of one non-Chilean life, the book went into significantly further details of the setting and the events. The important lesson learned from Allende's Chile is that, despite any claims to the contrary, if democratic capitalism is threatened by democratic socialism the loyalty of the State is not to democracy but to capitalism, and those forces will use any means in their disposal, including instituting a fascist and military dictatorship, to protect their profits, power, and privilege.

dancesofthelight

It's worth reflecting at length on one of the biggest and sharpest ironies of the failures of the USA as an ideal versus what it actually has been. In the America ~~of offering the skulls of adults to He Who Walks Be~~-er corn, Jesus, and apple pie, the idea is that the tree of liberty is refreshed by the blood of tyrants, that humanity was created equal and that the right of those when faced with repression is to smash it by any means necessary.

And yet, in US history, there are but a few names that have actually done so. Are they hailed as heroes for so doing? No. Why? They did it on behalf of opposing white supremacy, a thing that was considered across the Atlantic then and now to be a utopian fever dream, and where revolution in the name of the seizure of the Bastille or the glorious proletarian revolution of the Vorkuta mines and NKVD gunfire is heroic, those who were held in bondage overthrowing their masters by the bayonet, of course....
( Nat Turner, Prophet of Freedom )
( John Brown's body lies a moulderin' in the grave but his soul goes marching on ).

And yet.....is this really so different or as much of an aberration as it seems? Germany suppressed the Peasant revolts of the Reformation Age, the ones those who sought to reshape the engineering of the soul deemed worth suppressing in gunfire. The UK doesn't exactly cheer on Wat Tyler or the executioners of Charles I, nor does France on the whole admire the Jacobins whose main result was progress over a pyramid of corpses culminating in the rise of the first Bonapartist monarchy.

Where revolutionary ideals are admired they are seen in a sanitized version that pretends class war is a matter of ballots and not bullets and not an entirely literal war full of war's futility and grinding atrocities that the winning side calls just and the defeated side only gets to write if it happened to get an Andrew Johnson and not Lenin. Real revolutions are bloody maelstroms of chaos where the organized systems of power break down, and they tend to degenerate into a civil war if they didn't start as one because in the absence of state power the system of control does not shift to the wise or the kind but to the well-armed and the fanatical.

This is why the overthrow of the Pahlavis did not see Constitutional Revolution 2.0 but the rise of the Shah.

It is why the fall of white Tsars saw red Tsars and not that much different here.

Is the USA refusing to admire its most overt and bloody revolutionaries really that exceptional, or do other parts of the world cheer their most bloody revolutionaries whose idea of progress was rooted in a pyramid of skulls?

dancesofthelight

https://www.aljazeera.com/2020/09/22/legacy-of-iran-iraq-war-still-reverberates-40-years-later/

( Thoughts on the 1980-8 war, one of the bloodiest and most horrible wars of a century of bloody and horrible wars )

It is one of the 20th Century's great oddities that one of its most important wars, one of the very few where the superpowers backed the same side (Iraq) and the side they did not back dramatically outmatched the one they did, and one where the superpowers both backed the same side for fear of the same phenomenon (warlike Islamic fundamentalism) has become one of its most obscure. It is the conflict that tilted Iraq's 21st Century into the litany of horrors that it ultimately became, and ensured a sour 20th Century would curdle worse amidst the bloodbath of 1991 and the Long War in the air over the 'No Fly Zones' that followed into 2003 and was erased from memory to provide an illusion of a peace that never was.

It, however, is no oddity at all that a century of bloody and horrific wars between sides of moral repulsion that should and could stand out, like the regime in Hanoi versus the US Army in Vietnam, Adolf Hitler's genocidal barbarian savages and Stalin's Ivan the Terrible with an atom bomb regime, Kim Il Sung versus Syngman Rhee, Soviet grunts versus the prototypes of current Sunni Islamism in the Afghan valleys and cities, would see its longest war fought between two of the more repellent regimes it offered.

dancesofthelight

The founding and most driving elements of world history have tended to be Empires, whether trulthfully so or merely seen as so by the biases of the historical record and the imperial elites being those who commission and commissioned the histories and built the Ozymandian monuments for the mighty to look on and despair as they become derelict and rotten and covered in vines and fungus, the pedestals obscured in languages forgotten and unreadable to later years.
( Long summary of how bad empires are everywhere they arose )

It is built atop a foundation of evil that cannot be redeemed nor readily altered.

What then does one make of a world whose cornerstone is laid, and whose foundation rests atop the bleached bones of those whose true morality was to resist the very thing that made it? How can a moral world be built when the very societies that lead it, for a loose sense of that word, are built atop evils that will never see true justice?

Is there any kind of justice here, or is there just rearranging the chairs on death row to make the inmates feel better about the injection and the electric chair?

I've yet to find an answer here in fifteen years of pondering this question and I'm sure I could live for millions or billions of years and still not find it. But....it is one that continues to haunt me.

dancesofthelight

What is European culture, and how does it universally apply from the Atlantic to the Urals (or more precisely to Vladivostok unless those Siberian Russians turn into Asians by the magical de-Europeanizing power of the ass end of the Uural range)?

( The Bad )

( The bad )( The Ugly )( The good )

Whatever there is of it, the USA has gained the very worst. it's gained pogroms, albeit directed at Africans and not Jews. It's gained the addiction to war and slaughter as holy virtues and donning them with Christian garb as a kind of blasphemous mockery of the concept of salvation. It's adapted white supremacy to a point so toxic it will choke itself on its deformed mutation of the earlier concepts of the civilized world. It's taken the firearms and engines of death pioneered at their greatest levels in Europe and exported them back to the old heartlands and racked up the slaughters there, and now does so worldwide.

It has the Rome addiction too, even when the American Empire is far vaster than Rome will ever be.

And again, the Russians have built a civilization atop a pyramid of skulls and the blood of serfs, but they got the Russian ballet, the best novels in any European language, and pretty palaces out of it.

What's America gotten? Southern trees bearing strange fruit and Let's Make a Deal and so many goddamned superheroes that it makes one wish Wertham really had crushed that industry.

Every foul thing that arose in Europe has been taken and warped and made ten times fouler here, and in that sense, the USA is the dark mirror that Europe made, for all the vices that contributed to a world run mad with slaughter for its own sake and the theatrics of murder have farcical and sorrowful echoes here, waiting and lurking with fangs that gleam in the light of the moon to turn on those who should be wary but are not.

So, in that sense, however one answers the question my country gets the worst bit of all of it, where other countries might be founded by people no less murderous and savage if they were settler colonialist too, but they at least seem to have managed to find people less addicted to horror for horror's sake and rewriting it as a grand virtue.

mahnmut

"We have been sitting on a powder keg for quite some time and it has burst," Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said.

She said that after her cops had arrested hundreds of protesters during the race riots in her city.

She's right of course. Racism has "been there" for quite a while. Right from the colonial times in America actually, then through the Civil War, and to this very day.

Even a rough skim through history shows that since the time of the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery, and then the 14th Amendment that gave the freed slaves the right to life, freedom, property, and due process, the question "what shall we do with the blacks" has remained high on America's agenda. It remains there, even after America has had its first black President, its first black commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and its first black (and female!) Secretary of national security.

While there's no excuse for racism, there's a reason for its persistence. One is the hypocrisy of multiculturalism in its current form, a concept that has completely failed at both sides of the Atlantic. It's been presented as a fake facade that's been cracking ever more frequently as of late, displaying the festering ulcers of the past behind. Equal rights and integration turn out to be fiction that even the official stats and daily mainstream news outlets now struggle to deny.

( Read more... )

airiefairie

June Almeida left school at the age of 16. But that did no stop her from pursuing a brilliant career. She was an expert in working with the electronic microscope, and she has dozens of patents in monitoring viruses on her name. Her ground-breaking research still bears significance to this day - it was her technique that was used in China for identifying the Covid-19.

( Read more... )

asthfghl

A little known day of celebration to most Westerners, that's for sure. Today is the day of the Cyrillic alphabet, which is celebrated in parts of Eastern Europe, particularly Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia, and also Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and most of the Central Asian republics (Mongolia has exclusively used the Cyrillic too in the past). It's also the season of the proms around here, and a time when education, culture, knowledge, and literature are celebrated. In commie times there used to be huge parades in the street; as soon as democracy "exploded" here these were temporarily abandoned, as people somehow associated them with socialism; but in recent times there's been a resurgence of this tradition.

( More about May 24 )

kiaa

Now for some distraction from the usual daily horror.

Here, the peopling of the world (recent out of Africa and Upper Paleolithic). Figures are in thousands of years ago (kya).
Time is color coded in a scheme of increasing "frequency", red at 100 kya to violet at 0 kya. Dotted blueish lines are meant to indicate approximate glaciation during the LGM.
Read more: http://ow.ly/fyUW50zt4cj

abomvubuso

Watch on YouTube

fridi

(click on graph to enlarge)

Not exactly on the "historical revisionism" topic, but still very relevant, here are a couple of links to a two-part documentary that investigates the correlation between the 5th century Krakatau volcanic eruption, and the ensuing societal havoc that changed the destiny of entire civilizations worldwide:

Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUz5Vjq9-s
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JBdedLx-GI

The second part in particular deals with the consequences of the major eruption in Indonesia, which caused a global climate disruption, crop failure, famine, barbarian invasions, established civilizations collapsing and being substituted with new emerging ones, etc. It even ends up postulating a link between all this turmoil and the emergence of new world religions such as Islam. Highly recommendable.

( More about this, particularly pandemics )

dancesofthelight

The ol' chestnut of the beginning of World War I.

Now on paper it would seem supremely simple, the decaying Habsburg state under its senile philandering octogenarian seized on the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Germans seized on the chance to most optimistically divide the Entente with gunboat diplomacy or steamroll it in the mighty legions of the Kaiserreich's vast teeming hordes. The Allies were no angels but they did not begin the war, though they damned well did fucking finish it. And it fulfilled Engel's prediction of:

The ravages of the Thirty Years' War compressed into three or four years such that dozens of crowns will roll into the streets but nobody shall pick them up.

( The Guns of August and the Winter of Historical Analysis )
( Niall Ferguson and the alibis of the rich and powerful )
( Kaiser Wilhelm der Scheisskopf und das Weltpolitik )

( The peace that was not peace, and the Wile E. Coyote School of Military Strategy )
The willful censorship of the elites of WWI, in particular those of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg autocracies, in deliberately starting a war in full awareness of what they were doing serves its own aims. it permits the powerful to write a blanket absolution. It permits the comforting myths that states do not gleefully march themselves to their destruction with, in the words of one of their military leaders "we were compelled to choose the manner of our deaths, and we have chosen the most terrible" as the mentality behind it. It preserves the comforting illusion that authority, when existing, exists to do things rationally in its own interests, let alone that of society.

In truth the onset of the First World War was the Covid-19 of its time. People willingly and knowingly gambled on decisions that cost astronomical numbers of lives, and when the chaos that was easily foreseen ensued, tried to rewrite history to make themselves innocent. The generation of 1914 is still allowed to get away with it into the 2020s. This generation of leaders who made this crisis what it is need to be held to the most strict means of accountability.

luzribeiro

Watch on YouTube

Here's the rationale behind this school of thought. See, the West made Germany pay for WWI for no actual reason, and the amount they demanded was just insanely high, making them slaves till eternity with a debt they could never repay. That resentment made the rise of Hitler possible, and so the allied West is partially responsible for the start of WWII.

( Read more... )

dancesofthelight

The other side of the Good War mythology is the one that ultimately won the Cold War, and proved its military might against the fiendish legions of Grenada and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, armies that existed mostly in the minds of the starry-eyed dictators and cringing lackeys the USA went on to tolerate.

The US Good War mythology is the very simplistic Captain America vs the Red Skull to Free the Jews narrative. World War I didn't make the world safe for democracy, thanks to the Cold War, on paper, World War II would. It is amplified by the simple reality that absent the sheer heft of US war production and the sixteen million Americans who fought a global air-land-sea war the only winning option for the Allies was Tube Alloys dissolving Germany in nuclear fire. Because the USA did fight the war, the UK and USSR mechanized their armies more totally than either were going to do on their own, Japan was broken by an air and sea campaign with some contribution from ground troops, and the USA made the Soviet empire that met it in the heart of Europe possible, only to scream at its success when it realized that Tsarism with a Politburo had replaced the system that had prevailed before it.

( Freedom is Slavery )

( War is Peace )
( Ignorance is Strength )
And all of this, ultimately, because Eisenhower and King's great victories over Germany and Japan, respectively, were rewritten into moments of glory, rather than the blundering brutal savagery of the Axis guaranteeing their failure, and oscillations between multiple miniature hells that were made glorious from victory.

To have lost World War II would have been unimaginable horrors unleashed on a colossal scale.

Winning it ensured that instead of a German Empire marching itself to destruction atop the bones of its victims it made into marks of heroism for all time for the Fuehrerprinzip, now it's an American Empire dying by inches in the battlefields of Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Niger, and across the world. Instead of 'Glory to the Race, Service to the State', it's 'God bless America' and instead of 'dictatorship by the crash of the bomb', it's 'democracy by the drone firing a Hellfire missile at a shepherd.'

The Good War has left much sorrow and ruin in its wake. Few mythologies have sowed greater harvests of sorrow save perhaps for Germany's own war addiction made by its unification, and for the 'divine master of mankind' concept that underpinned the rise of Temujin of the Borjigin. The USA is not Nazi Germany, but it does not have to be. The blood of its victims cries from the ground, and all empires ultimately fall precisely because of those cries. If not directly, indirectly.

And so the doomsday clock continues to tick, and Americans pretend to themselves that it is church bells heralding the triumph of the divine mandate, neglecting the words beneath the clock. 'Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.'

dancesofthelight

Historical revisionism (meaning negationism, technically, in historical jargon but that's neither here nor there) is such a fertile topic I could do a post a day on it. Depression means I probably won't come near that, but....

One of the most familiar narratives of the 21st Century in terms of the Second World War is that the USSR, which 'entered' the war in June of 1941 was the selfless heroic regime that did all of the real work to beat the Nazis, where the USA that entered it in December of 1941 barely did any real fighting in it at all and entered it months after the USSR had already won. ( A wine salesman and bank robber cosplay Napoleonic era, hilarity ensues )

( Putin on the Vohzd )
( Voroshilov makes a Finnish of his reputation )
( Stalin goes west, hilarity does not ensue )

( Baltic indigestion makes USSR realize it FUBAREd itself a few decades too late )

To interpret the USSR properly in World War II is to begin its history in that war not with the movement east of the savage hordes of Nazism gleefully machine-gunning people in the back, but the smiling of the small man with the withered arm and the jumped-up champagne salesman in Moscow, setting in motion a set of decisions befitting powerful despotic autocracies but not the revolutionary utopian aspiration of the Bolsheviks of Great October (minus the inconvenient realities that Lenin was driven to Russia by Germans and was a German foreign proxy and the ultimate most triumphant example of why regime change imposed by foreign armies is a damn fool stupid idea, a lesson the USA stubbornly refused to see staring it in the face).

( Image cut because it's big )

The Second World War has become the 'Good War', and my next post is going to be focused directly on the US mythology of 'The Good War' and how much probably irreparable damage it's done to the USA then, later, and into the present era. The war made the American Empire, and bequeathed to it a righteousness it never possessed, and a means of neatly overlooking the very ironies inherent in the MR Pact of the alliance that fought that war, as well as an attempt, largely successful, to erase the inconvenient realities that the land war was won in Ukraine and Belarus, not anything done by the US Army or Marines.

To believe the lies of Putin and of Russians after him that the Soviet War began in June 1941 is to give the USSR more credit than it ever truly deserved, and to underplay the evil and opportunism and bloodsoaked hypocrisy of the Nazis, who were able to briefly swallow their hatred of the Judaeo-Bolshevik ogre to sign a pact with Stalin, and the amoral Machiavellianism of Stalin that showed he was always the truest and best disciple of Comrade Lenin. All wars are at best morally ambiguous if not outright evil.

abomvubuso

Animation of the major events between European countries from 1000 until 2020. The text frame on the left shows important events, and the text frame in the top-right shows general trends of the era.

Watch on YouTube

airiefairie

If we look closer at Lord Byron's biography, one could argue that, although he was born in 1788, in a way he was the first millennial. Because he basically shared the millennials' values and worldview, and their lifestyle. Do bear with me.

( Read more... )

Credits & Style Info

Talk Politics.

A place to discuss politics without egomaniacal mods

MONTHLY TOPIC:
Failed States

DAILY QUOTE:

"Someone's selling Greenland now?" (asthfghl)

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June 2025

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Summary

tcpip - A Few Words About Chile and Australia +6 comments
dancesofthelight - Since the monthly topic is Class Warfare:
dancesofthelight - In another development that should surprise no-one:
dancesofthelight - A second and related question:
dancesofthelight - Here's a deceptively simple question:
mahnmut - The 400 year old powder keg +1 comment
airiefairie - The woman who discovered the coronaviruses +1 comment
asthfghl - May 24, day of the Cyrillic alphabet and Slavonic culture +12 comments
kiaa - Friday offtopic. Peopling of the world +2 comments
abomvubuso - Friday offtopic. The rulers of Europe map
fridi - History-altering natural disasters +4 comments
dancesofthelight - Today in classic historical revisionism:
luzribeiro - Vlad's take on WW2 +1 comment
dancesofthelight - How the USA won WWII and fucked itself and the world:
dancesofthelight - Beginning the monthly topic with something quick and easy:
abomvubuso - Friday offtopic. History of Europe: Agario style
airiefairie - Friday offtopic. Was Byron the first millennial? +2 comments

Talk politics.

A place to discuss politics without egomaniacal mods.

Entries tagged with history

A Few Words About Chile and Australia

Since the monthly topic is Class Warfare:

In another development that should surprise no-one:

A second and related question:

Here's a deceptively simple question:

The 400 year old powder keg

The woman who discovered the coronaviruses

May 24, day of the Cyrillic alphabet and Slavonic culture

Friday offtopic. Peopling of the world

Friday offtopic. The rulers of Europe map

History-altering natural disasters

Today in classic historical revisionism:

Vlad's take on WW2

How the USA won WWII and fucked itself and the world:

Beginning the monthly topic with something quick and easy:

Friday offtopic. History of Europe: Agario style

Friday offtopic. Was Byron the first millennial?

Credits & Style Info

Links

June 2025

Summary