A Tale of Two Coups Peter McDermott

A remarkable thing began in Lisbon on April 25, 1974. What was called the Carnation Revolution had similarities to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia 30 years later. The difference with those events and others like it from the former Soviet empire was that the trigger in Portugal was a left-wing military coup ? a highly unusual occurrence, if not indeed unique, in the annals of the West.

Earlier that month, Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest with
"Waterloo," which turned out to be the first of numerous
international megahits for the Swedish band. Maybe it was that
association, and the military theme of the Abba hit, but for
several years afterwards Portugal''s song in the competition was
invariably a celebration of their momentous entry into the
community of free nations. It''s not easy to integrate the "Ongoing
Revolutionary Process," the official title of the Portuguese
democratization, into catchy pop lyrics, but did they try.

The coup of April 25 by junior officers ? which ended more than
40 years of right-wing dictatorship --was relatively bloodless. Four
people were killed by the old regime''s political police. It stood in
marked contrast to another military coup the previous fall. That
happened in Chile on September 11, 1973. It came from the right,
with the armed forces'' top brass overthrowing constitutional
democracy. Thousands were to die at the hands of the junta led
by General Augusto Pinochet.

Not long after Pinochet took power, the Chicago Boys group of
economists went down to Chile and applied their free market
principles and later claimed that they had made it the most
successful economy in Latin America (which is something that
others dispute).

I say all of this against the backdrop of a discourse in the United
States today in which the word "tyranny" is constantly bandied
about ?- as if higher taxes and more regulations, as well as a few
people with dodgy past associations having positions in
government, would be enough for us to tilt us toward leftist
dictatorship. One would have thought that if people were really
concerned about oppression they might be better served by
serious discussion about such things as Chile in 1973 and
Portugal in 1974 and other situations.

Of course, there is a case for American exceptionalism ? that this
country is different from others and has done fine by not knowing
too much about other places in the world. And yet, some
Americans have had no problem exporting democracy as they see
it, and the revolutionary ideals of 1776 generally, to other
countries. Here, a lack of knowledge has been a very dangerous
and costly thing. For instance, the idea that democracy is an
antidote to terror sounds good in theory until you remember that
most of the best-known terrorist campaigns in the world have
been ethnic wars directed at constitutionally-based western-style
governments. So, when you remove a centralizing power in one of
the most ethnically divided places on Earth you have the potential
for chaos ? which is what we got in Iraq. The argument that there
is a democracy of sorts in place there, and that that has made the
horrific bloodshed worth it all, should be examined more closely.
Over the past two decades, much of Latin America and Central
and Eastern Europe embraced democracy without any bloodshed
(the big exception of course, is the former Yugoslavia, which was
historically divided along ethnic lines). More generally we can''t
have it both ways ? we can''t export democracy on the one hand
and on the other close our ears to what happened in Portugal or
Chile or any other Western nation.

Being an optimist I don''t believe that a rightist dictatorship will
ever come to pass in this country, despite the worrying
concentration of corporate wealth and power. However, any
honest person would have to admit that that scenario is rather
more likely than the paranoid fantasies of a liberal-leftist takeover
that have helped make millions of late for certain folks with the
gift of the gab.

The most important reason why is the military, which, as in most
places, leans right -- and despite the burdens placed on America''s
soldiers, nobody has ever suggested that they are ever likely to
swing to the radical left. Portugal''s younger officers were the
exception that proved the rule. They had been radicalized by
fighting pointless wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau
-- the last Western colonies in Africa.

It was war and the collapse of authority that led to the Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia and also to the communists taking over in
China, both underdeveloped societies by Western standards.
Communist power in eastern and central Europe after World War
II was made possible by the presence of the occupying Red Army.
Then in early 1959, a group of radical guerillas overthrew the
Cuban dictator and came to the conclusion that their best bet for
survival was throwing in their lot with the Soviet bloc.

Chile was not Cuba. It had free elections, about which President
Nixon''s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger famously said:
"I don''t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go
Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people."

In 1970, medical doctor and socialist politician Salvador Allende
had been elected president. Despite the deepening economic
crisis and political instability over the next few years, his left-wing
coalition remained popular. The local elections in the spring of
1973 revealed that the country was split evenly between
government and the opposition forces.

The government, with its far-reaching radical reforms, which
included the nationalization of the copper mines, had provoked
the ire of the U.S. government. But here''s the thing ? Chile was
never going to slip into the communist bloc, as Kissinger
suggested it might. Its middle class was too big, and indeed had
flexed its muscles with anti-government "strikes" in 1972 and
1973, while its armed forces weren''t sympathetic to the left.
Furthermore, Brazil''s army on the frontier was perhaps an even
bigger deterrent to Chile joining the Soviet bloc.

The Chilean left suffered from two delusions. One part of it
thought that the "revolution" was at hand, a perspective that
contributed to instability. But Chile in 1970s wasn''t Russia in
1917, no more than it was Cuba. The government, in contrast,
was committed to the "constitutional road to socialism," which
was the other delusion. It simply wasn''t possible with just less
than 51 percent of the popular vote -- hence the country''s
paralyzing instability. As I argued in a previous column, far-
reaching change in a democracy requires much more than half of
the electorate behind it.




















Allende''s biggest ally in his constitutionalist approach wasn''t his
own Socialist Party, sections of which were very radical, but his
main coalition partner, the pro-Soviet Communist Party. It was
said of the PCCh that if it rained in Moscow, party members put up
their umbrellas in Santiago. But such parties in the West only
ever got millions of people to vote for them because of their mix of
militancy and pragmatic adaption to local realities.

A former archbishop of Canterbury once described communism
as a Christian heresy. He was referring less to the Soviet empire --
which replaced Czarist autocracy, and which itself has since been
replaced in the Kremlin by something that hasn''t quite been
defined yet ? than to the lure of its ideals in Western societies like
his own. It''s rarely noted in that regard that many people swept up
by those ideals were able to combine an uncritical devotion to the
USSR with a patriotic commitment to the constitution of their own
homeland.


Of course, the exaggeration of the threat they posed has always
been useful to people in power. In the early 1950s, FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover said that there were proportionately more members
of the Communist Party USA than there had been Bolsheviks
before the October Revolution. But prior to 1917 in Russia, there
were no Republican or Democratic Parties, or free unions, or
religious diversity, or an advanced and complex civil society
generally. Hoover was looking at the world, for his own reasons, in
much the same way the self-deluded ultra-left has done in the
West.

In the same period that Hoover made his comment about the
CPUSA, novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, who was no friend of
the party, said that the official attitude seemed to be that
Communism was somehow "catching," that you had to fire a
teacher, for example, because he or she might transmit their
views by some mysterious method unknown to science.

By the early 1960s, more liberals and moderates had come to
believe that the obsession with communism was potentially far
more destructive than the small CPUSA itself. Increasingly, too,
politicians began to question the obsession with an international
threat that had led humanity to the brink of nuclear conflict ? the
ultimate unjust war. President Kennedy was one. During his
thousand days in office -- from January 1961 to November 1963 ?
he had the confidence time and again to challenge the Joint
Chiefs of Staff.

In his enthralling "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy
Years" (2007), David Talbot reports that scenes from "Seven Days
in May," the best-selling novel by a political journalist about a
planned military coup, were "inspired by the increasingly ominous
mood in the capital." Talbot was told by the historian and Camelot
insider Arthur Schlesinger and several others that JFK asked
filmmaker John Frankenheimer to turn the novel into a movie "to
help him awake the nation to the threat of far-right treason."

In our time, that so-called libertarians are concerned with the
views and/or supposed connections of a handful of officials like
Van Jones than they are about what President Eisenhower called
the military-industrial complex for me shows the shallowness of
their concern for liberty.

One conservative columnist though, John Perry of the right-wing
Newsmax, was kind enough to go off message last fall. He said:
"Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution
through an interim administration that would do the serious
business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-
trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged,
radical-left commissars."

That was Pinochet''s rationale. The military had to step in to
protect the Constitution and to purge the nation of the Marxist
cancer. He began a reign of terror that extended as far as
Washington DC (with the murder of former Ambassador Orlando
Letelier and his assistant Ronni Moffitt by car bomb in 1976). All
parties, left and right, were in time banned. The junta ruled for 18
years.

Peter McDermott is the Associate Editor of The Irish Echo newspaper, and also a staff writer for ArtistsILove.com