THE CENTURIONS OF SANTIAGO
Paz, Octavio
The following comments on the Chilean military coup were written by the distinguished Mexican writer last fall. They appeared in the Mexican journal Plural and are reprinted here wtih the kind...
...At the top, a tribunal of uniformed and bemedaled pygmies legislates, excommunicates, and executes nonbelievers...
...We must oppose the monstrous but real originality of Tirano Banderas with the human originality of policies both realistic and rational...
...Ritual may afford relief to the one who performs it but it can no longer infect or convince...
...To condemn the action of the Chilean military and the international conspiracies which made it possible might assuage our rightful indignation...
...It is a grievous panorama: at one extreme the nationalist populism of the Peruvian military, at the other the technocratic military dictatorship of Brazil...
...Such actions as the looting of Pablo Neruda's house and the destruction of his books and papers underline the similarity, although this is not really fascism but a patched-up "ideological cover...
...The most urgent task of truly democratic and socialist movements in Latin America is to develop viable programs and to design a new strategy and new tactics...
...Reality must be approached with humility...
...Our countries are still the country of Tirano Banderas.* Valle Inclan's character is at the same time a monster and intensely real...
...One can no longer breathe on our continent...
...Marx and Engels would have categorically answered "No...
...I do not protest protests: I ask that they may be accompanied or followed by an analysis of the facts...
...facing them both, the ambiguity of Peronism...
...Despite the changes that the doctrine underwent, none of the followers, from Kautsky to Trotsky and from Rosa Luxemburg to Lenin, ever asserted that it was possible to establish authentically socialist governments in nonindustrialized countries that depend on a single product...
...The peace that is being built by the superpowers rises from peoples' humiliations, dissidents' sacrifices, and the remains of fallen democracies: Greece, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay, Chile...
...It is not enough...
...Rhetoric wears out itself and us...
...For its founders, socialism would increase and rationalize production and distribution in industrial society but it was not endowed with the mission of creating an industrial society...
...I mean that for them socialism would be the product of industry and not a means to achieve industrialization...
...The assumption is that the change toward socialism will happen very gradually and very slowly, so that at every step of the way a sizable part of those who were fearful at the start can be won over...
...We lack, in equal amounts, political imagination and intellectual restraint...
...Not only is it divided into many factions, it is also—more seriously and crucially—torn between the relative weakness of its forces and the geometric absoluteness of its programs...
...But are they...
...The ideologist of "socialism in one country" always considered it a determining prerequisite that the country would have the magnitude and resources of a continent—the U.S.S.R...
...To fight an adversary, we have to know him...
...Neither did Stalin...
...The defeat of Chile exposes the Left in Latin America to serious moral and political temptations...
...Francois Mitterand, the French socialist leader, thinks that in France things would have gone differently: "It is absurd to try and compare an underdeveloped country with an industrialized one...
...They seem to us significant beyond the immediate response to the coup.—ED...
...The future of our countries depends to a large extent on the answer we can find to it...
...One more in a long series of defeats...
...It means also to espouse, if not the ideas at least the techniques of one's adversary: excommunication, exorcism, recitation of canonical authorities, invective...
...Forsaking critical thinking means forsaking a tradition that shaped revolutionary thinking...
...True, we have seen such countries as Cuba or Albania call themselves socialist...
...Engels repeatedly stressed that it was impossible to skip historical stages...
...The new regime in Chile was no sooner born than it distinguished itself from that in Brazil...
...I wrote: "immediately responsible" because mediate causes are deeper and go back to the failure of our wars of independence, great breeding grounds for caudillos...
...A character from the novel of the same title by the Spanish writer Ramon del Valle Inclan, a prototype of the Latin-American caudillo...
...Brazil has a technocratic military dictatorship based on domestic and foreign capitalism...
...Recalling the recent failures of revolutionary violence is enough of a rebuttal...
...How...
...Extremists come from the middle class, and their actions and ideologies 354 are largely the product of despair, psychologi cal insecurity, and unconscious suicidal tendencies, as were those of the young fascists during the decade before World War II...
...Besides, the revolutionary road to socialism is harder yet then the democratic road for Western countries...
...We need to draw up programs that correspond to our history and to our present...
...All the while, Nixon washes the stains of Watergate off his hands in the bowl that Kissinger holds for him, Brezhnev opens new psychiatric hospitals for incurable dissidents, Chou En-lai woos Pompidou in Peking and alerts Western Europe against "the Russian peril...
...the oligarchies, the military castes, and what remains of the old conservative parties...
...In the Chilean upheaval, however, several distinctive traits appear: the mobilization and manipulation of the middle class and of impoverished "little people," xenophobia, sexual puritanism (dictatorships are modest), and, above all, the intention of creating a corporate state in which the army would occupy the privileged position that was the party's in Mussolini's Italy...
...In Western Europe, the strength of the French and the Italian Left contrasts with the cautious modesty of their programs: the exact opposite prevails in Latin America...
...Latin America has become a pyramid of ruined ideas and victims' bones...
...A STRANGE TRIANGLE: facing the military regime of Chile, that of Brazil...
...The proletariat, the revolutionary class per se, is not the parent but the child of the industrial age...
...That is the question we should all ask ourselves...
...In the light of the terrible experience of the 20th century, such programs will have to be democratic—although they do not have to be imitations of Western bourgeois democracies...
...Nothing is further from original Marxist thinking than Stalin's or Mao's economic "voluntarism"-to say nothing of the "social-ist" asceticism that Guevara pretended to impose upon workers...
...They appeared in the Mexican journal Plural and are reprinted here wtih the kind permission of the author...
...it has no ideology and, so far, has not made political use of the middle class...
...THE QUESTION of the so-called incompatibility between socialism and democracy should be changed ,thus: Is socialism possible in an underdeveloped country, barely or insufficiently industrialized, with the added misfortune of depending almost entirely on the export of a single commodity...
...Latin America is a continent full of rhetoric and violence—two forms of pride, two ways of ignoring reality...
...Protest has become a ritual and a rhetoric...
...We now have a literature and we have art (one of whose creators was Neruda himself) : when will we have political thought...
...I stress the word truly because I am convinced that socialism without democracy is not socialism...
...It also was a great defeat...
...The worst intoxication is ideology...
...Engels called Bismarck's Germany "barracks' socialism?' If socialism, in the strict sense of the word, cannot at this stage of world history be the cure to the woes of the Latin-American nations, what could be a minimum program of the Left...
...In Chile, such social mobility as was created in Brazil by economic development will not serve as a safety valve for social tensions...
...And I add: more so for underdeveloped, dependent countries...
...Outrage is ethical but it cannot take the place of a policy...
...Public order must be firmly maintained, even though it may constrain spontaneous popular demonstrations...
...The Latin-American Left is struggling against formidable enemies: North-American imperialism—its international flanks more or less undisturbed today, thanks to its double entente with the Soviet Union and China...
...The conditions in Chile were not auspicious, that's all...
...His is a reality without ideas, which does not mean a dumb reality...
...In a recent article ("Toward a Democratic Socialism," in Le Monde, September 24, 1973) , Maurice Duverger writes about Chile and makes a few remarks worth pondering: The first requirement on the road toward socialism in a Western country such as France is to reassure the middle class about its lot under the future government, so as to separate it from the core of big business doomed to disappear or to be put under stringent controls...
...This is a simplistic sophism made attractive by its very simplism...
...It is hardly necessary to add that radical extremist groups—of which the MIR of Chile is but the latest example—invariably act as a provocation...
...Might they be reminded of Lenin's remark: "Facts are stubborn...
...What has happened in Chile was a great tragedy...
...Violence and legality are variables and depend upon national circumstances as well as upon the international situation...
...They will have to contain the seed of a socialism to come and, above all, they will have to propose models of economic development and of social organization that would be less inhuman and less unjust than those of both the capitalist regimes and of "bureaucratic socialism...
...The first is to think that the tragic experiment of Salvador Allende has closed the democratic road to socialism...
...Russian tanks in Prague, Pentagon-trained and -armed generals in Santiago have accomplished the same "demonstration": democracy and socialism are incompatible...
...The lot of small businesses must be clearly defined, and it must be shown to be better than under monopolistic or oligopolistic capitalism...
...But the Left is also struggling against itself...
...In some cases, as happened in Chile, it has turned the middle class, its natural ally at this historic juncture, into an opponent...
...Such requirements are drastic and it is understandable that the radical Left— and a few others—should reject them...
...I:t is as if wetried to drill rocks with a needle...
...The military regime in Santiago will be confronted with the same serious economic limitations that confronted Allende...
...We must examine national and international conditions, weigh the social forces involved, think about the methods applied and recognize—however it may humiliate the leaders and the theoreticians enmeshed in their fragile schemes—that the results have been disastrous...
...Or is it too late...
...Ours will be the socialism of affluence...
...The nationalization of major companies must in no case be accompanied by the wildcat sit-down strikes or takeovers that proved so harmful to the Allende government...
...We Mexicans will be reminded of General Huerta's uprising and President Madero's assassination...
...Whether or not reality is unpleasant, it is real...
...NOTEBOOK 355 The Chilean coup displays the traditional features of Latin-American "pronunciamentos...
...Latin-American militarism was born with independence although its roots are older and spring from its Spanish-Arab past...
...Tirano Banderas is the barbarous reply of Latin America's reality to the unreality of ideologies...
...Translated from the Spanish by MONIQUE FONG 356 NOTEBOOK...
...Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay—now Chile...
...Both conceived of socialism as a tool for social change first and for economic change only second...
...The failure of traditional democratic ideologies—and its most striking examples were the Argentinian radicals and Christian Democrats in Chile—is immediately responsible for the advent of all these bizarre regimes, in the sense that Baudelaire gave the word: of a "singular" horror...
Vol. 21 • April 1974 • No. 2
