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Originally Posted by marichiko
I'd love to see some valid sources for your figures on both Allende and Pinochet. Your post is in and of itself proof that no one muzzles the press - either liberal or whacko.
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So I duly went looking, first for my notes and then for the source material. Still haven't found the notes, reread the source, and discovered my memory wasn't
quite the steel trap I'd like it to be, but here we go:
The March '06
American Spectator article is by James R. Whelan, and is a review, indeed a refutation, of Jonathan Haslam's
The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile. In the June issue of this year, there is a further exchange -- Haslam's try at a rebuttal, and Whelan's counter-rebuttal.
Whelan's credentials as a South American scholar and historian seem not only solider, but downright formidable, comprising thirty-eight years of study and experience, a Harvard Fellowship, the history
Out of the Ashes: Life, Death, and Transfiguration of Democracy in Chile 1833-1988.
Hardly the stuff of "yellow journalism" that your ideological blinkers made you allege it is, not too long ago. Mari, dear, please accept this life lesson: blinkers deny you data and make you talk silly. Lose the blinkered ideology and you'll be
much harder to patronize, which I really only do to the easy targets. I should think you'd find that a plus, all things being equal.
Whelan got the gig to write a review of Haslan's book and found such lacunae in its scholarship and available sources uncited or only the most nail-paring snippets therefrom, that he quit numbering his notes after about problem/error number 149, by his count. Whelan does not complain that his work wasn't cited to speak of. He learnedly takes issue with Haslan's main contention that it was really the Nixon Administration that did in the Allende government, and carries the day. Bone-deep anti-Americanism can make even Cambridge professors lose their abilities at scholarship seems the lesson here -- a third of the book is written to slap the Nixon Administration around.
From Whelan, quoting Allende cabinet member Voloida Tetelbaum, 1 Mar 1973: "A civil war in Chile would probably mean immense loss of life, half a million to one million." This was in a context of what the Allende government would have to set about doing to consolidate its power. The entire population of Chile in 1970 was 9.3 million -- and was the cite which I remembered, being in the same column of print with the civil war quote;
mea culpa. These guys were looking at decimating Chile -- after being elected, mind you.
As for the casualties of the Pinochet era, Whelan again, and worth quoting in some extent: "Closer to home, there's the startling absence of the three-volume
Informe de la Comision Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliacion, compiled by a commission formed after Pinochet had relinquished power. . . [the Rettig commission] was decidedly hostile to the military regime. Indeed, its report is the preferred bible of leftists the world over. It details the background of the political upheavals leading up to and during the Allende and Pinochet years: describes the terrorist/guerrilla forces that sprang up during those years, and the security forces that combated them; and (mainly) provides a laboriously detailed accounting of the killed and missing during the Pinochet years. (If Haslam had bothered to consult it, he might have learned that in the entire period between
September 11 and December 31, 1973, [emph. mine, and this is probably the number I remembered and cited] the total dead and missing was 1,261 -- of the grand total of 2,279 dead and missing during the 17 years of the Pinochet government. In his book, Haslam gives the toll of dead on September 11 as 3,500, including 700 soldiers. The Rettig Commission report lists a grand total, in all 17 years, of 132 military dead.)" (This board does not support Spanish diacriticals, so we must spell 'em as best we can without.)
Twelve hundredish during the coup when a fair bit of lead was flying around the streets, like from the Cuban embassy, and then a thousandish over the next sixteen years. Economical, compared to Tetelbaum's civil war ideas above. One might say conservative -- and from an unfriendly source at that.
From Whelan, quoting a June 1973 remark by Eduardo Frei Montala, President of Chile 1964-70: "Chile is in the throes of an economic disaster -- not a crisis, but a veritable catastrophe no one could foresee would happen so swiftly nor so totally . . . the hatred is worse than the inflation, the shortages . . . the economic disaster. There is anguish in Chile."
So, says Whelan, the Chileans turned on Allende, leaving everybody else standing.
In the June '06 issue, Haslan replies, "Whelan accuses me of believing Communists are
just deluded altruists. Surely people can genuinely believe in socialism or communism without becoming monsters?"
That ivory-tower remark from George Orwell's countryman -- oughtn't he to know better? -- causes me to stare. In my experience, if they put these beliefs into actual practice they inevitably do become monsters, by force of those beliefs. The harder they go at it the worse they turn out.
Haslan sticks to his thesis that the Nixon Administration went all out to kill the Allende government: "The White House suspected the [CIA's] Latin Americanists were too soft on Communism in Latin America because the Latin Americanists favored taking the long view -- namely the Allende regime would implode through incompetence and the absence of outside aid from Moscow or Beijing; at that there was therefore no need to pull it down through a
golpe negro (a bloody coup), a
golpe blanco would suffice. . . Once it failed, Nixon, now beside himself with anger, resolved to revert to a
golpe negro." Whelan remarks that absolutely no one of the numerous principals in the matter that he polled on this had ever, nor had he himself ever, throughout his 38 years of South American study, heard either term.
Haslan: "the blank check Allende came to collect in Moscow was denied him despite [Communist Party chief Luis] Corvalan's extensive lobbying." Whelan's reply, "It is not true that Allende emerged empty-handed from his mission to Moscow. They did not give him the $80 million he sought, but they did give him $45 million, on top of 200 million in earlier ruble credits."
Whelan again: "'If Mr. Whelan had read the book calmly and carefully in order to see whether there was something new to learn instead of erupting like a spluttering, formerly extinct volcano. . .' Any number of commentators through the years have referred to my qualities as a meticulous
(acusioso) investigator. I bring that same zeal to books I review, as well as those I write. (When I stopped numbering my notes on this one they stood at 149, not counting a number of others drawing on related books. There is scarcely a page of Haslam's book that is not decorated by one or more of my comments.) To what I can only suppose is his sorrow, read it thoroughly I did."
"I have no doubt that Professor Haslam is quite diligent about his work, but he is, after all, a 'parachutist,' dropping in on the country in the fashion of most foreign scholars and authors. And, although he would choose to scorn it, my works include a history of this country . . . surpassed to that point (1995) only by the works of Chile's own two leading historians. . . [and] what would mere Chileans know about Chilean affairs?"