The Day Democracy Died

September 11^th is a sad day for democracy and for the freedom of People. It will remain engraved in history as the beginning of a period where those who seek nothing but to push their vision of the world upon others demonstrated being capable of the greatest atrocities. It will show that those so loudly claiming to defend democracy and freedom cannot stand it when somebody takes a different path than the one they have decided for those others.

September 11^th, 1973. The day Salvador Allende, democratically elected, even if by a very narrow margin, was killed by the military forces at the orders of General Pinochet with the support of the USA.

One of the biggest arguments of those supporting neoliberalism and denying it is a disastrous ideology is that neoliberalism and free markets were never actually implement, and that it is the constrictions imposed by the remaining of the state apparatus that distort the markets into a non-functioning entity that spreads misery instead of development. Well… Chile is the denial of that claim.

On the afternoon of September 11^th, 1973 most superior and general officers of the Chilean armed forces had on top of their desks a copy of the infamous “El Ladrillo” – “The Brick”. El Ladrillo was drafted by Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys and embodied a neoliberal economic program for a “free” and “democratic” Chile. The commandments of the book were implemented without any restriction from the state. So nicely implemented that Friedrich Hayek himself, in a letter published by The Times in 1978, claimed that nobody, even in Chile itself, could deny that there was way more individual freedom under Pinochet than with Allende.

Within less than one year the rare couples where both managed to keep their jobs spent more than half of their income for the sole purpose of buying… bread. Not literary bread, but bread, actual bread.

Fascism and neoliberalism are the two faces of one same coin, the political face, and the economic face. One does not survive without the other. Neoliberalism needs the oppression of fascism to keep those exploited “in line”, whilst fascism needs the financing of the neoliberals to keep its oppressing machine – as Quinn Slobodian so clearly demonstrated in his book “Globalists” (ISBN-13: 9780674244849), presented by himself here.

“They have the power, they can smash us, but the social processes are not detained, neither with crimes, nor with power. History is ours, and the People will make it.” – from Salvador Allende’s last public address.