The Tribulation of Chile

It was a bit boy scoutish of them, but the soldiers who overthrew Salvador Allende thought that they had earned the gratitude of the American people, and of the West in general. For one thing, they had prevented the transformation of Chile into a sort of Latin American Czechoslovakia, complete with Soviet bases. For another, they were staunch believers in the market economy and the positive role of foreign investment. They set about denationalizing foreign businesses that had been confiscated under Allende, and agreed to pay handsome compensation to American copper companies that had been taken over —more, in the case of Cerro, than the book value that the corporation itself had placed on its Chilean assets! If this didn’t make the Chile of the generals a pro-Western country, deserving of friendly support (even if not the miniature Marshall Aid program needed to repair the economic havoc wrought by three years of Marxist misrule) what would?

Alas, how little these soldiers understood the mood of the times in Washington or London. With the spirit of Helsinki about, it is not done to attack Communists too stridently. Since the intellectual defense of capitalism has become a minority cause in most of the countries that owe their present affluence to it, these disciples of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman were a positive embarrassment. Chile, after all, is a backward, developing country, and the liberal Establishment has been telling us for decades that the only appropriate economic strategy for such places is the smash-and-grab redistributionism propounded by such bodies as the UN Economic Commission for Latin America. Anyway, the soft-core masochism of the liberal Establishment has now reached such extremities that any outsider who fails to gratify its need for an endless recital of the crimes and horrors perpetrated by the West is immediately dismissed as a fascist beast. Aid, from this perspective, is an act of expiation: you give it to people who tell you that you have wronged them and that they have a right to squeeze you for every penny they can get. It is not something that you give to people who tell you that they admire you, not for what you are but for what you were and might have been, if you had been able to sustain a more assertive faith in your own values and traditions.

RM

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Robert Moss

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It was a bit boy scoutish of them, but the soldiers who overthrew Salvador Allende thought that they had earned the gratitude of the American people, and of the West in general. For one thing, they had prevented the transformation of Chile into a sort of Latin American Czechoslovakia, complete with Soviet bases. For another, they were staunch believers in the market economy and the positive role of foreign investment. They set about denationalizing foreign businesses that had been confiscated under Allende, and agreed to pay handsome compensation to American copper companies that had been taken over —more, in the case of Cerro, than the book value that the corporation itself had placed on its Chilean assets! If this didn’t make the Chile of the generals a pro-Western country, deserving of friendly support (even if not the miniature Marshall Aid program needed to repair the economic havoc wrought by three years of Marxist misrule) what would?

Alas, how little these soldiers understood the mood of the times in Washington or London. With the spirit of Helsinki about, it is not done to attack Communists too stridently. Since the intellectual defense of capitalism has become a minority cause in most of the countries that owe their present affluence to it, these disciples of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman were a positive embarrassment. Chile, after all, is a backward, developing country, and the liberal Establishment has been telling us for decades that the only appropriate economic strategy for such places is the smash-and-grab redistributionism propounded by such bodies as the UN Economic Commission for Latin America. Anyway, the soft-core masochism of the liberal Establishment has now reached such extremities that any outsider who fails to gratify its need for an endless recital of the crimes and horrors perpetrated by the West is immediately dismissed as a fascist beast. Aid, from this perspective, is an act of expiation: you give it to people who tell you that you have wronged them and that they have a right to squeeze you for every penny they can get. It is not something that you give to people who tell you that they admire you, not for what you are but for what you were and might have been, if you had been able to sustain a more assertive faith in your own values and traditions.