History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but it Rhymes

I ran across this article about a Chilean singer. It is well worth reading.

Embedded in the story was the following video of song with film clips that remind you of the time -- 1973 -- when this singer died, the time of a military coup in Chile:



The sad story of Victor Jara is just one more life lost reminds me that life is an endless tragedy. The reality is that so much of that tragedy is authored by people who don't know their history.

As I read the article I thought of how George Bush proudly claims that "America wants democracy in the Middle East". If you don't know how the US has treated democracies, this sounds stirring, it sounds wonderful. But the sad truth of history is that the United States does not want democracy. Chile in 1973 is evidence of that. What the US wants is something called strategic "national interest" which is something very different from democracy.

The US intervened to suppress a democratically elected country, a stable country with a long history of democracy:

The Nixon administration authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to instigate a military coup that would prevent Allende's inauguration and presumably call new elections, but the plan was not successful. The extent of Kissinger's involvement in or support of these plans is a subject of controversy.

The US was involved in the 1970s in suppressing popular leftists throughout South America under Operation Condor:

Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a campaign of political repressions involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to deter left-wing influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the usually conservative governments. Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor will likely never be known, but it is reported to have caused thousands of victims, possibly even more.

Condor's key members were the right-wing military governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more peripheral roles.^[4] These nations were ruled by dictators such as Jorge Rafael Videla, Augusto Pinochet, Ernesto Geisel, Hugo Banzer, and Alfredo Stroessner. The operation was jointly conducted by the intelligence and security services of these nations during the mid-1970s with support provided by the United States of America.

The above article about a Victor Jara, a popular Chilean singer of the early 1970s, reminds us of that fact that the US really is not interested in democracies. But people forget this fact when a president like George Bush proclaims he is for "democracy" in the Middle East.

George Santayana tells us: "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it."