Story Of A Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11, 1973, by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

This book was terrible, but terrible in a way that I found deeply and unpleasantly familiar with. It should go without saying that I do not approach this book with anything remotely approaching impartiality. The book is written from an openly pro-Marxist position, and I do not believe that Marxism should be allowed to exist, so we are automatically not in a situation where the book and the reader have much at all to agree on. What I found most notable about this book was that the language of the book was strikingly familiar as someone who is used to reading and deconstructing Marxist propaganda, in that there was a clear script being used, a familiar set of lies and fundamental misunderstandings of the world, similar conflations of ordinary right-of-center people and political leaders with those who might with some degree of accuracy be labeled as fascist, to the point where the term lacks all credibility and worth as a definition except to mean not Marxist, and therefore at least somewhere on the spectrum of sane and reasonable politics. Even if the Soviet Union no longer exists as the obvious place for socialist and communist vomit like this to be cultivated and spewed from, it is clear that some degree of central organization exists among Marxists to set a consistent (and dishonest) message about the past, as well as the present.

This book appears to have been written in mind with a triumphalist reading of Chile at the moment of 2011, when it seemed as if the Left which had won narrowly in Allende’s time seemed to be ascendant again before being voted out after its predictable failures to live up to its utopian aims. One of the most predictably deceptive aspects of this book, and somehow obviously so, relates to the book’s treatment of Allende himself. On the one hand, the author seems to want to pillory Allende for being somewhat too bourgeois in his behavior, living a life of conventional dishonesty as a professional leftist politician, being a second-rate thinker, being persistently unfaithful to his wife, and so on. Yet the same author, at the end of the book, praises Allende for his honesty and claims that Allende’s honesty will prevail in time, a distinctly dishonest look at a dishonest man and a distinctly teleological view of history that is sure to pass into the dustbin of history like everything else that comes from the Left. Similarly, the author claims that Allende had been faithful to his nonviolent “Chilean Way” even as he goes out of his way to describe how Allende died with a gun in his hands shooting at the army that not entirely unreasonably overthrew him and set up a regime that, for all of its harshness, did manage to provide a better life for Chileans, one free of the disasters of socialist mismanagement and bad central planning (not that there is any other kind under heaven).

Like many tediously and repetitively dishonest books, this one is somewhat long and is organized according to a fashion that is meant to show off how many decadent and corrupt people within the mid-20th century were attracted by the evil politics of Marxism. The book begins with acknowledgements and an introduction. After that the narrative of the book is divided into three parts. The first part of the book discusses the precedents and causes for the conflict between Allende (and other forces of the Left) and his opponents (of which I am most certainly one). This includes chapters about outlaws and political cobblers, who served as Allende’s teachers in socialism (1), a predictably biased screed against the property owners of Chile (2), the anxiety that was felt in postwar Chile (3), the supposed dawn of the new man (4), and the long cold war (5). The second part of the book then discusses the coup itself. This part includes chapters on the “Chilean Way” of Allende against those the author libels as multinational vampires (6), a chapter that discusses the lack of complete success at silencing Allende at the time of the coup (7), three acts of the outbreak of the coup itself, which appears to have gone relatively well except for the failures of the Air Force (8, 9, 10), and a discussion of Allende’s death which sounds almost like a grim and blasphemous parody of the Christ sacrifice (11). The third part of the book then discusses the aftermath and consequences of the coup, with a chapter that serves as an obviously bias and hostile account of the rule of Pinochet (12) as well as the author’s unwarranted and misguided optimism in a bright socialist future for Chile (13). The book ends with notes, references, and an index.