Book Notes

The Allende Myth, by Vladimir Dorta

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My friend Val Dorta originally published this outstanding historical essay on his blog in 2003. With the death of Augusto Pinochet, much attention is again being given to the Allende period, the military coup and the dictatorship that followed. I wanted to link again to Val’s essay but, unfortunately, his blog is no longer online. However, Val has graciously allowed me to republish his essay here, and I am honored to do so. – Jonathan

UPDATE: Google’s cached version of Val’s original post, with comments. (Thanks to the commenter who provided this link.)

UPDATE 2 (12/28/2014): The Google-cached version has disappeared from the Web, but Val’s original post is available via archive.org here.

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The Allende Myth

Vladimir Dorta

07/21/2003

The failed and tragic attempt by Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity at creating socialism in Chile in 1970-1973 has become a myth for the world left, presented as the possibility of a peaceful and democratic transition to socialism that was destroyed only because the almighty CIA acted as master puppeteer of the Chilean reaction. The myth reinforces itself; while the Cold War context is never mentioned, neither is the fact that the CIA’s workings are well documented whereas the Cuban and Soviet interventions are still mostly unknown. The Allende myth may be good for keeping the socialist faith alive, but it evidently contradicts the historical facts.

While Augusto Pinochet’s brutal post-coup repression and terrorism cannot be justified, it is essential to explain what led him and the Chilean armed forces to the fateful coup d’état, outside of the fantasy that had him bursting onto the democratic Chilean political scene on September 11, 1973 with readymade CIA orders to stop a beautiful, pacific and liberating socialist dream. For I have no doubts that if the Chilean Marxist experiment had ended in civil war, as it appeared to most observers at the time, it would have been an even greater tragedy or, had it ended as the totalitarian society it pointed to, it would have lasted much longer and would have brought Chileans much more suffering than Pinochet’s ugly but temporary dictatorship.

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Book Review of The Man Who Saved Britain

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Being an old James Bond fan, I was interested when mention kept cropping up about a book by Simon Winder entitled The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond.

Most of the bloggers who discuss the book present it as a handy way to gain a historical perspective on Mr. Fleming’s most famous character. Plot elements or settings in the books and films that nowadays seem ordinary and unremarkable were once loaded with significance. Mr. Winder, it was said, supposedly put everything into context, explaining why Bond was a creation of his times and why the character resonated so with the audiences of the time.

This intrigued me, mainly because I have always had a vague feeling that there were plenty of nuances to Bond and his exploits that passed me by without making an impression because I was lacking a British cultural background. It appeared that Mr. Winder’s book would be just the thing to put everything into perspective.

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Naim — Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats …

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Naim, Moises, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, Doubleday, 2005, 340pp.

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, has written an outstanding summary of the flip side of the post-Cold War economic boom. Think of it as the antithesis of Jim Bennett’s book … a “The Global Criminal Affluenza Challenge: How an Army of Fagins Leverages High-Yield Crime while Civil Society Implodes in the 21st Century.”

The author asks a provocative question. What if we looked at global crime from a purely economic perspective?

What industries would form the MisFortune 500? What criteria would criminals use for market development? How would criminal enterprises adapt to the new technological realities (which are also challenging legitimate business)? In other words, setting morals and laws and national sovereignty to one side, how is crime coping with globalization?

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Mokyr – The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy

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Mokyr, Joel, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, Princeton University Press, 2002. 359 pp.

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

I first became aware of Professor Mokyr (Northwestern University) when I stumbled across his book The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1992) during a period of economic history reading late last year. The book was quite strong on the details of technology in the ancient world and Industrial Revolution but virtually skipped the period that Professor Alfred Crosby had considered crucial to the change in mentality in the West (1275-1325 AD in northern Italy) in his book The Measure of Reality. My reading program at the time was meant to fill in the details of the period after the peak of the Italian republics. Instead, it highlighted the fact that science and industry were a rather murky transnational undertaking that didn’t, by itself, lend much assistance to sorting out Anglosphere history. Was England unique, merely lucky, or simply the first? Lever of Riches was fascinating but steered clear of many of the social and political questions that might explain why the economics of the period were so unusual. Economic historians now believe that, before 1850, the contribution of “formal” science to technology remained modest. There was a long period of very modest economic growth in England before Industrial Revolution allowing a rising population between 1760 and 1815 without a decline in per capita income. Income per capita edged up very slowly before 1830. Real wages barely nudged up before mid-1840s. And the switch to mineral economy (as an industrial power source) had been proceeding for centuries before 1750. What was the source of the evident dramatic change that people quite naturally want to call a Revolution?

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Chua – World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

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Chua, Amy, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Doubleday (2003) 340 pp.

In a post earlier this year, Jim Bennett outlined both his concerns and his appreciation for Amy Chua’s book “World on Fire.”

Unlike Jim, I was less convinced that she was offering a “one size fits all” model but very much inspired by the utility of her model for understanding the relationship of the world to the United States and the Anglosphere. The US, and its occasional allies, are locked in a passionate love-hate relationship with the rest of the world — a discussion fought now on television that often appears deranged or infantile yet is driven by very real concerns and anxieties. There’s hypocrisy and cant aplenty on both sides of the argument as far as the eye can see. And it is the “do as I say, not as I do” conundrums facing the Anglosphere that will drive new and focused solutions — new legal structures, new ethical propositions, new responses to weapons of mass destruction and hyper-destructive individuals, new balances between individual and social rights, new clarity and, one assumes, a newly-minted sense of self-preservation.

Much of the reading I’ve been doing over the last year has focused on national productivity figures (cf. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity) and on the EU’s response to the increasing GDP per capita gap between it and the US (The 2000 Lisbon Agenda). To summarize: the United States (with 300 million people) has roughly 30% greater GDP per capita (purchasing price parity) than all other nations over 10 million in size. Canada (at roughly 78% of the US standard and 30 million people) is the only exception. US GDP percentage growth also leads its large industrialized competitors. My reading focus has been on the solutions offered by serious people around the world to close the gap or find a way to accommodate the gap within a successful sustainable social model. At the same time, I’ve been watching the figures, and discussion, on higher education and the “scientific wealth of nations.” In many ways, however, the responses and strategies put forward to catching up with the US, by both the industrialized and industrializing world, have been eerily parallel to those documented in the past by Chua for nations who have struggled to cope with free markets and democracy over the last forty years. There’s a lot more finger-pointing and bad-mouthing than concrete progress.

To quote Chua (p.6):

This book is about a phenomenon – pervasive outside the West yet rarely acknowledged, indeed often viewed as taboo – that turns free market democracy into an engine of ethnic conflagration. The phenomenon I refer to is that of market-dominant minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the “indigenous” majorities around them.

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