The War on Christmas: Ken Burns Edition

this morning, I woke up with a song in my head. It was the beautiful and haunting Vileta Parra song “Lo que mas quiero”. In the Inti Illimani version, no less.

That prompted me to fire up my oiPad and research various things, until I ended up reading a very well done article about “La nueva Cancion Chilena” and the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and eventually established the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

What does this have to do with our “War on Christmas”? Well, while I was refreshing my memory about the happenings surrounding the Coup, from the rounding up of students and professors to their torture and the plight of the Desaparicidos, there were some reports of the role of the Nixon administration, the CIA and so on.

What really caught my attention was the campaign of misinformation the CIA orchestrated to discredit Allende and his democratically elected government. Including the foundation of an actual newspaper bought and operated with US money with the sole purpose to discredit Allende.

What really floored me where the quotes from the era. The declaration of their version of the parliament and the CIA paid press and how similar those articles, resolutions, accusations, etc. were to our current political climate between the Obama administration and the political and religious right wing.

I wish I had the time to retrieve each and every quote and compare it to modern accusations against Obama and his administration/supporters. It would take me forever, but even just reading the Wikipedia entry and some of the sources they link too is enough to get a taste of the similarity between their rhetoric and what is going on today.

If you lived through that period or if you didn’t but you are interested in it, do some research. It’s eerie how some things never change.

I am not trying to compare a coup which killed and “disappeared? thousands with a silly war on Christmas, but there is definitely a similarity there. The level of paranoia, the self justification that useful lies are better than the truth if used to defeat a hated enemy.

The WOC is a facet of the current public discourse and I doubt it’s ever going to escalate into what happened in Chile. But I cannot avoid thinking that if a Chilean was asked a few years before their coup if something like what eventually happened was likely in Chile, the most stable country in Latin America up to that point, they would have told you you were crazy.

Again, we are not Chile, but the same forces are at play and they really dislike to lose.

Mario, you probably already know these singers, but I present them to other readers. For Chile, there is Victor Jara who was assassinated by Pinochet. For English only speakers, here is Arlo Guthrie singing about him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBv49PrR_nY

For Peru, there is Susana Baca. Incidentally, she became known in the U.S. thanks to David Burn of the Talking Heads who has recorded foreign artists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBo_bk6zqec&list=PL881D3869E5B797EE

There are many songs by these two artists on YT to love, whether you know Spanish or not. There also songs of Violeta Parra.

Pic this time.