September 11, half a century on

On the 11th of September, thoughts obviously go to those in the US marking with sorrow the terrible attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington. Twenty-two years later, I naturally feel great sympathy for them when I think how, driving along a road in Britain a friend of mine and I received a call from a colleague who asked, “have you heard about the plane flying into one of the Twin Towers?”, and the feeling of sickness that came when I realised this wasn’t the first line of a joke with a punchline behind it.

Of course, the sense of sickness deepened when I realised another plane had flown into the second tower. To say nothing of the three more planes converted into terrorist weapons.

Still, it’s important to remember that this isn’t the only act of appalling violence associated with 11 September. Indeed, this year marks an important anniversary, the half century, of another. Fifty years ago, on the 11th of September 1973, a group of Chilean officers led by Augusto Pinochet, rose in revolt against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.

Pinochet and his fellow mutineers had decided that they knew best what was good for their country and were better qualified than any civilian to achieve it. Their insurrection opened a seventeen-year period of dictatorship that cost at least 3000 opponents their lives. The bodies of 1000 have never been discovered.

It was an event that casts credit on no one. Obviously, there’s nothing but shame for the brutal dictators themselves, not just for their cruelty, but also because they seized power in a military coup, an act that denies a fundamental principle of military life, respect for the chain of command, which should have left them subordinate to the President. He was killed in the presidential palace when it was bombarded by units of his own air force.

La Moneda, the Chilean Presidential Palace
under attack from ground and air on 11 September 1973

There’s plenty of shame for plenty of others too. Three years earlier, soon after Allende was elected, the then commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces, René Schneider, was assassinated. He had championed what came to be known as the ‘Schneider doctrine’ that you could choose a military career or a political one, but you couldn’t combine the two.

While the US for a time denied all involvement in overthrowing Allende’s government, documents made public since make it clear that the death of Schneider had been orchestrated by the American CIA. Then CIA chief at the time, Richard Helms, convened a top-level meeting after Schneider’s death. The Agency chiefs sent a congratulatory cable to the CIA station in Chile, stating that, “a maximum effort has been achieved,” and that “the station has done excellent job of guiding Chileans to point today where a military solution is at least an option for them”. 

It took another three years, but in time with vital support from the CIA, the coup imposes a ‘military solution’ and launched the seventeen years of repression Chile then suffered.

Nor did Britain cover itself with honour. In 1998, after the end of his dictatorship, a human rights violation case was opened against Pinochet by a Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón. The case turned on an interesting principle, of universal jurisdiction, which said that for this kind of charge, action could be taken anywhere in the world against a former head of state, even if an amnesty had been granted in his home country. Pinochet was held under house arrest for eighteen months in the UK, in the course of which former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, always an admirer of the bloodstained dictator, spoke out in his favour, as did former US President George H W Bush. But the most deplorable act was that of a centre-left, Labour government, when the Home Secretary Jack Straw released Pinochet on health grounds. 

Pinochet left in a wheelchair but stood up from it as soon as he was back on the ground in Chile and greeting his well-wishers. 

With such a depressing trail of cowardly and unethical acts all along the way, it’s no surprise that in the US and Britain we prefer to focus on 11 September 2001 than 11 September 1973. We ought, however, to pay more attention to what happened in Chile. That’s particularly the case given that its wounds have still not wholly healed.

Here's what Beatrice Ávalos, a Chilean educator interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El País, suggests for this anniversary:

Perhaps the harshest effect in the years that followed the military coup was establishing a rift between Chileans and Chileans, raising some up and attacking the humanity of others. My proposal would be that we might use the rest of the year to heal that rupture by reaffirming our commitment to both political and social democracy, recognising the legitimacy of many of our differences. I would propose that opponents in the National Congress issue a joint statement expressing a vigilant commitment to democracy and to human rights; and that in every place where we work and live we offer each other our hands on the 11th of September, looking at each other and making a powerful pledge of ‘never again’. 

Now, isn’t that an excellent proposal?

The people spoke, and I spoke with them

It was the second biggest march in Britain this century.

670,000 people filed through the streets of London to say ‘no’ to Brexit and demand a second referendum – well, the third really, counting the one that voted to stay in in 1975. Why? So that people who voted Brexit in 2016 without knowing what it would look like, would have a chance to reconsider now that it’s become painfully clear.

The march stretches down London’s sun-filled streets

The march was cheerful and friendly under warm autumn sun. There were people of every age – grandparents pushing grandchildren in their buggies, the middle aged, young adults, students. There were people from every party, even the Tories – I talked to a couple of them and they seemed a little embarrassed, I suspect because they’d never taken part in a demonstration before.

It was uplifting just to be there.

There were also absences. The police presence was almost invisible: these weren’t people who were going to make trouble. Those weird fringe cults from the far left weren’t there either – Class War or the Socialist Workers Party or the Labour leadership. It seems they have trouble with the notion that leaving the EU will cost jobs and depress wages, and this isn’t generally an unmixed blessing for the working class the claim to represent.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, was missed by some.

A good question. With a sadly predictable answer

He couldn’t be there. As at the last March, he was abroad, this time in Geneva. Though he hadn’t lost sight of the cause, as he assured us by tweet: he was talking to the former President of Chile Bachelet, now a UN Commissioner, telling her about workers’ rights and human rights. I’m not fully convinced that, as a former victim of the Pinochet regime, she really needed a tutorial from Jeremy but he provided one anyway.

Jeremy Corbyn: talking to a UN official about the harm of Brexit
rather than actually opposing it
In Geneva, too. Somebody had to go. And it's a safe distance from London

And while I don’t want to be picky, I can’t help feeling that doing something to stop Brexit might be more constructive than talking to a UN Commissioner about how awful the Tories are going to make it. But he clearly believes that he could make a far better job of Brexit than Theresa May is, which is odd considering that the other 27 countries of the EU are unlikely to change their position just because he takes charge.

What’s odd is that anyone still thinks Brexit is going to deliver benefits. In the nearly two and a half years of negotiation since the Brexit vote, no one has come up with a formula that might actually work. That’s ‘work’ in the sense of delivering Britain benefits greater than membership does.

Nor have they found a formula for which they can build majority support.

There’s a form of wisdom which it’s hard to master. Part of the difficulty is that it requires the courage to admit to a mistake, one of the rarest forms. Here’s how it goes.

You have a pet plan. It might be Brexit. It might be a challenging new plan at work. You build a case for it, but it doesn’t work – sometimes it doesn’t even convince you. So you compromise a bit and try again. You still can’t make a case that’s really persuasive, even to yourself who wrote it. Now you can keep on going, from rewrite to rewrite, tweaking the assumptions, changing the approach.

The wisdom is to accept at a certain point that the problem isn’t in the way you’re building the arguments. It’s that your pet project, however attractive it seemed to you initially, really wasn’t that good. That the only intelligent conclusion is that you have to drop the idea altogether and try something different.

Now, I know that it would be hard for Brexiters, like May or Corbyn, to admit they got it wrong. Neither has shown the guts to accept that they sometimes need to question even their most cherished opinions. There’s an easy solution: put the question back to the people. If the people vote for Brexit again, we have no choice. We accept it for better or for worse (and there’s little chance it’ll be for the better). If they vote against, the politicians are off the hook.

Jacob's crackers are cheese biscuits and Jacob Rees-Mogg,
leading Brexiter in the Tory Party, certainly seems crackers

670,000 people gave them that opening on 20 October. If that many turned up for a march – and only 1200 took part in the pro-Brexit event in Harrogate – it says there’s a far larger reservoir of such feeling across the country. That’s an opportunity for a party to step forward, take the leadership of a growing and dynamic swell of opinion, and lead it to victory. Victory as much for itself as well as for the movement. What an opportunity for Labour if it chose really to oppose the current government. And we saw on the march that there are plenty of Labour figures prepared to take that leadership – just not the current leader who preferred to be in Geneva.

The People’s vote march was the second-biggest of the century. The biggest of all mobilised something between 750,000 and 2 million people, depending on who you believe. It failed to stop the Iraq war. If none of our politicians has the guts to step forward in response to this one, it too will fail.

And a lot of people, mostly the people Labour should be representing, will be paying a high price for that failure for at least a generation.

Tee-shirt on the march
Yes. Labour has had better times