I can't claim to be a Sartrean scholar. I'm taking an upper level undergraduate course in his works and it's been fun, but also immensely frustrating. Confronted by the density of such works as Imagination: A Psychological Critique, War Diaries, and even the totemic Being and Nothingness, my confidence in my ability to open any book and understand it has taken a deserved beating. Sartre is dizzyingly intelligent, too intelligent for me really, and yet when he applies that brilliance to human beings, I find myself on surer ground. His autobiography The Words is full of tossed off insights into human behavior, and the book I'm currently reading, Anti-Semite and Jew, is frightfully perceptive about the nature of hate. To vastly oversimplify, one of the sources of the consuming fury that is anti-Semitism is the sense that one's eternal country is being stolen by outsiders. The person who feels a birthright to the continuance of their country as it has always been is the person who will feel most threatened by usurpers of any kind. And where the oppressed work to make their host country hospitable to them, sometimes on an individual level and sometimes on a larger scale (i.e. through socialism), the reactionary can only see an attack on their privileged position. Challenging the government structure that has ensured the prosperity of them and their family is the same as challenging them to their faces. As their country is held hostage by outsiders, their loyalty to the rule of law declines. Because if the ruling class is illegitimate, what sense does it make to play by its rules?
Before we move on to examining this dynamic in Chile, I'd like to make another brief detour to one of my favorite blogs, The Last Psychiatrist. The blogger Alone, commander-in-chief of this little Internet outpost, specializes in shattering false binaries and epistemological traps. One post I've never been able to get out of my head suggests frighteningly that losers in a political battle don't hate the leader of the opposite party as much as they may seem to. The example is Obama, so we'll frame it in terms of Obama. Republicans may hate Obama plenty, but what they really hate isn't the man or even his policies. They hate the people who brought him to power: the blinkered, preening, arrogant liberals. He is the symbol of their wrongness, and through their dominance of media and pop culture, they're spreading the propaganda everywhere. It was bad enough when he rose to victory on a surge of misguided optimism in 2008, but even after various policy defeats and continual economic woes, the 2012 re-election kept him in power. It wasn't even close. And that's what's scary. Liberals are too blind to see that they've elected a naked emperor, and they'll defend him all the way to the bottom just to seem smarter than conservatives. Left with no cultural or legal power (save for tenuous control of the House of Representatives), is it any wonder American conservatives have seen this state of affairs as a fight to the death?
These thoughts crept uncomfortably to the forefront of my mind as I watched Guzmán's camera crew interview assorted Chileans as the opposition party made its stand against Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government. Many Chileans were happy to share their socialist beliefs and their praise of Allende's governance, but as for the supporters of the Christian Democrat Party? The conservatives? No such joy could be found in their statements, even those who firmly believed Allende's rule was coming to an end. The folks who testily declined to give their opinion? You can bet they weren't socialists. Even the "apolitical" bus driver struck me as being too apprehensive to give his real opinion. There's no shame in declaring your support for Popular Unity and the workers when everyone in the streets backs you up, but who wants to come out and declare their support for the bourgeoisie? Such is the dynamic of the "national mood." You need only look to the gleeful hostility with which George W. Bush was lampooned from 2000 to 2008. Frustrated and resentful, American liberals could only express their displeasure with the conservative majority through mocking their missteps (meanwhile, the disastrous Iraq War claimed thousands of American and Iraqi lives and further justified anti-US sentiment in the broader Middle East. But LOL look at this dumb thing Bush just said!). But where American liberals were content to make Bush jokes with their friends, and where American conservatives are content to wave Impeach Obama signs at your local gas station, Chile's situation was much more dire.
Again, the energy of this film cannot be understated. There are no grand narratives, no game-changing speeches. There are only short pieces of exposition from the narrator, followed by the passionate opinions of people involved in the leftist struggle with occasional counterpoints from the opposition. Certainly there must have been Chileans apathetic to the national conflict (e.g. the affectless son shuffling through the apartment of his joyous Christian Democrat mother), but they seem few and far between here. The shots of streets packed with Popular Unity supporters are a reminder of just how important socialism was to these voters. This wasn't some idle culture war. This was about remaking an entire country so that the least among them would no longer suffer. We learn shortly that Popular Unity gains even more parliamentary power from the election, and even forty years removed, you can feel the political atmosphere tense with suspicion. The opposition suspects foul play, and even though this charge isn't necessarily brought to political attention, you can tell it affected their outlook. If Popular Unity isn't going to play fair, then why should we?
From there it's a disheartening spiral into disobedience, obfuscation, and rising popular unrest. The Christian Democrats block many crucial proposals from Allende that sought to nationalize resources, and the fascist movement gains more and more power in the streets. In the last third of the film, a copper strike lays bare the tensions of the situation. Seeking to sabotage the funding that would create a stable system of redistribution, the opposition preys on the worsening economy and convinces the underpaid copper miners to strike. Allende is sympathetic to the cause but knows copper is a huge source of revenue for his country, without which the socialist agenda will only suffer. He enjoins the miners to go back to work and suffer through the injustice, but the miners don't want to hear that it's their job to pick up the slack when politicians are paid lavishly and there are storehouses of hoarded goods that the wealthier refuse to share with the less fortunate. Add into this mix the U.S. sanctions and the C.I.A. agitators sent to stir up counter-revolutionary anger in the dissatisfied opposition, and it becomes sadly clear in retrospect how this burgeoning socialist movement was doomed from the start.Nevertheless, a glimmer of hope appears when the country seems to unite in defense of the miners and their rights. Donations are made, of money and of tools. The miners are unhappy but many work overtime to keep the mines functioning and producing a steady output, knowing to quit now would only make things worse. It's all unfair, but what can anyone do but forge on in the face of injustice? The end of the film makes clear that this truce will be short-lived, but for a moment it seems that Chile would pull itself out of its factionalism and external pressures to keep the socialist dream alive.
I've always taken issue with people who say people will tear each other apart in times of hardship. Behavior in the aftermath of national tragedies suggests otherwise, and yet there's a thriving trend of apocalyptic fiction stoking the fears that we're all just barely civilized animals only looking out for ourselves. And certainly the increasing unruliness of Allende's opponents fueled the resistance that produced Augusto Pinochet and his dictatorship, but I refuse to see this as inevitable. An ephemeral alternate history, a "possibility" in the Sartrean sense, is visible in the selflessness of the people who banded together to support Allende's heroic endeavor. Their failure does not invalidate their attempt. In fact it vindicates Allende's belief in the people, who rose capably to the occasion. Sadly, forces outside control conspired to end the socialist enterprise, and what we have left of that battle is Guzmán's brave and informative document. I'll be watching the second two films in the trilogy and reporting back shortly.
(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)
