It didn't have to be a democracy or even a republic. In fact, they taught us that the only reason we were opposed to communism was that the people who lived under it didn't have the right to choose it for themselves.
If a country ever voted to become communist, they told us, that would be fine with us.
Of course we were like mushrooms back then. They fed us all sorts of shit and kept us in the dark.
We learned the real truth of that in 1973, when the Nixon administration backed a coup in Chile to oust Salvador Allende, the first Marxist ever to be freely elected in Latin America. Allende was doing the one thing the U.S. wouldn't tolerate, nationalizing many industries and collectivizing others. We financed the coup and the CIA provided other assistance.
There were hundreds of U.S. businesses with financial interests in Chile, and our government wasn't about to allow Allende to take all that away. We took away Chile's democracy and left the Chileans living under a military dictatorship.
Whether they voted for it or not.Of course this wasn't the first time this had happened. We have always seen the Western Hemisphere as our own little fiefdom. Just ask the folks in Honduras, Nicaragua and the other countries in which we intervened again and again. Legendary Marine General Smedley Butler -- one of a very few men to win the Medal of Honor twice -- once called war "a racket" and said that every time he was sent outside the U.S., he knew he was protecting American business interests.
Our ideals are a fine thing, but making money and protecting property is what really matters.
I don't know how many of you remember the stunning 1982 film "Missing," directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, but it was an extremely impressive look at just that.
Lemmon plays an American businessman whose son has been living with his daughter-in-law in Chile during the coup that ousted Allende. His son has vanished and the son's wife, played by Spacek, has been unable to learn anything.
He flies down from New York with complete belief in the goodness of the U.S. government and its representatives in Chile. He is actually annoyed with his daughter-in-law and his missing son because they don't have the same beliefs he does. As the plot unfolds, we see him become more and more disillusioned when he realizes that the reason his son may have been arrested was that he had learned that U.S. military personnel and CIA agents were involved in making the coup work.
Forty years later, after Watergate, Iran-Contra and the conquest-minded Dubya Bush administration, it's hard to believe that people would have been shocked. But the generation gap of the late '60s and early '70s -- when parents and the children were on opposite sides of the great divide -- changed the country in a very real way.
The movie didn't do much business, which shouldn't surprise anyone. It wasn't made to entertain, but to inform. The version available now on DVD has been cut from the original version. Most of the cuts were shots of corporate logos, showing just how deeply American businesses were invested in Chile.
This isn't to say we're an evil, horrible country. The ideals on which we were founded were worthwhile indeed, but things started to get off the track when massive fortunes were amassed during the Industrial Revolution. Ever since then, the story of this country has been a struggle between the mega-wealthy and the rest of us.
It may be a struggle that will never end.
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Can "Happy Birthday" really be copyrighted?Got $24 million to spare? There are some terrific homes for sale in Malibu.
The Onion has some great last-minute Fathers Day gifts.
The movie came out nearly 40 years ago, but Panini America is putting some members of the original Bad News Bears into its 2013 Golden Age baseball set.
Auf wiedersehen till tomorrow.
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