news from the long country: the right wingers are trying to steamroll the new constitutional document, which they totally can do based on the seats they got: bans on abortion, unions, and lgbt people doing this or that have already been announced, as well as constitutional protections for the private pension and healthcare systems. the very experts, about 60% elected by the right wing, are "worried that it won't be a neutral constitution anymore", which is already sayin something, as they were appointed by the extremely conservative senate. hopefully it'll be rejected on december.
on unrelated news, does anyone have a good explanation for the rise in fascism we're going through? certainly this isn't a chilean thing.
Chilean election thread (?)
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zompist
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Re: Chilean election thread (?)
Sure! I got three:
1. Historical memory is approximately two generations, ~ 70 years. That is, when all the people who remember a problem die off, it recurs. So, Grandpa remembers the Nazis, but he's dead or no longer matters.
2. The far left imploded, especially when the USSR disappeared. It wasn't that it was a good alternative, but it was a spur to keep democracy, equality, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism going so the commies had less to work with. Besides, the moderate left is far more appealing when there's an extremist left everyone is scared of.
3. Plutocracy has created a large class of people who feel left out. Marx told us that they should align with the other dispossessed, but it turns out they are easily convinced to align with aggrieved conservatives instead.
About the only consolation is that the current crop of fash is maximalist and not too bright, so they tend to implode themselves when given power.
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
I want to note for the record that I have a short reply to zompist's latest post over in the US politics thread:
https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=72825#p72825
https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=72825#p72825
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
ooo, nais. let's see
1 is a contributing factor, as in it removes a possible inhibitor to the dependent variable. people are less likely to say or give weight to others saying "man, this is kinda like the nazis". like, yeah, i think there's evidence for this, we treat "that's like the nazis" like a fallacy.
2 I totally share: i don't think it's a coincidence that no more soviet union and reaganomics becoming the economics is a coincidence: but like, yeah, that would shift the balance of power, the right is well funded and technically supported by the cia etcetera, while the left has no such buffs: but dislike neoliberalism as I do... can we really say that neoliberalism, or the rise of the right-wing even, cause fascism? was 1920s at the tail end of a period of exceptional weakness of the global left?
3 yeah, this one's good. the old "capitalism's contradictions intensify". a freer (to rentseek, speculate and exploit, to be clear) post-soviet capitalism of laissez faire deregulation is going to have fewer fetters on its own destructive tendencies than the highly regulated, almost planned economy of the postwar.
welp, hopefully the next soviet union is better.
EDIT: turns out, it does!
Okay since we're in the chilean thread... here's the thing about that: the coup itself was 50 years ago, and the transition was exceptionally intelligenty managed. like, they wrote the constitution! they for most of my youth the senate was full of "senadores designados". pinochet himself was a senador designado. he wrote laws, and voted on the laws. there were at least two, that i remember, moments where it was not clear whether los milicos would do another coup or not. lets say that for our purposes, los milicos means 'the military' but like... in a broad sense: active military personnel, but also the sort of military class of chilean society: you see, we here -and i bet this is the case in other countries, but here it's like pretty strong- have a thing we call the military 'family'. if someone is a soldier, they're very likely sons or nephews or cousins or something of somebody who is a soldier: back in the day they lived in military villages and complexes, at least many did, cause the army would just build houses and let them live in them. on the other hand, most people do not have *any* family members in the armed forces, especially not left-wing people, and this is not accidental: in order to enter the military you're background checked, and rejected -or kept in low-tier roles- if it is found you have left-wing family members or sympathies. perhaps this is not the case so much these days (though i wouldn't be sure, i'd have to see research here), but it definitely was the case in the nineties.
for an anecdote, there is an official identification card for the familia militar: la TIFA, tarjeta de identificacion familiar: they give it to family members of military. back in the 90s it got you out of car tickets, it allowed you to skip identity controls, and it let you get to the front of the line in many places.
... okay, it calls itself that, my people -leftos- call it los milicos: anyway it's military personnel, it's their sons and daughters, and its the people who may not be like soldiers themselves anymore but were at some time: soldiers retire afte 20 years service on a full paycheck plus lifetime benefits, so by 40 they're set for life, and are free to be exceptionally politically active, to have small businesses, and overall be, ethnically, a strong power bloc. What i'm saying here is that los milicos, those who surived the coup anyway, remain a powerful constituency in chile, as do the businessmen they collaborated with during the dictatorship. add to that that the chilean center-left concertación were like super collaborationist with these ruling classes (for example, half the famous concertacion politicians were in the boards of AFP, the organizations that manage money from mandatory retirement salary deductions, which is like 10% of the collective income of the formally-employed working class). milicos also include the truckers, cause duh, a lot of people learn to drive large vehicles in the military, right?
what i'm trying to say is that this isn't germany: we don't have anti-denialism laws, we don't have a strong social or media consensus about the coup and the dictatorship being bad, the right wing here doesn't go "i condemn the pinochet regime", they go "i condemn the human rights violations": a non-political chilean hears something like "pinochet saved us from communism, though yeah some excesses happened" and think that's... normal! hell, it is a normal opinion here. this has been changing the last 10, 15 years, but still if you look at almost any famous or prominent chilean, there's a fair chance you'll find that became famous during the dictatorship, that they became rich off of the privatizations, that their first political involvement was being appointed mayor or something by the dictatorship, that there are pictures of them in chacarillas (the chilean version of the nazi political rituals, complete with torches and eagles, i shit you not, google it).
so like... sure, people alive lived through the dictatorship, but a lot of people, and especially a lot of people that matter, remember those times quite fondly.
1 is a contributing factor, as in it removes a possible inhibitor to the dependent variable. people are less likely to say or give weight to others saying "man, this is kinda like the nazis". like, yeah, i think there's evidence for this, we treat "that's like the nazis" like a fallacy.
2 I totally share: i don't think it's a coincidence that no more soviet union and reaganomics becoming the economics is a coincidence: but like, yeah, that would shift the balance of power, the right is well funded and technically supported by the cia etcetera, while the left has no such buffs: but dislike neoliberalism as I do... can we really say that neoliberalism, or the rise of the right-wing even, cause fascism? was 1920s at the tail end of a period of exceptional weakness of the global left?
3 yeah, this one's good. the old "capitalism's contradictions intensify". a freer (to rentseek, speculate and exploit, to be clear) post-soviet capitalism of laissez faire deregulation is going to have fewer fetters on its own destructive tendencies than the highly regulated, almost planned economy of the postwar.
welp, hopefully the next soviet union is better.
I wonder if phpboard supports this sort of crosslinking...
EDIT: turns out, it does!
Okay since we're in the chilean thread... here's the thing about that: the coup itself was 50 years ago, and the transition was exceptionally intelligenty managed. like, they wrote the constitution! they for most of my youth the senate was full of "senadores designados". pinochet himself was a senador designado. he wrote laws, and voted on the laws. there were at least two, that i remember, moments where it was not clear whether los milicos would do another coup or not. lets say that for our purposes, los milicos means 'the military' but like... in a broad sense: active military personnel, but also the sort of military class of chilean society: you see, we here -and i bet this is the case in other countries, but here it's like pretty strong- have a thing we call the military 'family'. if someone is a soldier, they're very likely sons or nephews or cousins or something of somebody who is a soldier: back in the day they lived in military villages and complexes, at least many did, cause the army would just build houses and let them live in them. on the other hand, most people do not have *any* family members in the armed forces, especially not left-wing people, and this is not accidental: in order to enter the military you're background checked, and rejected -or kept in low-tier roles- if it is found you have left-wing family members or sympathies. perhaps this is not the case so much these days (though i wouldn't be sure, i'd have to see research here), but it definitely was the case in the nineties.
for an anecdote, there is an official identification card for the familia militar: la TIFA, tarjeta de identificacion familiar: they give it to family members of military. back in the 90s it got you out of car tickets, it allowed you to skip identity controls, and it let you get to the front of the line in many places.
... okay, it calls itself that, my people -leftos- call it los milicos: anyway it's military personnel, it's their sons and daughters, and its the people who may not be like soldiers themselves anymore but were at some time: soldiers retire afte 20 years service on a full paycheck plus lifetime benefits, so by 40 they're set for life, and are free to be exceptionally politically active, to have small businesses, and overall be, ethnically, a strong power bloc. What i'm saying here is that los milicos, those who surived the coup anyway, remain a powerful constituency in chile, as do the businessmen they collaborated with during the dictatorship. add to that that the chilean center-left concertación were like super collaborationist with these ruling classes (for example, half the famous concertacion politicians were in the boards of AFP, the organizations that manage money from mandatory retirement salary deductions, which is like 10% of the collective income of the formally-employed working class). milicos also include the truckers, cause duh, a lot of people learn to drive large vehicles in the military, right?
what i'm trying to say is that this isn't germany: we don't have anti-denialism laws, we don't have a strong social or media consensus about the coup and the dictatorship being bad, the right wing here doesn't go "i condemn the pinochet regime", they go "i condemn the human rights violations": a non-political chilean hears something like "pinochet saved us from communism, though yeah some excesses happened" and think that's... normal! hell, it is a normal opinion here. this has been changing the last 10, 15 years, but still if you look at almost any famous or prominent chilean, there's a fair chance you'll find that became famous during the dictatorship, that they became rich off of the privatizations, that their first political involvement was being appointed mayor or something by the dictatorship, that there are pictures of them in chacarillas (the chilean version of the nazi political rituals, complete with torches and eagles, i shit you not, google it).
so like... sure, people alive lived through the dictatorship, but a lot of people, and especially a lot of people that matter, remember those times quite fondly.
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
Thank you, that's very interesting background information!
We do have some of that here, but I don't think to the same amount. There are fascists in the military, there are probably families with a tradition of being in the military, there is mutual hostility between the military and left-wing subcultures, and during the mid-to-late 20th century, there were way too many older people around who remembered the old days fondly.
That said, having been in the military or at least being closely related to people who were there is, or at least used to be, a much more common experience, so there used to be less of an opportunity for the military to set itself apart from everyone else. We used to have conscription, and back then, even the professional soldiers were to a large extent recruited from among young men who were the right psychological "type" that, when they underwent conscription, they looked at their experience and thought "Hey, I wouldn't mind doing that for a living for a while. Beats the alternatives."
We do have some of that here, but I don't think to the same amount. There are fascists in the military, there are probably families with a tradition of being in the military, there is mutual hostility between the military and left-wing subcultures, and during the mid-to-late 20th century, there were way too many older people around who remembered the old days fondly.
That said, having been in the military or at least being closely related to people who were there is, or at least used to be, a much more common experience, so there used to be less of an opportunity for the military to set itself apart from everyone else. We used to have conscription, and back then, even the professional soldiers were to a large extent recruited from among young men who were the right psychological "type" that, when they underwent conscription, they looked at their experience and thought "Hey, I wouldn't mind doing that for a living for a while. Beats the alternatives."
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
in local news, most of the polling companies are saying the "reject" option will win by a comfortable margin. some analysts predict there will not be a vote on december. the document is not finished, but it already has the republicanos (the alt-right party) program all over it.
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
piñera, the only right-wing guy (if you don't consider the centrist-neoliberal coalition right wing) to be elected to the presidency since before pinochet, died a few days ago after an accident befell a helicopter he was piloting. the entire media has been sucking his you know what ever since. rather ironically, this time a pinochetist died during a helicopter ride.