The Times, on the morrow of the coup, was writing: “Whether or not the armed forces were right to do what they have done, the circumstances were such that a reasonable military man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene.”
Professor Hugh Thomas, from the Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies at Reading University: the trouble was that Allende was much too influenced by such people as Marx and Lenin, “rather than Mill, or Tawney, or Aneurin Bevan, or any other European democratic socialist.” This being the case, Professor Thomas cheerfully goes on, “the Chilean coup d’état cannot by any means be regarded as a defeat for democratic socialism but for Marxist socialism.”
Ralph Miliband (October 1973): The Chilean experience “offers a very suggestive example of what may happen when a government does give the impression, in a bourgeois democracy, that it genuinely intends to bring about really serious changes in the social order and to move in socialist directions, in however constitutional and gradual a manner...”
Had a left-wing government shown one tenth of the junta’s ruthlessness, screaming headlines across the whole ‘civilised’ world would have denounced it day in day out.
As it is, the matter was quickly passed over and hardly a pip squeaked when a British government rushed in, eleven days after the coup, to recognise the junta. But then so did most other freedom-loving Western governments.”
On the other hand, “Allende and his colleagues were wedded to a particular version of the “reformist” model, which eventually made it impossible for them to respond to the challenge they faced. This needs some further elaboration.
Allende was not a revolutionary who was also a parliamentary politician. He was a parliamentary politician who, remarkably enough, had genuine revolutionary tendencies. But these tendencies could not overcome a political style which was not suitable to the purposes he wanted to achieve.”
11 September 1973: The Coup in Chile
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