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Chile 2025: A Brief Account and Some Impressions

Inequality in Chile  is 43 in the gini index. It is higher than the world average of 38. It is lower though than in Brazil or Colombia (around 45), for example. Contra la violencia– gathering of music, dance and speeches in front of Palacio la Moneda. It was in that palace that Salvadore Allende ‘was killed’ by a US-backed Pinochet's coup in September 1973.  A chat with a middle-aged Chilean man: Gaza, genocide, the US, Chile, the left, the right and far-right. He seemed a progressive man. A street in central Santiago should be named Street of Opticians. Tens of opticas shops line up the street. I have never seen such a number of opticians in one street.  A chat with a Venezuelan man. A vet by profession, but is not allowed yet to work in Chile, for he has been in the country for only two months. He is doing some illegal work as celebrations decorator and sells some handicrafts he makes. He thinks that Maduro of Venezuela is an authoritarian who wrecked the country and th...

Cities of Daffodils

 

Global Middle East

I have just finished reading Global Middle East Into The Twenty-First Century . Apart from a couple of essays which I have found dry, the collection of 24 short essays is really worth reading.   It is accessible to both students and those who are eager to read about different topics related to the region in its global context, from music, food and Levantines in Latin America to oil, Egyptian cotton, Mo Salah and ports of the Persian Gulf...

God of Revolution

Who’s Terrorist?

The Doves

لَذَّةُ القَلَق The Pleasure of Distress
Chile: 11 September 45 years ago "The contrast between the beauty and the brutality that people are capable of was inescapable. The social power people invest in music became a permanent part of my thinking. Notable for its absence in the time after the coup was the  nueva canción  (new song) folk music movement. Urban musicians had taken rural traditional music and transformed it into inspirational expressions calling for human dignity, equality and compassion. The military regime outlawed it, and it disappeared entirely from the public Chilean soundscape. Overnight,  peñas —gathering places for  nueva canción  musicians and fans—became a thing of the past. It was risky to play or even possess instruments such as the  quena  flute or the  charango  guitar because of their association with the socialist movement." An Eyewitness of Pinochet's Coup

Hong Hong

There are similarities between the South Korean protest movement in the 1980s and the regime crackdown and the Arab uprisings since 2011, but one of the differences was that South Korea had already embarked on industrialisation and achieved it. Capitalist relations dominated and thus the struggle for bourgeois democracy was part of that transformation. The slogans and songs by the current protest movements in Sudan and Algeria come to mind when we read the following:  Protests inspired by South Korea's "March for the Beloved" See also March for the Beloved
The Astounding Eyes of Rita
Royal Opera House Muscat (Oman) and Budapest Symphony Orchestra (Hungary) led by composer  Yasser Abdelrahman