Shall we pause to remember another September 11th...?

[regnaD kciN]

The Chilean coup against the democratically-elected Salvador Allende and the beginning of the Pinochet police terror state took place thirty-seven years ago, on September 11, 1973. Before the coup, Henry Kissinger told Richard Nixon that there was no reason the U.S. should allow a country to elect a socialist government "due to the irresponsibility of its own people." Looks like Nixon and Kissinger got their wish...but, of course "we had nothing to do with it." :eyes:

Just a reminder that 9/11 isn't only a date to commemorate victims from the U.S.A.

[Dawson Leery]

1. If Hell exists, Richard Milhaus Nixon is there

and Henry Kissinger will go there too.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. Recommended.

[madrchsod]

3. i remember when that happened...dam i`m getting old.

[Swamp Rat]

4. k&r

[leftstreet]

5. K&R

[struggle4progress]

6. Written on the Sky: Chilean poet Raúl Zurita talks about life after Pinochet

by Daniel Borzutzky
8.26.10

... Raúl Zurita: It was very strange. There was a world that had to do with poetry that was full of conflict, and one had the sensation that we had to respond to the terror with a poetry that was just as powerful as the pain being delivered, but at the same time you had to try to avoid being punished. It was very difficult to find the language for this. And so Song for His Disappeared Love was published—it wasn't so black and white—thanks to a person named Maria Teresa Matte, someone on the right: she read it and got it published ...

RZ: I was a member of a group called CADA (Colectivo de acciones de arte), and we did performance/actions in the street, and so the risks were the same as those taken by anyone who at the time was opposed to the dictatorship: that you'd be disappeared, beaten, imprisoned ...

RZ: So with Anteparaíso I submitted a book that was different than the one that was actually published. They approved the book thinking it was one book but it was actually another ...

RZ: Chile is a country with two Nobel Prize-winning poets, and so there was a tiny fraction of the right wing who claimed Neruda for themselves even though Neruda was a communist. It was an incredible contradiction. Of course these weren't the military. These were people who loved Neruda and thought it was cute that he was a communist ...

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=239920

[regnaD kciN]

8. And it wasn't just Chilean poets who testified...

Several years later, there was an uproar when the Scottish national soccer team violated the unofficial international boycott of the Pinochet regime to play an exhibition match in the very stadium where so many of the executions were carried out. In protest, Adam McNaughtan wrote the following poem, later set to music by Ed Miller. As a soccer fan myself, this song never fails to bring me to tears.

Blood Upon The Grass

On September the Eleventh
In Nineteen Seventy-Three,
Scores of people perished
In a vile machine-gun spree.
And Santiago Stadium
Became a ground to kill,
But now a Scottish football team
Has graced it with their skill.
But now there's blood upon the grass,
Now there's blood upon the grass.

And did you go there, Alan Rough?
Did you play there, Tom Forsyth?
Where so many folk met early
The Grim Reaper with his scythe?
These people weren't terrorists,
Not even Party hacks,
But some were maybe goalkeepers,
And some were centre backs,
But now their blood's upon the grass,
Aye, their blood's upon the grass.

And Victor Jara played guitar
When they led him to that ground,
So they broke all of his fingers
So his strings no more could sound.
But still he kept on singing
Songs of freedom, songs of peace,
And even though they gunned him down,
His message didn't cease
But now his blood's upon the grass,
Aye, his blood's upon the grass.

And you go there, Archie Gemmill?
Did you play there, Andy Gray?
Did it trouble you to hear the voice
Of Victor Jara say
Somos cinquo mille -
We are five thousand in this place?
Now Scottish football helps to hide
The Junta's dark disgrace.
And there's blood upon the grass,
Aye, there's blood upon the grass.

And do you stand upon the terraces
At Ibrox or Parkhead,
Do you cheer the Hibs in green and white,
The Dons in flaming red?
Those Santiago victims
Were just people of your kind.
Too bad the football bosses
Couldn't change their narrow minds.
For now there's blood upon their hands,
Aye, there's blood upon their hands.

[ConsAreLiars]

7. Also the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which another supremacist nation/cult/tribe began murdering

those they regarded as "the other" and stealing their stuff.

The Mountain Meadows massacre was a mass slaughter of the Fancher-Baker emigrant wagon train at Mountain Meadows, Utah Territory, by a local Mormon militia and members of the Paiute Indian tribe on September 11, 1857. The incident began as an attack, quickly turned into a siege, and eventually culminated in the murder of the unarmed emigrants after their surrender. All of the party except for seventeen children under eight years old were killed—about 120 men, women, and children were killed, but precise numbers have been debated.<1> After the massacre, the corpses of the victims were left decomposing for two years on the open plain,<2> the surviving children were distributed to local Mormon families, and many of the victims' possessions were auctioned off at the Latter-day Saint Cedar City tithing office.<3>

The Arkansas emigrants were passing through the Utah Territory at a tense time in the Utah War when 2,500 troops sent by President James Buchanan were approaching with orders to restore US authority in the territory. Mormon leaders had been mustering militia and making defiant speeches stating their determination to mount a defense.<4> The emigrants stopped to rest and regroup their approximately 800 head of cattle at Mountain Meadows, a valley within the Iron County Military District of the Nauvoo Legion (the popular designation for the Mormon militia of the Utah Territory).<5>

Initially intending to orchestrate an Indian massacre,<6> local militia leaders including Isaac C. Haight and John D. Lee conspired to lead militiamen disguised as Native Americans along with a contingent of Paiute tribesmen in an attack. The emigrants fought back and a siege ensued. When the Mormons discovered that they had been identified by the emigrants, Col. William H. Dame, head of the Iron County Brigade of the Utah militia, ordered their annihilation.<7> Intending to leave no witnesses of Mormon complicity in the siege and also intending to prevent reprisals that would complicate the Utah War, militiamen induced the emigrants to surrender and give up their weapons. After escorting the emigrants out of their hasty fortification, the militiamen and their tribesmen auxiliaries executed the emigrants. Investigations, interrupted by the U.S. Civil War, resulted in nine indictments in 1874. Only John D. Lee was tried in a court of law, and after two trials, he was convicted. On March 23, 1877, a firing squad executed Lee at the massacre site.

Historians attribute the massacre to a combination of factors including war hysteria fueled by millennialism and strident Mormon teachings by senior LDS leaders including Brigham Young.<8> These teachings included doctrines about God's vengeance against those who had killed Mormon prophets, some of whom were from Arkansas. Scholars debate whether the massacre was caused by any direct involvement by Brigham Young,<9> who was never officially charged and denied any wrongdoing. However, the predominant position among scholars of the incident is that Young and other church leaders helped create the conditions which made the massacre possible.<10>

More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre

On edit: Rec of course. The slaughters the US carried out via its Fascist agents in Chile, and in many other countries, and through invasions, make it Number One!!! in atrocities committed since WWII.

[Marr]

9. Sadly, the same people currently have their sights set on the US.

They raped Chile for years, and even back then, pushed to have the same economic policies instituted in the US. They're getting their way these days.

[malaise]

10. K & R for another day that I won't ever forget

Kissinger is a war criminal.