European socialists and their fellow travellers the world over are fond of using the anniversary of the murderous September 11th terrorist attacks to recall another September 11th, that of 1973 when the Marxist government of Chile was overthrown by its own Armed Forces in a coup which leftists believe was instigated and planned by the CIA. This, they feel, is an excellent way of putting an anti-American spin on the day. “Sure,� they say, “it’s sort of sad that three thousand Americans were murdered by Islamo-fascists, but we shouldn’t forget that, thirty years ago, the Communist President of Chile killed himself after he was overthrown.� It’s a way of injecting a little spot of America-bashing into a time where most human beings would naturally feel some sympathy for Americas, a little poke in the eye of the Great Satan.

Chile’s leftist President, Salvador Allende, is and was a deeply cherished hero of the left. One of the few (open) Marxists to ever be elected the leader of a major country, he is mourned as a victim of American ‘imperialism’ and as a martyr of one sort or another. As the standard story goes, Allende was a great hero of the people, toiling away on behalf of the masses, when he was overthrown by a combination of home-grown Chilean fascists and the paranoid CIA which, misinterpreting Allende’s communist policies and rhetoric, suspected him of actually being a Communist. The motives for this, of course, were purely capitalistic in nature: the conspirators were afraid that the virtuous and good socialists in Santiago would force them to share their profits with the proletariat.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Salvador Allende was overthrown because he was an incompetent and cowardly oaf who nearly destroyed the Chilean economy and tried to turn his country into a base for international communist. The hero of September 11th, 1973 was not Salvador Allende, the man determined to ‘save’ his country by turning it into a satellite of the Soviet Union. Rather, the hero of that day was General Augusto Pinochet, the man who saved his country from the ruinous yoke of socialism, the man who anchored the fight of free people’s in South America, and the man who made Chile into what it is today: the most democratic, prosperous and stable nation on its continent.

Though nominally a member of Chile’s (already quite radical) Socialist Party, Salvador Allende was in fact a committed communist determined to take Chile into the Soviet sphere. Elected President with little more than a third of the vote (the rest of the vote was split between a centrist and rightist candidate); his election was ratified by the Chilean Congress only after he promised to respect democratic institutions and the integrity of the Armed Forces. His acceptance of these terms was deemed crucial to his election, as Allende’s acolytes were generally believers in the ‘one-election’ model of social democracy (campaign slogan: ‘Vote for us, and you’ll never have to vote again’), whereby a dictatorship of the proletariat would be established by quasi-legal means (an expansion of state powers by all means available, culminating in the passage of final act which would establish one-man and one-party rule).

During his time in office Allende nationalized more than five hundred companies by means which were unethical and largely illegal. Because an opposition majority in the Congress blocked nationalization by legal means, Allende’s socialist government would take measures (including artificially generated price increases, orchestrated labour unrest, and stock manipulation) to force companies into bankruptcy and then seize them using a long-forgotten Depression-era law which allowed for the temporary takeover of insolvent businesses.

The result of these policies was economic chaos. In the year prior to the Coup, the annualized rate of inflation was 323% and rising each day. Shortages were so endemic that one major grocery chain reported that 2500 of the 3000 products it normally stocked were unavailable. Agricultural production plummeted, with wheat production alone falling by nearly 50%.

By the time that the Chilean military was forced to intervene the country was on the verge of an open Civil War, with arms being stockpiled by both sides. Tons of Cuban munitions were found hidden in the Presidential palace, ready to arm the militias of the ruling party.

In the final year of his rule Allende began to openly defy the Chilean Constitution and Courts. When the Congress passed a law seeking to prevent him from making more nationalizations he sought to illegally veto it. He ordered his Interior Minister not to enforce court orders. Finally, Allende broke his promise to respect the integrity of the Armed Forces, firing several senior officers and replacing them with men politically sympathetic to him. In August of 1973 a plot by left-wing enlisted men within the Navy was discovered. Senator Carlos Altamirano, the Secretary-General of Allende’s own party, proudly admitted to being one of the authors of the plot. That same month Allende sought (and failed) to impose a State-of-Siege upon the country. Finally, on August 22nd, the lower house of the Congress passed a resolution calling for the military to restore order.

For all of the bleating of the left, the involvement of the United States in these vents was minimal. When Augusto Pinochet and the Armed Forces stepped in, they did not do so gleefully: they did so out of simple necessity and they did so largely alone. CIA intervention was limited mostly to assistance to a few strikes and money for a few right-wing groups. The military did not need a foreign push to step in: the Chilean economy was in a state of total collapse, with a once-rich nation being beggared by socialist idiocy. The President and his supporters were clearly taking steps towards the establishment of a dictatorship of their own. Had Chile’s Armed Forces not stepped in when they did, the best that could have been hoped for would have been a long and bloody Civil War, not unlike those experienced elsewhere in the Americas during the Cold War. At worst, a Communist Chile could have become the major Soviet base in the Southern hemisphere, using its secure position to export violence and revolution to neighbouring nations such as Argentina and Brazil. It would have been a disaster for free people everywhere.

Some cry for the Communists who lost their lives in the Pinochet era (most of whom were killed in violent clashes in the immediate aftermath of the coup). But, I must ask, who can honestly claim that fewer people would have died had Allende been allowed to continue in power? Everywhere in the world where Communists have gained total control millions have died. The Soviet Union killed over twenty million of its own people. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia killed close to half of the population. The Chinese Communists killed nearly one hundred million people. Communist-instigated civil wars all across the world claimed the lives of millions more.

The left conveniently forgets all of this when they try to castigate America for its Cold War-era ‘crimes.’ The Cold War was a struggle against one of the most evil and malevolent forces in all of human history. It was a battle against an ideology which murdered hundreds of millions of people in the space of just a few decades. The sad history of communism is a history of an evil whose monstrous crimes dwarf those of Nazism, an evil without parallel in all of time. The left likes to talk as if the choice was between a military dictator and a cheerful social democrat except, of course, it wasn’t.

It’s time that we end the distortions and lies about what really happened on September 11th, 1973. That day ought to be marked in history not as one of sorrow, but as a great triumph for Democracy. The overthrow of Allende allowed President Pinochet to implement policies which righted the Chilean economy and paved the way to a smooth restoration of democracy. It secured the Southern flank of the Western alliance in the Cold War. 9-11-73 is not, as some have put it, ‘the other 9-11’: it was the good 9-11. It was a date on which brave men, ignoring the whining of the left, staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour upon the salvation of their people from a great evil.