The most confrontational protesters want no return to a nation that is falsely unified, pretending we are all friends, a nation where some loot and exploit and lie and others suffer—the real looters, they assert, are the corporations, not those who steal from stores. They want no return to normality when “normality is the problem,” as one of the most popular slogans goes. These radicals, impatient and anarchic, do not appear to have a strategy that can achieve their utopian goals. But is my perspective distorted by the trauma of witnessing, nearly fifty years ago, how the peaceful Allende revolution was derailed by some of the Socialist president’s own most extreme supporters, who scared the middle classes with their wild rhetoric and actions, and gave ammunition to its most implacable adversaries?
Source : Chile: Notes from a Revolt
