Chris Clarke over at Creek Running North reminds us that there are a number of anniversaries associated with September 11. In 1973, September 11 marked the day that President Salvador Allende of Chile was overthrown in a coup backed by the US. Clarke writes movingly in his post of the last days of Victor Jara.
Having read that post, I happened to look up at the bookshelves above my computer monitor, and there in sight is a copy of Platform for Change – a book by the cyberneticist Stafford Beer published in 1975. Beer was invited by Allende to implement his ideas on operational research and cybernetics into a real-time computerised system – Cybersyn – to run the Chilean economy. The coup, led by Pinochet, dismantled the system, "disappeared" 3,000 Chileans and imprisoned and tortured 27,000 more.
Stafford Beer ends his book with an ironic comment on a lecture he gave in February 1973 on the Chilean experiment. He repeats unchanged, apart from the typographic layout on the page, a quotation from that lecture given seven months before the coup:
It appears to me that the government did notanticipate the full vindictiveness with whichthe rich world would react to its actions,which I emphasize have – so far – beenperfectly legal.At any rate, a true resolution of the verypotent conflicts in Chilean society is notdiscernible within the mounting instability,and may be long postponed.But I consider that this is largely a phenomenonof the cybernetics of international power :you could say that the Chilean people have notbeen given a chance.They are being systematically isolated behindthose beautiful Andes mountains, and are in astate of siege.
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