Just over 50 years ago occurred the purported Chilean coup d'etat of Sept. 11, 1973, enacted by Gen. Augusto Pinochet on orders from the legislature to unseat elected Marxist President Salvador Allende.

Pinochet, harshly reviled to this day by the Left, would rule Chile in a military government until in 1990 he returned power to an elected president after holding a referendum.

Since then, Chile has had an uneasy relationship with its armed forces.

The unease should be with the communist forces in the body politic that stirred up the trouble in the first place. During his presidency which he won with just 36.6% of the vote in a three-way split, Allende ran interference with the legislature while Cuban-supported, and actual Cuban, revolutionaries ransacked the countryside and rioted in the cities. These elements provoked the coup and continued to stir up trouble in Chile during Pinochet's military government (with multiple bombings, assassinations and assassination attempts), and still continue to stir up trouble all these years later.

Chile was the model for bringing America down. In the early 1970s, she exhibited many of the markers we see today in America as a country under siege by the revolutionary Left.

Their foot soldiers are generally college kids – those most easily reached and fooled because inexperienced, idealistic, and naïve – led by hardcore cadres.

Chileans in those years were somewhat notorious for their intense political polarization. In particular they read only the press that supported their politics. Everything was segregated by politics, they even had politically segregated beaches. I used to wonder about this, then it happened here and now I know why: the Leftist press is unreadable, though of course to them a fair press is unreadable.

There wasn’t in 1973 Chile nor America today a far Right of any significance, but neither did (do) ordinary folks cotton to revolution. The revolutionaries see them as enemies for just wanting to raise their families, go to church, pay their mortgages, and mind their own business.

Supporting revolution in Chile back then was Fidel Castro, bankrolled by the Soviet Union. Today in America, oligarchic billionaires provide the means to fuel the action. China, as we know via Hunter Biden, fits in prominently. All these vultures expect to profit handsomely from America’s götterdämmerung.

The model doesn’t fit in all particulars, mainly in that we don’t have to worry about our military taking action against the revolutionary Left. Not only do we not want it, but the crucial military personalities just wouldn’t do it. Judging by their comments, they side with Biden and the crooks.

Fighting communists is ugly, thankless, work that never gets properly acknowledged. Generalissimo Francisco Franco spared Spain a communist takeover and then the ravages of WWII, yet his countrymen spit on his name today. Pinochet suffers a similar fate. Neither man was a nice guy, but dictators aren’t all equally bad. Castro killed tens of thousands by firing squad in his early years; Pinochet’s count, over 17 years, was about 3,000, and most deaths were of armed revolutionaries in open warfare against the state.

Murder is murder, but surely far fewer is preferable to far more.

Chile 1973 is playing out in our own streets today. The violent Left doesn’t want to talk, they want to fight. And burn. And hurt people. And wreck lives. They will stop only when somebody just as determined stops them. While not news to anybody who’s paid attention over the years, this history needs to be reviewed periodically to remind everyone whose side they should be on.

During a 21-year career retired Army officer Richard Jack Rail specialized in Latin America and traveled extensively in the region, including tours of duty in Colombia and El Salvador during those countries’ civil wars.

Image: Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED