I had been asked to give a keynote speech at a conference at Columbia University’s Journalism School. It was January 2002. Two planes had been flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center months earlier and you could still feel how wounded the city felt. You could read it in the faces of New Yorkers you spoke to.
But it was the words of one of his classmates that come back to me now. He had arrived in New York just a few days before 9/11 from his native Pakistan to study at Columbia. He likened the United States to Imperial Rome.
"If you are lucky enough to live within the walls of the Imperial Citadel, which is to say here in the US, you experience American power as something benign. It protects you and your property. It bestows freedom by upholding the rule of law. It is accountable to the people through democratic institutions.
“But if, like me, you live on the Barbarian fringes of Empire, you experience American power as something quite different. It can do anything to you, with impunity… And you can’t stop it or hold it to account.”
Was in Chile earlier this year. There is a nice museum in Santiago which is basically about the Pinochet era. Seemed to be pretty honest about the whole thing. They didn’t blame the CIA at all. They did talk about the school of economics that Pinochet subscribed to. That’s influence, yes, but not the same thing as orchestrating the coup.
🙄 you may want to dig into “Operation Condor” beyond what’s written on Wikipedia.