SANTIAGO, CHILE — German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber once quipped, “The opponents must be slandered.” For the past seven weeks, Chile has borne witness to this infamous communist tactic.
In other words, any person who disagrees with the communists, who has economic means, along with all agents of law and order must be slandered. A small documentation of this stark reality could be of interest to the American public that may be unaware of what has been transpiring in the Andean nation.
Readers of The New American may be aware of alleged reports of massive human rights violations carried out by the Chilean armed forces and national police during the last month and a half of protests piggybacked by bands of violent anarchists.
Being far removed from the facts, one would find it hard to disprove such claims or perhaps even to be suspicious of them. Indeed, even in Chile the public has been bombarded with such stories from the press and social media, all the while as some of the most famous cases being nothing more than pure fiction or a gross manipulation of the actual events.
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Below are just some examples of alleged human rights violations, in which evidence of slander being utilized has since come to light, but as of yet not publicized by the mainstream media outlets and social media platforms in Chile.
First is the case of Jorge Ortiz, the head of the financial division of the Chilean-based National Human Rights Institute (NHRI). While serving as a human rights observer during the demonstrations in Santiago on October 29, Ortiz claimed that he was shot seven times in his leg by a Carabinero (Chilean national police officer). Ortiz claimed he was shot by lead rounds that pierced his skin.
The incident was even more alarming because at the time he was dressed in a high-visibility yellow jacket identifying him as an NHRI human rights observer, distinguishing him from the hooded protesters. News of the attack was broadcast all over Chilean and South American media, including CNN Chile and the Venezuelan state-run propaganda outlet TeleSUR TV.
Curiously, Karol Cariola and Camila Vallejo, two well-known members of the Communist Party of Chile, both of whom serve as elected members of the Chamber of Deputies in the National Congress, were also with Ortiz when he was shot.
In front of television cameras, Deputy Cariola held in her hand what appeared like a silver lead round, which she told reporters penetrated his skin. Ortiz was quickly rushed to an emergency medical center.
Ortiz is also no stranger to communism. In his youth, he was a militant in the MIR (Spanish acronym for Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, which translates in English to Revolutionary Left Movement) — a militant communist organization dedicated to the establishment of a Marxist-Leninist state in Chile.
However, when he was examined by medical professionals, it was revealed that he had in fact not been shot by lead rounds but by non-lethal rubber pellets that did not even penetrate his clothes. Doctors diagnosed him with bruises. Nevertheless, the story of the hyper-aggressive police officer firing onto peaceful protesters and wildly shooting Ortiz circulated at full steam, without an apology or retraction and without shame.
A video detailing the truth about incident was reported by Chilean journalist Teresa Marinovic on YouTube. Although the video is in Spanish, knowing the facts of the case can help non-Spanish speakers understand the footage.
A second interesting case is that of Javiera Bascuñán. According to police, she was arrested on October 20 by the Policía de Investigaciones (Investigation Police) when protesters were looting a supermarket in Lampa, in the greater Santiago area. She was brought to the police station, but she was neither handcuffed nor restrained in any way out of respect for her. When she arrived at the station she displayed fear about her 10-year-old sister having been left behind. When police went to search for the sister around the vicinity of the supermarkets, officers could only find their mother and not the girl. Finally, the mother learned that her daughter (Javiera’s younger sister) had arrived home safely and the police stopped looking for the child.
Instead, they brought the mother to the police station, where she was able to talk to her older daughter. At 8:53 PM local time, Javiera Bascuñán was released. Immediately afterwards, she posted on her Facebook an emotional video of herself claiming that her human rights had been violated. “This is Javiera Bascuñán, I am from Lampa. Police are killing our neighbors. They took me, they brought me to the police precinct, they undressed me and kicked me on the ground, they threw water on me, they shot us with their service guns. They have minors, women and men locked and naked. They have eight persons with shots, a 14 year old nobody with her belly open and bleeding,” she says on the now-viral post.
However, the police had video surveillance of most of her time at the police station, which completely debunks her alleged torment. Police are now suing her for slander.
And yet the lies of her alleged gross mistreatment and excessive police brutality continue to be propagated. This is a relentless line of attack on the country’s police. Police in other precincts, where similar false accusations have been levied against them, have spoken on social media recognizing that they are under a very intense attack of psychological warfare. Communists are rallying the public against those in uniform who are defending and protecting them.
On November 26, residents of Calama (a city in Northern Chile) called the police after observing suspicious activity by a small group of individuals before dawn. The officers went and found men at the location reported. Three of the men ran away but were eventually caught by the police and arrested. It turned out they were members of the Communist Party of Chile, including the party’s communal secretary, Ronald Rodríguez.
Rodríguez and his comrades, according to the police report, were carrying “approximately 35 liters of gasoline, 2 liters of solvent, masks, signs, trash and an arm chair,” most likely for making barricades in the streets to impede traffic and cause disturbance and fear. Immediately after police publicized their findings, members of the Communist Party declared that these facts had been staged by the police in order to criminalize the party. (See here and here)
Time and again this same type of slander is repeated on social media and by the press. The same was said about the burning of the country’s metro stations, which sparked the crisis on October 18 of this year, and about the lootings of the supermarkets, and so forth.
At a prominent university in Santiago, communists have staged a photographic display of the alleged victims of state repression, several of which are very outrageous. Communists have shamelessly attributed the deaths of several individuals who died in supermarkets or in storage places, which were burned down by their own activists, to the country’s law enforcement and security forces.
Unbeknownst to many, communists in Chile have created a very well organized campaign, largely through social media, propagating the urban myth that the arsons are being caused by the country’s law enforcement and security forces with the goal of slandering the revolution.
This is all the more surprising because one can easily read in the revolutionary publications, circulating throughout Chile, “rationalization” of the unleashed violence. To their own militants they declare that violence is necessary to change the structures of society, even if it is the innocent and the poor who have to suffer the effects (as is typically the case under communist tyranny).
Yet to the poor and the innocent, the communists declare that it is the police and the military that are destroying the infrastructure of the country in order to slander the revolution. However, the communists do not — nor will they — stop at slandering the police and military.
When Chilean cities and towns were left defenseless due to the withdrawal of the military presence and lifting curfews, some civilians dressed in yellow vests, as a sign of peace, stepped in to defend their community’s infrastructure that had survived after the initial lootings and arsons. These yellow-vested civilians defended the remaining small shops on their main street plazas, they defended their supermarkets and ATMs — all of which have been routinely ransacked, looted, and burned throughout the country for the past seven weeks.
There was a grassroots movement of individuals putting on yellow reflective jackets and beginning to clean and rebuild their neighborhoods. (In Chile, it is mandatory for vehicle operators to keep yellow vests stored in their vehicles in the event of a breakdown. Cyclists are also required to wear yellow vests so they are easily seen by drivers.) Soon afterwards graffiti began sprawling throughout Santiago’s streets, reading: “The yellow vests are the White-Guard of the Rich.” As a result of this slanderous intimidation, people are afraid to wear the yellow vests as a sign of peace. Anybody who opposes their own destruction is an enemy of the Revolution and must be slandered.
All of this lying and slandering is all the more revolting when considering that the Chilean government has seemingly been deprived of using physical force, when needed. Police and the military are now forbidden from even using rubber bullets. Meanwhile, revolutionaries can and have used them on police, hitting them and destroying police cars with stones.
At a supposedly peaceful march, protesters threw two ignited Molotov cocktails at the unguarded faces of two policewomen, resulting in severe burns. Police are unable to effectively defend themselves because they have been restrained by court orders from judges who have demonstrated themselves over the last two decades to be revolutionaries themselves. Meanwhile, small roaming bands of revolutionaries continue to burn, destroy, occasionally kill, and use all sorts of violence to terrorize the Chilean people.
One might ask, “But does anyone seriously believe these revolutionaries?” The answer to that query is that unfortunately all too many Chileans do. They are not aware of the capacity of the communists to lie, squarely looking into a camera and crying as if they were blameless lambs while gravely slandering their enemies.
Neither are the people aware of the unanimous and unabashed support for the communists and revolutionaries given by the mainstream media. Undoubtedly, this scorn of truth is a hallmark of the communists, as is the totalitarian nature of both international and National Socialism (i.e. communism and Nazism).
This author fears that college students in the United States have been indoctrinated with socialist ideology. May the current Chilean experience serve as a lesson and warning to the American people of this insidious ideology.
Dr. Carlos A. Casanova is a Venezuelan attorney and professor of philosophy of law at the Universidad Santo Tomás and at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, in Santiago, Chile.
