The solution the Activists developed to counter fascism was to root out the danger before it has a chance to bloom. Suspend political democracy, deny the opposition freedom of speech or assembly, build socialism with a powerful and determined dictatorship of the lower orders. Destroy the right before it has a chance to move against the revolution.
The Activist solution has terrible implications. Revolutionaries who wish to end violence must resort to it, socialists who fight to expand democracy to the economic and social sphere must limit it. Freedom fighters in Africa who want to end oppression must kill oppressed Portuguese peasant-soldiers. Vietnamese revolutionaries who seek an independent Vietnam make war against some of their own countrymen. Leon Trotsky, a warm and humane man, raced around in his special train in the Soviet Civil War and ordered deserters from the Red Army shot.
And the solution does not always work. The dictatorship of the lower orders can become a warped government by a bureaucratic elite. Josef Stalin set out to build socialism, but he turned it into a new form of oppression hardly more acceptable than its capitalist adversaries. Leonid ceptable than its capitalist adversaries. Leonid Brezhnew, the final product, has as little in common with Lenin or Trotsky as does Richard Nixon.
SALVADOR ALLENDE thought he could travel in Legalist road to justice. He banked that Chile's tradition of stable democracy and the historical neutrality of the armed forces would protect Popular Unity from extra-legal moves from the right. He adhered to strict legality, hoping that the success of the socialist programs would gradually add to his slender mandate until socialism was backed by a clear majority.
The nationwide elections last spring seemed to indicate Popular Unity was moving along well. Socialism received 44 per cent of the vote, comparing favorable with the 36 per cent Allende had been elected with two years earlier. This increase was despite the skyrocketing inflation and the growing strength of the far Right, and it appeared all to briefly to register a milestone of success for Legalism.
Even until the end. Allende never swerved from his commitment to an orderly and democratic transition. The Right had begun to move against Popular Unity from the outset: businessmen sent badly needed investment capital abroad, distributers and the rightest press teamed up to exacerbate the notorious shortages, Patria y Libertad began to strike with bombings and assassinations. Although Allende encouraged the Left to organize outside the government, he never responded in kind to the Rightist attacks. He went so far as to bring the military into the government for stability as the Right's offensive peaked in late summer.
Whether Popular Unity could have hung on without resorting to the Activist solution is going to be a matter of great debate--second-guessing about aborted revolutions is a time-honored Left pastime. Allende was a skilled political veteran whose knowledge of the Chilean political situation was based on over 40 years of experience, and it at least initially seems doubtful that anyone else would have been better equipped to handle the wave of crises. But perhaps he missed a few key chances for compromise, or bungled with one policy or another.
The errors will be hard to find. The scale of historical events is too vast for their outcome to hinge on one man, or one decision, or one policy. Chilean Legalism seems inevitably to have led to the polarization, the increasing Right attacks, the growing extra-legal threat. There seems little way a crisis could have been forestalled.
The Chilean example clearly strengthens the position of the Activists in the continuing debate and once again poses the awful dilemma of revolutionary violence. Should Popular Unity have crushed the truck-owners strike when it began, locked up or if necessary killed those fearful businessmen of principled rectitude, and then outlawed and rounded up the rest of the opposition? In retrospect, the answer seems to be yes, but who can forecast the future?
It is never easy for people who wish to banish repression forever to resort to it--especially against other people who in one sense were merely following the grim choreography of social change. Popular Unity was elected to feed starving children and bring new dignity to their parents. That it seems to have balked at wielding violence, even to eliminate violence forever, is no surprise.
The dilemma cannot finally be resolved by the Chilean events. A stronger sense of internationalism by the world Left, particularly in the United States, would certainly have lessened Popular Unity's difficulties. Had U.S. aid, other than military assistance, continued to flow southward, for example, perhaps the Chilean crisis would not have become so intense.
A Chile is a unique country in many ways, with a unique set of social and economic circumstances. Perhaps Legalism might work someplace else; any generalizations from Chile are necessarily problematic. But the gnawing suspicion remains that at some point a decision would have had to be made in Chile as it will have to be made in other places at other times. Can people who hate suffering with such a passion that they would give their own lives to end it inflict suffering on others?
* * *
AS A SOCIALIST, I sometimes question myself about this dilemma. Could I support the suspension of free speech and freedom of the press to aid a revolution waged for the extension of those and other rights? Could I imprison a Chilean truck-owner for endangering socialism--a socialism where there will be no prisons? Could I shoot a Portuguese soldier for a cause that seeks to outlaw war forever?
I doubt that I could do any of these things. But when I think of Salvador Allende cradling his machine-gun in the presidential palace which shells whine in and bombs explode, when I picture this calm and gentle doctor peering at the soldiers destroying socialism in Chile while children cry for milk in Santiago slums, these things become easier to contemplate.