The Passing of the Pinochet Moment

A. Montagnard

“If we continue to go down the route of the over-nannying state, I could conceive a time of not living in Europe… If you go to South America, there are not that many laws.”

- Iain Cochrane, 15th Earl of Dundonald, descendant of “The Sea Wolf” Thomas Cochrane

Torbert Fahey’s meditations drive home the point that “militaries, with their emphasis on engineering, science, and meritocracy, are often bastions of modernist nationalism in developing countries.” Even today, keyed flourishes seep out of Britain’s special forces now and again.

Nationalists often make reference to the increasingly frequent fedposting of French generals, warning of civil war after years of demographic change. It is an expression of the rightoid’s yearning for a deus ex machina moment. The Boogaloo. Collapse. Of course, in today’s rubberised world the capital-C Collapse never comes. Britain’s similarly redpilled military demographic shows that the French are not uniquely based. A loosely sympathetic officer corps and general fiscal instability are necessary but insufficient pretexts for totalitarian Progressive change.

Andy Beckett’s superb Pinochet in Piccadilly provides important insights into not only Chilean history but the nascent revolutionary culture of Britain’s military elite. Beckett doesn't chronicle any formal British Business Plot, but a “conspiracy of feeling” among military men that the postwar consensus was cracking up, and that inspiration could be found in the infamous military coup that rang in the melancholy 1970s.

***

The first half of the book explores Chile’s origins in the period of High Globalism we know as the 19th century. As with more explicit British colonies like Australia, Chile’s development was facilitated by the financial schemes of British financiers in The City up until the collapse of the nitrate trade due to the First World War.

Chile, The Prussia of the Pacific Coast, was subject to the same geographical imperatives that turned Germany’s military into a crack fighting force. Its long land borders and encirclement by enemies demanded an army capable of executing on Schlieffen Plans against the Bolivian menace to the north and perfidious Argentinians in the south.

In general, for a Latin country, Chile’s military was unusually apolitical, apart from a brief period of coups and juntas between 1924 and 1932. Although Beckett breezes over Allende’s travels across the Eastern bloc soliciting Cuban and Soviet arms, he is good enough to mention Pinochet’s role in brokering deals with Moscow on Allende’s behalf, as well as the army’s suppression of the more straightforwardly fascistic Roberto Souper’s failed “Tank Putsch” months before. The Daily Telegraph compared Allende to Atlee, and the Tory government’s ambassador David Hildyard complained about coup-plotters, claiming that in “the long view of history… all of Latin America probably needed to go through communism for twenty years to eliminate the glaring injustices.” There was no shortage of goodwill for the Allende regime outside of anti-communist circles.

In future books, Beckett dwells on the comparison between Allende and Jeremy Corbyn. Two demure democratic socialists who were cuckolded and humiliated at the “hour of decision.” His oeuvre fails to sufficiently explore how the downfall of the Latin dictators (Pinochet, Salazar, Franco) were crucial building blocks in the Human Rights tyranny evolving out of America’s freshly moralistic approach to the Cold War after the 1960s. Wikipedia estimates the death-count of the Pinochet regime to be around 4000, with more tortured, a drop in the bucket compared to the crimes of communism. Pinochet was vocally condemned by Blair and Mandelson, and New Labour’s Home Secretary Jack Straw spent time in Chile as a student politician. Instead, the book’s most valuable insights emerge when Beckett begins comparing 1970s Britain to Chile before the coup.

***

Being the son of a British soldier, Beckett is sensitive to Britain’s hidden history of martial intrigue.

“In Britain, as in Chile before Pinochet, it had long been a conventional wisdom that coups and military rule simply did not happen. Moments in the country’s history that challenged this assumption, such as Cromwell’s army government during the 1650s or the flirtations of the Daily Mail and the conservative establishment with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists during the 1930s, were not dwelt on.”

There were rumours all through the Wilson ministry that British soldiers were unwilling to fight against the Rhodesians in the 1960s following UDI.

“In 1977, a former MI6 officer called Anthony Eaton claimed that several Scottish peers with assets in the colony, together with ‘a small band of top-ranking officers,’ had in 1965 or 1966 ‘actually approached the Queen Mother with their plan for a coup’ in Britain. She supposedly rejected their proposal, which also involved a general revival of the British empire in Africa.”

There are plenty of leftist parapolitics accounts who wax lyrical about MI5’s subversion of the Wilson Ministry, under the assumption that the Prime Minister was a Soviet asset; preparing the way for a Mountbatten-led national emergency government before his untimely demise at the hands of the Provos. But none of these schemes were ever acted upon. Queen Lizzy preferred to remain the benign sovereign of the Commonwealth, a supranational organisation which loots the British Nation like a lord extracting rent from his vassals.

The platonic British soldier’s imperial experience of the world beyond Britain hardened their commitment to being Strong on Defense. Their experience with Marxist guerillas in Malaya, Kenya and Ulster taught them soldiers “that communist ‘subversion’ was a global threat,” and that “this enemy would sometimes hide within legitimate seeming protest organisations.” This was formalised in soldiers’ manuals authored by such experts on counterinsurgency as Frank Kitson, who plied his trade in Northern Ireland managing “gangs and counter-gangs.”

The trope of western right-wingers looking to anti-communist despots abroad for inspiration features heavily in libtard polemics, as they try to reclaim civic nationalism from their enemies. See the crude portrayal of Donald Trump as a “MAGA Maoist” from Drew Pavlou/Hanania or the staid invocation of “Putinist Populism” all through the Brexit debates. Jacob Heilbrunn wrote a whole book on the American Right’s interest in exotic “autocrats” like Bukele, Orban or Netanyahu. I have not yet brought up Pinochet memes as a critical part of every zoomer libertarian’s boyhood vocabulary.

In the 1980s, militant trade unions were the Stakeholders obstructing Progress, like the medieval guilds of old. Today migration is the major issue, and Kemi Badenoch’s appeals to Milei are an example of conservatives bloodlessly signalling extremism without violating any Woke taboos.

Speechwriter Robert Moss, a Canberra Grammar graduate who would later dub Maggie Thatcher the Iron Lady, wrote about The Collapse of Democracy on behalf of The Economist’s “intelligence unit.” Moss’s bugbears should sound familiar to contemporary readers: inflation’s effect on bourgeois living standards, pernicious Marxist educators and trade union militancy. Growing up in 1970s London, my mum recalled see-though bin-bags as a precaution against Irish terrorism. Those who were able to emigrated to the colonies.

Faced with a Tory party deep in the electoral wilderness, before Thatcher was even a word on the lips of the Freemasons of Carlton Clubland, the British right was blackpilling. Some looked to the National Front, but the more well-positioned among them looked to extra-parliamentary measures.

***

Into this anarchy strode General Walter Walker. Like many of the great Englishmen of the 20th century, Walker was a child of the Empire, born far from the home islands. Here’s some vintage J’accuse explaining how Britain’s “progressive right” grew out of her imperial diaspora.

“Being temperamentally hostile to Catholicism, by circumstance, they could never be absorbed into the emerging Anglo-Catholic form of Red Toryism, and being pro-Empire by necessity they could never become Socialists.”

Much like the radical international schoolkids massively overrepresented in our corner of Twitter, Walker grew up on a tea plantation in India, to a family of antebellum army brats splitting their time between military service and polo championships. Returning to Devon, Walker went from boarding school to commanding Gurkhas in Burma against the Japanese empire’s revolt against the white world. After that, organising the owners of Malayan rubber plantations into anti-Bolshevik civilian volunteer forces. He personally policed the first postcolonial elections in Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew, “the last true Whig” took over.

Beckett describes Walker as a “sort of latter-day Cochrane,” a badass rule-breaking policeman liquidating communists in southeast Asian jungles with greater enthusiasm than central command, who kicked him upstairs into a series of desk jobs. During Britain’s 1970s tailspin, Walker called for a messianic nationalist leader to take charge in the pages of the Daily Telegraph. It was matched with funding and popular support from the doyens of the City: high-ranking military personnel, ex-MPs, prominent captains of industry — the broader British Bürgertum.

With time, Walker’s bourgeois backing melted away and moderated. His private army, Civil Assistance, was folded into Moss’s “more respectable National Association for Freedom,” and monetarism’s electoral triumph thanks to Thatcher revived British industry’s faith in The Democracy. Walker’s twilight years were spent jetting between Somerset and South Africa, “encouraged by the British army to take up charitable work on behalf of the Gurkhas… too much of a dutiful soldier to overthrow the established order.” He patronised the Monday Club and Western Goals institute, making him the genealogical ancestor of Jonathan Bowden’s radical student faction.

***

Pinochet’s overt military coup is far from the only organisational model from South America worth studying. Trucker protests against New Labour were foreshadowed in Chile, mirroring the demographic makeup of all spontaneous right-wing activism seen in Britain. A motley crew of “farmers and taxi drivers, pro-hunting landowners and wealthy 'countryside commuters', right-wing politicians and newspapers with a sudden taste for the civil disobedience that they usually condemned.” Furthermore, Thatcher resolved trade union militancy without a civil war, though the coercive services of soldiers and policemen were needed to quash miners’ strikes. In the words of Franz Pokorny:

“Mass remigration will be accomplished through constitutional, democratic means. The ‘civil war’ meme that certain dark demographers like to play up is a deus ex machina to absolve tweedy SW1 types from having to get their hands dirty with good, honest populism.”

Capturing a castle from our enemies with representation in western militaries could never be a bad thing. A new generation of right-wingers will have to decide whether we leave overt Ceausescu-from-the-balcony risings to Ruritanias like Romania.