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Another The Economist banger
And The Economist provides a sort of ersatz morality. It gestures towards change, it gestures towards liberalism, it gestures towards being kind to people. But ultimately, there’s not much we can do about it. And what you don’t want to do is you never want to ally yourself or align yourself with those pesky socialists who do want to do something about it, right? And that’s really their ethos, which is, you know, here’s the stock market, here’s how you personally can make money. Here’s a kind of vaguely objective analysis of political unrest in this obscure country you otherwise wouldn’t care about unless you had stocks in their copper mines, right? It would be really great if there wasn’t this awful thing, but ‘Oh, shucks, what are you going to do? Here’s how you make money.’
also reminds me of this excerpt
Alexander Zevin: Yeah, so The Economist is really deeply involved in kind of preparing Western opinion for the need for regime change in Chile. You know, and we know of course that the CIA was preparing to undermine Allende before he was even elected. Right? Make the economy scream where the notes elected by the head of the CIA in advance of Allende’s being sworn in 1970. One figure in particular looms large in that story, and that is this guy Robert Moss who takes a number of trips to Chile for The Economist. He’s also working at the same time for these, has these connections to Western intelligence agencies. He’s writing things for magazines that go directly into the hands of the officer class in Chile about free-market economics, kind of promoting Chicago Boy ideas about what needs to happen in Chile. He’s on the ground also writing these special reports. I mean you guys read The Economist, so you know there’s these kind of special reports which do often have a byline and so that was, you know, it was easy to trace those to Moss. And I also could find out when he was there. He ends up writing a book called Chile’s Marxist Experiment, which of course tells you already a lot about what the book is going to argue. And it’s filled with misinformation stories provided to him by the CIA basically, that are totally bogus about Allende’s plot to take power, right? The delegitimization of Allende has to do in part with economic mismanagement and the fact that there are going to be shortages and there are going to be strikes and disturbances, but it also has to do with the fact that he is, you know, not, that he never wins a majority. Right? It’s a minority government. It’s not legitimate.
Adam: If only there were contemporary examples of this.
Alexander Zevin: Right, right. As though, as though in Western parliamentary systems, you know, right? Exactly. Exactly. So he writes this book and it’s culled in part from his Economist work, and unfortunately for him, the book is meant to justify the sort of taking of power, but the coup happens before he can get the book done. And it’s the book, Chile’s Marxist Experiment, that the generals end up ordering 10,000 copies of and distributing at their embassies, and the fingerprints and connections between these people are all over the place. Of course, one of the good stories in the book, although it’s also a gruesome story, is that the day that Allende takes his own life at La Moneda Palace as jets drop bombs, Moss — who is at that point sharing an office with Andrew Knight, who becomes editor and is a great friend with Henry Kissinger and Henry Kissinger will later do an ad for The Economist, which is gruesome in itself — Robert Moss dances down the corridors of The Economist offices chanting, “My enemy is dead.” So let that sink in.
