Imagined Communities

I'm about two-thirds of the way through Torture and Eucharist now, and I think it's going to trouble me more than any book I've read recently. Not because of the graphic visuals--Cavanaugh is actually pretty sparing with the blow-by-blow, preferring instead first-person testimonials and general notations that torture happened. The really troubling notes are the histories of Chile from 1970 to 1990. They resemble so much the state of America right now that I'm actually starting to believe the John Ashcroft conspiracy theorists. The strategy of the Pinochet people involved pitting the theological resistance against the "real" Christians, the nationalists who didn't question their leader. Their increasing secrecy in the early seventies led to a state in which nobody trusted anybody and anyone opposing the governing party was labeled treasonous. Their military became the national symbol, considered far more "Chilean" than politicians or intellectuals or workers.


Three voices were competing to define the people's imagination. On the one hand, the left wing painted a picture in which the peasants of Chile and the factory workers in Southeast Asia and the poor farmers of Cuba were all one, the "other" people being the Chilean oligarchs, the international capitalists, and the fat cats of the world. Against them the Pinochet regime leveled charges of "class warfare" (sound familiar?) and held that all Chileans, whether the impoverished or the multi-millionaire, were part of a whole in ways that a Chilean and a Cuban could never be one. And finally, the Church, after it had flirted with both of those sides, eventually declared that the body of Christ was no invisible thing but a real political body, one that pointed to the eternal but was constituted by a discipline here and now. Until the eighties, the Pinochet people won out, and anything done for the good of the nation-state (including torture) was considered good because if Chileans weren't protecting Chileans, nobody would. And the government maintained a perpetual "state of emergency" to justify any abuses that they "absolutely needed" to inflict on the people (sound familiar?).

I really don't remember what I dreamed about last night, by the way. I'm showing a video to my substitute class today, so I might get some more reading done. Who knows? All I know is that one candidate is looking more and more like Pinochet as the pages pass, and I'm going to be stepping into a booth come Tuesday...