revolution

Chile. Chilean truck owners and the United States's own International Brotherhood of Teamsters seem to have much in common. While the Teamsters attempt to eradicate the struggling United Farm Workers in California, their compatriots in Chile are attempting to reverse the course of Chile's socialist revolution.

The Chilean transport owners have kept their trucks in their garages for almost three weeks now, avowedly striking to topple the socialist coalition of Salvador Allende. The owners, fearful that their precious private property would be expropriated sometime soon, have resorted to clandestine sabotage, adding to the problems caused by the strike itself--shortages of gasoline, food and medical supplies.

The upper class and segments of the middle classes have always strenuously opposed Allende's program of social justice and wealth and power redistribution. The greatest threat to civil order in Chile clearly comes from the right.

Yet, somehow it is always the right who are interviewed for American newspapers and wire services. Hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants regularly clog the streets in Chile's capital, Santiago, to demonstrate their support for their Allende government, but their voices are never heard in the United States. Yet let a handful of middle class women bang some cooking pots and wail about prices, and cries of anguish about the subversion of Chilean liberties emanate from sensible American observers.

Allende, in U.S. news dispatches, is always "Marxist President Allende." Nothing the matter with that, but why not call the criminal in the White House "Capitalist President Nixon." At any rate, the right is moving to crush the Chilean people with extra-legal assassinations, political power plays and the like, and all the good American liberals can do is read their newspapers and tremble about civil liberties.

Cambodia. This war-torn Southeast Asian country is on the threshold of national liberation. Criminal American air strikes, which have reached new peaks of barbarism in the past several weeks, will finally end at midnight tonight. A flurry of peace rumors is blowing out of Phnom Penh, Peking and Washington, but even a last minute face-saving settlement cannot disguise the fact that American imperialism has lost another one.

The bombing will stop, Lon Nol's puppet strings will be cut, and Cambodia will eventually return to peace and national sovereignty under the leadership of the revolutionary Khmer Rouge. Lon Nol probably already has a mansion on the French Riviera picked out, where he can join other reactionary luminaries like Madame Nhu and a host of South Vietnamese generals.