19 quotes found
"The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb."
"With Christian faith I pray that those who are today our adversaries may understand their error in time and may deeply reflect before persisting in a stance which is rejected by all the free peoples in the world and by all those who had their territory mutiliated and endured colonialism and exploitation."
"The Empire Strikes Back."
"The episode of the Falklands war will be seen as important because it convinced many people in and outside the country that we were not played out as a nation... I saw the Falklands invasion as a test of the country's confidence, a test of how the British lion still should behave when somebody really twisted its tail. The great bulk of opinion in the House of Commons reflected opinion in the country. This was a time to stand and, if need be, fight. We should be grateful for that: imagine how this country would feel now if General Galtieri was crowing in Buenos Aires and the Argentinians were still in occupation of the Falklands. What happened was a triumph for a solid British virtue which knows when to say, "Up with this I will not put"."
"What really thrilled me, having spent so much of my lifetime in Parliament, and talking about things like inflation, Social Security benefits, housing problems, environmental problems and so on, is that when it really came to the test, what's thrilled people wasn't those things, what thrilled people was once again being able to serve a great cause, the cause of liberty."
"The battle of the Falklands was a remarkable military operation, boldly planned, bravely executed, and brilliantly accomplished. We owe an enormous debt to the British forces and to the Merchant Marine. We honour them all. They have been supported by a people united in defence of our way of life and of our sovereign territory."
"The significance of the Falklands War was enormous, both for Britain's self-confidence and for our standing in the world...We had come to be seen by both friends and enemies as a nation which lacked the will and the capability to defend its interests in peace, let alone in war. Victory in the Falklands changed that. Everywhere I went after the war, Britain's name meant something more than it had. The war also had real importance in relations between East and West: years later I was told by a Russian general that the Soviets had been firmly convinced that we would not fight for the Falklands, and that if we did fight we would lose. We proved them wrong on both counts, and they did not forget the fact."
"But when you are at war you cannot allow the difficulties to dominate your thinking: you have to set out with an iron will to overcome them. And anyway what was the alternative? That a common or garden dictator should rule over the Queen's subjects and prevail by fraud and violence? Not while I was prime minister."
"What an unlikely pair of antagonists! The British have always fought, to be sure. No nation on Earth can be taken seriously in historical circles unless it has had at least one war with the British; it's like not having an American Express card. And yet the very idea of Britain in a contemporary war is a shock. Britain, one feels, fights in history books and not on TV."
"The Falkland Islands are once more under the government desired by their inhabitants. God save the Queen."
"Solidarity with the poor ... means that we make ours their problems and their struggles, that we know how to speak with them. This has to be concretized in criticism of injustice and oppression, in the struggle against the intolerable situation which the poor person has to tolerate."
"Where unjust social, political, economic and cultural inequalities are found, there is a rejection of the gift of the Lord's peace, even a rejection of the Lord himself."
"As had been the case during Nixon's last years in office, the nation again faced the question of whether the United States should, or even could, maintain separate standards in fighting the Cold War from what it was prepared to accept at home. Events in Chile posed the dilemma most clearly. A successful military coup had finally taken place in Santiago in September, 1973. It left Allende dead—probably by suicide—and a reliably anti-communist government in power headed by General Augusto Pinochet. Direct C.I.A. complicity was never established, but Nixon and Kissinger openly welcomed the outcome and sought to cooperate with the new Chilean leader. By the time the C.I.A. investigations got under way in 1975, however, Pinochet's government had imprisoned, tortured, and executed thousands of Allende supporters—some of them American citizens. Chile, for many years a democracy, now had one of the most repressive dictatorships Latin America had ever seen. What the United States did in Chile differed little from what it had done, two decades earlier, in Iran and Guatemala. But the 1970s were not the 1950s: once the information got out that the Nixon administration had tried to keep Allende from the office to which he had been elected and had sought to remove him once there, "plausible denial" became impossible. That made questions about responsibility unavoidable. Could Allende have remained in power if there had been no American campaign against him? Would he have retained democratic procedures had he done so? Should the United States have refrained, to the extent that it did, from condemning Pinochet's abuses? Had it made a greater effort, might it have stopped them? There are, even today, no clear answers: Washington's role in Chile's horrors remains a hotly contested issue among both historians of these events and participants in them. What was clear at the time, though, was that the C.I.A.'s license to operate without constraints had produced actions in Chile that, by its own admission, failed the "daylight" test. They could not be justified when exposed to public view."
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
"At midday on September 11, 1973, after months of mounting tensions in the streets of Santiago, Chile, British-made Hawker Hunter jets swooped overhead, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the neoclassical presidential palace in the center of the city. As the bombs continued to fall, La Moneda burned. President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier at the head of a leftist coalition, was barricaded inside. During his term, Chile had been wracked by social unrest, economic crisis, and political paralysis. Allende had said he would not leave his post until he had finished his job—but now the moment of truth had arrived. Under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s armed forces were seizing control of the country. Early in the morning on that fateful day, Allende offered defiant words on a national radio broadcast, hoping that his 8 many supporters would take to the streets in defense of democracy. But the resistance never materialized. The military police who guarded the palace had abandoned him; his broadcast was met with silence. Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was Chilean democracy. This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Democracies in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion. But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps."
"Chile had known class struggle within a bourgeois democratic framework for many decades: that was its tradition. With the coming to the presidency of Allende, the conservative forces progressively turned class struggle into class war — and here too, it is worth stressing that it was the conservative forces which turned the one into the other."
"1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,000 available, more if necessary; full-time job — best men we have; game plan; make the economy scream; 48 hours for plan of action."
"The United States... supported authoritarian regimes throughout Central and South America during and after the Cold War in defense of its economic and political interests. In tiny Guatemala, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted a coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1954, and it backed subsequent rightwing governments against small leftist rebel groups for four decades. Roughly 200,000 civilians died. In Chile, a CIA-supported coup helped put Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power from 1973 to 1990. In Peru, a fragile democratic government is still unraveling the agency's role in a decade of support for the now-deposed and disgraced president, Alberto K. Fujimori, and his disreputable spy chief, Vladimiro L. Montesinos."
"The armed forces have acted today solely from the patriotic inspiration of saving the country from the tremendous chaos into which it was being plunged by the Marxist government of Salvador Allende.… The Junta will maintain judicial power and consultantship of the Comptroller. The Chambers will remain in recess until further orders. That is all."