HiPointDem (14,486 posts)
A Life Shattered by Pinochet: What Killed Neruda?
The recent order by a Chilean judge to exhume and then conduct an autopsy on the remains of the poet Pablo Neruda may throw light on the real cause of death of Pablo Neruda, a Chilean writer whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez called “the greatest poet of the 20th century — in any language.†Neruda’s former driver claims that the poet was assassinated on orders of General Augusto Pinochet, and didn’t die of leukemia, as is commonly believed.
Neruda’s political beliefs were behind some of his most powerful poems...He joined the Republican movement, first in Spain and then in France. In 1939, he was appointed Chilean consul in Paris, and from there, he coordinated the emigration to Chile of as many as 2,000 Spanish Republicans who had first escaped to France. In 1943 he returned to Chile and joined the protest against President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla’s repressive actions against striking miners. In 1945, he became a senator and joined the Communist Party. The government soon expelled him, and from 1947 to 1949 he lived in hiding.
In January 1948, Neruda delivered one of the most passionate speeches on Chile’s political history: He read out the names of 628 people being detained at the Pisagua concentration camp without having been interrogated or formally charged. That speech became known as “Yo Acuso†(I accuse,) after French novelist Emile Zola’s 1898 denunciation of the French government’s treatment of Alfred Dreyfus. In 1949, he fled to Europe.
When Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, he appointed Neruda as Chile’s ambassador to France, where he lived from 1970 to 1972. In 1973 he returned to Chile, but in September of that year, Augusto Pinochet, with help from the CIA, overthrew Allende’s government.
Neruda’s life, I firmly believe, was shattered by Pinochet’s coup and Allende’s suicide. Neruda died only 12 days after the coup. Shortly before his death, as he lay sick in bed, his house was ransacked by a military unit. When he saw the commander of the unit, weapon in hand in his bedroom, Neruda, who could hardly speak, told him, “There is only one dangerous thing for you in this house — poetry.â€
Whatever the results of this investigation I, however, believe that this man, the saddest of men after the death of his friend Salvador Allende and the defeat of democracy in Chile, died of a broken heart.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/29/what-killed-neruda/
HPD presumes to suggest to us that his way is the way society should be governed for the protection of all (and by "all" I mean "those selected by the self-selecting elite").
And yet, these grande protectors whither and die from a broken heart.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022597238Anyone watching DU regularly will see that their latest gun-grabber talking point is that gun nuts will curl into a fetal position and cry as the troops they promise they aren't sending to ransack our homes, ransack our homes because we're ***** cowards (with homicidal streaks?!?!) who need guns like frightened children need teddy bears.
But then they post articles about poets crying themselves to death.
Yeah.
OK
