¡Pedro Machuca vive!
“A cause worth fighting for is a cause worth dying for.”
Taking a class on Latin American history is a daily reminder: it is a reminder of what it is we’re fighting for and against. But more importantly, it serves as a reminder of who we, as anarchists and anti-authoritarians, are. We are the constant thorn in the ass of oppression and exploitation. However, because of this, we are not the vanguard any movement or struggle. But, as history has shown us, we are often in the vanguard of the firing squads. There is ample evidence of this: the Bolsheviks killed the anarchists before they confronted the capitalists; the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City in 1968; Brad Will in Oaxaca; and the inspiration for this article, the coup led by Pinochet, where thousands were murdered. As we bend over backwards to blindly mourn our own 9-11, we forget the 9-11 that our comrades and compañeros suffered.
A problem within the comforts of the University is that we do not take seriously ourselves as activists and agitators. With all the privilege we have, we do little to take advantage of it–instead, we are worried more about protecting that privilege than doing what is right. Activism for us is not vocation, something we come home to, but a hobby, an after-school club we go to when we aren’t occupied with more important things. Our destinies are laid out for us: moderate and live, or fight and die. This is not a choice many of us are comfortable making, but it is destiny, it is reality.
As Americans we are pathologically uncomfortable with reality. We suffocate ourselves with tabloids, fiction, and façades. We choose to whitewash our world rather than deal with what truly is. We paint over graffiti; we accept without a second thought the greenwashing of corporations; we categorically believe the lies of our leaders. We refuse to accept that anything worth fighting for could possibly be achieved, at risk of undermining our own complacency within this fake Hollywood set we try to live on. We look at other challenges to this global system through paternalistic binoculars: we emphasize the oppression suffered by others in the South alongside the color of their skin, without listening to what they are fighting for–we assign a different struggle to them to avoid comprehending the poverty of our world.
As I sit in a lecture hall in Madison after watching Machuca, there is a barrage of comments pitying the protagonist of the story, justifying his betrayal of his friend, otherizing and externalizing the story away from their own life. At the end of the discussion section, we abandon Pedro Machuca, and we abandon the tragedy of Chile.
Or at least we try. Can we really escape the legacy of fascism, just as Gonzalo Infante escaped the población? As much as we try to avoid it and deny it, we are just as capable of repeating 1973. We pattern ourselves a better bourgeoisie, we are less devisive. But do we not treat the poor with the same disdain? Do us “good” liberals not look down upon the rural poor of Northern Wisconsin and the urban poor of Milwaukee from atop Bascom Hill? We are capable of committing such atrocity. And that ability should be a reminder to those of us who fight out of convenience: if we do not fight like hell now, we won’t be able to fight when they come for us later.
From Behind the Orange Curtain 