Day after day over the past three years, as I watched Americans respond to the terror that unexpectedly descended upon them on September 11th, 2001, the direst memories of Chile and its dictatorship resonated in my mind. There was something dreadfully familiar in the patriotic posturing, the militarization of society, the way in which anyone who dared to be faintly critical was automatically branded as a traitor. Yes, I had seen that before: "You are either with us or against us." I had seen it far too often -- national security trumpeted as a justification for any excess in the pursuit of an elusive enemy.

Who could have imagined that in the United States, with its independent judiciary, thousands of men could be rounded up in the night -- many only because of their Muslim religion or foreign nationality -- without recourse to a trial, without even an acknowledgment that they had been arrested? Who could have dared to suggest that there would ever be "desaparecidos" in America? And there it was as well, torture being discussed as a legitimate option to protect a community in peril, and then being used in Guantanamo and Afghanistan, and even obscenely photographed in Iraq -- yes, there they were again, the depressing echoes of my Chile.

But worse perhaps than all of this was the erosion of the moral compass of America, the seeming indifference of the seeming majority to the suffering of others, the casual acceptance of "collateral damage" as an unquestioned consequence of the war on "terrorism," the demonization of an ubiquitous foe who had to be destroyed without second thoughts -- and often without first ones as well; without, in fact, any thoughtfulness at all. That was far more terrifying than the criminal attacks on New York and Washington: To realize that the Chile of strongman Augusto Pinochet was not that far away, not that difficult to imitate, that it was already hovering in the future and ready to materialize if we were not vigilant.

I would read the news each morning in my home in North Carolina and each morning I would feel the same sudden stab of vertigo. Was history repeating itself yet one more tired time? Could it really be that simple to corrupt American democracy? Could the citizens of the United States be so easily twisted and manipulated by their fear?

The answer was, in fact, no, not that easily.

Over the last year, everywhere I have turned in the United States, I have seen signs of an amazing spirit of resistance, another sort of better America mobilizing, citizens not moved by dread but by hope, a vast and plural and creative wave of activism that I had not witnessed since... well, since the year 1970 when my country elected Salvador Allende as our President, when gentle armies of my fellow countrymen and countrywomen took their destiny into their own hands and proclaimed to the winds of history that it was possible to build socialism using democratic means, that we did not have to terrorize or persecute our adversaries in order to free ourselves from oppression.

If the present American campaign for the presidency reminds me of that revolutionary moment in Chilean history more than three decades ago, it is not because John Kerry is at all like Salvador Allende or George W. Bush is a clone of Augusto Pinochet. But there is in the American air today the trembling prefiguration of the same sort of enthusiasm, the same conviction that each of us can make a difference, that history belongs to those who dare to imagine an alternative future. The world does not have to be the way we found it, the way we have been told it must remain: a message once sent to everybody by a multitude of hungry peasants in Chile marching to demand ownership of the land they had tilled for centuries for the benefit of others; a message transmitted again today by millions of angry internet subscribers to Moveon.org in the United States and defiantly announced by a widespread coalition of progressive American activists who are much more mature than the protestors of the Vietnam era and, I would wager, far outnumber them as well.

In Chile back then, as in the United States now, you could feel the same certainty that the last word has not yet been said.

What I do not quite know is if the new social activism in the United States has the same staying power as its Chilean counterpart. It took us almost a century of struggle to elect someone like Salvador Allende to the Presidency, and when he was overthrown by Pinochet in a military coup in 1973 -- on September 11th of all days! -- we kept fighting for seventeen years to rid ourselves of the dictatorship that misgoverned our land. We did not decide to give up on September 12th.

The real test will therefore come on November 3rd, the day after George W. Bush crawls back to power or John Kerry rides this wave of social transformation into the White House. That is when millions of American men and women who have mobilized in unprecedented numbers over the last months will be faced with the real dilemma of their times: Are they to pack up and go home to the old apathy and submissiveness, or do they deeply understand that, no matter who wins or loses the election, it depends on them, one by one by one and all together, that their country never turn into even a semblance of the Chile of Pinochet?

The struggle for the soul of America has barely begun.

Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean writer, holds the Walter Hines Page Chair at Duke University. His most recent book Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980-2004 (Seven Stories Press), a perfect introduction to his work, explores the ways Americans apply amnesia to their yesterdays and innocence to their tomorrows. His book Desert Memories (National Geographic) just won the Lowell H. Thomas Silver Award for travel writing.

© 2004 Ariel Dorfman

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