ON THE FAILURE OF A REVOLUTION

"It was difficult, it would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fueled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us. At the time, full as I was with wonder of new voices and lives flooding into the future and inseminating it, I barely gave a thought to what they felt, people we called momios, mummies, because they were so conservative, prehistoric, bygone, passé, that they were, as far as we were concerned, already dead. We ended up including in that definition millions of Chileans who, like Don Patricio, were on our side, who should have been with us on that journey into the new land and who, instead, came to fear for their safety and their future. We turned the Don Patricios into Chino Urquidis. 

As the years of exile and defeat taught me what it means to learn abruptly that you can be entirely accidental, everything you did or believed in reduced to mistaken dust, your body spared by those in power only because they have squeezed the soul out of it, I came to understand the dread our opponents must have lived through as they saw their world collapse. But at the time I was fanatical, deaf to their affliction. I didn't really care if they were scared. The truth is that we came to enjoy their fear, the thrill that power over them and over destiny gave us. We ended up savoring the fact that for once they were on the receiving end of the shit of history instead of doling it out. We did not realize how that fear would grow until we were bloated into monsters in their minds, monsters who had to be destroyed."

— Ariel Dorfman, "Heading South, Looking North"