Ideas - The Hinge Years: 1973 | The Dictators

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

In part four of our series exploring five years that shaped the world, IDEAS examines 1973. Augusto Pinochet comes to power in Chile, and dictators rule Portugal, Greece, Uganda and beyond. The OPEC oil embargo sets the world on a new path. The American Supreme Court legalizes abortion in Roe v. Wade, 50 years before it would be overturned. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 25, 2024.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

It's the year 1973. Augusto Pinochet seizes power in Chile, inaugurating a new era of repression in Latin America. Tonight we have by satellite the first film to come out of Chile since Tuesday's overthrow of Salvador Allende's socialist government. Dictators rule Portugal, Greece, Uganda, the Philippines, and beyond. Martial law is enforced throughout Greece, and the Greek armed forces are on a full alert

because of bloody anti-government demonstrations. In the Middle East, the Yom Kippur Arab-Israeli war unleashes far-reaching consequences, and the OPEC oil embargo rattles economic and political structures around the world. Kissinger and his advisers continued to look for a solution. And President Nixon himself again took public notice of the crisis. In the U.S., the Supreme Court legalizes abortion in Roe v. Wade, 50 years before it would be overturned. To raise the dignity of a woman and give her freedom of choice in this area

is an extraordinary event. And I think that January 22, 1973 would be an historic day. This is the fourth installment in a series we recorded at the Stratford Festival about hinge moments in the 20th century. We recorded this series in July 2023. And since then, questions about the history of violence, extremism, human rights, and imperialism have only become more

urgent as we grapple with our own era of profound change. Our panelists for today's program are Luis van Ischot, Associate Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto, Akhila Radhakrishnan, a human rights lawyer and the former president of the Global Justice Centre, and Randall Hanson, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the author of War, Work and Want, how the OPEC oil crisis caused mass migration and revolution. This is the year 1973, the dictators. Thank you. Today, as mentioned, we're looking at 1973, the year of dictators is what we're calling it.

Augusto Pinochet comes to power in Chile, and dictators also rule Portugal, Greece, Uganda, and beyond. The OPEC oil embargo, stemming from another episode of the Arab-Israeli war, sets the world on a new path. In the U.S., Richard Nixon insists he's not a crook, and the Supreme Court legalizes abortion in Roe v. Wade. It's just one of five hinge years,

as we've mentioned all along, that we're looking at this week, culminating in 1989. And as I've said all along too, two questions we are hoping to answer, at least partially today, are how does change happen throughout history? And are we now living in a hinge moment ourselves? So let's acknowledge this conversation will never be long enough to address any of those things, but we will do our best. So let's get started. We do this with every panel that we've had. I would love for you each to paint a picture, take a snapshot of the year 1973, something that encapsulates the moment, but also helps us visit that year. So Akilah, I'd like to start with you.

Sure. Thanks so much, Nala. Thank you for having me here. So I was thinking about what would I pick from 1973? My work focuses on reproductive rights, on gender equality. And initially I thought I would talk about Roe v. Wade. But really a moment that struck me is a debate that happened in 1973 in the United States between Betty Friedan, who was one of the prominent feminist writers at the time and 10 years ago had written The Feminine Mystique, and Phyllis Schlafly, who is an anti-feminist activist. And they were, they had a debate at Illinois University about the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States, which was actually introduced in July 21st, 1923. And they were seeking to apply the Constitution equally without discrimination on the basis of sex.

And, you know, it's this really intense debate. And if you've seen the show Miss America, they reenact this debate with Cate Blanchett really embodying Phyllis Schlafly and doing it much more justice than I am. But, you know, what I was thinking about as I was reflecting on this is the debate that they were having about 50 years ago is the exact debate that's happening in the United States right now, right? In 1973, Roe v. Wade had just happened. They were still trying to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment to be passed. Today in the United States, Roe v. Wade has been reversed.

And, you know, again, a couple of days ago, some members of Congress tried to reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment. So really just thinking about this moment 100 years ago where those in the feminist struggle in the United States were starting this conversation and it's an unfinished conversation a hundred years later. And that really, to me, was quite evocative. Extraordinary. Absolutely. Randall, what's the moment that you, that takes you back to 1973? Well, it was in October when the organization of Arab petroleum exporting countries, not OPEC, but OAPEC, got together and quadrupled in real terms the price of oil and instituted in the midst of the Yom Kippur War an embargo on oil. Now that quadrupling of oil prices, which some people in the room will remember, changed the global economy forever.

Growth, which had been 5% a year during the 30 glorious years of the post-war boom, halved. And multiple problems that we have today, economic stagnation, massive inequality. The Americans' interest, not to put it more bluntly than that, or more directly than that, in the Middle East, Middle Eastern wars, generating quite literally tens of millions of refugees, all of that comes back to 1973 and to OPEC. Great. Luis? No one person's shadow looms larger over Latin American history in the last 50 years than Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, who led a coup d'etat on September 11, 1973, against the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. And there are many reasons. I mean, his reputation is well-earned, thousands killed, tortured, wrongfully imprisoned. But on that day, he marked the lives of so many Chileans very personally as well. I recall, for instance, the story of the Chilean novelistist uh ariel dorfman who was working at the presidential offices of salvador allende but didn't come into work that day and if he had he probably would

have been killed the anecdotes of young people remembering the day as a day that school was cancelled and so the guilt they feel now at having actually felt some pleasure in being able to stay home on the day of the coup. And so many other kind of personal anecdotes that people still carry in their heart today in Chile. Across Latin America, of course, it's also remembered because it was the end of a great kind of democratic experiment and the beginning of the sort of closing down of Latin American politics, which is something I hope we

can get into more in detail. Absolutely, we will. But let's first tackle the period that led up to 1973, because of course, as we know, change doesn't happen in a moment. There's always something that precedes it or presages it. So maybe coming back to you, Randall, can you talk about what some of those forces were that shaped the period prior to 1973? Well, the events that converged in 1973, of course, had their antecedents. We had rising inflation. We had concerns about the economy. We had a crisis of Nasserism, the president of Egypt, Nasser, who offered a vision of pan-Arab secular socialism, a vision which has been rather sadly replaced by authoritarianism on the one hand

and political Islamism on the other. But the defining moment that led to 1973 was actually 1967. The Six-Day War. The Six-Day War, a preemptive war launched with spectacular success by Israel, and that had two consequences. It generated hundreds of thousands of more Palestinian refugees, the first set of hundreds of thousands being generated by the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and those refugees were put to work, literally, for the Israeli economy. So the use of refugees as a labor supply

and as a source of cheap labor really began in 67-73. And the 67 war created the Arab solidarity necessary to launch the oil embargo leading to this quadrupling of oil prices. So you don't understand 73 without understanding 67. Certainly conflict and war really is what sets the tone. Absolutely. Yeah. Akilah, in your estimate, what are the tectonic plates that are moving prior to 73 to make it 73? Sure. So I think for my work, thinking about human rights, thinking about the feminist movement, the 60s were obviously a really important moment for the language of human rights, of civil rights coming into being. lot of the fight of the feminist movement for a really long time had been around the right to vote. But here we were starting to talk about the individual rights of women to participate more broadly in society, rights towards employment, but also thinking about the rights in personal life as it related to marriage, as it related to control over

reproduction. And so those questions, that language was really developing in the 60s. And in my work, you know, the tools that we utilize now as human rights lawyers were also being developed, right? So two major treaties that I use in my work all the time, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic Social Cultural Rights were written in the 60s, but they came into force in the 70s. And I think in the 70s is when you started to see the equality and the rights realizations on paper themselves, right? You can think of 1973 and Roe v. Wade as one example of how you started to formalize the existence of

these rights. Louise, a more specific question for you, maybe if I can direct your comments. Just how did the rise of communism play out in the politics of Latin America at the time? It's a fascinating story because of the fact that I think many Latin American youth in particular, and this is picking up on a theme I think we were just touching on, were impatient with the pace of change, with the advance of rights. So working with the Chilean example again, we talk about, for instance, these key figures, Pinochet and Allende. And some of you may have a reference point to, and I think more often we do, but it was much more than about two people. When Salvador Allende is elected at the end of 1969, he's actually coming to power with a coalition of socialist and communist radical political parties, who through democratic means want to implement a very radical reform program in Chile,

reform program in Chile, nationalizing mining industries, banks, creating new forms of government, popular assemblies that will redo the way in which we conceive of politics. And the influence is coming from the left. It's a radical project that many Chileans supported. But Salvador Allende had actually been working in Chilean politics since the 30s. He'd been Minister of Health in late 1930s, first elected to politics in 37, and he came through a movement right in the 40s and 50s, first contested presidential elections in 1958, and almost won then, elections in 1958, and almost won then, that were really buoyed by this kind of more urgent desire to advance rights. Latin Americans had some pretty serious, if you will, successes in terms of advancing social, economic, and political rights, votes for women, social programs expanded from the 1930s and 40s forward.

But by the 1960s, many people were thinking that it was just not enough, that the promise, if you will, of democracy was much greater than what they were actually achieving. Yeah. In the year 1972, just on the eve of 73, speaking of dictatorships, we look at Idi Amin coming into power in Uganda. Military dictatorships ruled Greece and Portugal. How do you make sense of the rise of such dictatorships at the time, Randall? Why it happened then in particular.

I don't know if in that particular case you can point to anything to do with 1973. In the case of Greece, it failed in 1967. Idi Amin came to power because of an internal power structure and because he was going to be arrested for corruption. What to my mind is most interesting, what you mean is not that he was one of a series of dictators, but that he responded to his own illegitimacy through the mass expulsion of the East African Asians, of Ugandan Asians. So what we had in that moment in 67 and in 73 was the emergence of new forms of refugees, which defined the age until today. We're at a historic peak of 100 million refugees. But my panelists might see something else in the dictatorship connection. Well, maybe there's a way to tie all of this together by asking that this is an era where new ideas about human rights, as Akilah mentioned, are emerging in international law.

Could you talk about what the most significant advancements there were when you are thinking about human rights in the lead up to 73, just beyond what we've talked about so far? Sure. So I think that, you know, kind of the initial wave of the human rights movement, right, was really about civil and political rights. What is it that governments shouldn't do against the populace is one way of really looking at it, a real, like, you know, negative rights, right? So you should not suppress freedom of speech. You should not suppress the ability of individuals to vote. And I think that was one characterization of what was going on. A lot of that was really dominated maybe by global North politics, right? And what you see actually in other places, you were talking about, you know, perhaps more advancement in the realization of economic, social, and cultural rights, which continue to be marginalized today,

but those were positive obligations of a state, right? What is the state's responsibility in ensuring the right to health or the right to employment, creating an environment where everyone can work and thrive? And I think that those were some of the dynamics where you started to see the shape, but I do think that the focus on negative rights really did create a very specific dynamic for what we saw were the priorities for the human rights movement in the 70s, in the 80s, and in the 90s.

We're now finally in a place where I think we start talking about this more holistic vision of what rights realization looks like. But we weren't there at the time, and we were really focused maybe on just what should you not do. Can any of you or maybe all of you, talk about the backlash to communist ideas, just in a bit more detail? Can you talk about that a little bit, Lewis, in the Latin American context? Of course.

You know, from the 1930s and especially in the 1940s, Latin America enters what we sometimes refer to as its democratic spring, a kind of final, long-awaited opening of mass politics, ordinary people seeing a stake in politics. And the backlash following the end of the Second World War into the beginning of the Cold War, which incidentally was very much not a cold war in Latin America,

but a hot war fought with live ammunition, was swift and quite fierce. Basically, the first major episode would be 1954 coup that was committed in Guatemala. If not at the behest of, certainly supported very directly by the CIA, by the United States government, and by the United Fruit Company, one of the largest exporters of and the largest landholder in all of Guatemala. They built the railroads, the infrastructure, all for their own purposes. And when a democratically elected government challenged their hegemony,

challenged their position, they were dealt with very cruelly. And so the United Fruit and the CIA enlisted the support of a Madison Avenue ad man, very famous, Edward Bernays. He's the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Wrote a book called On Propaganda to design a counter-information fake news program to create the conditions necessary to justify a military coup against the Guatemalan government. Rundle, you wanted to add something? Yeah, it was in the vein of anti-communism in the sense that chief cold warriors,

namely Ronald Reagan, were heavily involved in this process, but also anti-social democracy. What happened after the OPEC oil crisis? Inflation exploded, peaking at 25% in the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s, so much higher than we have today. Inflation was defined as a problem of wages, and so the right seized its movement to destroy the American labor movement. The peak of the adult male wage was 1972. It's been on a long decline ever since. The collapse of the American working class, that was the seeds of what became Donald Trump's victory in 2016. The oil crisis and the resultant inflation

made all of that possible. Go ahead. I think one thing that this is also highlighting for me is that as you saw these positive rights realizations happening in the United States with these economic policies, they became a lot of the realization of rights became the domain of individuals, of the free market regulation, right? They became not ones necessarily of the responsibility of the state, which is what

as human rights lawyers we're often talking about is what is your responsibility as the state, but rather the conversations around, you know, for example, paid maternity leave, right? It became a domain of private companies rather than a conversation of what the United States was supposed to do. And I think that those dynamics are also interesting as we think about economic consequences, what was going on, as well as what we start to see is really this development of the language and the recognition of rights themselves. If I could just pick up on that for a moment, you know, studying the documents produced by new social movements, by political parties, by political dissidents in the 1960s and 70s in Latin America, you see that they really did understand positive and negative rights as indivisible. And they were lobbying for, as I said in the case of chile but elsewhere

to radical democratic change and then once the bloodletting really begins with those dictatorships that arise first in brazil in 1964 and then in chile and uruguay in 1973, Argentina in 1976, the conversation changes to stop the killing, please. That's it. And you see a reduction for a period of time of the conversation. The political bandwidth is reduced to stop the violence for a period. But in Latin America, if you're attuned to what is happening on the ground, you realize that they never did stop talking, actually, about the wider bandwidth, if you will. It's just that what we were able to hear or receive internationally was that smaller, more narrow focus. Yeah. So we're really kind of coming right down to 1973, three major events that we're talking about here. So the OPEC crisis, the Roe v. Wade, and really the coup in Chile. I'd like to try to find connection points between all three if we can, but maybe first, Randall, with you, you talked about what the consequences were of the OPEC crisis in the US. Could you talk about the political forces unleashed by it on an international stage? Oh yeah, I mean they were massive.

So in the West our growth rate was halved and what I argue in the book is that we reconstructed our standards of living on the back of cheap labor which led to a massive increase in low-skilled immigration, and we now have badly paid, exploited migrants. From where? From the global south. I mean, it depends on the country you're talking about. In the case of America, chiefly Mexicans who are packing our meat in incredibly dangerous conditions, who are picking in the fields, who are making clothes in sweatshops for us.

That's the Western story. In the Middle East plus Russia, OPEC was the greatest get-rich-quick or get-rich-quicker scheme in human history. So Saudi Arabia was flooded with a massive amount of money. Iran was flooded with a massive amount of money. So was Russia. And in the case of Iran, that

destabilized the country, led to the toppling of the Shah, led to the Iran-Iraq war. The fact that the Middle East was the center of oil production brought the Americans into at least two wars. And in the case of Moscow, Petromania, this sudden rush of oil money, this belief that politics had no limits, encouraged, did not cause, but encouraged the invasion of Afghanistan. And so the result of all of that was millions upon millions upon millions of refugees. And the dots keep being connected. connected. When Russia invaded Afghanistan and you had massive Afghan resistance, the Soviets, not Russians, drenched the country in mines and bombs. That resulted in massive refugees who ended up in Pakistani refugee camps, and they became the Taliban. So I'll stop because I'm going on too long, but the terrorism of the early 2000s can also be tied back to 1973.

On Ideas, you're listening to the year 1973, the dictators. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. And on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio, and on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401,

check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. On September 11th, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup in Chile, overthrowing the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. The overthrow began almost quietly. It was not until Allende resisted the military that the violence began. A brutal moment in a year and a decade of brutality, when strongmen seized power across Latin America and beyond. With Sayyendi died his attempt to seek socialism through peaceful means using existing legal structures. This is the year 1973, the dictators.

Louise van Ischot, Akhila Radhakrishnan, and Randall Hansen in conversation at the Stratford Festival about a hinge moment in history, a year whose aftershocks still shape our world today. Luis, can we talk about just how important a turning point it was, the coup in Chile, the political forces that unleashed? Absolutely. I think I would highlight maybe two very problematic examples and then one more positive example. The problematic ones are on

the one hand, the governments of South America first, and particularly the southern part of South America, what we call the Southern Cone, began to collaborate, policing, monitoring, and imprisoning dissidents, sharing political prisoners, and it would become known as Plan Condor. It was kind of like a transnational repression program to quash dissent in the region. If they called you a communist, whether you were or not, to come back to an earlier point, whether you were or not, to come back to an earlier point, you were vulnerable, you were a target. At the same time, with the arrival of Pinochet to power,

he could implement without any hesitation and no, if you will, breaks on his decision-making, free trade policies in Chile, inviting back U.S. and other Canadian investors as well, we would really come to know this as neoliberalism. But many of the Chilean economic advisors were trained at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, and Chile became a model for the whole region and beyond. On the positive side, and we can expand on this answer maybe later as well, we see the rise of international solidarity and human rights movements on a scale that had not really been seen before, that would come to force globally, really, on Chile, on South Africa as

well. Can you speak to that, Akilah? Is that something, is that a prominent feature of the history of the human rights movement? Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that we often didn't count it as a part of the human rights movement, right? The idea of solidarity or the idea of protest, rebellion, revolution, you know, in some ways you keep it out of this academic context of what we consider like a professionalized human rights regime, right? And I think that what you're pointing out is this was actually where everything was beginning, right? And I think that what you're pointing out is this was actually where everything was beginning, right? Solidarity movements really brought in this full context of what does it mean to be human and what does all of that look like? And I think that that dichotomy certainly existed

then and I think it continues to this day. And so that's something that I think we're all trying to grapple with now, the formalization and professionalization of the context of humanity versus what it means as every individual to be a human rights actor. And if I may, refugees play an incredibly important role as these dominoes are falling in different parts of Latin America. Dissidents are moving. So there were thousands of, including hundreds of quite high-profile political activists from Brazil living in Chile in 1970, 71, 72, 73, to the coup. And they would form transnational human rights organizations. They might sometimes use the language of human rights, not always,

but they switched between them, and they played a massive role in leading this. Randall, is there a line to be drawn between that scene, what is going on in Latin America and the Middle East, where there's a rise of sort of repressive governments and repressive leaders sort of rising in that time? Is there a line to be drawn? Yes and no. In a sense, with the exception of Israel, there never was a democracy post-war

in the Middle East. So in a sense, it always was the age of dictators. Where I think there is a clear connection is on the point you made about liberal capitalism, neoliberalism, because of course there's actually really two Middle Easts. There's the Middle East we tend to think of when we think of oil, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, the Middle East we tend to think of when we think of oil, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, UAE, but then there's the oil-poor Middle Eastern states, Syria, and Egypt. And what OPEC did in launching inflation was utterly destroyed Arab socialism, or what's more technically called import substitution industrialization, getting rich behind a tariff wall. And because the Egyptian and Syrian economy were utterly on their knees,

they had to turn to the IMF and the World Bank and to America. And the price of that support, as ever, was an end of subsidies for bread, the removal of tariffs, the welcoming of foreign investment. And that led to flashy hotels on the Nile and some positive benefits, but massive inequality. Political dissent developed, began to seethe, and what eventually became the Arab Spring, and Middle Eastern scholars agree on this, this is a response to neoliberalism, inequality, that again can be tied back to the economic changes unleashed by OPEC. So in that sense, it was absolutely transformational of both types of the Middle East.

It seems like a bit of a paradoxical period, Akilah, because you both have kind of a rise, and again, we're speaking in quite general terms, which is hard to do for journalists and academics, but we're talking about the rise of dictators, but we're also talking about an infrastructure that's coming together on human rights. Both are happening at the same time. How do you make sense of that? Or can we make sense of that? I mean, I think one thing, one way we can make sense of it is the ground laying actually what happened allowed for, you know, in the context of justice and accountability later on to actually see the realization of this. You know, the prosecution of Pinochet, the eventual prosecution of Pinochet, was actually a landmark moment in international justice.

These frameworks that were being built in the 60s and the 70s, in the 90s, they came to realization, right? And you actually saw what it meant for another country, in this context Spain, to hold a person accountable for the crimes that they committed. And that, you know, was a part of efforts to hold accountable what happened in Yugoslavia, what happened in the Rwandan genocide. So I think that, yes, there's a paradox there, but perhaps that's actually what we did see, is that those same political events, the human rights abuses that you were talking about, as these frameworks were developing, they actually did eventually give a platform for the vindication of the experiences of individuals. I mean, you know, at a very perhaps high level, but there is some level

of vindication and accountability there. Could you also make a statement about, Akilah, staying with you, about the consequences of all this repression for women's reproductive rights and women's freedoms? I mean, I know the general answer, but... Yeah, I mean, I think that we, and we see this today, the rise of dictatorships, authoritarianism, right? Backlashes against women's rights are almost, you know, they're an inexorable part of it. You actually start to see clampdowns on gender-related rights. And, you know, these days, I think you can't talk about gender-related rights without also looking at equivalent clampdowns on LGBTQI rights as well. But you

really start to see that these are the tools of authoritarianism and dictatorships. You know, you see what is happening in these contexts, the way that they mobilize, I think, a patriarchal world, right, as a way of galvanizing power, as a way of galvanizing resentment. And there's no question as well that when you look at the atrocities that were committed in the 70s in Chile, in Argentina, and we don't talk about them often, but there's a really strong component of gender-based violence. And now we understand that that to be a regularized context of atrocities, but back then we didn't even record it or see that that was happening. We spoke earlier in this series about how the West failed to address the refugee crisis in 1938, and prior and afterwards, and how that really, this was on the, obviously, the eve of the Holocaust.

By 1973, Randall, had the international community changed the way it responded to forced migration? had the international community changed the way it responded to forced migration? Well, it had, but in the 50s and 60s, there were many fewer refugees. And there's, in a sense, two types of refugees. There's the type of which Louise spoke as a classic political dissident, politically active, opposed to government, quite small in number, thousands. And the refugees as we understand them today, tens of millions of people fleeing war. And so we saw that shift from the late 1960s into the 1970s when large refugee flows as a consequence of war became more and more common and very regrettably that a process

accelerated through the 80s, 90s, and into the new millennium. Let's go back to the fact that it is 2023, 50 years after Roe v. Wade, and also the year in which it was brought down. Could you just take us back to 73 specifically and talk about just how monumental a decision that was and what it unleashed in its aftermath? Sure. So, you know, I think when you talk about the United States, 73 was so important. But just to kind of zoom back a little bit, right, globally, abortion didn't really become regulated until the 1800s or so. The criminalization of abortion is really something that happened in the 1800s. Actually, under Lenin in the USSR was the first time that abortion was fully decriminalized in the 1930s. And it was under Stalin that actually restrictions were brought back in in the Soviet Union. And so you had this moment where you did have, you know, some countries who

were starting to liberalize abortion laws. And I think what was representative about 1973 and Roe v. Wade was it was an inflection point in this moment where you started to see this trend towards the liberalization of abortion laws across the world. And actually, since 2000, only three countries have turned the clock significantly backwards, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the United States. Well, that same year in November, a jury refused to convict Henry Morgenthaler for performing abortions here in Canada in 1973 as well.

So is that a reverberation, do you think? I think there is a reverberation around how we started to talk about reproductive rights, how we started to talk about it. And maybe just quickly, I was talking about these human rights frameworks, which are now essential in many countries to changing abortion laws. None of them said the word abortion, right? And that's still used, actually, as a crud against saying it's not a human right. But that, you know, the language that was drafted in the 60s around equality, all these things, no one was talking about abortion. So I think putting, you know, the case, the way it legalized it was an important inflection in really starting to move towards this rights realization. And maybe we can talk a little bit more about why we ended up where we ended up here in the United States.

But that, I think, is important in the context of, again, putting a name to important components of the feminist struggle as well. So, again, moving far too quickly, but going into the aftermath of 1973, and of course, we've covered strands of this as we've gone on, but could you go back to Chile to keep with that example and the whole experiment with neoliberalism and just what kind of economic consequences it had and political beyond 73? I think that probably the main narrative thread in Chile between 73 and 89, and really in all of Latin America, was this steady process of repression. But at the same time, of course, there was tremendous economic growth because the country was taking in investment again. During this radical experiment that Salvador Allende had led between

1970 and 73, the U.S. had essentially backed out of Chile, taken their money out, and they'd also refused to give them loans. And so after Pinochet comes to power, the influx again of capital into Chile produced economic growth, at least in the first instance. Now, this wasn't sustained the entire period of time. There was a period of economic crisis as well. Nevertheless, you see this kind of association between the neoliberal policies, the kind of command economy, the government overseeing these kinds of policies, and they replicated it elsewhere in the region. And I would just add one small note to that.

In case we doubt for a moment that the crippling of the Chilean economy prior to the coup was an accident or was just the result of poor decision-making on Allende's part. We have the handwritten notes of meetings between Henry Kissinger, President Nixon, and others in which they say it's like a laundry list of things that they're going to do in Chile. And the fourth point is make the economy scream. They're planning it. This is early 1970. Randall, could you speak to how, I mean, in the Middle East at that time, that conversation was really not happening in terms of redefining how to have justice for people who have been wronged by leadership? Yeah, I mean, I think there are civil society actors across the Middle East who are articulating a different language and a different vision. So, I mean, one should avoid being orientalist about this in the sense that you have human rights organizations in the West, but you don't have them in the Middle East. So one should simply bear that in mind. That said, this is again an oil story.

When you flood these countries with massive amounts of oil revenue, it's very easy for dictators to maintain power. In that sense, Iran was the interesting exception where oil tipped into revolution, oil wealth. In the Gulf states, that massive influx of oil money allowed you to greatly expand your military, but more importantly, to buy off domestic dissent. So why the different reaction between the Gulf states and Iran? What made that different? Oh, it's a fascinating question. Well, I think in a sense because the Shah did two things with the oil money.

On the one hand, you had a massive buildup of the military, but you also launched, it was launched early, you expanded the white revolution, a massive program of increasing spending on hospitals, on schools, education levels went massively up in Iran. And in the mid-1970s, you had this odd situation where increasing oil wealth meant an expanding middle class of intellectuals who were denied by the Shah any outlet for political expression. And that is what led to the street protests that we saw up into 1977, especially 1978, to which the Shah responded with more repression. And in one of the greatest ironies of history, all of that opposition

coalesced around the most unlikely of figures, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who came to power, of course, in 1979. So oddly enough, I think in Iran, it was the fact that there was too much repression and too much liberalization at the same time. Bizarre. And there's still, the consequences are still playing out. As I mentioned earlier, our next episode of this tomorrow is in 1989. And by that point, most of the dictators in Latin America have been deposed. What is it, do you think, is there one thing that we could learn about how that happens or the main drivers behind such a wholesale deposition of all these people? Well, I do think that there are political forces being

marshaled in international organizations, the UN, the Organization of American States, some Western governments, and governments in waiting really in Latin America who are seeing the value in at least holding elections and at least having some formal sense of democracy. in at least holding elections and at least having some formal sense of democracy. And although it's not that deep, it's been called a kind of low-impact democracy in the case of Latin America, they do return to formal elections, formal procedural democracy by the end of the 1980s. But even so, we are seeing wars being waged in Central America and in the Andes, in Peru and in Colombia. And some of these are quite fiercely fought with very high body counts. In El Salvador in the 1990s, people are still being massacred by the hundreds in individual villages by the military up until the very end of the Civil War there in like 91, 92,

as it peters out. Guatemala is the same. The worst of the violence had all ended by the 80s, but it was still happening. It's not that I'm a skeptic about this idea of a transition to democracy, but as we see Latin America today still so deeply polarized, we realize that it never really took hold and was allowed to grow and be nurtured everywhere. Yeah. Akilah and then Randall. Let's just add something quickly, because this is a question that was brought to us recently, where I worked a lot in Myanmar, and there was a coup in Myanmar in 2021. And a lot of our partners came to us and said, but, you know, isn't democracy required under international law? What are the arguments that we can make? And you go and you start looking

and democracy is a loose concept, right? There's no full definition of exactly what it's supposed to look like. And there's no requirement that a government is a democracy to say to participate in the multilateral system. And so I think that's just a conceptually, it's interesting what you're saying about what this move towards looks likeually, it's interesting what you're saying about what this move towards looks like, because it's all very loosely constructed. Randall? Yeah, I mean, it's actually a bit of a topic switch in the sense that something else I think we need to put on the table when we think about 73, 70 is a turning point, and that's religion.

Social scientists, my colleagues, political scientists who generally get everything wrong, they got this wrong as well. They confidently wrote in the 1960s about the trend towards secularization, the inevitable march of secularization. That radically ended in the 1970s. And we think of that in terms of the Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States, and that's absolutely true, and they played a huge role in launching a counterattack on reproductive rights and on LGBTQ rights. But also in the Middle East, you had Shiite revivalism. That was the story of Iran. And also Sunni extremism, particularly after the seizure of the Grand Mosque. Again, 1979, another big turning point here in Saudi Arabia.

another big turning point here, in Saudi Arabia. And so religion in the public sphere is an important element here, and the losers in that are almost always women and LGBTQ people. There's religion as a defining feature of a population, but also as a tool of oppression as well. I'm making a distinction. I'm not anti-religious. It's not religion as a private matter.

It's no offense to people of faith. It's a question of religion deployed by the state. And obviously you can chart that with the fight for reproductive rights, the role of religion. I think most certainly, right? And, you know, you see it in the United States. You've already kind of prefaced it. And I started by talking about Phyllis Schlafly, who was kind of a galvanizer of the religious right in the United States. And Roe v. Wade of a galvanizer of the religious right in the United States. And Roe v. Wade was a galvanizing point. From the minute that abortion was legalized in the United States, you start to see the formation of the anti-abortion movement, right? And it's been,

you know, that 50-year struggle, the realization this year was a very concerted attack by a very specific and quite small minority on the right. And it was often using religious arguments. Actually, there's a really interesting case that has been filed in Missouri recently. And a lot of the legislators, when they were enacting the law, they were quoting from the Bible during the debates as their justification. And so part of the lawsuit is, this is a violation of the separation of church and state, and not just the general separation of church and state, it's actually the imposition of a singular religion through legislation on the people.

And I think that your point there is really important, and it's definitely the United States, but if you look at Afghanistan right now, the situation of women, and you look at the Taliban's weaponization of religious rules to entirely essentially eliminate women from public life, you see the threads that you're drawing out from the 70s, but you see them in play now. Absolutely. Any of these threads would make for an excellent panel. But I thought I would just ask each of you, what you think is the line that you would draw

between 1973 and today, like the most vivid one for you, an inheritance that we've had from 1973 that we're still living the consequences of today. Randall. 100 and 281. 281 million is the total figure of global migration, and 100 million is the total subset of that figure of forced migrants in the world.

You cannot understand either of those two figures, the world's dependence on cheap migrant labor and the mass expulsion of refugees without 1973. Lewis, and then Akilah. There's so many, really, that I can think of. The very notion of rights in the popular culture, the way in which we're able to read, to understand at basic levels, you know, the movements that are happening right now, a lot of that dates back to the types of protests being led by exiles and others and their supporters around the world from Chile and other parts of Latin America. If they didn't invent

protests, they certainly gave it a special kind of resonance that we still, I think, recognize today. special kind of resonance that we still, I think, recognize today. Akilah. So yeah, we focused a lot on kind of the negative repercussions in the United States of what's happened, but the rest of the world's in a very different place. And a lot of Latin American states have been leading the way. Argentina, where they recently liberalized the abortion law to 24 weeks. Mexico has recently decriminalized abortion through its Supreme Court. Benin, you know, you're seeing these movements all over the world. And so when we de-center what's happening in the U.S., the thread from 1973 is actually entirely, is a very positive thing as it comes to reproductive rights. And, you know, I think about, for example, Spain last year passed new legislation.

It included, for example, menstrual leave. So we're also in a conversation where abortion was like a catalyst for talking about the entirety of what it means to have bodily autonomy and have women's rights be respected. Yeah. One last round I'd like to do with all of you is to address one of those underlying questions that we were still trying to answer, which is how change happens through history. So perhaps each of you, if you look back at 73 or the period around 73, and the change, fundamental change that you've seen in that period, what have we learned from that year about how change happens in history?

Akilah. Sure. I'll start because I think I'm looking at, you know, the major change that happened and how the change got reversed. What were the failings of the feminist movement over the last 50 years as it related to reproductive rights and particularly in the context of the United States was it was a conversation that was centralized around largely white women who held certain types of power. white women who held certain types of power. So to think about both how change happens, but also how change can regress is we need to think about the inclusivity with which we reconsider these moments, right? And who is at the table? Because for that lasting change, perhaps for sustainable change to happen, we really need to be making sure that we're bringing an inclusive version of who is involved and who needs to have access to power, decision-making, strategic thinking to the table so that the change can hold.

Randall? Yeah, I mean, I think two things. One is energy as a driver of politics and of geopolitics. And 1973 was absolutely fundamental, but jump 50 years ahead. The world we're in now is remarkably like the one of the 1970s. Inflation is a political priority, a number one. Russia has launched, as in this is 79, not 73, the invasion of a sovereign country and been surprised by the degree of resistance, and is actively deploying across Europe restrictions on gas supplies as an effort of undermining and dividing democracies. So energy is a driver of politics, a force of history, one, two, but the dangers of complacency, because the early 1970s seemed like to be the

triumph of liberal values. Roe v. Wade, Earth Day in 1970, 1973 was the year in which the American Psychological Association, I might have the name incorrect, removed homosexuality as a mental illness. And we seem to be on the cusp of these wonderful social changes, some of which have occurred. But the right, because it is organized and divided, has managed to defeat the left, which is divided and turns on itself. Luis? Yeah, I think I want to speak about something that's really close to my heart

and something that I've worked on for many years. I've spent the last 25 years conducting research in a small city in Colombia that's the oil producing capital of Colombia. It was built by Standard Oil, but run by Canadian registered companies, like a flag of convenience in the 1920s, like so that they could hide their U.S. capital behind a Canadian flag. It was established in the 1920s, and for the better part of 50 years, the conversations around social justice were dominated by oil workers themselves, unionized men, basically. But in 1972, an organization called the Popular Women's Organization, would grow to become the largest grassroots women's organization in Colombia, was established.

Partly because they thought, hold on a minute. With all our great respect for the union, 95% of the people here don't work for the big oil company and we count too it would take you know 50 plus years really for the rest of the country to start paying attention to what they were saying but now the issues that they've been talking about for 50 years around gender rights environmental justice they were having those conversations so long ago and persisted. Lewis, Akilah, and Randall, thank you so much for your insights. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate it. On Ideas, you've been listening to The Year 1973, The Dictators.

It's the fourth in our series about hinge years in the 20th century, a collaboration with the Stratford Festival in Ontario. On today's program, our panelists were Louise van Ischot, Akhila Radhakrishnan, and Randall Henson. Coming up next, part five of our series, The Year 1989, Uprisings and Downfalls.

This series was produced by Philip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth with production assistance from Annie Bender. We recorded this series in July 2023. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Our acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.