On September 11, 1973 a coup against the government of Chilean
President Salvador Allende began with planes bombing the
presidential palace in Santiago. Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean-
American writer, was in that city on that fateful Tuesday. “By
the end of the day,” Dorfman writes, “Allende was dead and the
land where we had sought a peaceful revolution had been turned
into a slaughterhouse.” Twenty-eight years later, on another
Tuesday, September 11, another city Dorfman had called home was
“attacked from on high.” In a moving essay at The Nation Dorfman
explores the reaction of the countries affected by these two
tragic events. Ultimately Chile’s nonviolent response—which
echoed “unawares another September 11, back in 1906 in
Johannesburg, when Mohandas Gandhi persuaded several thousand of
his fellow Indians in the Empire Theatre to vow nonviolent
resistance to an unjust and discriminatory pre-apartheid
ordinance”—is the response Dorfman praises. As for the response
of Dorfman’s other home country, he writes, “I