It seems very unreal - even the blood. And for the next months New Yorkers will be talking about State of Seige, a second rate film scenario made about Uruguay and merely produced in graceful and libertarian Chile. Now it has become real.

   In an interview several weeks ago, a Socialist Member of Parliament, Adonis Sepulveda, asked what would happen in the event of a golpe, an armed coup, answered:

A military take-over would never succeed in unifying the country. Socialists - while we have life - would fight against it. That is also the feeling of the Chilean people. Whoever would make a coup must take that into account, that they would do it over thousands and thousands of corpses of workers; because they - with or without direction - are going out to defend their interests.
   The workers have a clear consciousness that they are playing out their destiny now. . .

   The hard truth is that, whatever degree of consciousness they had, in the week of the golpe one of the main interests of the masses must have been bread. With the transport strike little food was coming into the shops, and the country had only three days' supply of flour. The truckers’ strike was reinforced by a small shopkeepers’ strike. It was these two strategically located sectors of Chilean society that brought the citizens to their knees so that the army could bludgeon them.

   The absolutely weird thing about American reporting - or about the climate of ideas in which the stories are read - is that the strikes were described as terrorism by the workers. The reverse was true: they were strikes by the owners, and a crucial and determined part of the Right's strategy.

   The recent history of Chilean politics has been largely an elaborate game of chess in which Allende was trying both to placate, and to defuse the army. The French weekly, Le Monde, put it this way:

An experienced politician carefully respecting the legality which permitted him to come to power in an election, the socialist and moderate Allende is the tranquil father of the revolution. He hoped to associate a large fraction of the middle classes In the experience of a non-violent transition to socialism. . .
  The great majority of the army officers are middle class. To bring them to p