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How We Roasted Donald Duck, Disney’s Agent of Imperialism

danmand

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This is actual a serious and thoughtful essay, well worth reading in its entirety.


OCTOBER 12, 2018

How We Roasted Donald Duck, Disney’s Agent of Imperialism

by ARIEL DORFMAN Facebook
I should not have been entirely surprised when I saw How to Read Donald Duck, a book I had written with the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart, being burned on TV by Chilean soldiers. It was mid-September 1973 and a military coup had just toppled Salvador Allende, the country’s president, terminating his remarkable experiment of building socialism through peaceful means.

I was in a safe house when I witnessed my book – along with hundreds of other subversive volumes – being consigned to the inquisitorial pyre. One of the reasons I had gone into hiding, besides my fervent participation in the revolutionary government that had just been overthrown, was the hatred the Donald Duck book had elicited among the new authorities of Chile and their rightwing civilian accomplices.

We had received death threats, an irate woman had tried to run me over and neighbours – accompanied by their children – had stoned the house where my wife, Angélica, and I lived in Santiago, shouting: “Long live Donald Duck!” It was later discovered that the 5,000 copies of the third printing of the book had been taken from a warehouse by the Chilean navy and cast into the bay of Valparaíso.

What had we done to incur such enmity?

Armand and I had denounced Walt Disney as an agent of American cultural imperialism, incarnated in the life, adventures and misdeeds of Donald Duck, that innocuous icon, then one of the most popular characters in the world. Probing hundreds of Disney comic strips – sold by the million on newsstands in Chile and countless other lands – we had tried to reveal the ideological messages that underlay those supposedly innocent, supposedly apolitical stories.

We wanted Chilean readers to realise they were being fed values that were inimical to a revolution that sought to unshackle them from centuries-old exploitation: competition rather than solidarity, prejudice rather than critical thinking, obedience rather than rebellion, paternalism rather than resistance, money rather than compassion as the standard of worth.

We wanted Chileans to realise they were being fed values inimical to a revolution … to understand how previous rulers had presented subjugation as normal, natural and benign

It was not enough, we felt, to change the economic and social structures that benefited a rich minority and their international corporate allies. It was also imperative to understand how the previous rulers of our land had presented this subjugation as normal, natural and benign; how they had been covertly selling us an American model of success and consumer affluence as the false solution to poverty and misdevelopment.

Just as copper and other resources usurped by foreign hands needed to be recovered for the nation, so too did our dreams and desires. We had to take back control, forge a new identity, devise new forms of entertainment. Our book was meant to contest the authoritarian plots imported from the US, to open spaces for stories of our own making.

Described in this summary fashion, How to Read Donald Duck might seem like another dreary academic, jargon-filled leftwing semiotic exercise condemning the bourgeois, capitalist, neocolonial cultural impositions. Although Armand and I were indeed university professors – and our research was underpinned by knowledge of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Umberto Eco and Antonio Gramsci – the language of our diatribe was accessible, playful, mocking and vivacious.

We used the Disney cartoons to suggest the aseptic, oppressive sexuality in the Duck family, the way third-world natives were depicted as savages and idiots, the way riches were never produced by workers but always by investors, and how villains were portrayed with racial bias. In this realm, female Ducks are flirtatiously worried about their beauty, yet strangely asexual (Daisy: “If you teach me to skate this afternoon, I will give you something you always wanted.” Donald: “You mean …?” Daisy: “Yes … my 1872 coin.”) And the model jobs for the Duck nephews when playing a game at school about the adults they want to become: “I’d like to be a banker!” says Dewey, echoed by Huey: “I’ll pretend I’m a big landlord with lots of land to sell.” Or take the witch doctor who brags about his nation being modern because “Gottee telephone. Only trouble is only one has wires. It’s a hot line to the World Loan Bank.”

Our book tried to be as amusing as the Duck we were disparaging, determined to compete with the very tales we were skewering. Perhaps it was this boisterous, sardonic tone that most infuriated the defenders of Disney as a paragon of virtue, as the wholesome king of innocence, as the uncle with the keys to the Magic Kingdom and eternal childhood. Was nothing sacred?

The book was also meant to serve a practical purpose. For the first time in history, the leftwing Allende government had the resources (TV stations, film studios, magazines, large publishing houses) to produce its own mass media stories. One way to facilitate a broad range of alternative narratives was to unmask the strategies of dominant culture as it manipulated and seduced consumers. With this in mind, How to Read Donald Duck was conceived as an instrument for the liberation of workers, students, intellectuals in the struggle for a more equitable Chile.

It made some sort of perverse sense, therefore, that a book that had been the product of the Allende revolution would suffer the sort of violence that the new military overlords of the country were perpetrating against so many supporters of the socialist government. The readers, real and prospective, of our Duck book were being executed, tortured, exiled and imprisoned (several soccer stadiums had to be turned into concentration camps to jail the many followers of the deposed president): a way of teaching the upstarts a lesson, to make sure they never again ventured to envision a different world.

Words, however, have a way of persisting beyond repression and censorship. How to Read Donald Duck – burned, drowned, forbidden in Chile – ended up having a life beyond our shores, as Armand and I discovered when, along with our families and our book, we escaped into exile. It was hailed as “a manual of decolonisation” by the art critic John Berger and translated into more than a dozen languages, among them English.

That edition was brought out in 1975 by a small London-based publishing house, which attempted to export 4,000 copies to the US. The whole consignment was seized, however, by customs acting on behalf of Disney lawyers, who accused the authors of piracy because we had, without authorisation, reproduced images that were part of their copyright. Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, we won that suit, establishing what scholars have deemed to be a landmark case for freedom and fair use.

Disney might have lost that skirmish but it has, thus far, won the war for the soul of humanity. It is now one of the largest entertainment conglomerates in the world and keeps gobbling up companies (the latest: Twentieth Century Fox). We had insolently threatened to roast the Duck. Instead the Duck seems to be devouring us and the legacy we will leave to our children.

Even so, the book – which is now being published for the first time in the US and handsomely reprinted in the UK – may yet prove to be relevant in the pre-fascist era of Trump, Brexit and resurgent nationalisms all too reminiscent of the post-coup Chile of General Augusto Pinochet.

Dashed out in 10 feverish days, in the throes of a peaceful insurgency that beckoned with other urgent tasks, the book would not have been written in the same way in this new era. I try to be more attentive today to the complexity of cultural interchange, the fact that not everything generated by cultural workers in countries such as Chile is inspiring – and not all mass-media products absorbed from abroad, including the US, are negative. The Disney Corporation itself has evolved under pressure from minorities and feminists, and has distinguished itself by defending LGBTQ rights.

As I state in my memoir of the Allende years, Heading South, Looking North, it was perhaps misguided to assume that “millions of people in faraway lands are empty, innocent vessels into which the Empire passively pours its song, instead of tangled, hybrid, wily creatures ready to appropriate and despoil the messages that come their way”.

However, the values we impaled in our book – greed, ultra-competitiveness, overarching individualism, subjection of people with darker skins, derision of foreigners and immigrants (Mexicans, Muslims, Asians), suspicion of organised labour, a cult of wasteful consumerism, all of it sweetened by a false credo of unattainable happiness – are what animate many of those who enthusiastically embrace Trump and too many other bullying leaders as saviours promising a mythical past of nonexistent purity.

Though I stand by the scrutiny to which we subjected Disney’s falsely innocent world, what most matters to me today, what I cherish above all in what we wrote, is the joy that remains the book’s most incandescent feature – the joy of the Chilean people who did not fear to march towards the future, daring to redefine reality. In this time of dire crisis, perhaps our book can add its tiny seed to the struggle for a better humanity, which seems more necessary than ever on our imperilled planet.

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.
 

Butler1000

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Oct 31, 2011
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A couple of Marxist University Profs who printed a few thousand copies of a book accusing Donald Duck if being an Imperialist Agent.........

In 1973 in Chile.......

And we are supposed to take this seriously?


Yer Trolling right, it's a joke.......
 

onthebottom

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Luckily Chile avoided the communists and because of that became the richest (per capita GDP) country in Latin America. If you’ve been it’s beautiful and extremely safe. It’s what Argentina should be.
 

Butler1000

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Luckily Chile avoided the communists and because of that became the richest (per capita GDP) country in Latin America. If you’ve been it’s beautiful and extremely safe. It’s what Argentina should be.
Good wine too....
 

danmand

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Luckily Chile avoided the communists and because of that became the richest (per capita GDP) country in Latin America. If you’ve been it’s beautiful and extremely safe. It’s what Argentina should be.
Luck had nothing to do with it. The Americans assassinated the president and installed the murderous dictator Pinochet.

Something our resident "ugly Americans" can be proud of.
 

onthebottom

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Luck had nothing to do with it. The Americans assassinated the president and installed the murderous dictator Pinochet.

Something our resident "ugly Americans" can be proud of.
I’ve told this story here before but it’s been some time.

I arrived on my first visit to Chile the day that Pinochet was being buried. I thought it was an “interesting” time for an American business man to be landing in Santiago. I asked my guests (my company, partner companies, several senior bankers in the country) their thoughts about Pinochet. All who spoke said he saved the country from the communists. You have to take this with more than a grain of salt given who I was talking to.

A few years later I told a much longer version of this story to a work colleague at a dinner in São Paulo, he lived in Switzerland but his family was from Santiago. His father was a professor (he hinted at him being a communist but didn’t say it outright) and he had a very low opinion of Pinochet and the “Chicago Boys”. It’s not a high point of US policy but it did have a very positive long term economic outcome. It’s always dangerous to be a king maker, better isn’t perfect (or even good).

I’m sure the Chelaians Chileans are happy they are not enduring what the Venezuelans are currently.
 

kstanb

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Luck had nothing to do with it. The Americans assassinated the president and installed the murderous dictator Pinochet.

Something our resident "ugly Americans" can be proud of.
it was the Chilean military who did the coup, they would have done it with or without the US
and Allende (bravely) killed himself, he could had surrender and be sent to some golden exile like 99% of all deposed Latin American leaders do, but he decided that the dignity of the Presidency of Chile had to be defended until the end. He is one of the few leftist I respect

It is still a polarizing topic in Chile, some people hate Pinochet, some people hate the leftists, the current democratic government is right wing
 

danmand

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it was the Chilean military who did the coup, they would have done it with or without the US
and Allende (bravely) killed himself, he could had surrender and be sent to some golden exile like 99% of all deposed Latin American leaders do, but he decided that the dignity of the Presidency of Chile had to be defended until the end. He is one of the few leftist I respect

It is still a polarizing topic in Chile, some people hate Pinochet, some people hate the leftists, the current democratic government is right wing
The Americans instigated the coup and supported it. Read Hitchens: The trial of Henry Kissenger

https://www.amazon.ca/Trial-Henry-K...1539479072&sr=8-2&keywords=hitchens+kissinger
 

kstanb

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Apr 25, 2008
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kstanb

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Going back to the gross stupidity of the Disney article; most Latin Americans, including leftists like Hugo Chavez, grew watching those cartoons, so as far as we can tell the capitalist indoctrination failed

talking cartoons and Chavez; check this bizarre Venezuelan "anti imperialist" cartoon, where Chavez arrives to heaven and is welcomed by Bolivar, Che Guevara and other "heros". Of course with uncle Sam as the perpetual villain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMs0S4KqDD8

that is the kinf of shit you are forced to watch in national TV when you live under socialism
 
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