To say that this book was burnt in Chile should not come as a surprise to anyone. Hundreds of books were destroyed, and thousands more prohibited and censored.
It was written in the middle of 1971, in the middle of the Chilean revolutionary process. Copper had been rescued, the land was being returned to the peasantry, the whole Chilean people were recovering the industries that during the twentieth century had been the means of enrichment for Mr. Rockefeller, Grace, Guggenheim, and Morgan. Because this process was intolerable to the United States government and its multinational corporations, it had to be stopped. They organized a plan, which at the time was suspected, and since has been confirmed by Mr. Kissinger, Ford, and Colby to have been directed and financed by the United States intelligence services. Their objective: to overthrow the constitutional government of Chile. To realize their objective, an “invisible blockade” was imposed: credits were denied, spare parts purchased for industrial machinery were not sent, and later, the Chilean State bank accounts in the U.S. were blocked, and an embargo preventing the sale of Chilean copper throughout the world was organized.
There were, however, two items which were not blocked: planes, tanks, ships, and technical assistance for the Chilean armed forces; and magazines, TV serials, advertising, and public opinion polls for the Chilean mass media, which continued, for the most part, to be in the hands of the small group which was losing its privileges. To maintain them, with those of the U.S., their media prepared the climate for the bourgeois insurrection which finally materialized some years later on the 11th of September 1973. Each day, with expert U.S. advice, in each newspaper, each weekly, each monthly magazine, each news dispatch, each movie, and each comic book, their arsenal of psychological warfare was fortified. In the words of General Pinochet, the point was to “conquer the minds,” while in the words of Donald Duck (in the magazine Disneylandia published in December 1971, coinciding with the first mass rallies of native fascism, the so-called “march of the empty pots and pans”) the point was to “restore the king.”
But the people did not want the restoration of the king nor of the businessman. The popular Chilean cultural offensive, which accompanied the social and economic liberation, took multiple forms: wall paintings, popular papers, TV programs, motion pictures, theater, songs, literature. In all areas of human activity, with differing degrees of intensity, the people expressed their will. Perhaps the most important arm of this offensive, was the work of the State Publishing House “Quimantú,” a word meaning “Sunshine of Knowledge” in the language of the native Chilean Mapuche indians. In two and a half years it published five million books; twice the amount which had been published in all of Chile during the past seventy years. In addition, it transformed the content of some of the magazines it had inherited from before the Popular Unity government, and created new ones. It is in this multi-faceted context, with a people on the march to cultural liberation—a process which also meant criticizing the “mass” cultural merchandise exported so profitably by the U.S. to the Third World—that How to Read Donald Duck was generated. We simply answered a practical need; it was not an academic exercise.
For the mad dog warriors on that September 11th, there were no paintings on the walls. There were only enormous “stains” which dirtied the city and memory. They, using the fascist youth brigades, whitewashed all the singing, many-colored walls of the nation. They broke records, murdered singers, destroyed radios and printing presses, imprisoned and executed journalists, so that nothing would be left to remind anybody of anything about the struggle for national liberation.
But it was not enough to clean these cultural “stains” from the street. The most important task was to eliminate all those who bore the “stain” inside themselves, the fighters, workers, peasants, employees, students, and patriotic soldiers, to eliminate these creators of a new life, to eliminate this new life which grew, and for which we all created.
This book, conceived for the Chilean people, and our urgent needs, produced in the midst of our struggle, is now being published far from Chile in the uncleland of Disney, behind the barbed wire network of ITT.
Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well-roasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall:
Donald, Go Home!
Dorfman and Mattelart
January 1975
in exile