Note: the English edition of this book was banned by the US Customs
in June, 1976. Almost 4000 copies of the book were seized by the US government
that year which, it can be assumed, was acting in the interests of the
Walt Disney Corporation which did not approve of this academic critique
of its comic book characters.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
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 different degrees of intensity, the people expressed
their will. Perhaps the most important arm of this offensive, was the work
of the State Publishing House "Quimantu'," 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 11lth, 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 presses, imprisoned and executed journalists,
so that nothing would be left to remind any anything about the struggle
for national liberation.
But it was not enough to clean these "stains" from the street. The most
important task was to eliminate all those who bore the "stain" inside themselves,
the fighters, peasants, employees, students, and 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 in Chile in the uncle-land
of Disney, behind the barbed wire network of ITT.
Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well-roasted.
Look you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on
the wall:
Donald, Go Home!
Dorfman and Mattelart
Excerpts from Chap. III, From the Noble Savage to the Third World