![]() The activists are skeptical, and outraged at the thought of not holding Pinochet to account, but the ad man is a professional at selling things, and he sells them on it through sheer force of personality. We’re safer and more prosperous than we’ve ever been! But we’re ready to move on now, our country has grown up, we have a bright and beautiful future ahead of us if we leave this authoritarian regime behind!” The point is to put viewers in a happy, positive frame of mind, and to get them to associate this emotional state with dancing through the streets on their way to cast a No vote, not as a doomed act of symbolic resistance but in the spirit of a carnival, with grins on their faces. ![]() “Pinochet has had his time, and he’s done much good for the country. ![]() Instead, our hero says, the No campaign needs to market itself using joy. This referendum is a sham in any case, voting in it won’t do anything but get me in trouble. “True, Pinochet is a huevón, and he’s too scary for me to do anything about. Even those strongly predisposed against voting Yes will simply be demoralized by such messaging, as it will remind them that there could be painful personal consequences to casting a No vote. Frightened people given the choice between the devil they know and the unknown will choose the familiar every time. But focusing on these excesses will communicate nothing but fear, and from an emotional psychology standpoint this is not a winning strategy. Of course, the people know all about the brutalities of the regime. This, the protagonist explains to them, is a sure recipe for failure. If they can just make the people see how badly they’re being treated, they think, the people will reject the old tyrant out of a sense of moral outrage. Their lives revolve around getting beaten by riot cops at protests against getting beaten by riot cops, so of course, their plan for the No campaign is to focus on Pinochet’s human rights abuses. Whatever idealism they started off with has been ground out of them by their long, hopeless struggle, and their vehement opposition to Pinochet has long since crystallized around anger and resentment at the monster in sunglasses rather than any real hope of a better world. They have friends, lovers, and family members who have gotten vanned, held in black sites, tortured, executed. The No campaign staff are a bunch of crusty activist veterans, embittered and traumatized by a decade and a half of authoritarian military repression.
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