There were angry plenty of angry neighbors. Worst among them, a woman who screamed while attempting to run him down with her car. Her chants were the same as those employed by the children of Santiago, Chile. Not yet old enough to drive, they resorted to throwing rocks through the living room windows of the bungalow he shared with his wife and young son.
“Viva el Pato Donald!” they screamed. “Long live Donald Duck!”
Fearing for his life, Ariel Dorfman eventually sought refuge in a safe house. From there, he watched the military coup play out on television, including images of Chilean soldiers hurling hundreds of books into a bonfire. Scattered among them was a book-length essay he’d written with the Belgian sociologist, Armand Mattelart.
Born to a Jewish family in Buenos Aires at the height of the Second World War, Dorfman saw clear echoes of the Goebbels-orchestrated book burnings in the streets of Santiago that day. Of particular note was the brazenness to commit it all in plain sight of television news cameras.
“[T]here was something particularly disquieting about the spectacle of watching a book burning on television,” Dorfman wrote decades later. “Partly it was that the mediatization made the event so public and, indeed, flagrantly shameless.”
Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck) had quickly become a best-seller in Latin America, following its 1971 publication. The book was penned earlier that year in the relative safety of a nation embracing socialism under the leadership of Salvador Allende. Appointed cultural adviser to the President, Dorfman set out to create his own work that would critique American cultural and political hegemony through a Marxist lens.
Teaming with Mattelart, the pair found inspiration in the comic strips of Carl Barks. Though, on later examination, the legendary Disney cartoonist would get a reprieve. Namely, rather than channeling the words of Disney through his cartoon ducks, Barks is believed to have had a far more subversive aim in mind: mocking his own mistreatment at the hands of a corporate giant.
While Dorfman and Mattelart may have fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between Barks and Disney, the work still succeeds as a powerful — and entertaining —indictment of American capital. In the opening chapter, “Uncle, Buy Me a Contraceptive,” the authors explore the strange Duckberg dynamic of a world without parents.
“Uncle-authority, on the other hand, not having been conferred by the father (the uncle’s brothers and sisters, who must in theory have given birth to the nephews, simply do not exist), is of purely de facto origin, rather than a natural right. It is a contractual relationship masquerading as a natural relationship, a tyranny which does not even assume the responsibility of breeding,” the authors write. “And one cannot rebel against it in the name of nature; one cannot say to an uncle ‘you are a bad father.’”
The duo combed through hundreds of strips to tease out their corporate capitalistic messages. Written for a Chilean audience, the book was designed to demonstrate how such propagandistic messaging could be slipped into seemingly innocuous panels. The book was published during a brief window that found the Allende government controlling television stations, movie studios and publishing houses.
On September 11th, 1973, a military coup seized power in Chile. Allende took his own life, and the book’s authors went into hiding. Those copies of How to Read Donald Duck that avoided burning were confiscated by the navy and dumped directly into the bay of Valparaiso. Dorfman and Mattelart fled Chile for Paris. It was there in 1975 that they penned a scathing critique of America’s involvement in the coup that would serve as the preface to the book’s first English edition.
“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 Corporation],” they wrote. “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!’ ”
International General, the book’s U.K. publisher, sought to bring it to America. This time, Disney intervened. The 4,000 copies were impounded over violations of the U.S. Copyright Act.
Sources:
How we roasted Donald Duck, Disney's agent of imperialism https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/05/ariel-dorfman-how-we-roasted-donald-duck-disney-agent-of-imperialism-chile-coup
How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart