Posted on 12/10/2006 5:14:10 PM PST by indcons
WASHINGTON: The White House on Sunday marked the death of former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet by calling his rule a "difficult period" and commending the country for establishing a free society.
"Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile represented one of the most difficult periods in that nation's history," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. "Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families. We commend the people of Chile for building a society based on freedom, the rule of law and respect for human rights."
Pinochet terrorized his opponents for 17 years after taking power in a bloody coup.
His death put an end to a decade of intensifying efforts to bring him to trial for human rights abuses blamed on his regime. He was 91.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
Now can they survive his death.
Soon.
Mugabe and Castro are heros to the left, and they are many times worse than Pinochet on his worst day.
Couldn't agree with you more. However, their behavior doesn't excuse Pinochet's excesses, does it?
I'll let God judge Pinochet.
I don't know enough about Pinochet to comment on him but I have some concerns about those who opposed him. FOX news reported that rioting was breaking out among people angry that Pinochet didn't face punishment. I have to wonder about people who will riot because that can't punish the dead man. I'm just hoping that they don't seek retribution elsewhere.
How is one supposed to deal with Communists. They play by their own rules. They routinely use street violence to get their way. Once they get their way, they use murder to keep their way. Maybe we were wrong to kill Japanese and Germans who wanted their way with us?
WASHINGTON: The White House on Sunday marked the death of former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet by calling his rule a "difficult period" and commending the country for establishing a free society.
"Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile represented one of the most difficult periods in that nation's history," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. "Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families. We commend the people of Chile for building a society based on freedom, the rule of law and respect for human rights."
The only thing missing is the Che t-shirt.
Which is pretty much what Pinochet did, isn't it?
Was that comment addressed to me?
If so, are you sure you don't have one in the closet?
Nah, more towards this White House spokesman.
Thanks for the clarification. Please ignore the second line on my previous comment. It is quite redundant now :)
Which is pretty much what Pinochet did, isn't it?
No. He and the Chileans worked out a deal where he and his supporters stepped down from power. You know that. He was the opposite of a Castro. Don't be a wise-guy.
He reluctantly turned over power and only after he made sure he remained head of the armed forces and senator for life, thus protecting him from prosecution.
I suppose the White House is telling the Chileans what they want to hear. But on the whole his rule was good for Chile.
In the first place, it was one of those situations where either you deal with the revolutionaries, or they gain power and drive the country into the dirt. Salvador Allende had ambitions to be another Castro, but he was deposed by the will of most of the people.
You can compare the experience of Chile and Peru. Under Pinochet, the Chilean economy and people prospered. Peru was rent by violence and poverty, and even now is going back under the rule of another idiot marxist. Chile is a prosperous and free country, courtesy of Allende.
As for punishing Allende, that would have been evil and stupid. When the country had been cleaned up, he voluntarily stepped down from power, under the understanding that he would not be punished for any of his acts in office by his successors. Without that agreement, he would not have agreed to step down.
If you dislike dictators, then it makes sense to support such agreements, because you don't often find dictators willing to leave power. If you kill them afterwards, then other dictators will take the lesson.
The word "dictator" came from Rome. A dictator was a man given absolute power for the duration of an emergency, normally a war emergency. After he had dealt with it, he was expected to step down. That is pretty much what Pinochet did, which means he was a dictator in the better sense of the word.
Francisco Franco doesn't have a very good name among leftists either, but what he did was also for the benefit of Spain and civilization. Notice that although leftists usually pretend that he was a fascist or Nazi, he put an end to a violent revolutionary regime and successfully kept Spain out of the war. He also gave shelter to Jews and other refugees whom the French were unwilling to protect. If you get beyond the leftist propanda, you will find something very different from what they pretend.
It is preposterous the White House statement at the death of General August Pinochet, quite a contrast with the statement of Baroness Margaret Thatcher who expressed her deep condolences for the death of a patriot who saved his country from becoming a communist regimen puppet of Fidel Castro.
THE AMERICAS
What Really Happened
In Chile 30 Years Ago
By JAMES R. WHELAN
WSJ 9/12/2003
Having recovered from the worst of his own socialist deliriums, George Orwell wrote, after viewing the carnage of the Civil War in Spain: "At an early age, I became aware that newspapers report no event correctly. But in Spain, I read for the first time articles which bore no relation to the facts, not even the relation implicit in an ordinary lie." Of no nation since would that doleful observation apply more keenly than to the Chile of Salvador Allende and of Augusto Pinochet.
Consider the Chilean revolution of that other September 11 -- Sept. 11, 1973. It was less bloody than any other major 20th century revolution and, in economic and political terms it produced the best outcome. And yet, it is the most reviled of any in all the annals of Latin America.
Hear first from Gonzalo Vial Correa, arguably Chile's leading contemporary historian. He has written that Chile's sociopolitical system, beginning at the end of the 19th century, "suffered a progressive decay, culminating in its later and total collapse -- the collapse of death -- in 1973." Out of the wreckage, Gen. Pinochet and his associates erected a sturdy, realistic political system, anchored in the most carefully-crafted constitution in the country's history, one still in effect today after 13 years of democratic rule by center-left governments.
Like most charismatic, pioneering political figures, Allende was a complex man, steeped in democratic traditions, including 25 years in the rigorously democratic Senate, but persistently drawn to violent causes. In 1968, for example, he headed the Castro-backed Latin American Solidarity Organization, dedicated to the overthrow of democratic government.
From the beginning, Allende's Chile became a magnet for revolutionaries from all corners of the globe; eventually their numbers grew to between 10,000 and 15,000. At his show trial in Havana in 1989, Cuban Gen. Patricio de la Guardia defended himself by citing his service in Allende's Chile, training clandestine military forces.
Socialist Party congresses in 1965 and 1967 proclaimed that "revolutionary violence is inevitable and legitimate. Only by destroying the bureaucratic and military apparatus of the bourgeois state can the Socialist revolution be consolidated." In 1972 -- two full years after Allende was elected -- the Party proclaimed: "The bourgeois state is not suited for the construction of socialism; its destruction is necessary . . . we must conquer all power."
By March of 1973, when the worst was yet to come, former president Eduardo Frei Montalva spoke of "this carnival of madness." He added: "Chile is in the throes of an economic disaster -- not a crisis but a veritable catastrophe no one could foresee would happen so swiftly nor so totally. The hatred is worse than the inflation, the shortages, the economic disaster. There is anguish in Chile."
Faced with illegal seizures of farms and factories, of defiance of judicial orders, unchecked street violence and death threats against the judges themselves, the Supreme Court warned on May 26, 1973, in a unanimous and unprecedented message, that Chile faced "a peremptory or imminent breakdown of legality." Three months later, on Aug. 22, the Chamber of Deputies -- which had come within two votes of impeaching Allende -- voted a resolution which said "it is a fact that this Government has been, from the very beginning, bent on the conquest of total power . . . so as to implant a totalitarian system."
It was in that setting that Gen. Pinochet and the heads of the other armed forces acted, responding not to the craving for power typical of Latin caudillos, but to the clamor of a desperate people. Former President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla joined Frei and the third living president in thanking the military: "The Armed Forces have liberated us from the Marxist claws . . . the totalitarian apparatus which had been prepared to destroy us has itself been destroyed."
After the coup, the radical left was still not going to give up. The military and the growing cadres of civilians who joined it had to take aim at underground terrorist forces. In that, they had expert help: French secret service agents who had waged France's savage war in the 1950s against Algerian independence forces coached secret police organizations in Chile -- and also Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The man who headed Chile's secret police, Manuel Contreras, said recently that Gen. Paul Aussaresses, former head of the French intelligence service, personally trained Chilean agents in Brazil. In his monumental work, "Modern Times," historian Paul Johnson wrote that the French state terror units headed by Gen. Aussaresses "murdered and tortured prisoners, and on a wide scale. In this case, neither liberal France nor the international community raised a whimper of protest."
Mr. Vial Correa, a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has written: "But I believe he [Gen. Pinochet] never imagined that in the feared DINA [the secret police], random abuse would be the rule, much less a rule so extreme and universally outside the law."
Suppose Gen. Pinochet and his fellow commanders had not acted? Patricio Aylwin succeeded Gen. Pinochet as the first elected president and was among those imploring the military to act. A constant and acerbic critic in more recent years, he was in 1973 president of his Christian Democrat Party. He said then that if the military had not acted, Chile would have had to mourn the deaths of hundreds of thousands killed at the hands of Red brigades.
He was far from alone in that judgment. Volodia Teitelboim, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party (who spent his entire exile preaching violence from the microphones of Radio Moscow), said a few months before the coup that if civil war came, "it probably would signify immense loss of human lives, between half a million and one million." On Sept. 11, because the military averted civil war, the actual death toll was under 200.
Mr. Teitelboim was recently honored with Chile's National Literary award. Meanwhile, Gen. Pinochet, the man who saved the country, is every day vilified, ostracized. Abandoned even by his military colleagues, the 87-year-old general is supported by a small coterie of family and friends. But then, a Socialist president once again governs Chile.
Mr. Whelan is an adjunct scholar at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, and former visiting professor at the University of Chile.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106332196589384400,00.html
Drop the nonsense. The death toll during Pinochet's 26 year rule was 3,100, the majority of which were Allendist radicals killed during the coup and the weeks afterward. To put it mildly, the majority of these "victims" were anything but innocent civilians dragged off the streets. By and large, they were marxist thugs who belonged to the upper tiers of the Allende regime.
There were innocent casualties of Pinochet's regime, as is typical of any political coup or revolution. The cost was tiny though compared to the danger posed by the murderous communist thugs he defeated. Think Fidel Castro meets Hugo Chavez meets Lenin and you have an accurate picture of what Salvador Allende was.
God bless Maggie Thatcher for having the courage to speak honestly of Pinochet's passing, unlike the whiny media leftists who regret the fact that he stopped Fidel from gaining a foothold in South America.
By dictator standards Pinochet's excesses were miniscule. In fact he was probably the least brutal dictator of the 20th century, and unlike the Mugabes and Castros he actually expressed remorse for the violence committed in the wake of the coup. He was a flawed man, but he ultimately did a good thing by ending the regime of a very evil man, Salvador Allende.
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