Being a Catholic myself, I can categorically state that it is in fact a sin to acknowledge that there are sins.

THIS JUST IN !!!!!!



Carry on.......

Allende wasn't a monster, he was an idealistic dumbass.

NDD - here's a song for Allende, couldn't find the music file, the sheet music cover will have to do

Attachment 6994

Yes, it would be worth it. I take it you are asking me this to make sure you are talking to a realist, which I consider myself, rather than making comparisons between Chile in 1973 and Iraq in 2006.

I lived in Chile for a couple of years in the late 90's but I don't claim to be a student of Chilean history. I tell you this because you asked and it explains my interest in the subject, not because I think my time there gives me any special insight that others on this board don't necessarily have. It doesn't. However, since I have apparently been dismissed as college boy regurgitating his professors' thoughts, I'll explain how I came to my view.

I was in Santiago during the time that Pinochet was arrested in London and later released. I supported Pinochet. For one, I thought his arrest set a dangerous precedent that would encourage rogue prosecutors to arrest leaders of sovereign countries. (Maybe it did. Kissinger can't travel freely for fear of arrest.)

But foremost, my support for Pinochet was for the same reasons many have said here. He deserved credit for putting in place the free market economic policies that led to the "Miracle of Chile." Furthermore, I would remind my contemporaries that we were too young really to understand the fear of communism at the time of the coup, and we all knew that Allende’s Socialism was disastrous for the country. I said you had to take the good with the bad, and that in this case the ends justified the means. Blah Blah. We did not know yet that Pinochet had hidden $28 million in bank accounts.

I knew, as everyone did, that most of the folks rounded up and tortured or killed in the days and months after the coup didn't posed a threat to Pinochet's government. They were labor leaders, writers, teachers that had been fingered as sympathetic to Allende, not subversives. The real power of the killings and disappearances was not eliminating those particular people, but striking fear in the population and letting any future dissidents know that exile was better than trying to mount a resistance movement. (That is, of course, state terrorism, but no one really used the term "terrorism" then.) None of that bothered me.

I met two or three folks that had been imprisoned under Pinochet. Drank with them at parties. I was unfazed. The whole thing had been so long ago. Besides, I had drank a whole lot more with rich cuico a**holes whose parents had prospered thanks to Pinochet.

After all, it was because of Pinochet that I came to Chile. I had studied international business and Spanish in school, so I was well aware of Chile the Latin American tiger. Foreign investment was flowing into Chile and it was often a US company's country of choice when first entering the Latin American market. All thanks to Pinochet. (Actually, all thanks to Milton Friedman and his acolytes, but you get my point.) For an American wanting to live and work in South America, Chile was the obvious choice. (It helped that Chile is an outdoor adventure paradise.) I went there not knowing a soul and without a single lead on a job. I stayed for a couple of years, traveled from one end of the country to the other, got bored and moved.

It's worth mentioning that the first Socialist president since Allende was elected while I was there. He wasn't a true socialist, and the sky defied expectations and didn't fall. US companies still pour into Chile.

That would have been the end of it, except later, I found myself thinking a bit about another authoritarian president, this one more of a dictator-in-waiting. He has erased some personal freedoms and taken steps to consolidate power, and he's a major thorn in the side of the US and I believe his economic policies will eventually prove disastrous. I have nothing but contempt for him. However, he's nowhere near Pinochet on the scale of oppression.

Thus, I came to see the hypocrisy in my political views. Should we look the other way when our allies' trample on basic human rights? I won't give Pinochet a free pass when he murdered in order to strengthen his rule, and then cry foul when an elected ruler dissolves congress to strengthen his hold on the country. Our country was founded on certain rights, those rights truly make life better, and when we can, we ought to encourage those rights and democracy in other countries. This would be where freeing the oppressed comes in.

I know that the Chilean coup was necessary and inevitable. It is the murders and torture, and 17 years of dictatorship and repression that followed that I object to. In Pinochet's case, the ends simply didn't justify his means.

I'm still a realist. I know, for example, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan shouldn't be democracies. If you think I'm not, then I will reframe a question that was asked of me. We might find that we are both realists, but some of us will go further before we draw the line.

So, do you consider yourself a moral relativist, rather than an absolutist?

TR

I'm not sure who your implying. Would you mind clarifying please?

Regards,
Aric

(edited to add: Taken care of via PM. Out.)

Pinochet DEAD
 

Just found this article on Pinochet --- perhaps it shows his actions in a “different light”, and perhaps some justification for his pre-emptive actions

SnT

James Whelan: Far from being an evil dictator, Pinochet rescued Chile
Contrary to conventional wisdom, former Chilean autocrat Augusto Pinochet averted civil war and saved millions from the destruction of socialism

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December 15, 2006
SIX months before Salvador Allende was overthrown on September 11, 1973, Volodia Teitelboim told an interviewer for the Communist Party daily newspaper in Santiago that if civil war were to come, then 500,000 to one million Chileans would die.
Teitelboim knew whereof he spoke. He was then the No.2 man in the Chilean Communist Party, the third largest in the Western world (after France and Italy), and a senior partner in Allende's Marxist-Leninist government.

The Communists were then planning to seize total power in the country, though they were not in as much a hurry to do so as the Socialists, the principal party in the Allende coalition and one passionately committed to revolutionary violence. So the Communists and the Socialists shared the same goal - ending once and for all the bourgeois democratic state - but differed on methods. Allende, a Socialist, was somewhere in between, wavering between his own bourgeois tastes and the totalitarian temptation

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...2-7583,00.html

:munchin

'Magine that

Yeah, who ever heard of a communist, socialist or Marxist/Leninist leader who had Bourgeois taste. They always live among the people, right?

All animals are equals, but some animals are more equal than others. - Orwell

I don't consider myself a relativist.

So one death is as bad as one million?

TR

Let's see... If a Communist party aparatchik in 1973 told me the sky was blue, I'd have to go the window to look and make sure. I think most here would be just as skeptical. Communists have always claimed workers are on the verge of breaking free from their chains and rising up. Were they about to in Chile? I can't say, but given Allende's failed policies and low popularity, it seems unlikely. That Chile never had a significant guerrilla movement against Pinochet is more proof. (To be sure, Pinochet's ruthlessness made it difficult for such a movement to start. After all, that was his whole MO. But one would think that if Communist were about to start a civil war that would leave up to a million dead, then at least there would be some resistance to Pinochet that even 3,000 deaths couldn't deter.)

So I can't see that this person's comments are justification for 17 years of dictatorship?

I'll say it again. It's not the coup that earned Pinochet the opprobrium, but rather his actions in the following 17 years.

Allende was not unpopular with the masses until he had the land reform door slammed in his stupid face.

Che thought Chile was ripe and so did Fidel at one time. That's why he sent Che to Bolivia instead.