Pinochet, the untold story

[DesertFox]

To read the mainstream media stories lately, you'd think Augusto Pinochet's villainous henchmen, while twirling their pointy black mustaches and snickering maliciously, overthrew a Chilean "president" (Salvador Allende) somewhere on the order of Jimmy Carter. Then these henchmen lined up 3,000 harmless sociology professors and innocent leftist parliamentarians and shot them—for the sheer heck of it.

The real story, as you might imagine, is a tad more complicated—despite the media and academia’s Black Legend regarding Chile.

More (http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=18500)

[DesertFox]

Brent Bozell

That great American ambassador and lovely lady Jeane Kirkpatrick has left us, but her passing also causes us to remember her strategic sense and moral clarity. She came to national prominence in Reaganite circles in 1979 with her marvelous Commentary magazine essay on “Dictatorship and Double Standards.” It argued that traditional authoritarian autocracies were both more susceptible to liberalization and more amenable to American interests than totalitarian dictatorships of the left, which came into power with disturbing frequency in the late 1970s, with America as their stated enemy.

She easily explained how the Carter administration and the liberal press romantically saw in the revolutionary left a shared commitment to modernity over tradition, science over religion, an educated bureaucracy over private hierarchies, and futuristic and universal goals over appeals to an archaic and ordered past.

How little things have changed 26 years later. Even now, Jimmy Carter is touring the country blasting our democratic friends in Israel (smearing them in his book title as racist architects of “apartheid”) and making excuses for Palestinian terrorists completely at odds with American interests, just as the liberal press continues betraying sympathy for left-wing totalitarians while blasting long-faded right-wing authoritarians.

More (http://www.mediaresearch.org/BozellColumns/newscolumn/2006/col20061212.asp)

[d'urville]

It's current-events revisionism, the MSM has been trying to make a hero of Allende and a villan of Pinochet for...ever.

Allende fit their stereotype of a Latino hero - educated, priviledged, and Marxists, Pinochet was none of that. Allende called his economic plan "The Chilean Path to Socialism", which was to nationalize everything, seize private land, default on foreign debt, implement price controls, all within two years.

The results were hyperinflation, nationwide strikes, and economical contraction. He tried the auto-coup with the help of his close friend and trusted ally Fidel and lost. That's enough incentive for the left to begin the beatification process.

Pinochet's economic policy was called "The Miracle of Chilie" by Milton Friedman because it was one. He didn't just dismantle Allende's Soviet-style command economy, he implemented free trade (unheard of in SA at the time), shut down the Chilean parliment when he had to, disbanded the trade unions, privatized the national pension system, and, best of all, cut income tax.

All the while, leftists were decrying the human rights abused by Pinochet, but they paled in comparison to what Castro's were and what an Allende's would have been. Pincohet disproved one of the left's most basic Marxist tenets, that Third World poverty was caused by First World wealth, unforgivable.