We need another Pinochet in Venezuela.
CALGARYSUN.COM
Tue, May 11, 2004
Augusto Pinochet rescued Chile from sins of Marxist dictator
By Paul Jackson -- Calgary Sun
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher regarded General Augusto Pinochet as a great man of heroic stature who halted the total enslavement of the people of Chile under a brutal Communist regime.
Now, any individual Thatcher admires surely deserves the admiration of others who believe modern-day Stalinists shouldn't be allowed to trample on people's rights and freedoms.
Yet Premier Ralph Klein has got himself in some hot water by suggesting there was something positive in Pinochet cleaning up the chaos left by Marxist Salvador Allende after the reckless and ruthless leader had been in power just three years.
Klein was right and anyone who has read the carefully-assessed and critically acclaimed works Allende: Death of a Marxist Dream and Out of the Ashes: Life, Death and the Transformation of Democracy in Chile 1883-1988 by famed historian James R. Whelan (Winner of the prestigious
Nieman Fellowship at Harvard) will attest to that.
My only surprise at Klein's comments was that, after making his initial assessment of Pinochet, he then tempered his stance somewhat by suggesting Pinochet committed no worse sins than Allende. Actually, Pinochet
committed no sins, but simply rescued his countrymen from the sins of Allende, and deserves the praise of every Chilean for his courage and accomplishments.
President Richard Nixon himself saw the havoc Allende would wreak on Chile and authorized the funding of attempts to prevent him from coming to power in 1970 and backed Pinochet's coup d'etat against the Marxist
politician in 1973. Nixon has been much maligned by his enemies in the lib-left, but he beat them at their game by dying with the reputation of a honourable statesman.
During the three years Allende was in power, he ruined his nation's economy with massive state takeovers of huge sectors of industry and confiscated the assets of U.S. companies in that nation. Shortages of basic commodities were commonplace, and massive strikes erupted in protest.
Within the same period of time Pinochet, with the help of world renowned economists such as the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman, turned the nation's economy around so dramatically observers dubbed it the "Miracle
of Chile."
Allende had pledged to follow the disastrous economic, political and social policies of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro -- who turned his nation into an impoverished slave state -- and Pinochet, a true patriot, felt he
had to act for his own people's sake. He wanted, he proclaimed, "to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs."
That, as evidenced by Chile's revival, he certainly did. Naturally, there's nothing the lib-left and their Stalinist allies like better than to distort history and demean the achievements of their opponents.
The campaign against Pinochet never ceases, but never succeeds either.
Revisionist history tells us Pinochet was a dictator, but he was the first dictator to hold a democratic plebiscite and oust himself out of power.
He did that in 1988, when he felt the woes and corruption left by Allende were finally gone.
Following that plebiscite, in which he still won more votes than Allende had in 1970, Pinochet accepted defeat, staying in power only until 1990 when his term legally expired. After that, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Chile's armed forces, and later a senator. Hardly
actions that showed he was hated by the new democratic government of Chile or the Chilean people.
In 1998, while on a visit to Britain, a renegade judge in Spain used an obscure law to order his extradition to Spain to face charges of rights abuses. The free government of Chile itself opposed this bogus move.
Indeed, even Prime Minister Tony Blair's (socialist, at that) government refused to extradite the retired right-wing politician to face a sham showcase trial. Again, hardly a condemnation of Pinochet.
Pinochet returned to Chile and, in 2002, the Supreme Court of his country refused to prosecute Pinochet on any number of phoney charges.
Assess the actions of Allende and of Pinochet and the scales of justice and truth are weighted heavily in favour of Pinochet. The rewriting of history by unrepentant supporters of Allende and continuing attempts to impose the discredited theories of Marxism on society simply must be countered.