Posted on 12/12/2006 5:09:02 AM PST by DogByte6RER
THE 'BEST' DICTATOR
By JOHN O'SULLIVAN
December 12, 2006 -- GEN. Augusto Pinochet, who died Sunday, was the most successful dictator of the 20th century - yet also one of the most vilified.
Dictators are supposedly judged by two tests. How many people did they kill? And did they bring prosperity to their people? These two tests hang together because Marxists believed that their various ideological despotisms (in Cuba, China, the USSR) would eventually midwife a utopia - justifying their mass murders retrospectively.
So how did individual dictators fare? Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong each murdered tens of millions in labor camps, purges, forced famines and war. But they were less successful at improving their societies.
Stalin built a society on terror and extended it through conquest - but the USSR couldn't feed itself, and eventually collapsed in economic ruins. Hitler committed suicide in the literal ruins of Berlin with the German people digging for scraps in the rubble of the Third Reich. Mao? He killed as many millions unintentionally through his industrial "Great Leap Forward" as he did with malice aforethought in his purges and "Cultural Revolution" - and China's current prosperity is squarely rooted in a silent repudiation of his economic principles.
Yet Mao won lavish praise in Western obituaries, from the London Daily Telegraph to The New York Times.
Francisco Franco and Fidel Castro, meanwhile, each murdered no more than tens of thousands of people following their victories in civil war and rebellion. Moreover, their economic paths diverged.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
How do you leave "president for life" Tito off that list ?
Or else.
On September 11, 1973, I was overjoyed to learn of the coup, led by Pinochet, that ousted Allende. I would have been even more so had I known that Allende had been collaborating with the KGB, the Soviet Union's spy agency, since 1953.
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