Posted on 12/10/2006 9:46:26 AM PST by My Favorite Headache
Hell has a new employee...Pinochet is dead at 91.
I think if you look at the type of continental movement that was made by the marxist guerillas during the late 60s and 1970s, which was made with outside support and funding btw, you would be remiss not to conclude that there was an "open war" going on. So again, I think you are making a distinguishment without a difference.
Second of all, you wont condemn bombers -which until precision guided munitions have generally been indiscriminate purveyors of death and destruction- but you voice outrage at ambigously defined "death squads" and "underhanded" warfare. Again, a distinguishment without a difference.
Lastly, you are so quick to "ignore the numbers," WHY? You claim the acts were pretty different, but you only view them that way because you dont want to condemn arial bombers and you do want criticize Pinochet. The bottom line remains that we killed 100,000+ innocents -an act which your ok with because you consider the context- and he executed 2,000 without due process of law to win against an insurgency that would have installed a communist regime.
Why dont you afford him and his actions the same historical context and consideration in making a judgment?
"Pinochet was a hero, however flawed, who gave his country a respite, though unfortunately not a permanent escape, from the dark abyss of socialism."
Well spoken.
Requiem eternam dona ei, Domine.
Et lux perpetua luceat ei.
Requiescat in pace.
But if you look at the context of the instability that Chile was in, did it really warrant tactics such as death squads and disappearances of people?
Allende was a communist and was in league with evil. Taking him out was the right thing to do.
Pinochet came to power via revolution. During revolutions, people get killed. Almost all of the ~3000 people who died during Pinochet's tenure were killed soon after Pinochet came to power. Those ~3000 were almost all part of, or allied with, Allende's regime (or useful tools thereof), and they were thus legitimate targets of regime change.
Because of Pinochet, Chile was saved from communist. Pinochet's legacy has left Chile with a vibrant and healthy democracy, a thriving economy, and freedom that they would not have known under communism.
Was Pinochet or his revolution perfect? No. But he did what he felt he had to do, and everyone excepting the communists are better off for it.
LMBO! Well played. That's gonna leave a mark, and the sad thing is, he probably doesn't even realize it.
these are well documented facts
this was not a nice dictatorship.
The Nazis were anticommunist too. And they were some real nice folks.
two wrongs don't make a right.
yes...grabbing unarmed civilians off the street and beating them in secret prisons is not one of them
Then again, if tasering him just means that he'll be back next week, while a more permanent solution results in him not coming back and his friends staying far away too, then the latter has a certain appeal to it.
So how would you have taken out Allende before he had a chance to launch the typical Communist campaign of genocidal terror?
Virtually, every single communist country has killed it's own citizens and committed human rights violations in the name of government will.
In fact, the worst mass murders in the whole history of human beings were committed by country's with communist regimes. Millions of people died under the communist regime of USSR, Red China, Cambodia, and North Korea.
I think the real question is how many more people would have died under Argentina's communist regime as opposed to those who died under Pinochet's?
hypothetical... as if the Stalinist hadn't already killed 100 million people in the century.
Pinochet had to chose the lesser of two evils,given the choise of takeover by a vicious totalitarian philosophy or the methods he used,which was worse ? look at how many people were slaughtered by che and castro?
Churchill is said stated , "in the wars for modern democracy there is no room for chivalry
Is this the only issue where you get your information from Time or Newsweek, or are there others?
I believe you underestimate the danger that Allende posed to Chile by labeling it hypothetical. The standard operating practice of Communist regimes, and certainly those popularly elected, is to gradually introduce Marxism. Lenin waited until the Tsarists were defeated militarily before he cracked down on rival leftist parties like the Mensheviks and the Left Social Democrats. In the case of Cuba, Castro kept his Communist affiliation secret until well after he successfully marched on Havana. Only after several years of rule did Putin restore the symbols of the old Red Army and restore military and political leaders of the Soviet era to a position of honor. While most of the Communist regimes in post-World War II Europe were placed into power via Soviet bayonet, the Communists formally and publicly adhered to democratic processes in Czechoslovakia. Only after the social democratic party fell out of power and democratic leader Jan Masaryk was assassinated by the Communists did the Reds cast off the niceties and impose a dictatorship.
The worst Communist atrocities usually occur at least a decade after power is consolidated. The Chinese Cultural Revolution began 17 years after the Communists expelled the Nationalists. Stalin's extermination of the kulaks and the massive expansion of the gulags took place 15 years after the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg. The same track of gradual imposition of Communist power can be seen in Venezuela and South Africa today. (Would that the Venezuelan military harbor a Pinochet who would clean the clock of the tyrant Chavez. Pat Robertson was 100% right on this matter.)
Given the long history of Communist techniques for coming to power, there was no reason to imagine that Allende would have acted differently. Pinochet was entirely justified in his military coup. It is undeniable that he was brutal in his suppression of the Communists, but so was Lincoln and the Reconstruction governments to Copperheads and former Rebels, respectively, as were the Confederates to Union sympathizers, as evidenced by the burning of Lawrence, Kansas, and the hanging of dozens of Unionists in Gainesville, Texas. Cromwell was at least as ruthless to royalists and Catholics as the Stuarts were to the Puritans and other Protestant dissenters.
War is about killing people and breaking things, as Rush Limbaugh once put it. Civil wars are often uniquely brutal.
If the man who saved Chile from Hell on Earth deserves to go to Hell, then where does that leave you?
Disgusting comment, sir. May this hero to the Chilean people rest in peace.
He has had many years to get right with God. Who can say he Didn't?
That's totally true. As have a great many non-Communist countries. Communism is an enemy, but it's not the only enemy. We should oppose totalitarianism of all stripes, whether it's militarist, Islamist, fascist, Communist or anything else. Allende and Pinochet were both bad.
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