Even though the dictator is dead, his Big Lie lives on. And who “better” than the Washington Post Whore to keep that odious Energizer Bunny from Hell drumming and drumming and drumming? For they have written a very slimy apologia for Pinochet, and of the most cowardly kind…the unsigned editorial. Implying that the WaHoPo endorses him even in death, even not denying what he did. This is, of course, entirely in line with the fact that they are NO liberal paper at all, but a “my country, right even when wrong” one.
AUGUSTO PINOCHET, who died Sunday at the age of 91, has been vilified for three decades in and outside of Chile, the South American country he ruled for 17 years. For some he was the epitome of an evil dictator. That was partly because he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked. Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years. Thousands of others spent years in exile.
One prominent opponent, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated by a car bomb on Washington’s Sheridan Circle in 1976 — one of the most notable acts of terrorism in this city’s history. Mr. Pinochet, meanwhile, enriched himself, stashing millions in foreign bank accounts — including Riggs Bank, a Washington institution that was brought down, in part, by the revelation of that business. His death forestalled a belated but richly deserved trial in Chile.
It’s hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile’s economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It’s leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired. It also has a vibrant democracy. Earlier this year it elected another socialist president, Michelle Bachelet, who suffered persecution during the Pinochet years.
Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle — and that not even Allende’s socialist successors have dared reverse. He also accepted a transition to democracy, stepping down peacefully in 1990 after losing a referendum.
I’ve added emphasis here so you can see what they’re doing. Notice the sly dig at Salvador Allende, whom no one on the left actually has called a saint, and who might not even enjoy the status of martyr today if not for Washington’s unwelcome interventions. Notice also how they completely gloss over the connivings of Henry Kissinger, the real architect of the pre-coup economic collapse. And also the small fact that those fifteen years of “success” happened ONLY due to Pinochet’s stepping down.
And of course, there’s complete ignorance of the economic WRECK he made of Chile in order to “save” it for the half-assed “success” it “enjoys” today. The implication being that if you want to “succeed” in the global market, you should not “act irresponsibly” by electing your own leaders, but accept Washington’s bitter medicine–even if that means thousands of your countrymen (and even some noteworthy Americans!) dead, tortured or disappeared. The implication being, a nation turned into a singular chamber of horrors is a small price to pay for a little taste of economic “success”.
The Post-Harlot has done something truly bizarre here: it has both admitted that Pinochet is an unpunished criminal, AND falsely credited him for a slight economic recovery which owes nothing to any action of his except perhaps his abdication.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there:
By way of contrast, Fidel Castro — Mr. Pinochet’s nemesis and a hero to many in Latin America and beyond — will leave behind an economically ruined and freedomless country with his approaching death. Mr. Castro also killed and exiled thousands. But even when it became obvious that his communist economic system had impoverished his country, he refused to abandon that system: He spent the last years of his rule reversing a partial liberalization. To the end he also imprisoned or persecuted anyone who suggested Cubans could benefit from freedom of speech or the right to vote.
Notice a few more of the dirty girl’s tricks here: Castro is not Pinochet’s “nemesis”, as he never went to war against him or brought him to justice. “Killed and exiled thousands”? How many killed, really? They fudge over that, probably because the number who died when Castro overthrew Batista doesn’t approach Pinochet’s belt-notch count–it was in the hundreds, not the thousands. And let’s not forget that those executed were not innocent; they were the minions of Batista, who was Cuba’s own real Pinochet. As for the “exiles”, no one exiled them–they fled. When offered compensation for their soon to be expropriated estates as part of Castro’s agrarian reforms, the richest simply packed up and buggered off to Miami. There they attempted several coups against him, none of which succeeded, even with the CIA’s help. They never accepted a cent–and so Castro, a lawyer by training and a shrewd businessman despite limited means, wound up nationalizing their lands for free. And then there was the Mariel Boatlift, an economic migration which Castro did not oppose but permitted to proceed in good order. It was the United States that imprisoned those “refugees” upon arrival. Funny how the Post never mentions a word of that!
Notice too how they never mention that the REAL reason Cuba was left behind is because THE US EMBARGOED IT FOR DECADES. They just use Fidel Castro as a handy foil to show how much less evil Pinochet supposedly was. Again, they gloss over the fact that Chile under Pinochet was far more “freedomless” than Cuba is now; Cuba, at least, has municipal and national elections, though no presidential ones–yet. Political dissidents in Cuba get jailed, yes–but in Chile there were far more of them, and their fates were far worse, and all just for saying pretty much the same things as the Cuban dissidents. Meanwhile, how many state-murdered, tortured and disappeared people has Cuba got to be ashamed of? As it currently stands, the “freedom-loving” US is the world’s largest per-capita prison state, keeps pro-Castro Cubans prisoner, and has kept more political prisoners in Guantanamo Bay since 9-11 than Cuba has in total since 1959!
But never mind all that; it’s just trivia. The Washington Lady-of-the-night has one last dig of the shiv to get in before she slinks into the shadows on her too-high heels:
The contrast between Cuba and Chile more than 30 years after Mr. Pinochet’s coup is a reminder of a famous essay written by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the provocative and energetic scholar and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who died Thursday. In “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.
And of course, note the way they whitewash that antidemocratic whore Kirkpatrick. She was wrong and a bitch,
but dammit, she’s OUR bitch and that makes her right, runs the unspoken (because illogical) reasoning. Pinochet didn’t “pave the way” for anything; the way was actually paved by Allende, as Greg Palast makes clear. Pinochet’s highway had been paved for two decades already; the only good thing he did was to hit it. A damn shame he wasn’t run out of town on a rail instead.
By the way, this editorial is titled “A Dictator’s Double Standard”. The irony of it is, this paper just showed what subscribers to the double standard they themselves are! Pinochet killed people, killed jobs, tortured people, tortured the economy, imprisoned people, shackled the economy to a point it has yet to recover from–yet he is, inexplicably, a saint to the Post, which would rather go on tarring and feathering Washington’s favorite whipping boy than look honestly at all the gangsters she’s been in bed with.
A whore with a heart of gold she most certainly ain’t.
