G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Conservapedia and Augusto Pinochet: The Merits of Mass Murder
By Pamela Troy
Created Jul 27 2007 - 2:21pm
Pinochet was responsible for the death of at least 3,197 of his opponents.
(March 19, 2007 edit, 2.17 pm) [0]
Critics hold Pinochet was responsible for the death of at least 3,200 of his
opponents. (March 28, 2007 edit, 2:32 pm) [0]
Critics hold Pinochet is said to be responsible for the death of 3,200 of
his opponents. (April 12, 2007 edit, 10:03 pm) [1]
General Augusto Pinochet is a bit of a problem for the right. His embrace of
free market economics is as widely publicized as his regime's mass murder
and torture of liberals and leftists, so he can't be ascribed to the left,
(at least not for another few decades.) It would simplify matters, of
course, for right-wingers to denounce Pinochet as a murderous thug, to say
that his human rights record puts him beyond the pale.
But many of them just won't do that. They like him too much.
So Pinochet's brutality must be finessed, presented in a manner that makes
it less disturbing. The editors at Conservapedia are faced with the task of,
not just misrepresenting the history of Pinochet's regime, but of explaining
how a man whose name became synonymous with torture and political repression
could have been such good friends with conservative icons like Margaret
Thatcher and Jesse Helms.
One approach, as illustrated at the beginning of this chapter, is to imply
that the one-sided bloodbath following Pinochet's takeover is the stuff of
legend rather than fact. A simple and bald statement: "Pinochet was
responsible for the death of at least 3,197 of his opponents" is changed to
something that "critics say," inviting Conservapedia's young readers to
assume that there's some question about whether or not Pinochet was in fact
responsible. The words "at least" are removed, fixing the body count in the
reader's mind at 3,200 (The editor generously rounds it up by three
corpses.) And in the last edit, the "critics hold" addition is shifted to
the even more passive "Pinochet is said to be." pushing the phraseology even
closer to the language used in folklore. Pinochet's victims are thus made
more and more abstract, more and more unreal to the students Conservapedia
is "teaching."
This effort to sell the idea that there's some dispute about exactly who was
responsible for the killings and repression pervades the entries dealing
with the 1973 coup. The article on Salvador Allende includes the following
passage: [2]
In 1973, at the height of numerous Cold War crisis's occurring
simulataneously worldwide, the socialist government was overthrown in a coup
d'etat. The Chilean National Commision on Truth and Reconciliation concluded
in its 1991 report, "Within hours Chile's elected president, Salvador
Allende, lay dead (this report concludes that he committed suicide), and a
military junta presided by General Augusto Pinochet took power." Many in the
US vigorously protested both the CIA's alleged involvement in the coup, and
the appalling human rights violations that followed, including the murder of
Victor Jara, a popular songwriter and musician and ardent supporter of
Allende. Jara was one of several thousand Chileans who were taken into
custody by Pinochet's forces the day after the coup. He was tortured for
several days, then shot to death.
It would probably surprise anyone familiar with the history of what Time
Magazine referred to as the "carefully planned and meticulously executed"
overthrow of Allende in Chile to "learn" in Conservapedia that there is some
doubt about whether or not Augusto Pinochet was leading the military junta
immediately after the coup, or responsible for the actions of that junta's
armed forces in the days following September 11, 1973. And yet the
rationalizations offered by one of Consevapedia's editors in the article's
discussion page are framed as if who was in charge following the coup is an
historical mystery akin to what happened to the little princes in the tower.
"Perhaps tomorrow you can add some information to the Augusto Pinochet about
the 3,000 people who 'disappeared' subsequent to the 1973 Chile coup," he
writes [3]. "I understand that (some sources) blame Pinochet for this and
have accused him of mass murder."
"Some sources" that hold Pinochet responsible for the carnage include, of
course, contemporary press coverage of the coup and its aftermath, thousands
of Chileans who witnessed the coup, including those who actually survived
Pinochet's prisons and torture chambers, thousands of Chileans (and a few
Americans) whose children, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, friends, and
parents were among those murdered by Pinochet's forces, and the 1993 report
by the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation.
The Numbers Game
Your lurid images pale in comparisons to the stacks of skulls in Cambodia's
killing fields. Do the math: 3,000 vs. 2,000,000. Why are you trying to
magnify a few cases of human rights violations in Chile?
(From Conservapedia's Salvador Allende Discussion page.) [4]
Numbers are so much easier to deal with than the "lurid images" of
individual human victims. Numbers don't bleed or vomit or urinate. They
don't
beg for water or for their lives. They don't weep or scream. or have
relatives waiting for them, mourning them, demanding explanations. It's less
upsetting to simply "do the math," line up digits, give them labels - this
is group A, this is group B - and do a simple equation. How, after all, can
someone decide how to react to the discovery of a mass grave of nude, bound
and tortured civilians if there's no chart to consult?
This numbers game has been popular among online right-wingers ever since the
1997 publication of THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM, a controversial work that
puts the number of 20th century communist victims at 100 million. Frequently
this "the Commies-killed-more-people-than-antiCommies" argument is offered
alongside accusations of liberal double-standards when it comes to human
rights - though the definition of "double standard" is a strange one. The
above quote, for instance, raises disturbing questions about how the author
feels human rights should be approached, implying as it does that the proper
response is to refrain from criticizing the murder of 3,000 by a free market
thug in Chile because that "few" is morally trumped by the murder of
2,000,000 by a communist thug in Cambodia.
It's an argument that would come close to making sense only in a debate in
which liberals had been seeking to excuse the carnage of Pol Pot's regime.
Since there has, in fact, been no rash of liberal commentators writing in
major newspapers or magazines about how misunderstood and maligned Pol Pot
was, the reader is left with the sense that in fact, the idea is to give the
right-wing carte-blanche when it comes to political murder until they can
make up the presumed difference and reach that 100 million mark.
In other words, 3,000 dead is compared to 2,000,000 and deemed to be "not so
bad." This approach to "right" and "wrong" is appealing to many because it
seems so straightforward. Who can argue with the fact that the number 3,000
is less than the numbers 2,000,000 or 100 million?
Unfortunately it's a mindset calculated to excuse policies of political
extermination, serving the double purpose of dehumanizing the victims and
distracting attention away from why they were killed and how. It downplays
the moral difference between a government that permits dissent and a
government that routinely abuses and murders dissenters.
The context that needs to be kept in mind when assessing the morality or
immorality of a regime is not whether the political murders committed by
that government rise to three digits, or four digits, or higher. It's
whether people living within that regime feel free to openly dissent without
the reasonable concern that doing so will put their lives and physical
well-being at risk.
There's no significant ethical difference between a regime that decides it
has successfully frightened the opposition into silence by murdering one
thousand, and a regime that doesn't think it has quite reached that goal
even after killing one hundred thousand. The chilling effect on dissent
remains in both. And it's a chilling effect that many on the far right seem
to consider acceptable if those who are frightened into silence are
leftists.
Low-balling the political killings under Pinochet still, of course, puts the
body count in the thousands. And so the next step is to imply that the
victims were so incompetent or so immoral that the responsibility lies with
them rather than with the Pinochet regime. A handy grammatical tool for this
is.
The Passive Voice
The Pinochet government is alleged to be one of the most repressive in the
Americas. During his time in power over 3,000 people were killed or
vanished. This includes treasonous Marxist revolutionaries and people who
died in private disputes.
(From Conservapedia's Augusto Pinochet article.) [5]
The above excerpt gets us all a bit closer to the reality of what drives the
right's refusal to reject Pinochet. It's the premise that leftists and
liberals are bad people -- and imprisoning, torturing and killing bad people
isn't as terrible as imprisoning, torturing, and killing good people.
Conservapedia editors refer to the torture and murder that took place in
Chile, but they take pains to do so without ever actually saying who did the
torturing and murdering. At the same time, they imply that the victims were
incompetent and corrupt. In the Pinochet article, for instance, the
following revisions [6] were made to a passage dealing with Pinochet's
takeover:
He came to power as a member of a council of military leaders who after the
overthrew of the government of President Salvador Allende on 11 September
1973. Allende, a Marxist, had been elected to his position democratically
with a 36% plurality in 1970, but he had been accused of violating the
Chilean constitution and had been condemned for his conduct by the Chilean
legislature and by civil society organisations.
Pinochet, we are told, was just part of a group that "came to power" after
the overthrow of Allende. The fact that the coup itself was a military
overthrow is deliberately omitted. At the same time Allende is referred to
as "a Radical Marxist" who hadn't really won the popular vote and been
"condemned for his conduct." Thus, the reader is left with the impression
that the "military council" simply stepped in after that wild-eyed Allende
was overthrown by a popular uprising of outraged Chilean citizens. The
specific "conduct" for which Allende was condemned is not described in
detail, probably because doing so would highlight the fact that this conduct
didn't include the imprisonment, torture, and murder of his political
opponents.
A striking attempt to subtly shift blame from Pinochet can be found in the
discussion section of the article on Pinochet victim Victor Jara, where a
Conservapedia editor makes the following edit [7]:
Jara was executed killed a few days later"
and comments: "Yes, it is a sad story."
One of the more memorable moments in that great HBO serious The Sopranos is
a flashback to when young Tony Soprano, at about fourteen, witnesses his
father chopping off the finger of a terrified man who'd been unable to repay
a gambling debt. Afterwards, when Tony and his father are alone together,
his father tenderly explains to him that what Tony had seen "was very sad."
The lesson, his father says, is that Tony should never, never gamble.
Thus a violent crime is justified to a child as if it were an unhappy stroke
of fate, a "sad" event resulting, not from Johnny Soprano holding a man's
arm down and wielding a cleaver, but from the fact that the victim gambled.
In the same way, the word "executed" is altered in Conservapedia to the more
neutral term, "killed" and Jara's death is described as something that
inspires sorrow rather than anger. The entry on Jara has been deliberately
reworded so that it reads as if Jara died, not at the hands of Pinochet's
men, but from some accident or other natural cause.
Is a Little Torture and Mass Murder Really So Terrible When You're Fighting
Communism? Just Asking!
"General Pinochet headed a military government for 16 years (1974-1990) as
he fought and defeated communist opponents in Chile." (From the
Conservapedia entry on Augusto Pinochet) [8]
As we've seen, justifying Pinochet involves a great deal of precise wording,
creative math and a deliberate unfocussing of the eyes. All this effort is
aimed, not just at whitewashing the crimes of the Pinochet regime, but at
distracting attention away from the reasons for whitewashing the crimes of
the Pinochet regime. A heavy freight of implication comes with the above
bland statement, in which how Pinochet "fought and defeated communist
opponents" is carefully unspoken.
The most frequently cited rationale behind current right wing attempts to
present Pinochet as a hero who "defeated communist opponents" can be found
in one of the external links included in the Salvador Allende article, a
James Whelan editorial [9] from the Wall Street Journal that includes the
following:
Suppose Gen. Pinochet and his fellow commanders had not acted? Patricio
Aylwin succeeded Gen. Pinochet as the first elected president and was among
those imploring the military to act. A constant and acerbic critic in more
recent years, he was in 1973 president of his Christian Democrat Party. He
said then that if the military had not acted, Chile would have had to mourn
the deaths of hundreds of thousands killed at the hands of Red brigades.
There is no hard evidence offered to suggest that either Salvador Allende or
any waiting horde of Red Brigade fanatics had plans to slaughter "hundreds
of thousands" of Chileans. It's simply taken as a given that this is what
Marxists do. Therefore, it is implied, killing a few thousand liberals and
leftists, torturing an additional 24,000, and terrifying the rest into
compliance was - and is -- a valid and, in the long run, a humane
pre-emptive strategy.
The Pinochet regime is being used by the right to alter the popular
perception of political torture and murder. These crimes are no longer being
dismissed as unthinkable by mainstream conservatives. Instead, they are
being presented as tactics that should, however unpleasant, be weighed and
considered by thoughtful, broadminded anti-Communists. As Conservapedia's
article on Salvador Allende [10] observes:
Though the nature of the CIA involvement continues to be widely debated, as
well as Allende's status as a truly "democratic" leader, many conservatives
have argued that the coup against his government was justified, as Allende
had totalitarian, Communist ambitions.
American liberals are all-too-often unwilling to acknowledge what this kind
of rhetoric reveals about the current right-wing perception of dissent.
These attempts to paint the repressive policies of Pinochet as forgivable,
even heroic and necessary, are not taking place in a vacuum. They are being
offered at a time when there is a steadily increasing drumbeat from the
American right, a drumbeat that equates liberalism with communism,
opposition to the Bush administration with treason. The danger these
attitudes pose, not just to individual liberals and leftists, but to this
country, and the ideals this country was founded upon, must be taken
seriously.
_______
Pamela Troy
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Pamela Troy
Created Jul 27 2007 - 2:21pm
Pinochet was responsible for the death of at least 3,197 of his opponents.
(March 19, 2007 edit, 2.17 pm) [0]
Critics hold Pinochet was responsible for the death of at least 3,200 of his
opponents. (March 28, 2007 edit, 2:32 pm) [0]
Critics hold Pinochet is said to be responsible for the death of 3,200 of
his opponents. (April 12, 2007 edit, 10:03 pm) [1]
General Augusto Pinochet is a bit of a problem for the right. His embrace of
free market economics is as widely publicized as his regime's mass murder
and torture of liberals and leftists, so he can't be ascribed to the left,
(at least not for another few decades.) It would simplify matters, of
course, for right-wingers to denounce Pinochet as a murderous thug, to say
that his human rights record puts him beyond the pale.
But many of them just won't do that. They like him too much.
So Pinochet's brutality must be finessed, presented in a manner that makes
it less disturbing. The editors at Conservapedia are faced with the task of,
not just misrepresenting the history of Pinochet's regime, but of explaining
how a man whose name became synonymous with torture and political repression
could have been such good friends with conservative icons like Margaret
Thatcher and Jesse Helms.
One approach, as illustrated at the beginning of this chapter, is to imply
that the one-sided bloodbath following Pinochet's takeover is the stuff of
legend rather than fact. A simple and bald statement: "Pinochet was
responsible for the death of at least 3,197 of his opponents" is changed to
something that "critics say," inviting Conservapedia's young readers to
assume that there's some question about whether or not Pinochet was in fact
responsible. The words "at least" are removed, fixing the body count in the
reader's mind at 3,200 (The editor generously rounds it up by three
corpses.) And in the last edit, the "critics hold" addition is shifted to
the even more passive "Pinochet is said to be." pushing the phraseology even
closer to the language used in folklore. Pinochet's victims are thus made
more and more abstract, more and more unreal to the students Conservapedia
is "teaching."
This effort to sell the idea that there's some dispute about exactly who was
responsible for the killings and repression pervades the entries dealing
with the 1973 coup. The article on Salvador Allende includes the following
passage: [2]
In 1973, at the height of numerous Cold War crisis's occurring
simulataneously worldwide, the socialist government was overthrown in a coup
d'etat. The Chilean National Commision on Truth and Reconciliation concluded
in its 1991 report, "Within hours Chile's elected president, Salvador
Allende, lay dead (this report concludes that he committed suicide), and a
military junta presided by General Augusto Pinochet took power." Many in the
US vigorously protested both the CIA's alleged involvement in the coup, and
the appalling human rights violations that followed, including the murder of
Victor Jara, a popular songwriter and musician and ardent supporter of
Allende. Jara was one of several thousand Chileans who were taken into
custody by Pinochet's forces the day after the coup. He was tortured for
several days, then shot to death.
It would probably surprise anyone familiar with the history of what Time
Magazine referred to as the "carefully planned and meticulously executed"
overthrow of Allende in Chile to "learn" in Conservapedia that there is some
doubt about whether or not Augusto Pinochet was leading the military junta
immediately after the coup, or responsible for the actions of that junta's
armed forces in the days following September 11, 1973. And yet the
rationalizations offered by one of Consevapedia's editors in the article's
discussion page are framed as if who was in charge following the coup is an
historical mystery akin to what happened to the little princes in the tower.
"Perhaps tomorrow you can add some information to the Augusto Pinochet about
the 3,000 people who 'disappeared' subsequent to the 1973 Chile coup," he
writes [3]. "I understand that (some sources) blame Pinochet for this and
have accused him of mass murder."
"Some sources" that hold Pinochet responsible for the carnage include, of
course, contemporary press coverage of the coup and its aftermath, thousands
of Chileans who witnessed the coup, including those who actually survived
Pinochet's prisons and torture chambers, thousands of Chileans (and a few
Americans) whose children, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, friends, and
parents were among those murdered by Pinochet's forces, and the 1993 report
by the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation.
The Numbers Game
Your lurid images pale in comparisons to the stacks of skulls in Cambodia's
killing fields. Do the math: 3,000 vs. 2,000,000. Why are you trying to
magnify a few cases of human rights violations in Chile?
(From Conservapedia's Salvador Allende Discussion page.) [4]
Numbers are so much easier to deal with than the "lurid images" of
individual human victims. Numbers don't bleed or vomit or urinate. They
don't
beg for water or for their lives. They don't weep or scream. or have
relatives waiting for them, mourning them, demanding explanations. It's less
upsetting to simply "do the math," line up digits, give them labels - this
is group A, this is group B - and do a simple equation. How, after all, can
someone decide how to react to the discovery of a mass grave of nude, bound
and tortured civilians if there's no chart to consult?
This numbers game has been popular among online right-wingers ever since the
1997 publication of THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM, a controversial work that
puts the number of 20th century communist victims at 100 million. Frequently
this "the Commies-killed-more-people-than-antiCommies" argument is offered
alongside accusations of liberal double-standards when it comes to human
rights - though the definition of "double standard" is a strange one. The
above quote, for instance, raises disturbing questions about how the author
feels human rights should be approached, implying as it does that the proper
response is to refrain from criticizing the murder of 3,000 by a free market
thug in Chile because that "few" is morally trumped by the murder of
2,000,000 by a communist thug in Cambodia.
It's an argument that would come close to making sense only in a debate in
which liberals had been seeking to excuse the carnage of Pol Pot's regime.
Since there has, in fact, been no rash of liberal commentators writing in
major newspapers or magazines about how misunderstood and maligned Pol Pot
was, the reader is left with the sense that in fact, the idea is to give the
right-wing carte-blanche when it comes to political murder until they can
make up the presumed difference and reach that 100 million mark.
In other words, 3,000 dead is compared to 2,000,000 and deemed to be "not so
bad." This approach to "right" and "wrong" is appealing to many because it
seems so straightforward. Who can argue with the fact that the number 3,000
is less than the numbers 2,000,000 or 100 million?
Unfortunately it's a mindset calculated to excuse policies of political
extermination, serving the double purpose of dehumanizing the victims and
distracting attention away from why they were killed and how. It downplays
the moral difference between a government that permits dissent and a
government that routinely abuses and murders dissenters.
The context that needs to be kept in mind when assessing the morality or
immorality of a regime is not whether the political murders committed by
that government rise to three digits, or four digits, or higher. It's
whether people living within that regime feel free to openly dissent without
the reasonable concern that doing so will put their lives and physical
well-being at risk.
There's no significant ethical difference between a regime that decides it
has successfully frightened the opposition into silence by murdering one
thousand, and a regime that doesn't think it has quite reached that goal
even after killing one hundred thousand. The chilling effect on dissent
remains in both. And it's a chilling effect that many on the far right seem
to consider acceptable if those who are frightened into silence are
leftists.
Low-balling the political killings under Pinochet still, of course, puts the
body count in the thousands. And so the next step is to imply that the
victims were so incompetent or so immoral that the responsibility lies with
them rather than with the Pinochet regime. A handy grammatical tool for this
is.
The Passive Voice
The Pinochet government is alleged to be one of the most repressive in the
Americas. During his time in power over 3,000 people were killed or
vanished. This includes treasonous Marxist revolutionaries and people who
died in private disputes.
(From Conservapedia's Augusto Pinochet article.) [5]
The above excerpt gets us all a bit closer to the reality of what drives the
right's refusal to reject Pinochet. It's the premise that leftists and
liberals are bad people -- and imprisoning, torturing and killing bad people
isn't as terrible as imprisoning, torturing, and killing good people.
Conservapedia editors refer to the torture and murder that took place in
Chile, but they take pains to do so without ever actually saying who did the
torturing and murdering. At the same time, they imply that the victims were
incompetent and corrupt. In the Pinochet article, for instance, the
following revisions [6] were made to a passage dealing with Pinochet's
takeover:
He came to power as a member of a council of military leaders who after the
overthrew of the government of President Salvador Allende on 11 September
1973. Allende, a Marxist, had been elected to his position democratically
with a 36% plurality in 1970, but he had been accused of violating the
Chilean constitution and had been condemned for his conduct by the Chilean
legislature and by civil society organisations.
Pinochet, we are told, was just part of a group that "came to power" after
the overthrow of Allende. The fact that the coup itself was a military
overthrow is deliberately omitted. At the same time Allende is referred to
as "a Radical Marxist" who hadn't really won the popular vote and been
"condemned for his conduct." Thus, the reader is left with the impression
that the "military council" simply stepped in after that wild-eyed Allende
was overthrown by a popular uprising of outraged Chilean citizens. The
specific "conduct" for which Allende was condemned is not described in
detail, probably because doing so would highlight the fact that this conduct
didn't include the imprisonment, torture, and murder of his political
opponents.
A striking attempt to subtly shift blame from Pinochet can be found in the
discussion section of the article on Pinochet victim Victor Jara, where a
Conservapedia editor makes the following edit [7]:
Jara was executed killed a few days later"
and comments: "Yes, it is a sad story."
One of the more memorable moments in that great HBO serious The Sopranos is
a flashback to when young Tony Soprano, at about fourteen, witnesses his
father chopping off the finger of a terrified man who'd been unable to repay
a gambling debt. Afterwards, when Tony and his father are alone together,
his father tenderly explains to him that what Tony had seen "was very sad."
The lesson, his father says, is that Tony should never, never gamble.
Thus a violent crime is justified to a child as if it were an unhappy stroke
of fate, a "sad" event resulting, not from Johnny Soprano holding a man's
arm down and wielding a cleaver, but from the fact that the victim gambled.
In the same way, the word "executed" is altered in Conservapedia to the more
neutral term, "killed" and Jara's death is described as something that
inspires sorrow rather than anger. The entry on Jara has been deliberately
reworded so that it reads as if Jara died, not at the hands of Pinochet's
men, but from some accident or other natural cause.
Is a Little Torture and Mass Murder Really So Terrible When You're Fighting
Communism? Just Asking!
"General Pinochet headed a military government for 16 years (1974-1990) as
he fought and defeated communist opponents in Chile." (From the
Conservapedia entry on Augusto Pinochet) [8]
As we've seen, justifying Pinochet involves a great deal of precise wording,
creative math and a deliberate unfocussing of the eyes. All this effort is
aimed, not just at whitewashing the crimes of the Pinochet regime, but at
distracting attention away from the reasons for whitewashing the crimes of
the Pinochet regime. A heavy freight of implication comes with the above
bland statement, in which how Pinochet "fought and defeated communist
opponents" is carefully unspoken.
The most frequently cited rationale behind current right wing attempts to
present Pinochet as a hero who "defeated communist opponents" can be found
in one of the external links included in the Salvador Allende article, a
James Whelan editorial [9] from the Wall Street Journal that includes the
following:
Suppose Gen. Pinochet and his fellow commanders had not acted? Patricio
Aylwin succeeded Gen. Pinochet as the first elected president and was among
those imploring the military to act. A constant and acerbic critic in more
recent years, he was in 1973 president of his Christian Democrat Party. He
said then that if the military had not acted, Chile would have had to mourn
the deaths of hundreds of thousands killed at the hands of Red brigades.
There is no hard evidence offered to suggest that either Salvador Allende or
any waiting horde of Red Brigade fanatics had plans to slaughter "hundreds
of thousands" of Chileans. It's simply taken as a given that this is what
Marxists do. Therefore, it is implied, killing a few thousand liberals and
leftists, torturing an additional 24,000, and terrifying the rest into
compliance was - and is -- a valid and, in the long run, a humane
pre-emptive strategy.
The Pinochet regime is being used by the right to alter the popular
perception of political torture and murder. These crimes are no longer being
dismissed as unthinkable by mainstream conservatives. Instead, they are
being presented as tactics that should, however unpleasant, be weighed and
considered by thoughtful, broadminded anti-Communists. As Conservapedia's
article on Salvador Allende [10] observes:
Though the nature of the CIA involvement continues to be widely debated, as
well as Allende's status as a truly "democratic" leader, many conservatives
have argued that the coup against his government was justified, as Allende
had totalitarian, Communist ambitions.
American liberals are all-too-often unwilling to acknowledge what this kind
of rhetoric reveals about the current right-wing perception of dissent.
These attempts to paint the repressive policies of Pinochet as forgivable,
even heroic and necessary, are not taking place in a vacuum. They are being
offered at a time when there is a steadily increasing drumbeat from the
American right, a drumbeat that equates liberalism with communism,
opposition to the Bush administration with treason. The danger these
attitudes pose, not just to individual liberals and leftists, but to this
country, and the ideals this country was founded upon, must be taken
seriously.
_______
Pamela Troy
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson