Rebel Leader: You are accused of killing over a thousand people in your term of office... of torturing hundreds of women and children. How do you plead?
General Emilio M. Vargas: Guilty... with an explanation.
From Woody Allen’s 1971 Film BANANAS
"Chile's official commission investigating his dictatorship found that Pinochet had 3,197 bodies in his column; 87% of them died in the two-week mini-civil war that attended his coup. Many more were tortured or forced to flee the country.
But on the plus side…"
LA Times Jonah Goldberg, “Iraq Needs a Pinochet”
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-goldberg14dec14,0,5277475.column?coll=la-opinion-columnistsSo now certain people on the right have decided that the time is ripe for a wholesale rehabilitation of Augusto Pinochet, -- and not just his economic policies. Jonah Goldberg, in his recent LA Times piece “Iraq Needs a Pinochet” is enthusiastic about the entire package, including what he discreetly refers to as Pinochet’s “list of sins – both venal and moral” which, he claims, “helped create a civil society.”
It’s an interesting essay because its premise is so horrible that the gross logical inconsistencies and historical omissions used to support it are almost beside the point. Euphemisms for the torture and murder of political dissidents abound. Aside from Pinochet’s “list of sins,” we are told that Pinochet “clamped down on civil liberties and the press,” that he “took measures to protect himself” – no doubt Goldberg’s little way of referring to the murder in Washington DC of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Karpen Moffit.
An especially clever use of words occurs when Goldberg declares that, like Castro, Pinochet “dispatched souls.” Letters and messages are “dispatched.” “With dispatch” means “quickly, without hesitation.” One pictures all those souls “dispatched” from Chile Stadium as little white rectangles, quickly and without any undue fuss mailed off to the afterlife with the correct postage.
Even as he flirts with stating directly what Pinochet did, the writer deftly manages, by posturing and tossing the red herring of Castro into the mix, to shift attention away from Pinochet’s victims. He goes so far as to imply that in such cases it’s the tyrants who truly suffer:
“Let's put aside, at least for a moment, the question of which man was (or is) ‘worse.’ Suffice it to say, both have more blood on their hands than a decent conscience should be able to bear.”
Can’t you hear a faint, regretful sigh? Can’t you see Jonah shaking his head sadly at the thought of those bloodied hands? That second sentence is especially good. “Suffice it to say,” and “decent conscience” give it a dignified, old-fashioned air, and “should be able to bear” cleverly turns the situation around so that it’s the owners of those hands who are being forced to “bear” something. (How could they bear it, all that blood dripping from their fingers? I mean really, so unsanitary...)
This Gordian knot of obfuscation and posturing can be neatly cut by considering how that editorial would have read if it had actually described in detail some of those “moral and venal sins,” like Pinochet’s murder of musician Victor Jara. Instead of saying that “Pinochet’s abuses helped create a civil society,” suppose he had written:
“Arresting a popular leftwing singer, taking him to a sports stadium being used as a holding pen and killing field for other liberals and leftists, beating and torturing him over a period of three days, smashing in his ribs, breaking his fingers and mockingly inviting him to play his guitar with his shattered hands, and then finally pumping 44 bullets into him and leaving his body in a shantytown for his wife to collect, helped create a civil society.”
Don’t get inveigled into a debate about whether Castro or Pinochet was worse. Don’t allow people like Jonah Goldberg to reduce the dead to numbers on a bar graph, claiming that Castro’s pile of bodies is higher than Pinochet’s, ergo Pinochet was not such a bad guy. Is that really how this kind of mass murder works? If, as this LA Times piece proposes, Iraq’s version of Pinochet were put into place, would someone keep careful tabs on the body-count and step in and blow a whistle, calling it all to a halt once the victims of our “Iraqi Pinochet” started to approach Castro’s numbers?
Of course not.
Salvador Allende, the Chilean president overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973, was legally elected. The “autocratic style” Allende was accused of did not include torturing and murdering his opponents, and there is no convincing evidence that he had any intention of doing so. And yet Jonah Goldberg says, “…Better the path of Pinochet than the path toward Castroism, which is where Chile was heading before the general seized power. Better, that is, for the United States and for Chileans.”
Keep in mind that, unlike in today’s Iraq, the bodies of tortured and murdered Chilean citizens were not being discovered on a weekly basis in Allende’s Chile.
That was something more likely to happen in the months after Pinochet took over. And that, we are told, is “better.” The mass murder committed by Pinochet had to be done in order to lead Chile onward to its glorious capitalist present.
Jonah Goldberg is promoting a repulsive idea that has been steadily gaining currency in America’s right wing -- that the moral measure of a leader should not be that leader’s commitment to human rights, but whether or not that leader’s economic policies are “valid,” i.e., Free Market as opposed to Socialist.
The many, many individuals who died in agony in Pinochet’s torture centers were not terrorists or killers. They had done pretty much what many Americans are guilty of – they had supported the policies of a candidate who legally ran for office and was legally elected. And because they did this, Goldberg strongly implies that they were comparable to the insurgents in Iraq and provide an object lesson in how to deal with the insurgents.
Every American should read "Iraq Needs a Pinochet," not because what Jonah Goldberg advocates is worth considering, but because of what it says about the state of modern conservatism – and where some in the right wing may be willing to take us.
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