At what price dignity?

It's ironic that former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet should die only a few days after one of his chief apologists: former US ambassador to the UN Jeanne Kirkpatrick. She devised the "Kirkpatrick Doctrine" which essentially stated that any dictator, no matter how bloody or repressive, could count on unflinching US support so long as it called itself anti-communist. This explains the Reagan administration's active backing for despots like Pinochet and for the genocidal regimes in Guatemala and, yes, Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

When al-Qaeda launched its attacks on New York and Washington, 2973 people were killed. Al-Qaeda was denounced as a group of terrorist murders who needed to be hunted down and administered Wild West justice.

Pinochet's fascist regime murdered more people: over 3100, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and hundreds of thousands sent into exile, thus destroying one of Latin America's oldest and most stable democracies. Yet he is still revered as a hero, not only by a minority in Chile, but by some on the American and British right.

Apparently, they think it's no problem sacrificing a few thousand people and terrorizing a nation for decades is an acceptable price to pay for mass privatization (well not complete privatization: the Chilean military still directly receives a hefty cut of the country's copper exports, with no government oversight). Big corporations, some American, benefited greatly from the junta. Corporatacracy is one of the traits of fascism.

But it begs the question: if you were violently raped and beaten, would you be magically appeased if your attacker threw a few hundred dollar bills at you?

While the worst violence of Pinochet's dictatorship occurred with the complicity Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Reagan and Kirkpatrick enabled other horrors thanks to their blind support of butchers in the name of 'the free world.' Reagan-ally Rios Montt in Guatemala committed his genocide against the Mayas during the Reagan administration. Reagan-ally Saddam Hussein launched his genocide against the Kurds during the Reagan administration. CIA-backed death squads in El Salvador killed over 30,000 people during the Reagan years.

This was the Kirkpatrick Doctrine in action.

Click your heels and say 'freedom and liberty' three times.

(Certainly, there have been atrocities committed by left-wing forces in many conflicts, including El Salvador. Fidel's Cuba still holds a fascination for many leftists in the west, despite his authoritarianism and repression. But these are almost never backed by my government or enabled by the CIA's use of my tax dollars.)

The irony is that the 1973 date on which Pinochet launched his coup and began the political rape of Chile was... September 11.