The Good Tyrant: A Timely Look at the Right's Moral Relativism

[farmbo]

Saddam's swinging corpse invites a comparison with another infamous, newly- deceased, sociopathic strongman: Chile's General Augusto Pinochet. Both owed their acension to power to the CIA and Friends in the Highest Places in the US. Each owed their tenuous control over their people to the liberal use of murder, torture and mayhem. Both were stridently anti-communist and turned to the US frequently for military assistance; requests which Washington fell all over itself to fufill, albiet covertly.

Sure they were Sonofabitches...but they were OUR Sonofabitches, after all!

But history, as they say, is written by the winners. And the putative winners have applied their own curious brand of moral relativism to the Dastardly Duo.

As the Rightwing pundit community trades hi-fives over Saddam's execution, its interesting to observe how they've sent out the story of Chile's General Pinochet for a full re-write. Jonah Goldberg even waxes nostalgic for the erstwhile strongman in his misty-eyed LA Times puff piece, "Iraq Needs a Pinochet" http://www.latimes.com/...

But as Barry Lando recently observed at http://barrylando.com/... when it comes to Rightwing punditry...irony can be pretty...ironic:

<snip>Pinochet and Saddam also had friends in common. During some of their most repressive periods, both tyrants were strongly backed by the U.S. government. Pinochet was seen as a staunch ally by the U.S. in the 1970’s ,during what the Nixon White House regarded as a life or death struggle against International Communism.

After first failing to block the election of Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile, under Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s direction, the CIA then spent millions to destabilize the new Chilean government. When the Chilean army under Pinochet finally overthrew and murdered Allende, they launched a wave of brutal repression. As thousands of bodies piled up in Santiago’s Central Morgue, Secretary of State Kissinger battled all attempts by the U.S. Congress to enact sanctions against Pinochet’s regime.

When Kissinger finally met with Pinochet on June 7, 1976, the Secretary of State had just received a report saying that mass arrests, torture, and disappearances continued in Chile. "Numerous political prisoners have been killed arbitrarily or have died from torture received or from lack of medical treatment," the report said. An OAS report detailed those tortures: women beaten, gang raped, and forced to endure electric current applied to their bodies; men subjected to electric current, especially to their genitals, burned with cigarettes, hanged by the wrists or ankles.<snip>

Rape rooms and torture chambers and mass graves...Oh my!

So...lemme see...

Both men were tyrants, guilty of irredeemable sins against humanity.

One is overthrown-- at a terrible cost in terms of our blood and treasure--and hanged in a dank prison cell after a farcical show trial.

The other dies in bed at a ripe old age and is granted a funeral with full military honors in his home country...with a litany of eulogies from the rightwing chattering classes.

So in the end, what distinguished these two tyrants in the admittedly skewed minds of America's rightwing power brokers?

The General, it seems, was 'good for business'. His ruthlessness opened Chile up to American corporatism.

Saddam, not so much.

Pinochet and Saddam... may they both burn in hell...and may they drag their rightwing, morally relativist crowd of enablers down with them!

[Union Thug]

1. K&R Dead on - Pinochet was good for business...

and capital is the only true god in America.

[Selatius]

2. Yes, Pinochet was better for Wall Street. He privatized his whole country for them.

Saddam saw fit to keep the oil infrastructure in his country under state control. That proved to be a bothersome but growing problem. Pinochet, in contrast, was the ultimate capitalist. Every inch of Chile's infrastructure was for sale to the highest bidder. A small number of owners ended up in control of vast sectors of the economy as a result, a situation that could probably be called feudalism.