Pinochet was responsible for the death of at least 3,197 of his opponents. (March 19, 2007 edit, 2.17 pm)Critics hold Pinochet was responsible for the death of at least 3,200 of his opponents. (March 28, 2007 edit, 2:32 pm)Critics hold Pinochet is said to be responsible for the death of 3,200 of his opponents. (April 12, 2007 edit, 10:03 pm)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: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. “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 GameYour 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.)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 VoiceThe 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.)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 were made to a passage dealing with Pinochet’s takeover:
He came to power as a member of a council of military leaders who <u>after the</u> 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:
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)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 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 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.
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