Thanks to Darcy in the comments for linking to this odious Wash. Post editorial:
Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with [Chile’s] success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle — and that not even Allende’s socialist successors have dared reverse. He also accepted a transition to democracy, stepping down peacefully in 1990 after losing a referendum.
The antidote to all this garbage is Marc Cooper, here and here. Marc worked as a press aide to Salvador Allende and saw Chile succumb to dictatorship with his own eyes. Pinochet simply stepped down, did he?
He remained head of the army until 1998 and then promoted himself to Senator-for-life under the terms of a military-written constitution.
Created an economic miracle, did he?
At gunpoint unions were outlawed, labor laws were abolished, universities were stifled, tuition was hiked, national health care and social security programs were privatized and these already unequal societies were rigidly stratified into rich and poor, strong and weak, the favored and the invisible. […] [H]is ‘shock therapy’ nostrums prescribed by the recently deceased Milton Friedman pushed Chile to the brink of bankruptcy….
Just like Jonah Goldberg, the Wash. Post statement draws the Fidel Castro comparison but winds up displaying the very same contempt for democratic values that Castro’s diehard supporters do. In both cases, ideology trumps all. In the pursuit of this or that social/economic agenda, decency is heaved aside, and the results are praised as decent.
Chile has prospered to the degree that it has in spite of Pinochet’s societal deformation, not because of it.
Look at Marc Cooper’s post: rightists in Chile are giving Pinochet’s corpse a Nazi salute. As the world condemns — quite rightly — this week’s display of Jew-hatred disguised as open-minded inquiry in Tehran, Pinochet’s apologists in high places in the U.S. might want to reacquaint themselves with the basic precepts of liberal democracy.
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