georgeob1 wrote:We can only speculate about whether Alliende would have done the same - however it is worth noting that the totalitarian socialist doctrine he espoused included the precept that socialist revolutions are not reversable in the normal political process.
I don't consider any of the examples of human suffering you cited as either justified or necessary, no matter which of the contending parties may have done them. Would a recitation of the like horrors practiced by other socialist totalitarian governments been in your view a sufficient cause for resisting a new application of this system in Chile after Alliende dissolved its constitution?
That's twice in a row that you base your entire argument re: Chile on an equation of Allende with the communists of the totalitarian governments you reference, whether Cuba or the Soviet Union.
Leaving aside the question of whether the death toll of the Castro regime, in terms of tortures, dissappearances and executions, does compare so negatively with that of Pinochet (even if his economic track record clearly does) - Allende was no Castro. Allende was no communist. And therein lies the entire weakness of your argument.
Allende was arguably even no Chavez, that current-day Latin-American populist, who despite his catastrophical mismanagement of his country can't measure up to Pinochet when it comes to death and torture either. He was neither that purely corrupt, egotist type of populist, nor the ruthless totalitarian leader of the Soviet brand. You will remember that the Chilean communists considered Allende a softling, and attacked him from the left. He was no doctrinarian of that totalitarian Marxist-Leninist ideology that you reference, when you compare Pinochet favourably to, I presume, the various Soviet regimes. It's a straw man.
Unlike Castro, Allende was freely elected. Unlike Ortega, he did not deploy the army against dissident rebels. All you have to go on in terms of the 'slaughter' you propose Allende would have wrecked are ominous signs. We will indeed never know. But since Allende was no communist and in fact had repeatedly resisted the communists' demands, there is at least as much evidence to suggest he would
not have become another Castro - or have wrecked the murder and torture that we do know Pinochet
did spread throughout the land.
You argue your point, twice now in these threads, on the basis of the fear you remember your landowner acquaintances and family members expressing. But that is hardly necessarily the most objective of standards. Just compare the doomsday tales of their current-day Brazilian counterparts when Lula came to power. You may not like Lula, but he did not herald the utter breakdown of the country that the upper classes had warned against in panic.
You defend what we know was one of the more outrageously cruel dictatorships of the Cold War era's Latin America, by comparing it to what you speculate the alternative might have been, which in turn you define by equating that alternative, the socialist Allende, with regimes espousing an ideology and a system he never subscribed to. It's a bankrupt argument.
