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Is It Wrong To Talk Ill Of The Dead? Not If His Name Is “Pinochet”.

Pinochet is dead. Will anyone mourn? If ever there was a time to hang out bunting and celebrate, it is now. For many, solace will be the thought of Augusto Pinochet burning in Hell for eternity. He will not, for Hell is a myth. But if ever anyone deserved it, he did.

In a news report headlined: “White House remembers “difficult” Pinochet era” a White House spokesman said, “Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile represented one of the most difficult periods in that nation’s history……..Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families. We commend the people of Chile for building a society based on freedom, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.”

Commendable, considering the United States fully supported Pinochet’s military coup that overthrew a democratically elected government, and then went on to murder over three thousand people, many taken from their homes and never seen again.

Pinochet later went on to steal over $27 million dollars, a matter still being investigated at the time of his death. Cocaine smuggling was another possible sideline of the General, though it has never been proved.

US policy doesn’t change much over the years. Democracy was a convenient weapon to use against a Middle Eastern dictator in 2003, when he thumbed his nose at American foreign policy; it was conveniently forgotten by Richard Nixon in 1973 when Augusto Pinochet wrested political control of Chile, with US backing, from the democratically elected Marxist government. It has been accomodatingly overlooked once again in 2006 when the US, along with its “allies” cut funding to the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine, because it failed to meet US criteria. That decision was taken knowing full well it would cause further untold hardship to the Palestinian people and result in the eventual collapse of the Hamas government.

US foreign policy over the years has been brutal, cold and uncaring. Yet, in many ways it has only reflected the attitudes of many Americans, though certainly not all, who care little what happens in the rest of the world provided their own small part of that world remains safe, secure and unaffected by anything that occurs outside US boundaries.

So long as nations like the United States are content to support murdererous dictators like Augusto Pinochet and scuttle democratic processes when such actions are considered in the “US interest”, the world will continue to be rocked by wars, genocides, and mass murder.

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2 Replies to “Is It Wrong To Talk Ill Of The Dead? Not If His Name Is “Pinochet”.”

  1. Mr. Adams, my take has always been that dying doesn’t cure a man of having been a rotten, depraved son of a bitch. I know nothing of Pinochet that suggests he should be an exception to that. As for the U.S., we have what appears to be a lamentable weakness for convenient rotten, depraved sons of bitches.

  2. Xristi – Britain’s dearly unbeloved, ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a close personal friend of Augusto Pinochet, and fought valiently to prevent the Spanish extraditing him for war crimes back in the nineties. It isn’t just the US!

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