General Augusto Pinochet

I have to agree with Thales that General Pinochet had the right idea. He just didn’t get enough of them.

Helicopterism: the idea that someone who actively attempts to install a tyrannical, murderous ideology in your country is due a free, one-way helicopter ride with a destination somewhere over the Pacific.

On my honor, sir, I thought commies could fly. It’s certainly more likely than the notion that Socialism could ever work.

HT: Vanderleun.

Alberto Fujimori saved Peru from a bloodthirsty communist terrorist movement, the Shining Path, of which the British editorialist Theodore Dalrymple wrote:

The worst brutality I ever saw was that committed by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, in the days when it seemed possible that it might come to power. If it had, I think its massacres would have dwarfed those of the Khmer Rouge. As a doctor, I am accustomed to unpleasant sights, but nothing prepared me for what I saw in Ayacucho, where Sendero first developed under the sway of a professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzman.”

So, naturally, we read in today’s New York Times that Alberto Fujimori is being extradited by the socialist government of Chile (a country which was itself saved from Marxist totalitarianism by the late General Augusto Pinochet, who was also internationally hounded by leftist attempts at judicial vengeance) to Peru to stand trial on “human rights and corruption” charges.

Save a country from Marxist totalitarianism’s reign of terror, and you’ll be indicted and internationally extradited to be tried as an enemy of “human rights.”

But, if you take US diplomats hostage, and become head of a major terrorist regime which stones people to death, wages covert war against the United States, and bends every effort at acquiring nuclear weapons, why! then, you get to give a speech at Columbia.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal noted the human costs of General Pinochet’s suppression of leftist revolution in Chile.

The official death toll of the Pinochet dictatorship is some 3,197. An estimated 2,796 of those died in the first two weeks of fighting between the army and the Allende-armed militias.

In the course of 17 years of military rule, the Chilean military extra-judicially eliminated permanently a total of 401 revolutionists, i.e., 401 persons actively engaged in a violent conspiracy against the political rights, private property, personal freedom, and prosperity of 16 million Chileans.

It was obviously the successful elimination of precisely this leadership cadre which prevented the capture of the government in Chile by Communism. Germany should have been so lucky that an aristocratic general staged a coup when Hitler became chancellor and began dismantling the Weimar Constitution, subdued the revolutionary Brownshirts and Blackshirts, and restored democracy, along with freedom, prosperity, and the rule of law, at so small a cost.

The International Left, and its sympathisers in the media and the Entertainment Industry, have waged an incessant and continuing public relations campaign against General Pinochet and his military regime, attempting to portray them in the most sinister of lights, but the Left’s hypocrisy is patent.

Allende would unquestionably have followed the model and example of Fidel Castro, who has killed far more people and driven many more political opponents into exile than the Chilean military. And there exists the important difference that Castro’s victims were innocent, and Pinochet’s were guilty. There is also the second important difference that Pinochet undertook a coup against a rising dictatorship in order to restore democracy and law, while Castro’s coup replaced a more benign dictatorship with a far more vicious and lawless one. The Left which defends Castro is in no position whatsoever to criticize Pinochet.

General Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, liberator of the Republic of Chile, died today of a heart attack in Santiago at the age of 91, eluding finally the vindictive efforts at persecution of the cowardly hound pack of the international left.

Most sensible people would regard the personal project of the British big game hunter hero of Geoffrey Household’s famous 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the stalking and assassination of Adolph Hitler, as a commendable effort to save the lives and liberty of millions from the depraved ambitions of a tyrant.

What Captain Thorndike (played by Walter Pidgeon in the 1941 film version by Fritz Lang, retitled as Man Hunt) tried to do fictionally for the European world of 1939, Augusto Pinochet really did in cold reality for the population of Chile in 1973.

The Communist Salvador Allende managed to gain power in 1970 by a plurality of 36.2 percent in a three-way election.

Immediately upon taking office, Allende began instituting La vía chilena al socialismo (“the Chilean Path to Socialism”), featuring the nationalization of all large industry, government takeover of the health care system and education, land seizure and redistribution of all property of more than eighty hectares (197 acres) of irrigated land. The Allende government defaulted on all foreign debt, and instituted a freeze on prices along with a government-dictated raise of all salaries.

Naturally, even basic commodities disappeared from supermarket shelves, and the necessities of life became only available via the black market. In 1971, Allende established diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba, and invited Fidel Castro for a month-long visit in which Castro participated actively in the government of Chile.

Hyperinflation (508%) and food shortages ensued. Allende proceeded to rule while disregarding the courts. Attempts at restriction of freedom of speech, and unauthorized seizures of farms and private busineses became commonplace.

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, led by General Pinochet, commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, intervened to restore the rule of law. Defeated, and facing arrest and trial, Allende committed suicide with the same AK-47 Kalashnikov given to him as a gift by Fidel Castro.

General Pinochet ruled extra-constitutionally for 17 years, in the course of which a few thousand radical leftist extremists, bent upon violence and upon assaults upon the basic liberties and property rights of the people of the Republic of Chile, and guilty of revolutionary conspiracy and assassination attempts, were prophylactically eliminated by the security forces of the Republic.

Suppose Captain Thorndike had been able to shoot Hitler before the outbreak of WWII? Suppose he, and perhaps some big game hunter associates, had also eliminated Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann and another few thousand key Nazi lieutenants, in time to prevent the full establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany, saving thereby millions of innocent lives? Should Thorndike have subsequently been prosecuted by one European Union Jack-in-Office judiciar after another?

In 1980, General Pinochet promulgated a new constitution promising a return to civilian rule in 1990. In 1988, he sought the approval of a plebiscite for another 8 year term as president. Failing to win that vote, he proceeded to conduct a democratic election, and stepped down voluntarily on March 11, 1990 to an elected successor. He left power, having restored both freedom and prosperity to Chile.

Mr. Allende’s role model, Fidel Castro, seized power in 1959 and continues to rule tyrannically over a starving and impoverished population nearly 50 years later. Castro has executed many thousands of people, but curiously enough, not one single European Union judicial official has ever chosen to indict or prosecute him.

The general’s reputation, and personal freedom, were the objects during the later years of his life to an endless succession of manipulative and propagandistic attempts at judicial vengeance by the international left. With his death, he has moved beyond their reach to take his rightful place, along with Bolivar and O’Higgins, among the heroes and liberators of Latin American.

Viva Pinochet!