Gracias, Senor Reisman!"The General is denounced again and again", says professor Reisman, "for the death or disappearance of over 3,000 Chilean citizens and the alleged torture of thousands more. It may well be that some substantial number of innocent Chilean citizens did die or disappear or otherwise suffered brutal treatment as the result of his actions. But in a struggle to avoid the establishment of a Communist dictatorship, it is undoubtedly true that many or most of those who died or suffered were preparing to inflict a far greater number of deaths and a vastly larger scale of suffering on their fellow citizens."
Aside from the obvious nonsense of what he implies here, (i.e. that a fascist dictatorship is somehow better than a communist or socialist one), Pinochet killed, tortured, exiled, imprisoned and suppressed not only the democratically elected government but also labor unions, news media (independent, socialist, communist, and essentially all voices that opposed his coup), academics, (political and non-political), religious groups and clergy, and embezzled Chilean state funds for his own personal use. Pinochet didn't merely kill the supposed Communists and their allies, but essentially any and all who opposed his dictatorship.
How the hell can Reisman support such an undertaking, one that lasted some seven long, dark years? Read the above-cited paragraph carefully please; it could be written as a justification for Hitler, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Castro, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Il or any other dictator, the way I read it.
But Reisman gets worse.
"Their deaths and suffering should certainly not be mourned, any more than the deaths of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, and their helpers should be mourned. Had there been a General Pinochet in Russia in 1918 or Germany in 1933, the people of those countries and of the rest of the world would have been incomparably better off, precisely by virtue of the death, disappearance, and attendant suffering of vast numbers of Communists and Nazis. Life and liberty are positively helped by the death and disappearance of such mortal enemies. Their absence from the scene means the absence of such things as concentration camps, and is thus ardently to be desired."
I wonder what Reisman thinks of the innocent people Pinochet and his apparatchiks killed? Merely collateral damage I would guess, based on what he says here.
In 1976 the Chilean state intelligence service paid to have anti-Castro Cuban exiles detonate a bomb in Washington, DC under a car passengered by former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, killing him and an assistant (a native born American citizen) and injuring two others. An act of state sponsored terrorism by any other name, no? But Reisman says deaths like these "should not be mourned", but celebrated evidently.
Reisman has revealed himself as a pro-fascist and anti-liberty nutjob who really has no business at all calling himself a libertarian. Reisman’s authoritarian and pro-violence initiation views have lately gotten him booted from even such an extreme outfit as the Ayn Rand Institute, an organization well known for its apologetics for statism and war as well, but with this screed he goes straight into the ranks of kookery such as is found at Stormfront.com and other such ilk. WTF is he doing writing stuff like this on the LvMI blog anyhow, and why the hell hasn't it been take down yet?
Technorati tag: Pinochet Icerocket tag: Pinochet
No comments:
Post a Comment