Whiplash
by digby
It’s amazing to realize that Lucianne Goldberg’s offspring gets paid good money to write things like this in the Los Angeles Times.
Following on this new hagiography of free-market guru and all around successful leader Augusto Pinochet, Goldberg bizarrely implies that “the left” is agitating for an Iraqi Fidel, and argues that Iraq would be better off with an Iraqi Pinochet instead. He actually says, “if only Ahmad Chalabi had been such a man.”
After all, Pinochet may have tortured and killed his political opponents for years, but it all came out ok in the end after he left office. Meanwhile, we on the left allegedly worship Castro en masse, who’s also killed thousands, and his country is still poor and unfree. So the left must cry uncle. Or something. (No word on where eastern Europe plays into this new “theory” of rightwing dictator superiority. Last I looked, the ex-commies of the eastern Bloc were doing even better than Chile.)
Anyway, Jonah wonders which kind of torturing tyrant the Iraqis would prefer us to install, which is downright democratic of him, when you think about it:
I ask you: Which model do you think the average Iraqi would prefer? Which model, if implemented, would result in future generations calling Iraq a success? An Iraqi Pinochet would provide order and put the country on the path toward liberalism, democracy and the rule of law. (If only Ahmad Chalabi had been such a man.)
Now, you might say: “This is unfair. This is a choice between two bad options.” OK, true enough. But that’s all we face in Iraq: bad options. When presented with such a predicament, the wise man chooses the more moral, or less immoral, path. The conservative defense of Pinochet was that he was the least-bad option; better the path of Pinochet than the path toward Castroism, which is where Chile was heading before the general seized power. Better, that is, for the United States and for Chileans.
I bring all this up because in the wake of Pinochet’s death (and Jeane Kirkpatrick’s), the old debate over conservative indulgence of Pinochet has elicited shrieking from many on the left claiming that any toleration of Pinochet was inherently immoral — their own tolerance of Castro notwithstanding.
Right. Never mind that Allende was a socialist, not a communist, and never mind that he was democratically elected. Oh, and never mind that he wasn’t torturing his political opponents with electrodes strapped to their genitals or dropping them alive from helicopters!
Never mind either that this entire discussion of “bad options” and comparing Iraq to Castro and Pinochet is stupid; the bad options are between chaos, civil war, and religious dictatorship which have absolutely nothing to do with any of the bullshit that Goldberg is nattering on about.
Sorry bub. Support for Pinochet’s mass killing and torture is inherently immoral. And justifying your support because the Chilean economy is doing better than Cuba’s is just plain disgusting. This is what has become of the grand neocon experiment in Iraq: phony rhetorical battles with leftist ghosts of thirty years ago. It would be sad if it weren’t so sick.
I should point out that Goldberg does mention the torture. After listing Castros many sins, here’s what he says:
Now consider Chile. Gen. Pinochet seized a country coming apart at the seams. He too clamped down on civil liberties and the press. He too dispatched souls. Chile’s official commission investigating his dictatorship found that Pinochet had 3,197 bodies in his column; 87% of them died in the two-week mini-civil war that attended his coup. Many more were tortured or forced to flee the country.
Sexual abuse, including rape using animals, burns from cigarettes, welding torches and acid, ripping off fingernails with pliers, immersion in water, cooking oil or petroleum, and being forced to watch other detainees, often family members, being tortured.
This partial list of torture methods used under the Chilean dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) also includes beatings, mock executions, lengthy detentions with blindfolds or hoods, electric shock to the genitals and other sensitive parts of the body, as well as the bursting of eardrums using loud noises. The descriptions are contained in a report presented Wednesday to Chilean President Ricardo Lagos by a special commission that spent a year gathering testimony from 35,000 torture victims.
Among other things, the former commander of the armed forces is charged with having — jointly with others and in purported performance of official duties — intentionally inflicted severe pain or suffering on:
•Marta Lidia Ugarte Roman, by suspending her from a pole in a pit; pulling out her finger nails and toe nails, and burning her;
•Meduardo Paredes Barrientos, by systematically breaking his wrists, pelvis, ribs and skull; burning him with a blowtorch or flamethrower;
•Adriana Luz Pino Vidal, a pregnant woman, by applying electric shocks to her vagina, ears, hands, feet and mouth, and stubbing out cigarettes on her stomach;
•Antonio Llido Mengual, a priest born in Valencia, Spain, by applying electric current to his genitals and repeatedly beating his whole body;
Some forms of torture included the employment of a man with visible open syphilitic sores on his body, to rape female captives and to use on them a dog trained in sexual practices with human beings.
Who can argue that rape by dogs is a small price to pay for free markets thirty years from now? Let’s hope the Iraqis are so lucky.
Jonah indoubtedly thinks that Pinochet and his henchmen were just blowing off steam. And as for the wonderful Chilean outcome, perhaps Jonah should ask himself how healthy a country can be when it is still, after 30 years, trying to exorcise the demons that were unleashed under Pinochet. Chile is still traumatized and will remain so until everyone who lived under that cruelty is dead.
But they do have free markets.
And here’s the odd part. All these glowing tributes to Pinochet see Chile as a great right wing success story. But they have a socialist feminist president today— a woman whose father was tortured to death by Pinochet and who was herself, along with her mother, tortured before she was exiled. Do you supose she agrees that Pinochet was a blessing for her country?
Finally one observation that makes me wonder what possesses the LA Times to publish this guy. He concludes his article with this:
But these days, there’s a newfound love for precisely this sort of realpolitik. Consider Jonathan Chait, who recently floated a Swiftian proposal that we put Saddam Hussein back in power in Iraq because, given his track record of maintaining stability and recognizing how terrible things could get in Iraq, Hussein might actually represent the least-bad option. Even discounting his sarcasm, this was morally myopic. But it seems to me, if you can contemplate reinstalling a Hussein, you’d count yourself lucky to have a Pinochet.
Have you ever read anything so muddled in your life? It makes Kaye Grogan sound coherent.
First, there’s this alleged “newfound love for precisely this sort of realpolitik.” He uses Jonathan Chait’s essay* on bringing back Saddam as the basis for this, but he describes it as “Swiftian”, meaning he believes it was satire, presumably in the mode of “A Modest Proposal” which presented a horrifying option to an intractable problem in order to illuminate the lack of moral concern on the part of the ruling class. If that were so, then then it is not a “newfound love” but rather a “newfound disdain” or “newfound loathing” that Chait was displaying.
He then says that “even if you discount the sarcasm” it is “morally myopic.” Well, duh. If you “discount” the satire of “A Modest Proposal” you would be advocating cannibalizing children. Jesus. But Goldberg has just spent seven paragraphs telling us why you sometimes have to make such unpleasant decisions as Chait suggests so I don’t see why he, of all people, would consider Chait morally myopic. They agree.
Goldberg is a very confused person, which is a condition we are seeing a lot of among the right wing (and some very dizzy liberal hawks.) It’s amazing to see them switch abruptly from waving their purple fingers of democracy in everybody’s faces to serious public contemplation of installing a friendly dictator. They must be experiencing some kind of psychic whiplash.
* For the record, as I wrote before I don’t believe Johnathan Chait’s article actually was satire. As he explained later, it was actually a pretty straightforward proposition — that the US and Iraq might be better off if we installed a strongman. He suggests Saddam because he’s the guy who would scare the Iraqis straight in a hurry. I don’t know how Chait feels about Pinochet’s reign, but he is quite seriously entertaining the idea that we might be better off making a Pinochet omelette in Iraq. He and Goldberg are equally morally myopic on this topic.
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