Q: How many people do you have to kill before some fucking morons will withdraw support for your administration?
A: If Chile is any example, a lot. A fucking lot.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Now I understand why there are still Bush supports out there
Q: How many people do you have to kill before some fucking morons will withdraw support for your administration?
A: If Chile is any example, a lot. A fucking lot.
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4 comments:
Heaven has another angel, I guess...
In 1983, I took a two-day train trip from Chicago to San Jose to visit my family. One of the things I read on the trip was Amnesty International's report on the Chilean coup (yes, this is the kind of stuff I read). I was literally nauseated by what I read. The cruelty was truly depraved.
Great book to read: Weavers of Revolution, by Peter Winn. It tells the story of how Allende's democratic revolution helped the poor of Chile. It also showed how moderate Allende really was, undermining the Chicken Little fears of the Pinochets and Kissingers of the world.
BTW, Netflix just emailed that the The Ground Truth is on its way. Thanks for the recommendation.
Chris: And if there's a rock-n-roll, heaven, then you know they got a helluva band.
JohnnyY: I got to say I was a little surprised that the NPR coverage of his death portrayed Pinochet's economic reforms as unquestionably beneficial to Chile, and credited him with the relative stability and prosperity the country enjoys now. Whereas the implication for Allende was that his administration would have doomed Chile to a future not unlike it more impoverished and chaotic neighbors.
And this was NPR.
I have a lot of issues with 'NPR. More on that another time.
I think the "Chicago Boys'" (University of Chicago economists) ideas have been pretty roundly rejected by anybody that knows squat anymore about economics. The idea was simple: raise unemployment to reduce inflation to make the country a good place to invest in. The unwritten part of it was that you needed to have a police state to make sure those surly poor didn't cause too many problems so that multinationals could invest and have a compliant cheap labor supply.
Of course what happened is that the rich minority became richer, skimming off any profits that the multinationals could make, squandered the foreign aid that came in and little really changed. The economic growth in Chile has come since Pinochet left, in 1990.
The stability 'NPR spoke of was there long before Pinochet's "peace of the graveyard." They were noted for decades as a democratic island in Latin America; the coup shocked everyone because the military in Chile had long been a bulwark against extremism and for democracy.
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