Egg Hunt

[Pamela Troy]

"For some he was the epitome of an evil dictator. That was partly because he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked. Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/11/AR2006121101166.html

You can almost see the slight moue of disdain as the writer observes that “some” consider Pinochet “the epitome of the evil dictator,” a disdain that revs up into outright contempt as he describes Allende as “an elected president considered saintly by the international left” and complains that Allendes’s “responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked.”

I mean really, some people think Allende was soooooooooooo great just because he was legally elected and all and didn’t do stuff like herd opponents into a sports stadium and machine gun them to death. Do you hear anyone on the international left talk about the role President simon-pure Saint Salvador played in the death of those 3,000 people and torture of tens of thousands? Of course not! It’s all, “Pinochet ordered this,” and “Pinochet ordered that!” “Pinochet’s soldiers put electrodes on my genitals.” “What did Pinochet’s apes in uniform do to my daughter when they took her away in 1973? Where is her body?” and of course it’s all Pinochet’s fault and not Allende’s! It’s so unfair!

This piece follows a template that has become predictable among Pinochet apologists, and is showcased at The National Review Online, which offers a “symposium” of right-wing reactions to the death of Pinochet. (http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDQxNTJlM2M4OTRhOGJhNTMzNTkyNDQ2YmYzMTU3ZTU=)

First the writer must, to varying degrees, put on a frowny-face to acknowledge the issue of that 3,000 the Washington Post editorial mentions. This can range from anguished regret, to an irritated wave of the hand. Ion Miha Pacepa refers to the dead and tortured as Pinochet’s “later aberrations.” Anthony Daniel airily waves the number aside by observing “he hardly figured among the 20th century’s most prolific political killers.” Roger W. Fontanne allows as “Human rights did suffer under Pinochet,” and Mario Loyola goes so far as declare “Pinochet's coup d'etat and the murder of Salvador Allende along with 3,000 or more suspected opposition members, were perhaps the worst thing that has ever happened to Chile.” Otto Reich, a tender hearted soul, dabs his eyes because poor Pinochet will now be remembered for all those people he killed instead of being a commie fighter and free market savior.

But then they set that frowny-face aside, brighten up a bit, and declare that, really, it all came out right in the end! I mean, come on, doesn’t the poor guy deserve some credit for fighting communism/revitalizing Chile’s economy/not being Castro? All those lefties who said they were upset about that stench of blood, vomit, voided bowels, and rotting bodies wafting from the country after Pinochet took over were just jealous and/or squeamish and/or snobbish about Pinochet’s working class ancestry. When you look at the big picture, stand back and thoughtfully assess Chile today, you can see the victims of Pinochet in their proper context without getting so tiresomely over-emotional about them. And not only Pinochet is vindicated by the presumed economic “miracle” of Chile, we are told, but the late Jean Kirkpatrick and her proudly waved double standard about right-wing thugs as opposed to left wing thugs.

Nobody in this gaggle of Pinochet apologists has yet invoked that proverbial omelet and the broken eggs necessary for it, but the image remains. It is the essence of Jean Kirkpatrick’s famous dictum, in which the atrocities of right wing, anti-communist regimes are to be tolerated as nothing more than a troublesome stage they go through on their way to Democracy. While I am no believer in either Heaven or Hell, I do like to imagine Kirkpatrick now trying to explain this doctrine to the many, many, dead souls of Chileans who died so horribly during Pinochet’s regime.

The notion that it’s just…well…different if a free market or Christian society tortures and murders someone as opposed to a Communist or Moslem society torturing and murdering someone has become increasingly popular in this country. It’s so popular, in fact, that the difference between, say, someone wearing an Iraqi Republican Guard uniform beating a prisoner’s legs to a jellied pulp in 1990 and someone wearing an American uniform doing it in 2004 is frequently dismissed as too obvious to dignify the comparison with an argument. To make such comparisons, we are frequently told, is “offensive.” It “trivializes” the suffering of “true victims,” insults them.

As someone who has for years been mystified by this presumed “difference” between eggs in an omelet and “true victims,” I’ve decided to at last get to the bottom of it.

What follows is a sort of quiz. I’ve deliberately removed any references to the nationalities of either the perpetrators or the victims in these descriptions. I also have made a point of describing a range of abuses from gross torture and murder to simple dehumanization. What they have in common is that these were things that happened within the past 100 years, and were done at the behest of governments. Some were during the Third Reich. Some were Communist. Some were Middle Eastern, some right-wing, some left wing. At least one took place in Pinochet’s Chile. If the difference between being abused by an anti-Communist/Anti-Moslem regime is that obvious, readers should have no trouble picking out which was which – and explaining why one is bad, and the other not so bad.

In short, it’s an egg-hunt. Which of these qualified as abuse, torture, inhumanity to be unreservedly condemned – and which were just eggs going into Pinochet’s or some other right-wing regimes yummy, free market omelet? Which ones would inspire right wing sites like Free Republic and Little Green Footballs to roar about the inhumanity of these fiends – and which ones would just result in smirks of barely concealed satisfaction?

Freeper lurkers are, of course, welcome to participate.

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The journalist was arrested after they took power. Few people were surprised, since those leading this new regime had been the frequent targets of his barbed, often witty attacks. His wife learned of his death about a year later when she received his bloodied eye-glasses in the mail.

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Women prisoners were often treated in ways that can only be described as grotesque. Rape, sometimes so brutal that it breached the peritoneum, was a frequently used method of interrogation. A hospital technician was blindfolded, deprived of sleep for three days, tortured with electric shock applied to her genitals, shot up with drugs, and raped orally. In some cases, women were gang-raped and told to “respond” or they would be forced to perform fellatio.

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The entire community, men, women, and children, were gathered together by the soldiers and then, one by one, selected and killed. To save ammunition, bullets were not used on the children. Instead, they were seized by the feet and swung, their heads smashed against a post, or simply torn apart using a rope and three strong men.

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The students were guilty of scattering leaflets critical of the government at a local university. They were not tortured, but they were picked up, put in jail, and interrogated. When it was established that they were guilty of the offense they were quickly executed.

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A few hours after his arrest for his political activities, the young man died in police custody. The authorities claimed it was suicide, but the autopsy report stated he had died from shock, probably as the result of an electric current being run through his body. In short, he had been tortured to death. He was seventeen.

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One night, in the center of a wide circle of searchlights and machine gun emplacements, several thousand men were ordered to lie on their stomachs, their faces pressed into the earth. Every now and then, one of them would be forced to rise and run, pursued, beaten and kicked until he fell and was forced to rise with more kicks and blows. The pursuit took place within the circle, the tormentors and the tormented running across the backs of the terrified prisoners. When the victim finally fell and could rise no more, another was chosen, and the game continued throughout the night. Morning brought with it the sight – and with the rising heat – the stench of those who had not survived the ordeal.

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Five years after he joined the opposition and fled, he received something in the mail. It showed the rape of a female relative. They called in soon afterwards to ask him if he’d enjoyed it and to let him know they still had her in custody.

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The prison doctor had measured the middle-aged inmate’s blood pressure at 240/120. “That’s too low, the interrogators said. “We’re going to kill you by driving it up to 340, and it won’t leave so much as a bruise.” After a night spent in interrogation, the prisoner was put in a cell, and watched closely during the day by a jailer. At any sign of sleep, the jailer would break in and yell, “Open your eyes or I’ll haul you off that cot by the legs and tie you to the wall standing up.”

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The musician was arrested the day after they took power. Few people were surprised, since he had been an ardent supporter of the recently overthrown government. When his wife was allowed to retrieve his body a few days later, she discovered that, before being shot to death, he had been repeatedly tortured over a period of several days, his hands smashed with rifle butts.

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They picked up the woman with her two year old son on suspicion of supporting an opposition party. In addition to being tortured herself, she was forced to watch as her son’s hands were burned with cigarettes, and electroshocks were administered to his back.

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The prisoners were ordered to clean the excrement from a latrine by wiping it up with their shirts, which, still caked with feces, were then tied closely around their faces by the laughing guards.