Chile is prosperous today? 40% of Chileans live below the poverty line.
A three-year-old Marxist government of Salvador ALLENDE was overthrown in 1973 by a military coup led by Augusto PINOCHET, who ruled until a freely elected president was installed in 1990. Sound economic policies, maintained consistently since the 1980s, have contributed to steady growth, reduced poverty rates by over half, and have helped secure the country's commitment to democratic and representative government. Chile has increasingly assumed regional and international leadership roles befitting its status as a stable, democratic nation.
pinochet overthrew a democratically elected President to "save democracy?" What crap. Allende elected by a minority of voters? So was Bush!
Chile is prosperous today? 40% of Chileans live below the poverty line.
Pinochet knew nothing of the tortures at the time? Even I knew about them. How could he not? Amnesty International knew. The Toronto Star knew. The fucking RCC even knew. But Pinochet, the President of the country didn't know. WOW, that man must have been a very heavy sleeper.
This article, start to finish, is a pack of lies. It's bullshit. I know who the author is. He's a fascist. He'll asy anything in support of fascism. This whole thing is absurd.
The CIA WHAT-book? The CIA was instrumental in the overthrow of the Allende government and the torture and murder of over 3,000 Chileans by fascist criminals. And you think they're gonna admit to that in their own "factbook?"
These guys are bullshit artists, liars and murderers. They're about as believable as the average Nazi war criminal. Nice that they publish a factbook though. Even the Nazi war criminals didn't have the chutzpah to do that.
The CIA WHAT-book? The CIA was instrumental in the overthrow of the Allende government and the torture and murder of over 3,000 Chileans by fascist criminals. And you think they're gonna admit to that in their own "factbook?"
These guys are bullshit artists, liars and murderers. They're about as believable as the average Nazi war criminal. Nice that they publish a factbook though. Even the Nazi war criminals didn't have the chutzpah to do that.
Chile has a market-oriented economy characterized by a high level of foreign trade. During the early 1990s, Chile's reputation as a role model for economic reform was strengthened when the democratic government of Patricio AYLWIN - which took over from the military in 1990 - deepened the economic reform initiated by the military government. Growth in real GDP averaged 8% during 1991-97, but fell to half that level in 1998 because of tight monetary policies implemented to keep the current account deficit in check and because of lower export earnings - the latter a product of the global financial crisis. A severe drought exacerbated the recession in 1999, reducing crop yields and causing hydroelectric shortfalls and electricity rationing, and Chile experienced negative economic growth for the first time in more than 15 years. Despite the effects of the recession, Chile maintained its reputation for strong financial institutions and sound policy that have given it the strongest sovereign bond rating in South America. Between 2000 and 2007 growth ranged between 2%-6%. Throughout these years Chile maintained a low rate of inflation with GDP growth coming from high copper prices, solid export earnings (particularly forestry, fishing, and mining), and growing domestic consumption. President BACHELET in 2006 established an Economic and Social Stabilization Fund to hold excess copper revenues so that social spending can be maintained during periods of copper shortfalls. This fund will surpass $20 billion by the end of 2007. Chile continues to attract foreign direct investment, but most foreign investment goes into gas, water, electricity and mining. Unemployment has exhibited a downward trend over the past two years, dropping to 7.8% and 6.7% at the end of 2006 and 2007, respectively. Chile deepened its longstanding commitment to trade liberalization with the signing of a free trade agreement with the US, which took effect on 1 January 2004. Chile claims to have more bilateral or regional trade agreements than any other country. It has 57 such agreements (not all of them full free trade agreements), including with the European Union, Mercosur, China, India, South Korea, and Mexico.
Does the factbook tell you what percentage of the population lives below the poverty line even now?
Does the factbook tell you what kind of tortures were used on the 3,000 Chileans tortured to death by their own government? Does the factbook show you any pictures of the 3,000 Chileans that were tortured to death? Or of their parents?
Does it show you what any of the bodies looked like after torture?
Do you have any concept at all of right and wrong or is it all a question of GDP and GNP?
DIT: Population below poverty line:
Definition Field Listing
18.2% (2005)
That's a little shy of 40%
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It would be if I believed it. I don't believe it. JS or maybe XO posted the real figures for Chile recently in another thread. I'll have to leave it up to them to get the real figures.
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Ho Chi Minh never had 3,000 of his own citizens tortured to death.
Does that answer your question?
And so did the "Chicago Boys" the economists who graduated under Milton Friedman's tutelage.
What the folks who like to lick Friedman's orifices don't want to admit is that the Free Market free for all failed miserably! It was a disaster. Inflation was in the thousands of percents. While wages sank in real terms. Unemployment hit a third of the population.
| But did any Chilean indeed have that better life because of free-market policies? It is a matter of faith among the left that Chile in fact had its economy destroyed by rampant Friedmanism. In an excellent article (not available online) that appeared in the August 1983 issue of Inquiry magazine in the midst of Chile's first severe recession after some early market reforms, called "Did Milton Friedman Really Ruin Chile?" Jonathan Marshall pointed out that both Friedman, who was too quick to declare permanent victory for free-market reform in Chile, and his detractors, who thought his policies had brought the nation to ruination, were missing some important details: "Friedman's own proteges abandoned laissez-faire economics at certain critical junctures, and these departures, not any maniacal monetarism, produced Chile's suffering." Marshall particularly fingered Chile's very un-Friedmanlike insistence on fixing the price of the Chilean peso to U.S. dollars in the early '80s, creating an overvaluing of the peso that devastated the Chilean export market. He also noted Chile's continued system of crony capitalism in which those with access got special government credit, and bailouts when free-market risk hurt them. Those sorts of policies, as well as a worldwide collapse in copper prices, Chile's prime export, were to blame for Chile's early '80s recession, not a mad rush for too-free markets. |
It turns out that free markets = military police states.
These were states of terror.
And amazingly you have "libertarians" and right-wingers defending this shit today. And in Orwellian fashion they use terms like "freedom" and "democracy" when they speak in hallowed reverence to megalomaniacs like Pinochet or useless twats like Milton Friedman.
<<Ho Chi Minh killed two million Vietnameese.>>
Bullshit. He led his country in a war for independence from foreigners, and the last foreigners he defeated were the Amerikkkans. In the course of his driving the Amerikkkan invaders out of his country, 2,000,000 Vietnamese had to die, most of them killed by Amerikkkans.
It seems to be typical of criminal fascist regimes to blame the victims of their aggression. Hitler blames the Jews for the gas chambers, and Amerikkka blames the Vietnamese for the deaths of 2 million Vietnamese. Too bad nobody except the fascists and their stooges is taken in by it.
<<Pinochet is such a piker.>>
Agreed. But a piker when compared to Hitler. You can't even compare him to Ho Chi Minh. Uncle Ho was a courageous leader of his people in their long fight for independence, not a stooge of the CIA and an agent of U.S. imperialism. Apples and oranges.
Ha. This is an obvious invitation.
Ha. This is an obvious invitation.
And you're an obvious idiot!
Here's a Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Chile) showing the GDP trend of Chile from 1955.
And let's note, despite being governed by your Marxist-trained leader, Chile's equivalent of Social Security is still private, and still pays better returns than our does, and the economy is still essentially free-market based.
I'll also note you've yet to produce a scrap of documentation supporting your contention that Pinochet's economic policies produced the disaster you claim for them. By any quantifiable measure, that's simply not true.
In 1982 and 1983, Chile?s GDP fell by 16 percent. The collapse of the financial sector cost Chilean taxpayers between 30 and 40 percent of GDP. Unemployment shot up to 30 percent. Around 50 percent of the population fell below the poverty line. Extreme poverty affected 30 percent of the population.
People living below the poverty line still represented 45 percent of the population in 1987. Additionally, a key decision by the Pinochet government to reduce taxes and government expenditures in 1988 had a further negative impact in social policies. The decrease in social expenditures was equivalent to 3 percent of GDP, resulting in severe deterioration in the coverage and quality of public health services, lower wages for teachers, and lower pensions for the elderly.
You point out a couple of ways in which Chile or Argentina were not pure lily white free market states. Therefore, Friedman is vindicated.
Actually, I tend to believe and there is evidence aplenty that the purist view is essentially part of the problem. It is nearly religion. It is a purism of which economists and military worked together to "cleanse" society of any impurities. The interrogators in Chilean death camps would tell their victims that they needed to be cured. It mimiced the racial purity of Nazism.
So where was the freedom in these countries? Elections were gone. Political parties were outlawed. Freedom of assembly and the press were gone. Trade Unionism was obliterated. The freedom to disagree with the government was gone. The freedom to disagree with Milton Friedman's beliefs was gone. Did free markets = free people. Hell no! To "free the markets" it took torture, death, murder, disappearing, rape. The people targeted were the working class, unionists, poets, musicians, journalists, professors, peasants and it went into the heart of society UP. Chile made it illegal to have students give group reports, because that defied the logic of individualism. Think about that.
So if I sound passionate about it, it is because I am. These people laid waste, not just to leftists, but to an entire culture and society. And worst of all...the United States supported it, not just with money, but with active participation of agents and corporate interest.
Milton Friedman always claimed to separate the economics from the horror of the realities in those countries - but that was the worst lie of all. Do you hear many people avidly separating Nazi economic policies from their other policies? No, it went hand-in-hand. There was no Nazism without anti-Semitism.
<<This is what I am getting at, North Vietnameese who might have disagreed with Ho Chi Minh were no better off than Cheilian Communists.>>
And you know this because . . ?
Actually you don't know it because it is not true. You make this stuff up as you go along, but that's OK. I would like to know WHY? Why would you want to make up stuff like this? And what if anything does it add to this discussion? You know and I know that there is not a shred of evidence to support what you say. Are you making it up because you think, "That's how it must have been. Ho was a communist. Communists don't tolerate dissent. Communists must torture their opponents to death?"
Help me out here, plane. I just want a window into your mind. You know you're lying. I know you're lying. It's OK, I don't give a shit, you're saying something that's not true, it's not the worst thing in the world, but I'd really like to know why you do it. I'd really like to understand somebody like you. If I understood you, I could maybe reach you. whether you realize it or not, people like you are a big part of the world's problem. You don't MAKE the wars, but you support the ones who do - - even when it's directly to your own disadvantage and everyone else's disadvantage. And I really cannot figure you out.
<<Ho as a stooge of his Soviet masters is an apple.>>
That's hilarious - - you obviously know absolutely nothing about Ho Chi Minh or Viet Nam. Ho was receiving aid from both China and Russia, so it was impossible for him to tie himself too closely to one side or the other of the "Sino-Soviet split." As a matter of fact from the time that Khruschev began touting his bullshit policy of "peaceful co-existence," around 1960, Uncle Ho moved noticeably closer to the Chinese side and stayed there until Khruschev was removed from power.
Plane hears stuff on Rush. But not just Rush. It is as though he was a magnet for disinformation and propaganda. It apears to stick to him like superglue.
Like Reagan, he knows tons and tons of stuff, and like the stuff Reagan knew, most of it it isn't actually true.
Plane hears stuff on Rush. But not just Rush. It is as though he was a magnet for disinformation and propaganda. It apears to stick to him like superglue.
Like Reagan, he knows tons and tons of stuff, and like the stuff Reagan knew, most of it it isn't actually true.
Actually, Plane listens to quite a lot of NPR and is heavy into documentaries, certainly NOT the type of leisure time spent by someone who is as scrwwed in the head as you seem to not only imply but state.
I happen to agree with him on this issue, and I have noticed I tend to generally even thoguh he does support Bush a little much, I'd say, so am I part of this "vast rightwing conspiracy" as one of your Leftist leaders said?
So what does happen to free thinkers in Vietnam?
You also mentioned the re-education camps. Again, being re-educated and released is not even remotely comparable to being tortured to death.
Actually, I tend to believe and there is evidence aplenty that the purist view is essentially part of the problem. It is nearly religion. It is a purism of which economists and military worked together to "cleanse" society of any impurities. The interrogators in Chilean death camps would tell their victims that they needed to be cured. It mimiced the racial purity of Nazism.
I don't think much of anything happens to "free thinkers" in Vietnam, unless they are dumb enough to challenge the Party or take active steps against the government. Maybe write a newsletter that deals with human rights or something like that - - then I would think they would get beaten up and/or thrown in jail. The Party spent a lot of blood and lives of people near and dear to them to bring independence and socialism to the Vietnamese people, and they aren't too anxious to see the gains they bled and died for eroded by the activities of anti-social schmucks. Not after what they had to sacrifice to get there.
[...]
You also mentioned the re-education camps. Again, being re-educated and released is not even remotely comparable to being tortured to death. Only a moral imbecile could equate the two. A long war of sacrifice had been waged by Uncle Ho against the French, the Japs, the Chinese, the French again and then the Amerikkkans. In the course of that war, there were traitors to their own people, traitors who had joined the foreigners (or at least the French and then the Amerikkkans) to fight against, torture and kill their own people for the sake of their foreign masters. Instead of killing them all immediately for their treason (which I admit is how I myself would have handled them) Uncle Ho decided instead to re-educate them. I'm no expert but my impression seems to be from the reading I've done and the Vietnamese that I've met here, the average re-education took around five to six years in a camp, less for the low-end civilian and military flunkies - - but here's a paper based on the experiences of a Lt.-Col. who was in for 11 years: http://www.hmongstudies.org/PeterVanDoAReeducationCampStory.pdf It's interesting to note that although there are lots of complaints about poor health and sanitation, near-starvation rations, untreated illnesses, many of them fatal, there is not a single complaint of torture in the entire document. Again, compared to Pinochet, the contrast couldn't be clearer. In my eyes, Uncle Ho is a humanitarian for not killing the whole damn bunch. Also their sentences - - while prisoners of the Amerikkkan fascists face death sentences and probably will rot for 30 years to life, the longest that Uncle Ho held a treasonous rat in custody was 11 years.
Maybe you weren't following the thread.
Personally, I don't think that Ho Chi Minh's reeducation camps would have been pleasant, but being killed and tortured by Pinochet would have been even worse.
Your argument, Plane, seems to be that since Ho got to reeducate dissidents, Pinochet should be given a pass for all the torture and death he dealt out, and that is just plane dumb.
No one has the right to torture or suppress or murder people because of their beliefs. If you start throwing bombs, that is different.
Allende was elected by the people of Chile. Pinochet was elected by no one. Neither was Ho Chi Minh.
Had Pinochet been good for Chile, his party would have triumphed at the polls once Chile had free elections. Chile has absolute political freedom now, and the rightwing's election would be easily tolerated if they had the votes. But they have not won any election since the old bastard was thrown out of office, and it does not look like this will happen anytime soon.
Personally, I think the people of Chile should have the ultimate and supreme authority to elect anyone they choose, even if US propagandists or Rush or anyone disagrees.
<<It is one thing to ask people to deal with less, and rather another to force them into re education camps to teach them to deal with less.>>
The re-ed camps were primarily for officers of the "South Vietnamese" Army and officials of the "South Vietnamese" government. Traitors and collaborators who IMHO should have been shot immediately after the victory was achieved. Many of them were die-hard anti-communists who could not be allowed to poison the atmosphere of the new People's Republic and sabotage it on behalf of their Amerikkkan masters. Re-educating them was a way of deprogramming their anti-communist brainwashing. The theory was that the re-education process would reveal those enemies of the people who would not change, so they could then be liquidated in the more traditional way; the rest could be salvaged, returned to their families and the larger society, where they could either make a positive contribution or at the very least not constitute a road-block on the way to socialism.
The only other theoretical explanation for the re-ed program was that there were too many of the bastards to just shoot - - the hardship for the families would be enormous and the regime would have created a lot of enemies for itself unnecessarily. The Vietnamese CP was renowned for its pragmatism and IMHO this is one of its best examples. They looked ahead to the ultimate cost of executing people's justice upon the traitors and collaborators who fell into their hands and did a costs-benefit analysis. Doctrine and dogma took a back seat in this results-oriented regime.
Plane hears stuff on Rush. But not just Rush. It is as though he was a magnet for disinformation and propaganda. It apears to stick to him like superglue.
Like Reagan, he knows tons and tons of stuff, and like the stuff Reagan knew, most of it it isn't actually true.
Actually, Plane listens to quite a lot of NPR and is heavy into documentaries, certainly NOT the type of leisure time spent by someone who is as scrwwed in the head as you seem to not only imply but state.
I happen to agree with him on this issue, and I have noticed I tend to generally even thoguh he does support Bush a little much, I'd say, so am I part of this "vast rightwing conspiracy" as one of your Leftist leaders said?
Don't tell them enough to blow my advantages TP.
Are you comeing to the big VRWC picnic this year?
You point out a couple of ways in which Chile or Argentina were not pure lily white free market states. Therefore, Friedman is vindicated.
The problem here is not that Chile or Argentina were somehow just ever so slightly blemished free market states. The kind of crony capitalism that went on is not free market capitalism.
I watch people insist that Goldberg's new book Liberal Fascism is somehow in complete error because liberals would never support the Nazi racism and nationalism. This ignores that many of the domestic policies of Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy had a lot in common with liberal politics of the time and even of today. So, if we're going to argue that Chile was some sort of example of unadulterated free market capitalism, then let's all agree that Goldberg is right and fascism is basically liberal/socialist at heart. And I suppose next someone is going to tell me how China is a libertarian paradise.
Actually, I tend to believe and there is evidence aplenty that the purist view is essentially part of the problem. It is nearly religion. It is a purism of which economists and military worked together to "cleanse" society of any impurities. The interrogators in Chilean death camps would tell their victims that they needed to be cured. It mimiced the racial purity of Nazism.
Not at all like the socialist leaders who imprisoned or killed "enemies of the state". But please, by all means, find me some statement in Friedman's words that supports "cleansing" society in the manner your describing or anything remotely similar. I'm not saying Friedman was a saint, but let's not conflate free market ideas with authoritarianism. Yes Pinochet and others may have done so, but that hardly means we should make the same mistake.
So where was the freedom in these countries? Elections were gone. Political parties were outlawed. Freedom of assembly and the press were gone. Trade Unionism was obliterated. The freedom to disagree with the government was gone. The freedom to disagree with Milton Friedman's beliefs was gone. Did free markets = free people. Hell no! To "free the markets" it took torture, death, murder, disappearing, rape. The people targeted were the working class, unionists, poets, musicians, journalists, professors, peasants and it went into the heart of society UP. Chile made it illegal to have students give group reports, because that defied the logic of individualism. Think about that.
Again, they didn't have free markets. And they didn't have them because the governments were authoritarian, as you just illustrated. If anything, we do not see here examples of free markets=fascism, but rather that free market ideas mixed with tyranny don't work.
So if I sound passionate about it, it is because I am. These people laid waste, not just to leftists, but to an entire culture and society. And worst of all...the United States supported it, not just with money, but with active participation of agents and corporate interest.
And you'll get no argument from me there. I'm no fan of that.
Milton Friedman always claimed to separate the economics from the horror of the realities in those countries - but that was the worst lie of all. Do you hear many people avidly separating Nazi economic policies from their other policies? No, it went hand-in-hand. There was no Nazism without anti-Semitism.
How about Soviet Russia's economic policies? Are those separate from, say, Stalin's atrocities? Is socialism responsible for the government sanctioned deaths and rights violations that went on in the U.S.S.R.? I don't believe you'll say yes to that. I think maybe you might even argue that Soviet Russia was not really a good example of socialism. But I'm supposed to believe Chile was some sort of example of free market ideas being inseparable from Pinochet's tyranny? Go on, pull the other one.
Letter from Margaret Thatcher to Friedrich Hayek
February 17, 1982
Thank you for your letter of 5 February. I was very glad that you able to attend the dinner so thoughtfully organized by Walter Salomon. It was not only a great pleasure for me, it was, as always, instructive and rewarding to hear your views on the great issues of our times.
I was aware of the remarkable success of the Chilean economy in reducing the share of Government expenditure substantially over the decade of the 70s. The progression from Allende's Socialism to the free enterprise capitalist economy of the 1980s is a striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons.
However, I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time. Then they will endure.
<<Had Ho Chi Minh been good for Vietnam, his party would have triumphed at the polls once Vietnam had free elections.>>
Spoken in pure ignorance of the situation, as usual.
The Geneva agreements which partitioned Viet Nam into North and South called for free elections on both sides one year following partition. The South refused to hold the elections. When the U.S. decided to support the South, Eisenhower was asked why he was backing a regime which refused to hold free elections (at the time it was controlled by a group of mostly Roman Catholic Vietnamese who were formerly low-ranking officers of the French colonial army, basically French puppets) Eisenhower's famous answer was, if we allowed free elections, 80 per cent of them (South Vietnamese voters) would vote for Ho Chi Minh.
I wish I could, it sounds like fun. American movie audiences treat war films like they were meant to be interactive media. I saw The Deer Hunter in Dallas once, and when Christopher Walken and the other G.I.s bust out of the prison where they were being forced to play Russian roulette, the entire audience broke out in whoops, Yee-Haws and rebel yells for a solid two or three minutes. Seemed like the walls of the theatre were shaking. Never heard anything like it before or since. (I was gonna cheer for the Viet Cong, but it seemed like a bad idea even then.) I guess there's a good, wholesome side to American patriotism, and I felt privileged to see an all-out demonstration of it that night.
Never been in Macon, not even to visit the Macon County Jail, but I did spend a day on business in Athens, Georgia once, back in the 80s. Eavesdropped shamelessly on some of the dinner conversations in the nice, 50s-style (booths and mini-juke-boxes) family restaurant where I ate my supper, and they were hilarious.
The point at issue in this thread between plane and I was whether harsh communists are the moral equivalent of harsh fascists.
I'm not attacking libertarianism, or saying that one cannot support the free market without supporting tyranny. What I am saying is that Milton Friedman did not support such a notion (in fact he later wrote a book that stated that "change requires a crisis" and that the crisis leaves a void where one has to be ready with his or her ideas. It was a strong refutation of the idea that free markets naturally bring freedom (or vice versa).
That's what makes my stomach churn the worst. That Friedman and von hayek and Harberger were whitewashed from their roles in the Southern Cone (in fairness, von Hayek simply lavished his praise on it, he never played the direct role in the countries that the other two did). So while the Soviets get rightly blasted for the role of the KGB and the Gulags, neoliberalism trudges onward like OJ Simpson - guilty of crimes against humanity - but free to walk the streets, in complete arrogance as if everything was golden, the bloody knife in a trophy case at home.
| "I have nothing good to say about the political regime that Pinochet imposed," Friedman said in 1991. "It was a terrible political regime. The real miracle of Chile is not how well it has done economically; the real miracle of Chile is that a military junta was willing to go against its principles and support a free-market regime designed by principled believers in a free market?.In Chile, the drive for political freedom that was generated by economic freedom and the resulting economic success ultimately resulted in a referendum that introduced political democracy." --http://www.reason.com/news/show/117278.html (http://www.reason.com/news/show/117278.html) |
| Rarely are the simplest facts, many of which complicate Ms. Klein's presentation, given their proper due. First, the reach of government has been growing in virtually every developed nation in the world, including in America, and it hardly seems that a far-reaching free market conspiracy controls much of anything in the wealthy nations. Second, Friedman and most other free market economists have consistently called for limits on state power, including the power to torture. Third, the reach of government has been shrinking in India and China, to the indisputable benefit of billions. Fourth, it is the New Deal--the greatest restriction on capitalism in 20th century America and presumably beloved by Ms. Klein--that was imposed in a time of crisis. Fifth, many of the crises of the 20th century resulted from anti-capitalistic policies, rather than from capitalism: China was falling apart because of the murderous and tyrannical policies of Chairman Mao, which then led to bottom-up demands for capitalistic reforms; New Zealand and Chile abandoned socialistic policies for freer markets because the former weren't working well and induced economic crises. --http://www.nysun.com/article/63867?page_no=2 (http://www.nysun.com/article/63867?page_no=2) |
Can free markets exist without cronyism? Can they exist without the death camps or torture chambers? I don't know (with advocates such as you, I tend to think it is feasible). Historically, we've never seen it. The United States is certainly not the bastion of freedom we've claimed to be. Historically, we've supported some of the world's most nightmarish regimes and literally wrote the book on torture.
Socialism can. It did not in the Soviet Union. You are right to criticize that. But it exists very well in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and other nations where the economies do well and so do the people with no gulags, and no re-education camps.
The "liberal fascist" thing is another discussion, not really worth the effort. Fascism does not recognize class warfare. It is pure corporatism, similar in many ways to neoliberalism, except that Fascists were willing to work with unions and neoliberals cut out that third point of the triangle (the other two are government and corporations).
We're all greedy to some extent but when some people's greed leads them to become enemies of the people by engaging in anti-Soviet, counterrevolutionary or pro-fascist activities, that is the end of their right to exist. Real altruists have not only the right (in the name of the people) but also the duty to kill them. Or, according to circumstances, to re-educate them and spare the ones who can be salvaged.
We're all greedy to some extent but when some people's greed leads them to become enemies of the people by engaging in anti-Soviet, counterrevolutionary or pro-fascist activities, that is the end of their right to exist. Real altruists have not only the right (in the name of the people) but also the duty to kill them. Or, according to circumstances, to re-educate them and spare the ones who can be salvaged.
I have a difficult time reconciling socialism as advocated by JS and socialism as advocated by Michael Tee. They seem at odds to me. Am I wrong, JS? Michael Tee?
<<I have a difficult time reconciling socialism as advocated by JS and socialism as advocated by Michael Tee. They seem at odds to me. Am I wrong, JS? Michael Tee?>>
There are different flavours of socialism. I'm hard-line and JS is soft-line. I'm Stalinist and JS is SR (Social Revolutionary.) (just kidding about JS and SR)
Reg:Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
Stan: Yeah, the Judean People's Front.
Reg: Yeah. Splitters.
Stan: And the Popular Front of Judea.
Reg: Yeah. Splitters.
Stan: And the People's Front of Judea.
Reg: Yea... what?
Stan: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
Reg: We're the People's Front of Judea!
Stan: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
Reg: People's Front!
Francis: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
Reg: He's over there. [points to a lone man]
Reg, Stan, Francis, Judith: SPLITTER!
JS, about Allende. He disbanded the Workers' Militia just before the coup. This was the stupidest and weakest thing he could have done and I blame him completely for the disaster that followed. He never should have trusted the national army, it had very close ties with the U.S. military and the assassination of General Schneider should have alerted him to their plans, as should the truckers' and the housewives' (tin pan) strikes, which were entirely CIA creations. THAT was the time to triple the workers' militia, arm them with Eastern-bloc arms and had the Soviet Navy pay a few friendly visits to Chilean naval bases and the country's commercial ports. Allende was a coward and a weakling who failed to defend his country against fascism.