Pinochet Legacy

[The_Professor]

<<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.

It is clear you have not seen Red Dawn or read Between Planets....sigh.

[The_Professor]

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?

VRWC? Vast Right Wing Conspiracy? What picnic? I'll bring rotten eggs in case any liberal rabble rousers show up!

[Michael Tee]

<<It is clear you have not seen Red Dawn or read Between Planets....sigh.>>

No, but I saw First Blood and the next two Rambo movies.  Do they count?

[The_Professor]

Only if you also saw Delta Force.

BTW, Stallone's new movie, "Rambo" is coming out in a few weeks. Come on down to Macon and we can go together. I'll throw in AVP Requiem for dessert.

[Michael Tee]

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.

[_JS]

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.

First of all, let me say that I knew that you would not be one of the libertarians who would defend Pinochet or what took place in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, or Uruguay.

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).

The "Chilean Economic Miracle" was a myth, at least when viewed from multiple economic indicators. Yet, it was vigorously promoted by Friedman, Harberger, and the deified von Hayek. The latter wrote a letter praising Chile and Pinochet to Maggie Thatcher. Hayek instructed Thatcher to emulate Pinochet. Thatcher wrote back to her economics mentor that she would, but that Britons would not accept the "Chicago Boys" reforms and that British democratic institutions and traditions prevented her from implementing many of the necessary steps Chile's junta took and von hayek lavished praise upon.

Think on that UP. The man who wrote Road to Serfdom, a veritable god amongst right wing economists was in love with Chilean economics. His pupil, the Iron Lady, was blocked by what? The very democratic institutions that made Britain a western, free country. (I have the bibliographical details of the letters at home, I will get them for you).

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.

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).

[Xavier_Onassis]

I fail to see why anyone would need to see Red Dawn to understand some point about the real world:It was a rather poor propaganda film written from a wacko Reaganite perspective, to show us what a terrible place a world without Ronnie would be like.

Any film can make pretty much anyone agree with the guys who wrote it, at least if it is in any way a convincing portrayal of the world the viewer lives in. Among the greatest propaganda films are Potemkin and Triumph of the Will. Red Dawn a propaganda flick, as was the ABC series of the same ilk Amerika in which the USA is taken over by evil Kommissars. A well-made film can easily cause the viewer to sympathize with the hero and  for at least the duration of the film sympathize with his cause. In the film American Beauty , most people have little difficulty in sympathizing with a middle-aged lech whose greratest desire is to boink his daughter's 15 year old girlfriend.

What makes us do this is the power of image and narrative, not the power of logic.

I would still add that I find Pinochet to be a teacherous, evil scumbag, while Uncle Ho is a semi-benevolent undemocratic tyrant. I don't think I would like to have lived under either regime, but Pinochet's would have surely been worse.

[_JS]

As promised, here is the reply from Thatcher to Friedrich von Hayek.

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.

Correspondence in the Hayek Collection, box 101, folder 26, Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto, CA.

Underlining is mine.

So yes, your beloved economists did fall in love with the Chilean Economic myth.

[Plane]

<<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.

That is a misquote of JFK , not Eisenhour.

Kennedy was certain that no one in the north would be allowed to vote opposite the regimes wishes , a  sham that would have nothing to do with the will of the people.

[Plane]

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.

Macon is in Bibb county , but you can still eat at the Waffle house in every county we have.

[Plane]

   The point at issue in this thread between plane and I was whether harsh communists are the moral equivalent of harsh fascists. 

Well stated , all in all a very good post.

Your argument is in essnce that a blade of grass does care whether it is a cow or a horse that eats it.

That greedy people have no right to exist , but that altrustic people have right not only to exist ,but have the right to kill also.

[Michael Tee]

<<Your argument is in essnce that a blade of grass does care whether it is a cow or a horse that eats it.>>

Not in the slightest.  That has absolutely nothing to do with my argument and I am amazed that you could so baldly mis-state it.

My argument is that it matters to a cow whether it meets its death in a modern humane slaughterhouse or whether it is slowly roasted to death on a grill by sadists or given to a pack of wild dogs to be killed slowly and painfully in an arena.

<<That greedy people have no right to exist , but that altrustic people have right not only to exist ,but have the right to kill also.>>

That's a little closer.  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.

[Universe Prince]

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).

Saying that change requires crisis is hardly the same as saying that supporting a free market requires supporting tyranny. Now I haven't seen the book, and don't really have time to go find it. But as you present it, this hardly seems like an endorsement of tyranny and killing.

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.

That seems awfully harsh. But you might be right. Still, I haven't the time to look into this further. I wish I did. I am biased, but I have a hard time believing Friedman or Hayek would give praise to killing people. Don't misunderstand. I see that they praised economic policy in Chile, but I just have a hard time believing they were praising the killing. I have never seen anything of their work that would ever indicate they would endorse such a thing.

What I have seen on this suggests that Friedman's only direct connection to Pinochet was a short meeting on economic matters, not "cleansing" the nation. Friedman met with a number of world leaders, and apparently was willing to promote free market ideas to anyone who would listen, including Pinochet, which in hindsight should have been at the very least followed up with a condemnation of Pinochet's atrocities and authoritarianism. I do know that Friedman was not an endorser of Pinochet's political tyranny.

"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

So when you talk about this as if Friedman was somehow directly an accomplice in the deaths and torture, well, I have I hard time believing that.

And I would like to also point to a review by George Mason economist Tyler Cowen of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism".

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

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.

Well, we've had times when the U.S. has come close to a free market, and did not have to kill any citizens to do so. And notice that while the U.S. is willing to support bad guys and to torture, it's isn't really happening as a "cleansing" of the type Pinochet, or Stalin, had going on.

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.

I also notice those nations get along without pure socialism. Sweden, I think, has been making more economic moves toward more capitalist policies in the past decade or so. As have most of the socialist countries in Europe, as I understand it, because long term socialist policy has caused economic trouble for the countries. So we've never had a pure free market in the U.S. but I doubt we could claim Sweden et al were purely socialist countries either. The problem, as best I can determine, is not whether free markets or socialism lead to despotism, but whether people who insist on controlling the behavior of others leads to despotism, and clearly it does. Chile and the U.S.S.R. being examples of this.

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).

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that liberalism is fascism, or some variation of that sentiment. But I am saying that Chile never actually had free markets; so holding up Chile as some sort of free markets=fascism makes about as much sense as saying liberalism=fascism. Can we make some comparisons between Pinochet's economic policies and free market ideas? Obviously we can. But we can also make some rather obvious comparisons between liberal ideas and certain policies in fascist Germany and Italy. Let's not forget there was open admiration of Mussolini's Italy by many liberals in the U.S. and that includes many in Roosevelt's own administration. Comparison, however, is not the same as equating. People often confuse the two, but I see no reason for us to make that mistake.

[Universe Prince]

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?

[Michael Tee]

<<That is a misquote of JFK , not Eisenhour.

<<Kennedy was certain that no one in the north would be allowed to vote opposite the regimes wishes , a  sham that would have nothing to do with the will of the people.>>

Numerous websites and books quote Eisenhower, who in fact was the President of the U.S. at the time of the partition of Viet Nam and the refusal of the puppet South Vietnamese government to hold free elections:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vyTRW2_kV9cC&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=eisenhower+ho+chi+minh+vote+voted&source=web&ots=EKZTGOhzNj&sig=qYJKJK-fgfs7vLBMkV2pKPcg7mE

(link to one of many sites attributing the quote to Ike, none attribute it to JFK) 

The quote as I gave it was pretty accurate and the reason given had nothing whatsoever with the North holding or not holding the elections.  That wasn't even mentioned at the time in justification, although that's certainly no reason not to fabricate it now as a reason.  I don't know if the North was required by the Convention to hold the elections or not, but if even Eisenhower admitted Ho would get 80% of the vote in the South, it's a cinch that Uncle Ho wouldn't have had any trouble winning in the North.