If only Jeanne Kirkpatrick could have stayed around a few more days, she would have felt vindicated by the obituaries and editorials that poured in in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s death on Sunday. Author of the famous 1979 article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which prompted President Reagan to appoint her as his foreign policy advisor, Kirkpatrick argued that traditional autocrats (her euphemism for right-wing dictatorships) were less harmful, less cruel, and more likely than the left-wing variety to open the door to liberal democracies. It is an argument that, taken to its conclusion, simply tries to quantify how much death and torture is acceptable if it is all done in the name of our ideals. Pinochet’s passing has provided an opportunity to trot this argument out again as a way of giving the Chilean dictator his due.
The end of the Cold War and the emergence of a democratic Eastern Europe out of countries that were, indeed, left-wing dictatorships, would seem to have put Kirkpatrick’s big idea to rest and exposed it for the politically partisan notion that it was to begin with. But reading the encomiums to Pinochet over the last two days, we had to keep rubbing our eyes and pinching ourselves. Could it be that anyone would still try to qualify one brutal dictator as somehow less bad or more justified in his cruelty than another?
The Wall Street Journal offers a perfect example of this strange revisionism and the not-so-subtle form it’s taking. A Journal editorial today began with the contention that “the real story” about Pinochet is “more complicated” than the standard narrative, which only seeks “to emphasize the loss of liberty during the 17 years he ruled the country as a military dictator.” See, if we really want to take stock of Pinochet as a leader, we need to consider that while “he is responsible for the death and torture that occurred on his watch … had Salvador Allende succeeded in turning Chile into another Cuba, many more might have died.”
That’s the first way Pinochet’s legacy is twisted around: by comparing it to a hypothetical Allende regime (a man who was, by the way, democratically elected) or to Castro’s reign. But intellectual honesty would dictate that neither of these two comparisons should mitigate a real look at Pinochet’s crimes. Intellectual honesty, it would seem, is not the goal here.
Having established the “complexity” of Pinochet’s human rights violations, the Journal moves on to its coup de grace (excuse the pun): crediting Pinochet for the free market, Milton Friedman-inspired reforms that, it claims, are responsible for making Chile the envy of South America. The Journal even gives Pinochet credit for securing a democratic Chile, one “that truly belongs to the Chilean people.” This about a man who trampled over democratic institutions, then only reluctantly stepped down from power, while keeping himself in charge of the army and finally appointing himself senator-for-life in a bid for permanent immunity for his sins. “The day they touch one of my men, the rule of law ends,” he warned in 1991, afraid that his minions might be brought up on crimes against humanity.
Maybe it should not come as a surprise that the Wall Street Journal editorial page — defender of the free market at any cost — would try to find a way to praise Pinochet. And it is not the only conservative paper to be morally compromised by his death. Look at the editorial page of the New York Sun, which only reminds us that Pinochet’s hands are “stained with blood,” after waxing excitedly about the influence of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys and how “in his nearly two decades in power [Pinochet] presided over radical changes in the economy that set a new philosophy for how to develop a country, an example that has been followed by reform governments all over the world.” Over at National Review‘s dubiously named “symposium” on the meaning of Pinochet’s death, the positive reviews are five to one — including a weigh-in from Otto Reich, President Bush’s former assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, who offers this pearl: “Augusto Pinochet was a tragic figure. Instead of being remembered for saving Chilean democracy from a communist takeover, and starting the country on the longest-lasting economic expansion in Latin America, which he did, he will be remembered mostly for carrying out a brutal campaign of human rights abuses.”
But the most surprising appraisal (and the one that has many bloggers apoplectic) is the editorial in today’s Washington Post, which brings up Kirkpatrick’s double standard idea and fully endorses the conservative line on Pinochet’s legacy, down to the irrelevant Chile/Cuba comparison. “It’s hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America,” the Post declares. “In the past 15 years, Chile’s economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It’s leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired. It also has a vibrant democracy. Earlier this year it elected another socialist president, Michelle Bachelet, who suffered persecution during the Pinochet years.”
The Post editorial — and the others like it — is based on a strange, morally bankrupt logic. It might be true that it was Pinochet’s initial embrace of Friedmanite reforms — deregulation, privatization, deficit reduction, export expansion, and so on — that stabilized his country’s economy and made the GDP grow and inflation fall. But is the lesson of Pinochet that the murder of 3,000 and torture of 30,000 is a worthy price to pay for liberalizing an economy? Is it that trampling on democracy and terrorizing a population for 20 years is legitimate if the result is a sound economic model? How is this any different from saying that Castro (just as evil a dictator as Pinochet) should be excused for his crimes because Cuba has great health care and educational systems?
A blogger responding to the Post editorial, Michael J.W. Stickings at the Reaction, put it best: “The problem with the view espoused by Kirkpatrick, put into practice by Reagan, and endorsed here by the Post is that it excuses all manner of brutality in the name of economic neoliberalism. No matter the social consequences, no matter the negative impact on all others but the rich. Whether it’s Pinochet or Marcos or Noriega or any other rightist dictator, it’s all about anti-communism and extremist free market reforms. Those reforms and their dubious successes justify whatever brutality enabled them … Chile is doing relatively well today, but Pinochet’s true legacy is his tyranny. The ends do not justify the means, particularly when the ends are in question, and dubious reforms hardly justify mass murder.” Conservative or liberal, editorial pages can only expect to be taken seriously if they are consistent. Call a monster a monster.
The last words should probably go to an editorial page that got it right, the Los Angeles Times: “Whatever his accomplishments or failures in the economic realm (which are destined to be debated for decades to come) there is no longer any possibility of denying the level of soulless brutality and inhumanity that Pinochet imposed at bayonet point on Chile. It wasn’t just the thousands of dead, tortured and jailed. It was rather the en masse humiliation of an entire population, forced to kowtow to a snarling dictator who had overnight reversed 100 years of civil democratic tradition … Chileans have a saying: ‘The color of blood is never forgotten.’ Pinochet’s brutality unleashed the sort of ghosts that never rest.”
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.