Sunday, December 10, 2006

General Pinochet is Dead

Not sure I have an awful lot more to say. Brutal Dictator. Supported us during the Falklands War. UK House arrest was a disgrace. Not shedding a tear. End of story.

FOOTNOTE: This story first appeared on the Press Association at 17.59, on Sky at 17.56, on my blog at 17.43 and on the BBC News website... well, at 18.09 it still isn't there. UPDATE: 18.10, it's there now.

49 comments:

Anonymous said...

General Pinochet is Dead

More soon.


To me that sounds a bit final.......I am not sure what the more soon adds to matters

Anonymous said...

Is that a promise? Anyone applied the wooden stake yet?

Anonymous said...

When Fidel Castro dies then (Don't) Have Your Say on the BBC website will ask for "Your Tributes".

Whenever anyone to the right of Heath dies then it is always "Your Comments". Just wait.

SKY News is already spinning a lefty view of his legacy. He was a great man and a strong ally against the evil of communism.

RIP

Anonymous said...

Brutal dictator.

UK house arrest a joke.

Aren't those two statements slightly incongruous ?

Or does the fact that Maggie had tea with him wipe the slate on thousands of dead and tortured prisoners ?

Anonymous said...

Iain, Stop your facile beating up on the BBC - they mentioned it on R5 Live as soon as the footy finished. For goodness sake, do you really want to live in a country without a BBC ?

Then go and live in America.

Anonymous said...

So would Chile have been a better place under Allende? Was the brutality one-sided? What is the porpose of your post?

Gavin said...

"This story first appeared on the Press Association at 17.59, on Sky at 17.56, on my blog at 17.43"

Errrrm, very suspicious!! you didn't do the deed yourself, did you??

Anonymous said...

Have I missed out on Iain's "beating up" on the BBC??

When and where did this occur?

Anonymous said...

PS. Where did you first hear about Pinochet's death as you clearly heared about it before Sky declared it.

Anonymous said...

So you've noticed that, too, Geoff, eh? When Dennis Thatcher died, they asked for Your Comments. You are correct, when Fidel pops off, they will ask for Your Tributes.

Anonymous said...

Iain, In the spirit of 'Pinochet' perhaps you could threaten to make some of your opponents on this blog 'disappear' and turn up in a mass grave somewhere, after having died a slow death through being tortured ?

Just a thought !

Anonymous said...

Can I state the obvious and say that the lives lost in defending the Falklands were a waste anyway.

The Falkland islanders have no real connection with this country, are poorly educated and contribute little or nothing to the UK.

We struck a deal over Northern Ireland and we were in the midst of striking a deal over the Falklands. If we didn't have such intransigence in Number 10 at the team it could all have been sorted out by the FO over a nice cup of tea at Chatham House.

But then British lives are cheap when they're not your own family, and the 'Belgrano boys' cheaper.

Anonymous said...

We struck a deal over Northern Ireland and we were in the midst of striking a deal over the Falklands.

followed by a deal with Islamabad for power-sharing in Bradford no doubt ?

Anonymous said...

Pinochet dead? Good.

Check the Death List here and place your bets: http://www.deathlist.net/

Anonymous said...

I can see a long comment thread coming on.

Anonymous said...

I may not shed a tear - but then I don't generally make a habit of bawling over people I've never even met - however, I will raise a glass in his memory. He was OUR brutal dictator, and a damn sight better for Chile than the alternative he replaced.

Anonymous said...

Will Tony Blair be going over to try to horn in on the funeral?

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 6.46pm

Well there is plenty of oil down there .

As for General Pinochet, isnt it facinating that a right wing dictator is treated they way he has been. Yet you never hear anything about all the Communist and left wing dictators, with what they did to thir own population.

Anonymous said...

I'm curious - how exactly did you scoop Sky News, the BBC AND the Press Association on this one?

Do you have contacts in Chile?

Iain Dale said...

Woffle, I have my contacts - but not in Chile!

towcestarian said...

Met the bloke once. Seemed a nice enough sort of chap. I always found it rather comical that he became some sort of pantomime baddie for the lefties.

Mugabe. Met him too. Now there is an evil bastard if ever there was one. Strangely the lefties don't seem to mind him. Can't work them out at all.

Anonymous said...

It is true that Pinochet sanctioned the murder of some thousands of opponents. It is true that he halted the Sovietization of Chile just as Allende was completing the destruction of the economy as part of the usual strategy. Militia on rampage taking over small holdings. The military would be the next target before introducing a Cuban style regime which would have required the elimination of tens of thousands. Pinochet no saint. A necessary evil, possibly. Paralells Malaysia and Indonesia where 'strongmen' similarly 'killed off' attempted introduction leftist totalitarianism. Again probably for the relative benefit of the nation. Who knows?

Anonymous said...

He's not really dead at all. It's just a ploy to avoid war crimes prosecution.

And I hope he gets away with it. He was a great man who gave the international left a big bloody nose, probably the first time that that had happened since the Spanish Civil War 35 years earlier. Respect.

Anonymous said...

Be nice to Iain everyone. He is in a genuine quandary here. On the one hand, it is clear that the Pinochet regime, along with his pals in Argentina, was one of the most brutal, sadistic and barbaric since the war. On the other, Iain's Beloved, one M Thatcher, danced around Pinochet like an errant schoolgirl battling for a kind word from a troublingly cruel senior housemaster. Poor Iain! What to say under such circumstances. And then there was Norman Lamont. And a whole host of other venal Tory politicians who praised Pinochet.

But the sad truth is that this is all just part of Britain's long tradition of loving corrupt cruel dictators so long as we don't have to live under them. And so long as they fit in with the plans of our international bankers and businessmen. Carry on Saudi Princes! Long live Putin! Well done Mugabe!

Anonymous said...

I can see this having the same kind of public grief attached to the death of Diana...Dors, that is. It was a shame that the Malvinas did not go back to whom they belong under international law. But, what does Britain care about international law, prime example, Iraq. Wasn't this Rick O' Shea a friend of Maggie? No doubt Dave will be attending his funeral. It's a pity Iain can only drink his product placement Fanta. I will celebrate with a whiskey.

Luke Akehurst said...

17.55 on my blog, with a comprehensive obit and an exclusive about the role of British students in moving refugees to safe havens. I claim a share of the £5.

Anonymous said...

Oh, so the fact that he was useful to us in the Falklands makes it wrong to arrest him? Stalin was useful to us in WW2. Would you have given up the opportunity to try him if he ended up under house arrest in Britain?

towcestarian said...

leftie anonymong 10:14 said:
"the Pinochet regime was one of the most brutal, sadistic and barbaric since the war."

You are having a laugh, aren't you? Could I possibly suggest a few dictators that were/are just a tadge more brutally homicidal: Stalin, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Sadam Hussein. And lets not forget the minor brutalities of Rwanda, Tiamaman Square, Darfur, DR Congo etc etc etc.

Pinochet probably falls somewhere in the Putin and Gerry Adams league of politically motivated murdering bastards.

Gosh, you lefties really do know how to bear a grudge, don't you.

David Lindsay said...

How useful was he over the Falklands, really? Anyway, Thatcher had practically invited the Argentines in, and the Royal Navy then had to behave as if she did not exist in order to drive them back out again, a sort of coup without which the Falklands would be Argentine to this day.

Reagan, Botha, Friedman, Kirkpatrick (from whose doctrine Botha and Pinochet so benefited, like Marcos, the Duvaliers, &c), and now Pinochet. Next will be She. But remember, these elderly or deceased represent the future. Don't they?

And will She be going to Pinochet's funeral?

Etzel Pangloss said...

I can't deny deny it, i'm glad people die.

I feel strange....
..but good.

Ross said...

"It was a shame that the Malvinas did not go back to whom they belong under international law"

They did, look up the concept of self determination.

Anonymous said...

About 3000 people were killed by the pinochet regime. The national stadium was turned into a concentration camp housing 40,000 prisoners. 130,000 people were arrested in the first four years of the coup and a total of at least 29,000 people were tortured. Including people exiled and threatened by the military junta the number of chileans affected reached 300,000. This was roughly 3% of the total population.
Given there was no civil war and the country had a history of stability beforehand this is actually a very bloody situation.
The first ever terrorist attack in the United States occured in 1976 when the chilean secret service exploded a car bomb in Washington. Another murdered in a bomb attack was in Argentina in 1974 - the head of the Chilean military who had resigned rather than overthrow democracy.
Let's not forget the millions of dollars pinochet stole from the chilean government - the count is $26 million so far.
With thousands of dead, hundreds of thousands brutalised, and millions stolen I see nothing to mourn. I don't care whether he was left or right, the count of lives ruined says everything that needs to be said.

Manfarang said...

Anon 6:46
The Falkland Islands are in the South Atlantic.English spoken there with a bit of a west country accent.You are confusing the Falklanders with the Chagos Islanders- Indian Ocean.(Yes they do want to go home!)

More soon
Military funeral-Stahlhelme and goose step!

Anonymous said...

Stalin was useful to us in WW2. Would you have given up the opportunity to try him if he ended up under house arrest in Britain?

He only left the USSR to visit Teheran - if he went anywhere else Molotov or Mikoyan would have replaced him............Khrushchev was the first Soviet leader to "retire" alive in 1964.

Anonymous said...

Let me see...

Triple-digit inflation conquered;
Government spending slashed;
Privatisation;
Reversal of the Allende land theft;
Bank deregulation;
A growth rate three times the South American average;
A 95% literacy rate; and
3000 dead commies.

Sounds like a result to me.

Anonymous said...

What I remember about Pinochet is Jack Straw, Minister of the Crown, playing student politics. Set the scene for ten years of immature foreign policy.

Anonymous said...

Permanentexpat -

Huh? The first fifteen or so years of Francoist rule are known as the Years of Hunger. He pursued a policy of autarky and the Spanish economy stagnated as a result.

The arrival of the technocrats led to some development and opening the economy, but until then even buying a new tractor from overseas was essentially impossible.

I suggest reading Nada (Nothing or Nothingness) by Carmen Laforet for an idea of what Francoist Spain was like.

The real development came as Franco, increasingly ill, was sidelined and other powers came into play. Increased openness allowed tourism to bring in money, but the real development took place after 1978 and particularly with EC money.

Anonymous 4:54am - well said.

voyager - but say it had happened. I know it didn't, but imagine it had, and use the logic of the argument

xD.

Anonymous said...

He was certainly an inventive torturer. Having someone forced at gunpoint to sodomise their brother, in turn forced to sodomise their own elderly father is not something most of us would ordinarily think of.

Still, if people think he was basically a decent chap, that's their call...

Anonymous said...

toastrian - I don't like your politics but I like your style. Personally I hate all dictators, whatever their politics. I don't think that some are worse than others should be a 'get out of jail free card for anyone'. And human rights are the same for all their victims, communist or otherwise.

Would you have been happy to see John Reid 'strung up' ? Really ? Then you don't belong in Great Britain.

Try making one of those Top Twenty programmes for late night telly.
'The World's Worst dictators'. But you might have to make it a top forty if you want to illustrate that Pinochet wasn't such a bad sort.

Cue that 'Alan Freeman' music, and 'At number 27, down from last year's number 18 is Robert Mugabe, clearly his pluggers haven't been spreading the word about his land grab enough. Not 'arf....'

Anonymous said...

paul, Ah yes, but as some of the posters on this site would say, at last when sodomising one's brother at gunpoint, clearly one would be thinking:-

'Ah yes, but the sodomising would be so much worse under a REAL dictator, thank heavens we only have Pinochet'.


And when sodomising one's elderly dad: -

'Ah yes, but just think about the improvement in literacy levels, at least the people will be able to read about me fucking my old man, you couldn't have had that under Allende - it would be kept quiet'.

Have we imbeciles learnt nothing from Abu Ghraib ? No, because we 'humans' are to thick to learn the lessons from history. Or if we do there's 'moral relativism'. Awful.

Anonymous said...

uk house arrest a disgrace? he was a torturer! if he'd tortured and killed one of your family, you'd surely want him pursued to the ends of the earth? i would. same goes for fidel, saddam, adolf and the rest of the gang. liberty and freedom surely includes the right not to have your hands broken before being shot in a football stadium.

Anonymous said...

A great man who saved Chile from total destruction at the hands of Marxist totalitarian fantasists and restored it to the road of prosperity. England needs someone to do the same here.

neil craig said...

I think the way the CIA put him in power was an obscenity.

Nonetheless in retrospect 3,000+ dead seems pretty unremarkable compared to El Salvador, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo (under our occupation that is, there was no genocide when Milosevic ruled) or Iraq.

Anonymous said...

and william hague launches the tory human rights policy today.

nice one.

will he back thatcher and the torturers' torturer? or will he back people who dont like getting their goolies fried because they happen to be a member of a trade union?

over to you mr hague.

Anonymous said...

To all the various Pinochet apologists - would you advocate extra-judicial killings, concentration camps, torture and so on in Venezuela? Bolivia? Attlee's Britain?

Anonymous said...

The disgrace was letting him go when there was the last chance to nail him. I am sure his death squads didn't go away when their intended victim showed a medical certificate. For Thatcher to call him a friend of Britain says everything anyone needs to know about her.

Anonymous said...

I expect that many of you will be organising drinks parties to celebrate this evening.

May I recommend my eel and mango canapes for something a little 'different' with your sherry.

http://frogend.blogspot.com/2006/12/eel-and-mango-canapes.html

Audrey

Anonymous said...

there goes my support for thatcher's state funeral. and i'm a labour supporter. she should hang her head in shame for her public support for that vile man. a total blind spot, unfortunately one shared by most if not all of the conservative party. will any tory mp have the guts to say "yes, he was a torturing dictator"?

imagine what he'd have done to bloggers in his day, iain. you'd have been strung up by your plums.

Anonymous said...

El Dave. said...
To all the various Pinochet apologists - would you advocate extra-judicial killings, concentration camps, torture...


Yes, if it kept the evil of Marxism at bay. I would do my part too.