Pinochet croaks on International Human Rights Day.
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EDITORIAL
Kirkpatrick and Pinochet shared a conservative political orbit. But history has proved both wrong.
December 11, 2006
IT'S A COINCIDENCE that Jeane Kirkpatrick, the astringent U.S. envoy to the United Nations in the 1980s, and former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died only a few days apart. But in death as in life, the two are associated with a political theory that defined the early days of the neoconservative movement in the United States. Unfortunately for Kirkpatrick, its author, the theory proved to be dead wrong.
The idea was that right-wing authoritarian governments were much better bets for conversion to democracy than left-wing totalitarian ones. This is how Kirkpatrick put it in "Dictatorships and Double Standards," the influential 1979 essay in Commentary magazine that brought her to the attention of Ronald Reagan.
"Although there is no instance of a revolutionary socialist or communist society being democratized, right-wing autocracies do sometimes evolve into democracies — given time, propitious economic, social and political circumstances, talented leaders and a strong indigenous demand for representative government." Kirkpatrick's article, which focused on the Carter administration's policy toward Iran under the shah and Nicaragua under Anastasio Somoza, made some valid points about the differences between Marxist and traditional authoritarian societies. But the article — and Kirkpatrick — are remembered most for the suggestion that dictatorships of the right (especially those friendly to the United States) offered more fertile ground for democratization than dictatorships of the left.
Chile, where the murderous Pinochet eventually relinquished much of his power after a 1988 referendum, seemed to vindicate the Kirkpatrick doctrine. But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of more democratic governments not only in the formerly captive states of Hungary and Czechoslovakia but also in Russia. And as China has shown, spectacularly, Marxist states can turn capitalist in a hurry, though political freedoms may still lag.
Like other reductionist theories, the Kirkpatrick doctrine ran up against the wisdom of H.L. Mencken's observation that "for every problem, there is a solution that is simple, clean and wrong."
2 comments:
Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty (1965)
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Meanwhile, the Republicans and Democrats remain as bipartisan in forming and supporting this Establishment as they were in the first two decades of the twentieth century. "Me-tooism"--bipartisan support of the status quo that underlies the superficial differences between the parties--did not begin in 1940.
How did the corporal's guard of remaining libertarians react to these shifts of the ideological spectrum in America? An instructive answer may be found by looking at the career of one of the great libertarians of twentieth-century America: Albert Jay Nock. In the 1920's, when Nock had formulated his radical libertarian philosophy, he was universally regarded as a member of the extreme left, and he so regarded himself as well. It is always the tendency, in ideological and political life, to center one's attentions on the main enemy of the day, and the main enemy of that day was the conservative statism of the Coolidge-Hoover Administration; it was natural, therefore, for Nock, his friend and fellow libertarian Mencken, and other radicals to join quasi-socialists in battle against the common foe. When the New Deal succeeded Hoover, on the other hand, the milk-and-water socialists and vaguely leftish interventionists hopped on the New Deal bandwagon; on the Left, only the libertarians such as Nock and Mencken, and the Leninists (before the Popular Front period) realized that Roosevelt was only a continuation of Hoover in other rhetoric.
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http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=910
The war against communism and hunger in Chile left aproximately 3000 dead.
US war versus terrorism, how many?
Consider facts within context, please.
(history will prove him right)
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