Viva Pinochet!

The anticipated wingnut mourning has yet to begin — I suppose there’s not enough time, what with Jimmy Carter and the Associated Press and Flying Imams to be fretful about — but some early gems have emerged.

Some textbook nihilistic relativism from this fellow:

General Pinochet is dead and his country owes him gratitude for saving it from the reign of terror and communism. Yep, he killed a few but freedom ain’t free.

But those who complain about Pinochet are always silent about commie dictators like Castro. How many were killed by this monster Castro in the past 50 years?

And — as if to demonstrate Rob’s powers of clairvoyance — we get this from a Serious Thinker:

He saved Chile from Marxism, but did it with deadly force worthy of his Marxist enemies. Then in 1990, Chile was free. Hated by the American/European Left, but loved by many of his countrymen. A complicated legacy.

And as to the question of whether Pinochet deserves a state funeral, this happy looking fellow answers in the affirmative:

Every nation should of course avoid state-organized murders or torture but at least the Chile’s economic model is certainly an example for others to follow. And I feel that the former dictator deserves a standard funeral with their state honors. If he were one of the guys who want to be dictators forever, like Stalin, he would almost surely get one. Is the fact that he actively allowed the fully standard democracy under the civilian rule to return — and he may have intended that from the beginning — a reason to treat him like an animal?

Any state-organized murder is bad. But if one views some of them as a necessary evil to create a better future, I would guess that those 2 thousand people who died under Pinochet allowed a better future than the 50 million people who died under Stalin.

All this reminds me of Hunter Thompson’s remarks shortly after Nixon’s death, in which he suggested that Tricky Dick’s body be burned in a trash can, or his casket set afloat in an open sewer canal. Or perhaps he should just be buried in a lime pit, or thrown from a helecopter into the Pacific Ocean.