FROM CHILE, WITH LOVE....DON'T TREAD ON US!

[Your Uncle Sam]

DIFFERENT PLACE, CHILE;

DIFFERENT TIME, 1973

....SAME DIFFERENCE

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THIS IS ABOUT AN "EARTHQUAKE"....

BUT NOT THE KIND YOU'RE THINKING OF....

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JUST REPLACE "CHILE" WITH "AMERICA";

PRESIDENT "ALLENDE" WITH "CHAIRMAN MAO’bama"

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Chile under Allende

Mark Falcoff, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, expert on Latin American history and politics, and author of "Modern Chile, 1970-1989: a critical history", has written an article titled "Who killed Latin democracy?". This article appeared in National Post on March 4, 2000. The article was timely in that it appeared shortly after General Augusto Pinochet was allowed to return home from Britain, where he had suffered a long enforced detention, in his own words, as "the only political prisoner in Britain". The detention was occasioned by a request for Pinochet's arrest and extradition to Spain to face charges of crimes against humanity which the general is alleged to have committed (and in a way, no doubt he did) during his dictatorial rule of Chile. It just so happens that the Spanish government is Socialist and the judge who issued the arrest order is even more so.

Since 1991 we often encounter the statement that 'Communism and real Socialism have been consigned to the ash heap of history.' Some of us dispute this assertion because we are not at all sure that is the case. The class of political ideologues collectively known as the Left is large and ubiquitous throughout the world. The Left remains, as ever, the incubator of new variants of coercive utopianism and totalitarianism, as well as the place for hibernating and recycling of already discredited older forms of it. The Pinochet affair reminds us exactly how influential and powerful the Left is. It also reminds us that the Left, since their first capture of power under the leadership of Lenin, have never forgotten or ignored their effective opponents -- those who have, or could, hurt them; to this day they observe the maxim that such enemies must be hunted down and put paid to with great persistence and tenacity.

So, that's what the effort to "get" Augusto Pinochet is all about. The Left thirsts for revenge against Pinochet because he was, in his day, arguably the smartest and most effective demolisher of Leftist totalitarianism that the world has seen. The Mark Falcoff article contains a very comprehensive account, reproduced here, on the progressive Allende take-over of Chile. As will be seen below, the destruction of the societal and economic infrastructure of Chilean democracy was already well under way, proceeding according to tried and proven Communist practice, when the army staged its coup. It was classic Sovietization of a nation in progress and Pinochet stopped it cold in its tracks. For that the Left must hound him to the very gates of hell, if need be.

The harsh truth is that without Salvador Allende there would have been no Pinochet. The former was elected in 1970 with a bare plurality - slightly more than a third of the popular vote. Only Chile's firm tradition of recognizing the winner in its first-past-the-post electoral system assured his inauguration. Even so, to win the votes of Christian Democrats in Congress, he was forced to agree to a **Statute of Democratic Guarantees (see below) that obliged him to recognize such liberties as freedom of the press and unfettered access to the electronic media.

Allende was a likeable man.... but remarkably ignorant, fatuous and weak. He thought of himself as both a democrat and a Marxist, and professed to see no particular contradiction between the two. Unfortunately, within his own government coalition (four parties, two of them formally Marxist), the lines were far more sharply drawn. Ironically, the Communists were the moderates of the piece, since they were carrying water for Moscow, which had other fish to fry in more central theatres of political conflict. (The great concern of the Soviets in Chile -- apart from not wanting to pay for another Cuba -- was not to scare off Christian Democrats and Socialists in Western Europe who might be toying with similar coalitions in the future). Allende's Socialists -- a somewhat sui generis party made up of social democrats, anarchists and Trotskyites -- were far closer ideologically to Fidel Castro's Cuba, which, by the way, maintained a remarkably outsized diplomatic and military mission in Santiago, and also the principal source of illegal weaponry that poured into Chile during these years. Intoxicated by their own rhetoric and ideology, and also deluded by the apparent proximity of total power, the Socialists and their allies on the farthest left (the so-called MIR) were impatient to move to a final confrontation with the "bourgeoisie". During 1972 and 1973 they actively took the initiative, seizing factories and farms, far exceeding the government's own program of reform and forcing the president to recognize their audacious strokes as faits accomplis. Unfortunately, the nationalized sector of the economy lost money so quickly that the only way to pay its workers was to print unbacked currency in massive quantities; the result was a hyperinflation hitherto unknown to Chile -- 600% in 1973. In the countryside, improvised expropriations -- some of the farms rather smaller than those marked for division by the existing agrarian reform law -- polarized opinion, produced a mini-civil war and greatly dislocated the provision of food to Chile's cities. The result was drastic shortages and a flourishing black market.

Meanwhile, the pell-mell expropriations of factories and the intentional bankrupting of large enterprises had another consequence, one not entirely unwelcome to the Allende government -- independent newspapers and radio stations lost a principal source of financing (advertising). Indeed, it is an inconvenient but incontrovertible fact that Chile would have had no independent press at all in the last days of the regime were it not for clandestine financing by the hated CIA.

Economic chaos and political polarization propelled Chile's middle class, many of whose members had voted for Allende in 1970, toward the right. The result was a new political coalition between Christian Democrats and Conservatives that obtained 56% in the March, 1973, parliamentary by-elections -- a decisive vote against the government but short of the two-thirds needed to impeach Allende. What the new congress could do, however, was to declare the regime "outside the law", which it surely was. At the same time, many members of the opposition were knocking on the doors of the barracks, virtually imploring the military to break the political stalemate.

As it happens, in Chile in August, 1973, which is to say, about 30 days before Allende's fall a coup of some sort was almost universally expected, though no one was quite certain what form it would take or in what direction it would move. For his part, President Allende, from the very beginning, had assiduously courted the high command. He had invited several generals into his cabinet during 1972 and again in 1973. He even managed to seduce politically General Carlos Prats, the commander-in-chief of the army. A "left wing" military government was by no means unimaginable; one already existed in near-by Peru (with economic policies which were remarkably similar to those of Allende), another in Bolivia. Across the Andes in Argentina General Juan Peron was about to return to power with leftist support.

What many failed to see was that General Prats was increasingly isolated from his own officers, who shared the concerns and anger of the middle class. A little more than a week before the coup, he was forced to retire, replaced by his chief of staff, General Augusto Pinochet. On the day of the coup, the new army commander was a personality virtually unknown to all but a handful of Chileans. Small wonder that no one saw what was coming. Most Christian Democrats imagined that after a brief interlude, new elections would be called in which Allende's predecessor, Eduardo Frei Montalva, the former president, would be the inevitable victor. Instead, all politics came to an end, and many politicians, labour leaders, and intellectuals ended up in prison or exile. More than a thousand ended up in graves whose precise location remains to be revealed. Even General Prats, Pinochet's closest professional friend, failed to take the full measure of his successor. Permitted to emigrate to Argentina, he and his wife were murdered there a year after the coup, apparently on orders from Pinochet himself.

As stated before, the Communist take-over of Chile followed the same course which had been used successfully many times before in the countries of eastern Europe and Asia. Similar strategies were also employed in Central America and Africa. The Falcoff article describes how the standard communist modus operandi for the wrecking of a democracy proceeded in Chile:

• Allende's coalition came to power with the endorsement of only a third of the electorate. It is telling that the democratic politicians did not trust Allende at all to act in the interests of democracy by forcing him "to agree to a Statute of Democratic Guarantees that obliged him to recognize such liberties as freedom of the press and unfettered access to the electronic media." That is truly the weirdest of agreements ever made in the governing of a democracy, but evidently it was made with great foresight by the democratic politicians..

• The Cubans had already become well ensconced in Chile, maintaining a large military mission and supplying armaments to the Communist forces. The same thing happened also in Nicaragua. There is no doubt that the Cubans were only waiting for the time when their secret police experts could start helping the Chileans to construct the standard KGB-style apparatus for securing all the vital sectors of the state and for initiating a campaign of terror against the population in order to bring it into complete submission.

• Expropriation and looting of property in the name of the state was rapidly dismantling the free-market economic system. The currency of the country was debased. The agricultural sector of the economy was destroyed, causing food shortages. Unemployment, dislocation, impoverishment by state-sponsored robbery, the rise of a black market -- all the standard methods for the material and moral destruction of the "bourgeois" society were at work in Chile in 1972 and 1973.

• True to form, Allende refused to yield his hold on the levers of state power after a decisive congressional defeat in 1973. Retreating from power is not what communists ever do peaceably.

• True to form, Allende attempted to corrupt the military leadership. Once the Communists own the military, their power is assured, and from then on all opposition to Sovietization can be ruthlessly squashed in a systematic manner without any significant opposition from within the population.

Allende failed to deliver Chile to the Soviet fold mainly because Chile had a mature culture of democratic politics, and a substantial middle class which treasured the traditions and institutions of that culture. It was the beleaguered middle class which called on the armed forces to unseat the rogue, Allende, who was "outside the law." Nevertheless, it was a close thing.

The Chileans were fortunate to have Augusto Pinochet ready to take command of the armed forces on their behest. He was a man with the necessary appreciation of the Left -- its organization and tactics -- and an understanding of what counter-strategy must be employed against it in order to defeat it decisively. That counter-strategy is not pretty. It is basically the strategy employed by the Communists themselves, which Pinochet turned back upon them. It involves sudden arbitrary arrest, without any evidence of wrong-doing as such, but simply on the basis of guilt-by-association or expressed sympathies for -- in this instance -- Leftist politics. This is followed by ruthless elimination of the arrested person without a trace. As the totalitarians say of their enemies: "the person must disappear into the fog of night" forever. This tactic works in two ways. First, it eliminates permanently the enemies one captures, and second -- and more importantly -- it spreads terror within the ranks of the organized elements of the opposition, inducing them to flee the country. That, in a nutshell, is the standard procedure that a Communist regime uses to eliminate internal opposition. Pinochet very adroitly used their own tactics -- which they could understand and appreciate the consequences of -- on themselves. Historically, Pinochet ranks among the very few who have succeeded in eradicating a Communist organization so completely and so permanently. Other examples that come to mind are Malaysia and Indonesia. Pinochet followed the Communist blueprint to the last detail: he even took care that a potential focus for regrouping of the Communists -- General Prats -- was eliminated.

There are many who are neither Leftists nor fellow-travelers of the Left, but who condemn Pinochet without a proper consideration of the issue. Condemning Pinochet is the trendy thing to do. These people should give the issue some further thought. Falcoff explains why the Soviet Union was rather cool towards Allende's revolution, but perhaps the main reason -- not mentioned by Falcoff -- is that the Soviets might have recognized Chilean society to be quite resistant against a totalitarian take-over because of its strong middle class. However, the Politburo surely would have been elated by a Communist conquest of Chile. Air, missile and submarine bases along the long coastline of Chile would have given the Soviets a strategic reach into the South Pacific region, as well as new opportunities to exert their influence on the adjoining states in South America. The non-Leftist Pinochet haters should ponder the consequences of this kind of strategic situation to the defense of the West.

Similarly, non-Leftists who condemn Pinochet for eliminating several thousand Communists or communist sympathizers, should contemplate what would have happened if Allende had succeeded in taking over the armed forces and the police, thus gaining total control of Chile. Again, the well-known pattern of Communist take-overs would be repeated. Many of the same Communists who were eliminated by Pinochet would in that case have been active participants in the terror apparatus which would -- in typical Communist fashion -- arrest, torture, kill, or imprison a hundred times more people than Pinochet ever did. As usual, the task of the Communist terror apparatus would have been the elimination of the middle class -- their "bourgeois enemies."

The Soviet model for doing that would have been replicated in Chile (on a smaller scale than in the Soviet Union, just like in Eastern Europe and Cuba). Cheka-style "interrogation" centers and kangaroo "peoples courts" would have been established in the main administrative centers of the country. Many "socially undesirable elements" would not survive past this stage of imprisonment, finishing up in unmarked burial trenches. The rest would wind up in a miniature "Gulag" network of establishments where they would be starved and worked to death at a more leisurely pace.

Taking the above scenario down the actual historical path, we can see what Chile would have been like when the Soviet empire collapsed in 1991 by looking at the countries in eastern Europe. By then, Chile would have been under Communist rule for some eighteen years. Judging by what is the case in eastern Europe, after liberation from communism the Chilean economy would still have taken a generation to recover from its devastated condition, and Chilean society would take just as long to recover from the mutilation by totalitarianism of the morals and ethics essential in a free-market society.

All things considered, Chile is fortunate to have had Pinochet. He sanctioned the killing of a few thousand Leftists, many of whom deserved their fate in light of the crisis facing Chile. But by his actions Augusto Pinochet saved an entire nation from immense damage. Call him a necessary evil. Sometimes there is no other option but to fight evil with evil means.

"Those who refuse to learn from History are doomed to repeat it."

God Save America

Your Uncle Sam

**Agreement of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile:

(Read carefully, America LOOK FOR THE PARALELLS)

August 22, 1973

The Resolution

Considering:

1. That for the Rule of Law to exist, public authorities must carry out their activities and discharge their duties within the framework of the Constitution and the laws of the land, respecting fully the principle of reciprocal independence to which they are bound, and that all inhabitants of the country must be allowed to enjoy the guarantees and fundamental rights assured them by the Constitution;

2. That the legitimacy of the Chilean State lies with the people who, over the years, have invested in this legitimacy with the underlying consensus of their coexistence, and that an assault on this legitimacy not only destroys the cultural and political heritage of our Nation, but also denies, in practice, all possibility of democratic life;

3. That the values and principles expressed in the Constitution, according to article 2, indicate that sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation, and that authorities may not exercise more powers than those delegated to them by the Nation; and, in article 3, it is deduced that any government that arrogates to itself rights not delegated to it by the people commits sedition;

4. That the current President of the Republic was elected by the full Congress, in accordance with a statute of democratic guarantees incorporated in the Constitution for the very purpose of assuring that the actions of his administration would be subject to the principles and norms of the Rule of Law that he solemnly agreed to respect;

5. That it is a fact that the current government of the Republic, from the beginning, has sought to conquer absolute power with the obvious purpose of subjecting all citizens to the strictest political and economic control by the state and, in this manner, fulfilling the goal of establishing a totalitarian system: the absolute opposite of the representative democracy established by the Constitution;

6. That to achieve this end, the administration has committed not isolated violations of the Constitution and the laws of the land, rather it has made such violations a permanent system of conduct, to such an extreme that it systematically ignores and breaches the proper role of the other branches of government, habitually violating the Constitutional guarantees of all citizens of the Republic, and allowing and supporting the creation of illegitimate parallel powers that constitute an extremely grave danger to the Nation, by all of which it has destroyed essential elements of institutional legitimacy and the Rule of Law;

7. That the administration has committed the following assaults on the proper role of the National Congress, seat of legislative power:

a) It has usurped Congress’s principle role of legislation through the adoption of various measures of great importance to the country’s social and economic life that are unquestionably matters of legislation through special decrees enacted in an abuse of power, or through simple "administrative resolutions" using legal loopholes. It is noteworthy that all of this has been done with the deliberate and confessed purpose of substituting the country’s institutional structures, as conceived by current legislation, with absolute executive authority and the total elimination of legislative authority;

b) It has consistently mocked the National Congress’s oversight role by effectively removing its power to formally accuse Ministers of State who violate the Constitution or laws of the land, or who commit other offenses specified by the Constitution, and;

c) Lastly, what is most extraordinarily grave, it has utterly swept aside the exalted role of Congress as a duly constituted power by refusing to enact the Constitutional reform of three areas of the economy that were approved in strict compliance with the norms established by the Constitution.

8. That it has committed the following assaults on the judicial branch:

a) With the goal of undermining the authority of the courts and compromising their independence, it has led an infamous campaign of libel and slander against the Supreme Court, and it has sanctioned very serious attacks against judges and their authority;

b) It has made a mockery of justice in cases of delinquents belonging to political parties or groups affiliated with or close to the administration, either through the abusive use of pardons or deliberate noncompliance with detention orders;

c) It has violated express laws and utterly disregarded the principle of separation of powers by not carrying out sentences and judicial resolutions that contravene its objectives and, when so accused by the Supreme Court, the President of the Republic has gone to the unheard of extreme of arrogating to himself a right to judge the merit of judicial sentences and to determine when they are to be complied with;

9. That, as concerns the General Comptroller’s Office—an independent institution essential to administrative legitimacy—the administration has systematically violated decrees and activities that point to the illegality of the actions of the Executive Branch or of entities dependent on it;

10. That among the administration’s constant assaults on the guarantees and fundamental rights established in the Constitution, the following stand out:

a) It has violated the principle of equality before the law through sectarian and hateful discrimination in the protection authorities are required to give to the life, rights, and property of all inhabitants, through activities related to food and subsistence, as well as numerous other instances. It is to note that the President of the Republic himself has made these discriminations part of the normal course of his government by proclaiming from the beginning that he does not consider himself the president of all Chileans;

b) It has grievously attacked freedom of speech, applying all manner of economic pressure against those media organizations that are not unconditional supporters of the government, illegally closing newspapers and radio networks; imposing illegal shackles on the latter; unconstitutionally jailing opposition journalists; resorting to cunning maneuvers to acquire a monopoly on newsprint; and openly violating the legal mandates to which the National Television Network is subject by handing over the post of executive director to a public official not named by the Senate, as is required by law, and by turning the network into an instrument for partisan propaganda and defamation of political adversaries;

c) It has violated the principle of university autonomy and the constitutionally recognized right of universities to establish and maintain television networks, by encouraging the takeover of the University of Chile’s Channel 9, by assaulting that university’s new Channel 6 through violence and illegal detentions, and by obstructing the expansion to the provinces of the channel owned by Catholic University of Chile;

d) It has obstructed, impeded, and sometimes violently suppressed citizens who do not favor the regime in the exercise of their right to freedom of association. Meanwhile, it has constantly allowed groups—frequently armed—to gather and take over streets and highways, in disregard of pertinent regulation, in order to intimidate the populace;

e) It has attacked educational freedom by illegally and surreptitiously implementing the so-called Decree of the Democratization of Learning, an educational plan whose goal is Marxist indoctrination;

f) It has systematically violated the constitutional guarantee of property rights by allowing and supporting more than 1,500 illegal "takings" of farms, and by encouraging the "taking" of hundreds of industrial and commercial establishments in order to later seize them or illegally place them in receivership and thereby, through looting, establish state control over the economy; this has been one of the determining causes of the unprecedented decline in production, the scarcity of goods, the black market and suffocating rise in the cost of living, the bankruptcy of the national treasury, and generally of the economic crisis that is sweeping the country and threatening basic household welfare, and very seriously compromising national security;

g) It has made frequent politically motivated and illegal arrests, in addition to those already mentioned of journalists, and it has tolerated the whipping and torture of the victims;

h) It has ignored the rights of workers and their unions, subjecting them, as in the cases of El Teniente [one of the largest copper mines] and the transportation union, to illegal means of repression;

i) It has broken its commitment to make amends to workers who have been unjustly persecuted, such as those from Sumar, Helvetia, Banco Central, El Teniente and Chuquicamata; it has followed an arbitrary policy in the turning over of state-owned farms to peasants, expressly contravening the Agrarian Reform Law; it has denied workers meaningful participation, as guaranteed them by the Constitution; it has given rise to the end to union freedom by setting up parallel political organizations of workers.

j) It has gravely breached the constitutional guarantee to freely leave the country, establishing requirements to do so not covered by any law.

11. That it powerfully contributes to the breakdown of the Rule of Law by providing government protection and encouragement of the creation and maintenance of a number of organizations which are subversive [to the constitutional order] in the exercise of authority granted to them by neither the Constitution nor the laws of the land, in open violation of article 10, number 16 of the Constitution. These include community commandos, peasant councils, vigilance committees, the JAP, etc.; all designed to create a so-called "popular authority" with the goal of replacing legitimately elected authority and establishing the foundation of a totalitarian dictatorship. These facts have been publicly acknowledged by the President of the Republic in his last State of the Nation address and by all government media and strategists;

12. That especially serious is the breakdown of the Rule of Law by means of the creation and development of government-protected armed groups which, in addition to threatening citizens’ security and rights as well as domestic peace, are headed towards a confrontation with the Armed Forces. Just as serious is that the police are prevented from carrying out their most important responsibilities when dealing with criminal riots perpetrated by violent groups devoted to the government. Given the extreme gravity, one cannot be silent before the public and notorious attempts to use the Armed and Police Forces for partisan ends, destroy their institutional hierarchy, and politically infiltrate their ranks;

13. That the creation of a new ministry, with the participation of high-level officials of the Armed and Police Forces, was characterized by the President of the Republic to be "of national security" and its mandate "the establishment of political order" and "the establishment of economic order," and that such a mandate can only be conceived within the context of full restoration and validation of the legal and constitutional norms that make up the institutional framework of the Republic;

14. That the Armed and Police Forces are and must be, by their very nature, a guarantee for all Chileans and not just for one sector of the Nation or for a political coalition. Consequently, the government cannot use their backing to cover up a specific minority partisan policy. Rather their presence must be directed toward the full restoration of constitutional rule and of the rule of the laws of democratic coexistence, which is indispensable to guaranteeing Chile’s institutional stability, civil peace, security, and development;

15. Lastly, exercising the role attributed to it by Article 39 of the Constitution,

The Chamber of Deputies agrees:

First: To present the President of the Republic, Ministers of State, and members of the Armed and Police Forces with the grave breakdown of the legal and constitutional order of the Republic, the facts and circumstances of which are detailed in sections 5 to 12 above;

Second: To likewise point out that by virtue of their responsibilities, their pledge of allegiance to the Constitution and to the laws they have served, and in the case of the ministers, by virtue of the nature of the institutions of which they are high-ranking officials and of Him whose name they invoked upon taking office, it is their duty to put an immediate end to all situations herein referred to that breach the Constitution and the laws of the land with the goal of redirecting government activity toward the path of Law and ensuring the constitutional order of our Nation and the essential underpinnings of democratic coexistence among Chileans;

Third: To declare that if so done, the presence of those ministers in the government would render a valuable service to the Republic. To the contrary, they would gravely compromise the national and professional character of the Armed and Police Forces, openly infringing article 22 of the Constitution and seriously damaging the prestige of their institutions; and

Fourth: To communicate this agreement to His Excellency the President of the Republic, and to the Ministers of Economy, National Defense, Public Works and Transportation, and Land and Colonization.

CLICK HERE:

http://tpartyus2010.ning.com/video/obama-marching-us-toward

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[Marjorie McEntee]

GOD BLESS AMERICA........

[Alfred Michael Lorenz]

From Chile With Love should raise everyone's awareness! All I can sugest is to heed the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared and may God Bless America! Alfred Lorenz, Safford,AZ

[LANYON]

Thanks for posting this great piece of information... I remember living through those years, although in a different country but, nevertheless, the results were the same as my father was a "political prisoner" as a consequence of the kangaroo courts and false "Union" charges.