General Pinochet and our lying media

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 3 March 2007

First published in The New Australian 26 October 1 1998

The arrest in London of General Pinochet demonstrates the hypocrisy and duplicity of the Blair Government. There is little doubt, if any, that Blair, Mandelson, the Home Secretary Jack Straw, Gordon Brown the Chancellor et al. conspired to induce Pinochet to enter Britain for the purpose of having him arrested, even though he had diplomatic immunity. None of this is unexpected considering this sanctimonious mob were members of the Marxist controlled pro-Castro Chilean Solidarity Campaign.

That Allende was overthrown because he was attempting to turn Chile into another Cuban totalitarian state is just one more reason to have Pinochet arrested. Make no bones about it — this is the Left’s revenge and is motivated by pure ideological malice. Justice has nothing to do with it nor will it be served. That is why Blair, Straw, Brown, etc, have never called for Castro’s arrest despite his appalling crimes.

However, this article is about the hypocrisy and dishonesty of those left-wing journalists who joined Blair’s lynch mob. As expected Rupert Murdoch's left-leaning Australian led the pack Down Under with an editorial (19/10/98) that claimed “The bloody coup of 1973 overthrew a Chilean democratic tradition . . .” This is a brazen lie. That The Australian should perpetuate it does not surprise those of us who have witnessed its gradual intellectual corruption by left-wing journalists.

On the 14 March, 1998, Cameron Stewart, the paper’s New York correspondent, wrote a viciously dishonest article on Chile and the 1973 military coup. Stewart makes a good starting point because he encapsulates the left’s propaganda line on the Allende regime and what followed. Parroting the party line Stewart asserted that the 1970s and 1980s was a time when “Latin American governments from Panama to Uruguay were ruled by iron-fisted military dictatorships”. Now why did he start with Panama? Because it is south of Cuba. Starting with Panama, therefore, allowed him to avoid mentioning the embarrassing fact that Cuba, a Latin American country, is also a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian state complete with its own machinery of terror.

Having decided that there were no Latin American dictators north of Panama, Stewart went on to imply that the CIA was responsible for all the region’s dirty wars, political murders and dictatorships, including Pinochet’s. This is another baseless left-wing accusation. Eric Ellis, The Australian Financial Review’s San Frisco correspondent, pushed the same line (20/10/98).

No one has ever been able to produce a shred of evidence implicating the CIA in the Pinochet coup. The coup was carried out by military officers without the knowledge or connivance of the CIA in the apparent belief that either the CIA would try to stop it or that the conspirators’ plans would be leaked.1 Compare the miserable $US8 million the CIA channelled into Chile with the $US650 the Soviets made available to Allende.

Most of the CIA money mainly went to fund opposition newspapers and radio stations that Allende was trying to close down, not murder people. Moreover, Cuban and Soviet intervention was so pervasive that it turned Santiago into a centre for Soviet and Cuban subversive operations in Latin America. Allende gave cart blanche to Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI), the KGB and even a band of North Korean specialists in terrorism. All of these groups were controlled from Moscow. Allende’s daughter Beatriz also played an intelligence role in these subversive activities. Not surprising as she was to married Louis Ferndez Ona, a high-ranking DGI officer.

The Marxist Allende came to power in a three-corned contest because the opposition was split. He collected 36 per cent of the vote (less than Hitler’s vote in the 1932 elections), including the votes of Chile’s Moscow-line communist party. Once in power Allende set about preparing the ground for a Marxist dictatorship. The opposition was continuously harassed and threatened, communists were placed in important positions throughout the government and the bureaucracy; regulations and inflation were combined with actions by communist unions to bankrupt companies so that they could be nationalised, opposition newspapers and radio stations were physically attacked, left-wing terrorist bands — some misleadingly called workers’ militias — were organised and set loose against opponents.

Allende and his totalitarian allies spent three years looting the country, vandalising its economy, raping its constitution and trampling on its democratic traditions. Enough was finally enough. On 11 September 1973 a coup put an end to it. These are facts, however, that the likes of Stewart will never report.

Stewart accused Pinochet of having “grabbed power”, mindlessly parroting the phony party line that Allende was a democrat. As I have made clear, Stewart is not alone in his ideological bigotry. We had Eric Ellis telling readers that Pinochet ousted the “democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende”, obviously implying that Allende was a democrat. (If this lot were consistent in their thinking they would refer to Adolph Hitler as the democratically elected National Socialist leader of Germany. But consistency and honesty is not what they are about.) As we have seen, even a casual examination of the Allende episode clearly reveals that he was a Marxist (a fact he never tried to hide) with a loathing for democracy. To him, the democratic process was merely a means to bring about a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship.

Pushing it all the way, Stewart stated that Allende was assassinated, knowing full well that the circumstances of his death are uncertain, followed by the correct statement that Orlando Letelier, husband of Isabel Allende, Salvador Allende's niece, had been assassinated by Pinochet’s security forces, making it seem that the killing was carried out as part of a political vendetta. What he neglected to tell us that Isabel Letelier and Orlando Letelier were DGI agents and that the DGI was under the direct control of a KGB general.

The FBI retrieved Letelier’s intact briefcase from the bombed car. The case contained conclusive evidence that he was a DGI agent and not the simple human rights activist that left-wing journalists had painted him. There were extensive lists of Soviet, Cuban and other Soviet bloc agents with whom he was in contact. His own commitment to democratic values can be gauged from his statement: “Perhaps some day not far distant we can also do [in Chile] what has been done in Cuba”. Letelier’s treasonous role under Allende and his pro-Soviet activities in the USA warrants an article. But Stewart won’t write it.

To bolster his left-wing view of Chile he quoted Larry Birns, author of The Death of Chilean Democracy, forgetting to mention that Birns is an ardent supporter of Fidel Castro and a member of the notorious pro-Soviet Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies. The same outfit that cooperated with Letelier in his role as a Soviet agent; the same organisation that supported Allende’s attack on Chilean democracy and the very same group that had very strong KGB links. No wonder Brian Crozier (a fellow of the prestigious Institute for the Study of Conflict) called it a Soviet front.

Birns had very strong links with the Allendes and Letelier, meeting with the latter in Santiago in 1973. Birns also helped establish the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) which was really a product of the World Peace Council, another Soviet front organisation. Needless to say, Birns and his fellow-travelling mates used the COHA to promote Latin American Marxist-Leninist groups. But what is of particular interest is that Larry Birns credibility was completely shot to pieces when the Soviet forgery Dissent Paper on El Salvador and Central America legitimising the FDR/DRU coalition was traced back to Birns. Despite the fact that Birns is a Castro apologist, that he has no credibility and is also a fellow of the extreme left-wing IPS, Stewart still palmed him off to The Australian’s readers as an authoritative and reliable source on Chilean affairs.

All of this brings us back to Pinochet. It is painfully obvious that most of those reporting on the Pinochet case are morally and ideologically compromised. They have revealed nothing but ignorance and political bigotry, mouthing the nonsense they were spoon-fed by left-wing lecturers. For example, in one short item Matthew Stevens2 (The Australian) called Pinochet “a bloody despot” and “a cruel despot”, totally ignoring the circumstances that brought about the coup. Despite their moral posturing, I have yet to see Stevens, Stewart and their ilk call Castro a “bloody despot” or “a cruel despot”, or even Allende a Marxist.

But what can we expect from the kind of journalism that asserts Latin American dictatorships only start at Panama. If these journalists were really concerned about justice they would call for Castro to be arrested next time he leaves Cuba3. “That’ll be the day”. To the Left it is not the crime that matters but who committed it. That is why leftists can call for Pinochet’s blood while giving Castro a standing ovation.

Armando Valladares spent 22 years in Castro's Gulag and lived to relate his gruesome tale in Against All Hope. I shall quote the last two heart-breaking paragraphs:

I remember Estebita and Piris dying in blackout cells, the victims of biological experimentation; Diosdado Aquit, Chino Tan, Eddy Molina, and so many others murdered in the forced-labor fields, quarries, and camps. A legion of specters, naked, crippled, hobbling and crawling through my mind, and the hundreds of men wounded and mutilated in the horrifying searches . . . Eduardo Capote's fingers chopped off by a machete. Concentration camps, tortures, women beaten, soldiers pushing prisoners' heads into a lake of shit, the beatings of Eloy and Izaguirre. Martín Pérez with his testicles destroyed by bullets. Robertico weeping for his mother.

And in the midst of that apocalyptic vision of the most dreadful and horrifying moments of my life, in the midst of the gray, ashy dust and the orgy of beatings and blood, prisoners beaten to the ground, a man emerged, the skeletal figure of a man wasted by hunger, with white hair, blazing blue eyes, and a heart overflowing with love, raising his arms to the invisible heaven and pleading for mercy for his executioners.

“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.' And a burst of machine-gun fire ripping open his breast”. (Against All Hope, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1986).