Pinochet

Lee at Verbum Ipsum has an interesting but brief remark on how Pinochet's passing has occasioned several rationalizations from the press. The argument appears to be that material prosperity somehow compensates for the suffering and death of 3,000 human souls.

That aside, I'm surprised that "only" 3,000 dead are attributed to Pinochet. I genuinely mean no disrespect to any of the man's victims, but considering how much attention his bloody hands have received, you'd think the man would have been a champion of mass murder.

By way of comparison, consider the the Shining Path guerillas in neigboring Peru. They've murdered over 30,000 people, yet who among us is familiar with the name of Abimael Guzmán? Fidel Castro also has the blood of thousands of Cubans dissenters on his hands, and perhaps tens of thousands, not including the deaths of thousands of soldiers he sent abroad to spread his less-than-glorious revolution. Strangely, no Spanish court has taken it upon itself to indict Castro or Guzmán the way they indicted Pinochet.

Why does Pinochet receive so much attention? I don't know. The Italian writer Eugenio Corti observed thirty years ago that the European press was continuous running stories about Pinochet's alleged crimes, while ignoring or even denying the murders of millions of Cambodians taking place at the very same time. The way he tells it, it was only in later years that the European press could be bothered to admit that Pol Pot had murdered 1/3 of his population.

These comparisons strike me precisely because Pinochet claimed to be fighting a rising communism in Chile. If there is a grain of truth to his words, is it not legitimate to balance 3,000 lives against 30,000, or against several millions? If not, why not?

What exactly is my point? I don't know. I certainly do not mean to whitewash or even minimize Pinochet's crimes. What the man did was obscene. I suppose I mean to question more the self-righteousness of those who condemn him, without mentioning the crimes of those he claimed to oppose.