1. A short follow-up on moral equivalencing. Yesterday I posted this about the killing fields in Cambodia under Marxist communism. Immediately I got huffy responses like “But what about Pinochet in Chile?!” And “Don’t forget the US also supported right-wing dictator Pinochet.”
2. Pinochet was a bad guy. No question. Yet numbers and context matter. Pinochet targeted his political enemies. The death toll? “According to the Chilean government, the number of executions and forced disappearances was at least 3,095.”*
3. Now the Cambodian death toll: “the Cambodian Genocide was an explosion of mass violence that saw between 1.5 and 3 million people killed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a communist political group.”**
4. So the Cambodian left-wingers’ killings were somewhere between 500 and 1,000 times worse than the Chilean right-wingers’ killings. Pause on those numbers for a moment. For every one person Pinochet killed, Pol Pot killed between 500-1000.
5. Implication (a): If you find yourself responding “But Pinochet!” whenever communist atrocities are mentioned, take a step back and ask yourself a hard question: Why am I knee-jerk responding that way? There is *no* serious equivalence.
6. Implication (b): If you find yourself responding “But US intervention!” whenever communist atrocities are mentioned, pause and ask a hard-nosed realist foreign policy question: Is it ever justified to support the bad in order to combat the truly evil? No easy answer to that question, but it’s where serious thinking begins.
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Great points. Pinochet was a hero to many for a long time, when the memories of 70’s-era communism were fresh in the minds of those who narrowly avoided becoming a new Cuba. The current Chilean socialists are nothing like what would have ruled Chile, had Allende’s Castro-backed “auto-coup” succeeded in securing complete control.
Suzanne Labin is a good source, as a non-Marxist view of the coup against Allende. She records much that the left-loving media failed to report, although even the NYT included much against Allende on the back pages of every article at the time.
https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/product/chile-the-crime-of-resistance-henry-kissinger-first-edition-signed/
Thanks for the recommendation, Wolf.