[Urbane Guerrilla]

So the Chileans are mad at Pinochet. How much madder, do you think, would they have been at Tetelbaum and Allende should they have gotten that decimation program, a/k/a a civil war, going. Proportionately? Some arbitrary multiplier? The thing you're failing to see was Allende, perverted by Marxism, was a worse fuckup than Hugo Chavez, which is saying something.

I should have thought it was clear that Chile succeeded in dodging no mere bullet, but something like a 155mm shell, those days in 1973. Mr. Whelan (of whom you clearly haven't read even the snippets I have) seems considerably more to be trusted than the something you got off the net. Bear in mind that Whelan is my source, not Brent Bozell.

What is absent from your something from the 'net is any indication that these entirely understandable efforts at influencing events (after all, if you're a major player, do you just sit back passively or do you try and be proactive?) had any effect on the course of events at all. One shouldn't regard every effort to secure a liveable environment for business and trade as some kind of evil machination -- down that path lies socialist poverty, and that's nowhere you want to live, Tonchi. If you didn't know. Nationalizing an industry is a quick way to screw it up, as its fiscal efficiency goes to hell, followed by collapse, and a resumption of what should have been the case all along: keep the business in the private sector.

Did we play ball with the Pinochet government, wrt Chilean affairs, later? Yes -- precisely in accord with our habit from the earliest days of our nation, that of keeping our hands off the local politics in order not to impair trade -- however much that may be honored in the breach or in the observance, for we've had both, in this case the former. What seems to establish the tipping point is whether politics impairs trade, such as Cuban politics from July 1959. Castro deliberately had things screwed up by the end of that year. Nice for the dictator's grip on power, lousy for everyone not in his inner circle. Now Cuba has enjoyed an equal division of the misery for going on four decades. The place won't come right until the Communists are gone.

It was vital to the Chileans' national interest to kill the guy, as the reputable historians apparently understand. Was I somehow unclear about this in my previous post(s)? They did it. Nobody else really got the chance to.

Frankly, Tonch, your "moron" call cannot stand, and you should withdraw it, instead spending your energies doing your homework. My "type," as you harrumph it, is anticommunist, which is smarter than any communist. More moral too. Plenty of room on the bright side, Tonch; come on over and leave the collectivists to rot in their own malaise and malheur.