Brief for Murder: Pinochet's Apologists Five Decades On

SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

BY BINOY KAMPMARK



Photograph Source: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile – CC BY 2.0cl

During the Cold War, assassinations most foul were entertained as necessary measures to advance the set cause. In Latin America, military regimes were keenly sponsored as reliably brutal antidotes to the Marxist tic, or at the very least the tic in waiting. Any government deemed by Washington to be remotely progressive would become ripe targets for violent overthrow.

To this day, the murderers of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende, (wait, we hear the first apologist mock, he was not murdered but suicided out of choice) along with thousands of innocents continues to receive briefs in their defence.

On September 15, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a Wall Street Journal scratcher turned police-state boot polisher bombarded her Australian Radio National host, Tom Switzer, with the stock libels about Allende’s legacy and the military coup of September 11, 1973. The interview will go down as one of Switzer’s poorer efforts, despite meek attempts to bring his frothing interviewee back to the bloody account opened by the military regime.

Perhaps we could have expected little else. As Jeffrey Goldberg so fittingly remarked in The Atlantic in September 2010, O’Grady “never met a fascist Central American oligarch she didn’t like”. Her penchant for falsifying history in the name of pathological polemics is the stuff of legend.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/09/20/brief-for-murder-pinochets-apologists-five-decades-on/