Two dictators
Interesting comparison of two South American Dictators that have been in the news recently.
From
NewsMax:
Castro, Pinochet, and Human Rights
Two former Latin American heads of state have been much in the news lately.
One because he passed away; the other because his death seems imminent. The terms "human rights abuses," along with "murders and tortures" appear consistently in the articles on one while being almost completely absent from the ones on the other, where the terms "gains in health-care and literacy" predominate.
One jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Hitler and Stalin — and for three times as long. Modern history's longest-suffering political prisoners languished in the prisons and forced-labor camps established by his regime.
According to the Harvard-published "Black Book of Communism," he executed 14,000 subjects by firing squad. These ranged in age from 16 to 68 and included several women, at least one of them pregnant.
According to the scholar/researchers at the Cuba Archive, his regime's total death toll from torture, prison beatings, machine gunning of escapees, drownings of same, etc. comes to 112,000 and counting.
According to Freedom House, half a million Cubans have suffered in his Gulag and torture chambers. Today — 47 years after the establishment of the totalitarian police state — political prisoners still languish in his regime's prisons for quoting Martin Luther King and Gandhi.
And the other one:
One led a coup to oust a Marxist regime that had been declared unconstitutional by his nation's legislature and Supreme Court. In the "dirty war" immediately following the coup, 3,000 people were killed and 30,000 arrested.
Within a few years all had been released or exiled.
He is the one reviled for "human rights abuses, killings, and tortures."
The article talks a lot more about Castro and how "human rights" groups ignore the massacres and torture of the Castro regime.
What isn't mentioned that under Pinochet, Chile flourished economically and the previous government was trying to remake it into the same workers paradise that Castro was envisioning for his lucky people.
The Iraqi's really need someone like him now. Someone strong enough to command power and to get the stupid little theocrats to stop playing games and to simmer down while the nation gets rebuilt.
Posted by DaveH at December 21, 2006 10:19 PM