Democracy in Chile and the ghosts of Pinochet

[boingboing]

Originally published at: Democracy in Chile and the ghosts of Pinochet | Boing Boing

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[gracchus]

Pinochet’s Chile, the primary case study demonstrating how little Libertarians actually care about liberty.

[bobtato]

AKA the unpolished prototype for the UK, US and other neoliberal regimes from 1979 to the present day.

For whatever it’s worth, at least Chileans have never been under any illusion about what’s behind the neoliberal mask. In America and Britain, people still think Pinochet’s policies are the sensible, non-ideological view. We make North Koreans look like jaded anarchists.

Then again perhaps I am deluding myself thinking it makes a difference whether people swallow the propaganda or not. A cop in Santiago once blithely opined to my travel companion that things were better when they had a dictatorship, which is certainly more frank than how an American cop would have put it, but self-awareness obviously didn’t soften his politics much.