EDITORIAL — Through one lens darkly — Cold War legacy

To those on the far left of the political spectrum, Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet should be locked up for life and the key thrown away for the human rights violations he allegedly committed during his reign as dictator of the South American nation. To the far right, he is Chile’s saviour.

The ailing general is now fighting extradition from Britain to Spain to face charges of human rights abuses. He has been accused of, among other things, having ordered the killing of 3,200 suspected communists and leftists. Our position is that this matter is best left to the courts, and that Pinochet’s legacy is best decided by the people of Chile. Human life is too precious for us to presume otherwise; past events, too murky and complex for us to pass judgment.

Yet it strikes us as more than curious — indeed, perhaps even perverse — that the left is conspicuously silent when human rights abuses are committed by their own ideological comrades and leaders. It is a conspiracy of silence that has prevailed for most of this century, with disastrous consequences.

This high-minded blindness helped trigger the biggest political blunder of the 20th century: the Yalta conference during the aftermath of the Second World War. American President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose armies had just helped rid Europe of the mass murderer Adolf Hitler, together turned over millions of Eastern Europeans to an even worse mass murderer: Joseph Stalin. In one astonishing lapse of judgment, they betrayed their allies in Eastern Europe to a man who had been Hitler’s ally when the war began.

The cost in human lives, lost liberties and lost properties was staggering and horrific. But the West never batted its blind eye, and the left barely uttered a word of protest, when the newly invigorated Stalin pressed ahead with his reign of terror. His death toll of 20 million barely rated a drop of ink, and many leftist intellectuals and labor leaders continued to idealize both the man and his aggressive communist agenda right up to the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

What’s worse, the Yalta decision laid the seeds for the Cold War. In one fell swoop, the Soviet Union was given ports in the formerly independent Baltic countries of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, and the rich and developed resources of Eastern Europe. And off Stalin went, drunk with visions of world domination and armed with stolen booty, to spread his gospel in new lands.

Chile was but one of many victims of the Cold War, the single most polarizing event in politics this century. The great tragedy of the Cold War is that people had to choose between right or left, because the dueling opponents never allowed for any middle ground that was safe to tread.

In the eyes of the radical chic — the ones calling for Pinochet’s head — the left is always right and the right always wrong. Cracks in the edifice, like the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or the tanks in Tiananmen Square, meant little.

There is no question that General Pinochet committed human rights abuses and atrocities. But it has been argued — rightly or wrongly — that by stopping President Salvador Allende and his communists from taking control of Chile, he also saved lives and prevented the theft of the Chilean people’s property.

Had the communist government of Chile followed the Russian model of mass murders — calculated by experts at 0.42% of the population per year — it would have killed more than a million unarmed men, women and children.

Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge communists killed an estimated 8.16% of its population per year, without much protest from anyone until after it was too late. Why, we wonder, are the lives of those on the right end of the political spectrum worth less than those on the left?

Today, Chile is the most prosperous nation in South America. Leftists argue that Pincochet’s abuses are not a “fair price” to pay for economic growth.

Yet, historically, they have excused similar behaviour from leftist regimes on the grounds that they achieved economic equality by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. The means justified the end, even though basic freedoms were almost always denied.

In Chile today, civil rights and freedom are flourishing. By contrast, communist Cuba is one of the poorest and most repressive countrie in Latin America, even though it was the richest before becoming communist.

The Cold War has spawned far worse villains than General Pinochet, from both sides of the political spectrum. He at least voluntarily gave up power and turned the country into a democracy. Who knows if Allende would have followed the communist model, which tolerates no opposition? After all, communism is a tyranny that must be imposed. It is one of the few political systems that must build prison-like walls to restrain the movements of its own citizens.

The problem with history is that it is too easy to examine past events through an ideological filter — to view them through a left lens or a right lens darkly. The need for absolute goodies and baddies runs deep in all of us. Yet when it comes to the Cold War, no one side can claim a monopoly on morality. South Africa is one of the few nations to seek healing over retribution. Clearly, others need to follow suit.