Check out Gideon Rachman’s Blog. Today he looks at the legacies of both Jeane Kirkpatrick and Augusto Pinochet:
It is somehow fitting that Jeane Kirkpatrick and Augusto Pinochet should die within a week of each other. For it was Kirkpatrick who did most to provide an intellectual justification for American tolerance for Latin American dictators, like Pinochet.
By making a now famous distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” regimes, Kirkpatrick sought to defeat the idea that there was a “moral equivalence” between American support for right-wing dictators and Soviet support for their own client regimes. The general idea was that authoritarian regimes were less awful than the totalitarian variety – because they allowed more space for civil society and free markets and were, partly as a result, much more likely eventually to give way to democracy. The fact that the Pinochet regime did eventually give way to a restoration of democracy in Chile was hailed by some as a perfect illustration of the Kirkpatrick thesis.
Further on Mr. Rachman states that Lady Thatcher was an ally of his, not only because of Pinochet’s anti-communism, but also because he allied himself with the UK, during the Falkland conflict with Argentina. Read the whole piece here
Filed under: Current Events, Politics, kirkpatrick, pinochet, thatcher
