Glenn Greenwald on Pinochet and the WaPo

Wandering around I came across this amazing piece of self-regarding humbug mixed with factual inaccuracies from an American journalist called Glenn Greenwald. It really is the most wonderful example of how some American journos see themselves, as the high-minded saviours of democracy, freedom and liberty.

The more one thinks about The Washington Post's warm editorial embrace yesterday of Augusto Pinochet (as well as its affirmation of Jeane Kirkpatrick's general affection for right-wing dictatorships), the more extraordinary it seems. Few events illustrate quite as vividly the complete corruption of our journalistic institutions, as well as just how fundamentally the political spectrum has shifted over the last decade, and particularly during the Bush presidency.

Warm embrace?

Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years. Thousands of others spent years in exile.

Let me know when they hate someone, will you?

It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator

Hey! it's a full on love in!

But that's not what I find so amusing about this piece. No, not even the Kirkpatrick point that he manages to avoid mentioning, that there is indeed a difference between authoritarian societies and totalitarian ones.

No, the hilarity is here:

Both in theory and in practice, The Washington Post -- as the most influential newspaper in the nation's capital -- has been a vitally important check on the power of the federal government. Its greatest successes and contributions have been when it has acted as an adversarial force balancing abuses of power by national political officials. That is the core function which newspapers are intended to perform, and the Post has a long and illustrious history of performing it as well as any other newspaper.

The core function which newspapers are intended to perform? By whom my man? They were consciously set up so as to speak truth to power? To hit back at the man? To be part of the legislative and constitutional set up of the United States? Codswallop, they're wannabe profit making businesses. They exist, as with every other such business, to make money for their owners. The fine words that you craft are simply the filler between the advertisements which pay your wages.

It may well be true that there is a market for newspapers which do those valuable things, and that those who pursue that market wax rich, just as there is most definitely a market for tales of Britney's caesarian scar and those who pursue that get fattened with greasy lucre too. But to think of newspapers as an adversarial force, with a core function, is absurd. They're ads on paper with words in between, published in order to enrich their owners.

Those who have political power are naturally seduced by the temptations of tyranny. That's why our entire system of government is structured so as to provide as many mechanisms as possible to check and limit that temptation, with newspapers being one of the most critical opposing forces. Politicians will naturally err on the side of exceeding the proper limits of their power, and balance is achieved when adversarial branches -- led by newspapers -- err on the side of opposing audacious and novel exercises of government power.

A branch of government now, eh? My, what an exalted position for a wordsmith or two to occupy. That they might at times help to alleviate or restrict some of the temptations of tyranny is true, certainly, but then that's just an example of Adam Smith's old line, that markets mean that we might indeed do good to others simply by our pursuit of our own rational self-interest.

What kind of media do we have where one of the most prominent editorial voices views the slaughter of political opponents, pervasive torture, death squads, state-sponsored terrorism, military coups, and merciless, bloody tyranny as nothing more than some necessary, perhaps unfortunate measures, benevolently invoked to preserve order and mitigated -- even justified -- by the pursuit of free market economics? That is just perverse for anyone to argue, but particularly perverse for a newspaper editorial page.

Anyone actually reading the piece will get a rather different view of the logic. I see it as stating this. Pinochet was a murderer, tyrant and dictator. So is Castro. Pinochet left power (semi-) voluntarily. Castro not so. Pinochet, as well as being a tyrant, laid the foundations for the country to become vastly waelthier. Castro not so.

I've no doubt that there are those out there stating that Pinochet's actions were justified by his adoption of free market economics. I'm not one of those who think so, nor is it apparent from hte WaPo piece that the writers of it thought so either.

But to see the "centrist" Post Editorial Board join them in paying homage to this despicable, murderous dictator -- a tyrant who, even ten years after his coup, was so brutal and inhumane that even the dictator-loving Reagan administration eventually tried to help push him out of power --

Quick question...who was the Reagan Admin's UN Ambassador? Wasn't it that same Jeanne Kirkpatrick who so loved right-wing dictatorships?

I stick with the view I had when I first read about Pinochet's death. I too compared him with Castro:

No, I don't defend the fact that he killed and tortured people and I don't think that I ever have. Just one little counterpoint though. There's another Latin American Caudillo who has also killed and tortured thousands of his country men, Fidel Castro. He, as we know, has not led his country to an era of robust economic growth.

If we are going to be accurate, and portray both of them as dictators who took power at gunpoint and then reshaped society in their preferred image, killing innocents as they did so, well, perhaps we might want to point out that if you're going to break eggs, can you at least manage to make the damn omelette?