Friday, July 5, 2013

Dictator Street Journal

People reading this blog know better than to trust the Wall Street Journal editorial page about anything, but my goodness:
Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy. If General Sisi merely tries to restore the old Mubarak order, he will eventually suffer Mr. Morsi's fate.
Wikipedia: "Following Allende's deposement, army General Augusto Pinochet declined to return authority to the civilian government; and Chile became ruled by a military junta that was in power from 1973 to 1990, ending almost 48 years of Chilean democratic rule." And again: "Some political scientists have ascribed the relative bloodiness of the coup to the stability of the existing democratic system, which required extreme action to overturn."

If you want the body count, "According to a government commission report that included testimony from more than 30,000 people, Pinochet's government killed at least 3,197 people and tortured about 29,000." Hundreds of thousands of people went into exile to escape the horrors, and hundreds of thousands more left in the 1980s due to economic failures.

"Midwifed a transition to democracy"? The midwife's job isn't to eat the baby. 

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