Maybe writing for the "Liberal New York Times", Ross Douthat’s will
drift toward the Left. And maybe the cow jumped over the moon.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/19/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Media December 18, 2018
NY Times Columnist Ross Douthat Defended Murderous Dictator Pinochet in His
Harvard Days
Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is one of numerous
corporate media figures to have defended Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s
murderous
US-backed capitalist dictator
By Ben Norton
Back in his Ivy League college days, right-wing New York Times columnist
Ross Douthat wrote an op-ed defending the US-backed dictator Augusto
Pinochet, whose military junta murdered and disappeared thousands of
dissidents and tortured tens of thousands more.
Intellectual historian Timothy Barker dug through columns that Douthat
penned for Harvard University’s right-wing student newspaper The Harvard
Salient between 1998 and 2002.
Barker found a slew of articles in which Douthat echoed explicitly racist
talking points that are popular among the so-called alt-right today,
including the idea that white Europeans are “vanishing” and being replaced
through immigration by supposed “barbarians” like Turks, Africans, and
Arabs.
The future New York Times columnist attacked gay people, warned of “the
evils of strident feminism,” and insisted that US “whites, too, suffered
because of slavery.”
Already a major league conservative with a stadium-sized ego, Douthat
declared in a 2001 profile, “Coming to Harvard, I now have a new sense of
the power and success that is at our fingertips – I know I will be one of
the 25 richest writers of the future.”
But most striking of all the Douthat articles uncovered by Barker is a
November 9, 1998 column titled “Reassessing Pinochet.”
Barker noted that the front cover of the issue advertised this piece with
the teaser “Free Pinochet.” (The conservative publication later joked of a
“Rally for Justice” to “Free Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet!”)
Douthat: Chile Was ‘Fortunate’ to Have Pinochet
In his 1998 column “Reassessing Pinochet,” Ross Douthat demonized Salvador
Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of Chile, justifying
the 1973 military coup that ousted him and replaced the Chilean republic’s
fledgling socialist democracy with a murderous right-wing junta.
Douthat studiously avoided mentioning the role of the United States in
propping up Pinochet, and specifically omitted the CIA’s part in
orchestrating the bloody coup.
Writing defensively of the free market autocrat, Douthat claimed,
“Pinochet’s crimes pale in comparison to those of Soviet apparatchiks who
faced no courts after the end of the Cold War — or African despots sunning
themselves in Saudi Arabia — or Chinese leaders with whom with [sic] West
concludes trade pacts.”
All in the international community agree “that Augusto Pinochet was a
villain,” Douthat lamented. “And therein lies their mistake.”
“Were innocent socialists executed for fictional communist sympathies?
Yes,”
the future New York Times columnist conceded. “But the fact that Pinochet’s
government ordered punitive measures against leftists who had plunged the
country into chaos is not grounds to charge him with ‘genocide,'” he
exclaimed.
Douthat downplayed the staggering human toll of the Pinochet regime,
stating, “three thousand executions after a period of civil strife seems
rather tame in our bloody twentieth century, especially when set against
the
record of Communist governments that Pinochet opposed.”
The conservative pundit went on to romanticize 1998 Chile as “one of the
most stable and prosperous countries in South America,” insisting that the
country was “fortunate” to have been ruled for nearly two decades by
Pinochet.
“Chile had Pinochet, but other Latin countries were not so fortunate,”
Douthat maintained.
The future New York Times columnist concluded his article condemning
Western
critics of Pinochet (while once again glossing over decades of US support
for him) by declaring that right-wing authoritarianism was a necessary
remedy to socialism:
It is easy for a country like the United States, where the radical Left
never took power, to castigate men like Augusto Pinochet for human rights
abuses. But imagine a United States where Students for a Democratic Society
held the presidency, where Black Panthers sat in the Cabinet and the
Weathermen controlled foreign affairs, where the Port Huron Statement was
made the law of the land — imagine this, and it becomes easier to
understand
how three thousand Chileans died, and why the West has no business trying
Augusto Pinochet as a salve to our offended sensibilities.
US Media’s Whitewashing of Pinochet
Pinochet’s US-backed regime infamously supported a torture colony called
Colonia Dignidad, a secretive German enclave in Chile, founded by a former
Nazi, where children were systematically sexually abused. Top ministers in
Chile’s current right-wing government, which is led by billionaire oligarch
Sebastian Piñera, were unabashed supporters of Colonia Dignidad.
In fact Piñera echoed some of the same rhetoric employed by Douthat in a
speech he gave back in 1998, in which the contemporary Chilean president
defended Pinochet.
That a prominent US pundit once carried water for this regime seems less
shocking in light of the obituaries corporate media outlets published for
Pinochet upon his death in 2006.
The Washington Post applauded the dictator for leaving “behind the most
successful country in Latin America.” The Financial Times whitewashed him
as
“the man who paved the way for Chile’s economic prosperity.” The Telegraph
wrote that he “saved his country from Communism and created the most
successful economy in Latin America.” And NPR described the despot simply
as
“villain to some, hero to others.”
Former Democratic President Barack Obama refused to apologize, in 2011, for
the US government’s staunch backing of Pinochet.
From Pinochet to Bolsonaro
Ross Douthat’s past praise for Pinochet has contemporary parallels, echoing
the support Brazil’s fascist President-elect Jair Bolsonaro has received
today from conservative media outlets.
Bolsonaro, a far-right extremist from Brazil’s former military
dictatorship,
is himself an admirer of the Chilean generalissimo — his only complaint was
“Pinochet should have killed more people.”
Bolsonaro’s ultra-capitalist finance minister Paulo Guedes even taught
economics in Chile under Pinochet’s military junta.
The Brazilian fascist’s neoliberal capitalist economics is the main reason
why he has enjoyed endorsements from the Wall Street Journal and Washington
Examiner, along with kind words from Canada’s CBC.
Douthat’s own newspaper has a history of whitewashing Bolsonaro. In 1993,
the New York Times published an article titled “A Soldier Turned Politician
Wants To Give Brazil Back to Army Rule.” This report noted Bolsonaro was
already calling for the restoration of the right-wing military
dictatorship,
a mere eight years after Brazil had become a democracy. According to
America’s newspaper of record, the Brazilian fascist was emerging as a
national hero with widespread support, who in just a matter of time would
ascend to national power.
Ben Norton
Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a producer and reporter for
The
Real News, and a contributor to the Grayzone Project and FAIR.
