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Originally posted by lord of the mark
With all due respect to you, and your experiences in prison, Id say there is. A political activist makes a conscious decision to participate in politics. That entails risks. In most regimes prior to the enlightenment, and in many after it, being a political activist of any kind meant a risk of death. Now democratic, liberal, politics, which understood that the state had to be limited to create a more just, freer society, was a major advance in human civilization. Pinochet, like Castro, like Banzer, like Lenin, like a hundred others, was a retreat from that.
But what Hitler did was to kill not just those who became activists, and made a risky choice. He killed people purely for existing, for the state of their birth. And he did so in numbes large enough to wipe out whole communites, and with the stated goal of eliminating entire peoples. His was a retreat to the very worst in human life. Hitler was morally different from, say, a Franco, just as Stalin was morally different from a Lenin or a Castro.
With all due respect to you, and your experiences in prison, Id say there is. A political activist makes a conscious decision to participate in politics. That entails risks. In most regimes prior to the enlightenment, and in many after it, being a political activist of any kind meant a risk of death. Now democratic, liberal, politics, which understood that the state had to be limited to create a more just, freer society, was a major advance in human civilization. Pinochet, like Castro, like Banzer, like Lenin, like a hundred others, was a retreat from that.
But what Hitler did was to kill not just those who became activists, and made a risky choice. He killed people purely for existing, for the state of their birth. And he did so in numbes large enough to wipe out whole communites, and with the stated goal of eliminating entire peoples. His was a retreat to the very worst in human life. Hitler was morally different from, say, a Franco, just as Stalin was morally different from a Lenin or a Castro.
In some cases (in Chile and Argentina, by example), they took the children of those man and woman killed, and raised those kids like their own children. Teaching them the code of beliefs of the assassins, teaching them the values that killed their fathers. It’s monstrous.
Pinochet is different, IMHO, of those little ones…
Pinochet deserves a special place, together with Stalin, Pol Pot and - please, forgive me by godwinizing- Adolph. The worst thing about “El Generalíssimo” is that a lot of people here are willing to accept his goals, just a little sorry because of his methods…
He didn’t use gas chambers. He used the National Stadium. Just 3,000 “enemies of the regime”, against 20,000,000 innocent people killed by Hitler.
Well,“ethnic cleanness” may be a political tool. Hitler had the desire to make an Empire to stand for 1,000 years… He wanted power. Like Augusto. Augusto Pinochet.
The scale is different, but their little evil hearts not.
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