love when people act like the Soviets weren't financing and supporting South American leaders in the exact same way as the US. They were as "popularly elected" as Kim Jong Un and Putin. It was a proxy war in the same way the Middle East is/was, global powers each picking a side to achieve their goals.
the only logical thing is to feel bad for the citizens who get caught in the crossfire
You don't get to cry "fraud" just because you don't like the result. And while the Soviet Union liked Allende, realistically their reach was much weaker than the US'. South America is/was "the backyard" of the US, and their reach here has always been the strongest.
Allende won the elections fair and square. We now know, due to declassified documents, how hard the US illegally meddled with its government, and how it helped a bloodthirsty military coup against it. A blot in the history of the US, one that shows how false it is to claim the country is a beacon of light, freedom and democracy.
And the US did not overthrow Allende. To allege so is to deprive Chileans of any kind of political agency
If the choice were between pinochet and a liberal democratic government, then the liberal democratic government is the obvious choice. But the choice was between a military Junta and Communism; you've got two bad choices, but one of them has a free market and economic stability. The utilitarian decision is to pick pinochet.
If you have to choose between Naziism and Communism, you've got two equally bad, genocidal choices. In such a case, you shouldn't side with either group as it makes no difference which one you pick.
Democracy is a useful tool for building consensus, it is not the end goal of politics. Marxism is a catastrophic political cult which has never resulted in anything other than the deaths of millions, either through deliberate genocide or incompetent adherence to its pseudoscientific economic divinations. It should be removed from government through any means necessary. If a Nazi was elected president and vowed to use his political authority to achieve his goals, the military would be justified in overthrowing him and violently suppressing his supporters
Consensus can be achieved through other means. All forms of government rule by a monopoly on the use of violence, including democratic ones.
Your whole analogy is moot: if a Nazi achieves power via democratic means, and stays there via democratic means, he wouldn't be a Nazi: Nazism is the rule of antidemocratic Might Makes Right; he wouldn't remain democratic if things didn't go his way. Which paradoxically, is precisely what you seem to be advocating: that it's ok to abandon democracy when it doesn't go your way.
I appreciate your honesty and candor: you dislike democracy, and your worldview is despicable and vile. Still, your honesty is something!
The same is true of communism, which advocates for the violent murder of land and property owners and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. I have little faith there would have been another election after Allende; Marxism is an inherently violent political cult which sees its enemies as subhuman. Sound familiar?
> you dislike democracy, and your worldview is despicable and vile. Still, your honesty is something!
Try to attack ideas instead of people. The way you argue is unconstructive. I like democracy, but it's imperfect.
> your worldview is despicable and vile
You defend the presidency of a Marxist; I can say the exact same thing about you. Would you likewise defend a Fascist who was elected and vowed to abolish democracy?
I think the disconnect between you and me is that I see no substantive difference between Communism and Naziism, while you seem to think that Communism is capable of a soft side, which it objectively is not
You are arguing in favor of the overthrow of democracy because you don't like the party in power. What's worse, in your attack of Communism you decided to defend a bloodthirsty, murderous dictatorship that tortured thousands of people (some were mutilated so horribly, even the military that captured them are on record as horrified. Read the accounts).
So I thought long and hard about how to reply to you, and my argument boils down to this:
Fuck you.
I want nothing more to do with you. Don't bother replying, I think you're vile.
If you had to power to prevent a man who espouses a genocidal political ideology from seizing absolute power, would you not do so?
Of course we now know Hitler ended up with a dictatorship, but at the time he was playing by the rules. If you are going to argue scifi time-travel scenarios, I'm not interested and you can shove them up your ass where they belong.
This is getting really silly. Either you respect democracy or you don't.
You don't, period. Your worldview is vile and I want nothing to do with you.
Indeed, he got into power by democratic vote. After that he bullied his way in dictatorship. But the first step was getting elected into the Bundestag.
>> Really, this is getting silly: it's ok to overthrow dictatorships, it's not ok to overthrow democracies you don't like as long as they remain democratic. You have to wait your turn.
If somebody promises to overturn a democracy the moment he is elected. We should wait for him to do this and only then start with the resistance?
Stick a Christmas tree up your ass.
I looked at your post history and saw your discussions with other people, and it seems this is your modus operandi: spout bullshit and then dodge direct questions. You did this here: you basically avoided all direct statements and instead went on fantasy tangents.
Fuck off.
And even if it wasn't, it's still on the level of "at least the fascists got the trains running on time".
Since, like the trains cliche, it's not even true, it's just cheerleading for pointless death and torture.
No. Pinochet "fixed" nothing, his government was one of cronyism and his "miracle" deepened injustice and inequality in Chile.
> And the US did not overthrow Allende. To allege so is to deprive Chileans of any kind of political agency
The US absolutely abetted and prepared the coup, as part of Cold War thinking. This has been declassified and is well known.
I guess you want to live in a post-truth world. It's unfortunate that reality doesn't agree with what your spouting.