There is such a thing as the National Review Online. Makes sense, right? But still I don’t think it’s an automatic expectation; besides maybe the International Socialist Review, I can’t think of any magazine that clings more stubbornly to an obsolete worldview in its analysis of present-day affairs. So I wouldn’t put it past them to dismiss the internet as some unwholesome beatnik craze or something.
In any case, the NRO exists, and it looks like a lot of media websites. It has hyperlinks and multimedia and a pretty slick banner and, well, it looks pretty good actually. It even has a blog where staff writers can muse briefly on wandering topics of interest. It’s called The Corner. It is the most obnoxious blog on the web.
Can you tell which is the murderous power-hungry fascist and which is the murderous power-hungry commie? (hint: the commie is the one with the forked tongue)
Take this post, written yesterday by John Derbyshire, a rumination on the Pinochet regime by way of Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s recent film Tony Manero. It’s hard to say whether Derbyshire actually saw the film, since he offers nothing in the way of critical analysis, but he has a pretty strong reaction to it nonetheless. You see, the film apparently isn’t nice to Augusto Pinochet, or to America for supporting him, and this offends John Derbyshire.
Why does this offend him? For the same reason that he describes Larraín as a “commie director”: because he’s still living in the cold war. For people like Derbyshire, there is a line in the sand, and you are either left of that line, or you are on the side of America and all its righteousness. Any implication that America was wrong about supporting a right wing military dictator must be met with an immediate apologia of said dictator in order to vindicate our actions.
What follows is as intellectually dishonest an argument as you’re likely ever to find:
When the Castroite Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup in 1973, thus probably forestalling the usual catalog of nation-wrecking Leninist horrors — slave-labor camps, famines, etc. — the international Left was outraged. They still are. The subsequent government of Augusto Pinochet, while often brutal and corrupt in the way of military dictatorships, restored Chile’s economic health and eventually stepped aside to let the nation return to democracy. That of course outrages the Left even more.
In this worldview, America is self-evidently good, and the Left, being necessarily evil, resents America’s virtuous glory. Pinochet was a hero who rescued his country from the scourge of international communism. Anyone who disagrees with this must be a) a commie, and b) sour about the triumph of liberty.
Of course, the actual history of the Pinochet regime is a convoluted story that doesn’t fit so nicely into Derbyshire’s outdated paradigm. Pinochet’s policies undoubtedly helped to make Chile the most prosperous of Latin American nations during a time of violent instability and economic catastrophe. But prosperity came at a cost.
Aside from glossing over the vicious reality of more than 30,000 disappearances and murders under Pinochet’s reign, the glaring understatement that the regime was “brutal and corrupt in the way of military dictatorships” ignores the fact that said brutality and corruption are precisely why military dictatorships are fundamentally bad. They are not the necessary evils of an otherwise benign system. And when Derbyshire writes that Pinochet generously “stepped aside to let the nation return to democracy,” he fails to mention that this only occurred after fifteen years of iron-fisted rule, and only after mounting domestic opposition made his hold on power increasingly untenable.
The assertion that Chile under Allende was bound for “the usual catalog of nation-wrecking Leninist horrors” is, of course, impossible to know, since Allende was deposed and killed before he could realize his Soviet-style dystopia. One may as well suggest that he would have been secretly replaced by an alien robot that hunted honor students for sport — or that he would have created a socialist paradise of universal equality. However, the evocation of labor camps and fatal scarcity again betrays Derbyshire’s outmoded way of thought; this is the same alarmist claim that paranoid American hawks made before and during Allende’s regime, particularly after he was endorsed by Castro. It is true that Allende’s policies probably would have dragged Chile into the same economic black hole that consumed its neighbors in subsequent years, and in this regard Pinochet was certainly preferable. But it is ironic that Derbyshire invokes Allende’s potential for brutality to justify the coup, when the alternative was no less brutal. Like other cold warriors, Derbyshire seems to think violence and oppression are more palatable when committed by the right.
The author’s motives become much clearer in his final paragraph, when he suggests that his conservative ilk should insist on Pinochet’s virtuousness, “if only because it annoys the hell out of [the Left].” Even under the direction of the very thoughtful and articulate William F. Buckley, Jr., the National Review has never been concerned with uncovering political truths or demonstrating the values of conservatism. Rather, it wants to win the culture wars, to embarrass its enemies on the Left.
In the 60s, the culture wars mattered, but these days they seem kind of absurd. There is the Left and there is the Right, but most of us fall somewhere in between, and anyway those two camps aren’t monolithic systems but diverse and fissured alliances of like-minded people, some more like-minded than others. Politics should consist of dynamic engagement and the courage to consider the intractable truths that defy ideological elegance.
Also, whiskey and cigarettes should cure cancer.
