I sarcastically recommended former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet to be considered as one of our top five presidents in another conversation. Pinochet was a hero to many Chileans who lived through the turmoil of the Allende administration, yet polite society will not entertain any notion other than Pinochet as right wing monster.
Fidel Castro took one of, if not the top economy in Latin America and obliterated it. Chavez (R.I.P.) wiped out the upper and middle classes in Venezuela. Cuba’s Castro terrorized and impoverished “his” people for a couple of generations, and not even in death will Chavez’s reign of terror end in Venezueala.
On the other hand, Pinochet (with much help from ‘the Chicago boys’) helped to create one of the most productive and free business climates (more so than the US’s according to The Heritage Foundation’s 2013 Index of Economic Freedom: http://www.heritage.org/index/) in the world, and eventually even voluntarily gave up power, yet he is still demonized by both right and left.
The propaganda is working. Most of my Chilean friends look up to Pinochet, but their sons and daughter despise him at best. I get why leftists can’t admit Pinochet was a force for good in Chile, but why must scholars dissuade non-intellectuals like me from believing the reality we experienced under Pinochet’s benevolent dictatorship?
ST UnWoked & UnVaxxed! 
Making me smarter, re: this whole subject, ST. Thanks:
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u r welcome krap
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Sometimes I totally embrace Yeats’ theory about the gyres. There is a center, and events spin out from it, so far:”penning and perming in a widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer/Things fall apart, the center cannot hold..” It doesn’t matter how good and just and sensible the “center” was: entropy is inevitable. Why are civilizations always rising and falling? Why should Chileans want to destroy what Pinochet built? Just because it was there.
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The ideals of communism can never be defeated despite tens of millions of perished souls who perished proving those goals always lead to satanic tyranny.
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