John Howard was keynote speaker at Quadrant's 50th anniversary dinner a couple of weeks ago.
He cited Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as 2 of 3 people [curiosuly, Pope Paul II was the other] as people who he admired. Really?
Andrew West, writing in New Matilda [online, but only available on subscription] reflects on these "heroes":
"Let’s start with Thatcher....
She remains unrepentant in her support of apartheid South Africa. She opposed sanctions against the White minority government and declared Nelson Mandela a terrorist who would never lead his country. She never supported a South Africa with one-person, one-vote, one-value, which is the essence of democracy. Only six weeks ago, one of Thatcher’s successors as Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, repudiated her support for apartheid but Howard still lauds her as a role model.
Thatcher’s other great pin-up boy was the homicidal Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, responsible for the deaths of 3,000 and the torture of 35,000, including the near incineration of university activist Carmen Gloria Quintana. In 1999, when a British court ordered Pinochet be detained for human rights abuses, Thatcher rushed to his bedside, and then to the stage of the Conservative Party conference to eulogise the man who in 1973 seized power from the democratically elected Allende Government.
Pinochet was also Reagan’s main man in Latin America. Even after the CIA established Pinochet’s connection to the most significant act of pre-9/11 terrorism on American soil — the 1976 car-bombing of former Allende diplomat Orlando Letelier and US citizen Ronni Moffit — Reagan embraced Chile’s terrorist regime. Pinochet was, you see, a bulwark against communism, no matter how grotesque his behaviour, which included knowing about and allowing a former Nazi officer, Paul Schaefer, to sexually abuse children in his ‘Colonia Dignidad’ in the Chilean countryside. That the current Chilean Government has validated at least 28,000 cases of torture, and agreed to compensate the victims, does not seem to have tempered the Right’s love of Pinochet.
But Pinochet was not Reagan’s only man in the Americas. In his first term, Reagan also supported General Jorge Rafael Videla, an architect of Argentina’s dirty war, and later General Leopoldo Galtieri. In addition to the standard operating procedure of ‘disappearing’ their political opponents and applying electrodes to their genitals, their regime also coddled escaped Nazi war criminals and, in a particular specialty, harvested babies from imprisoned mothers, whom they later murdered."
Hmm! And these are people to admire or hail as heroes? Meanwhile, check out New Matilda here to subscribe to a very worthwhile weekly online journal.
He cited Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as 2 of 3 people [curiosuly, Pope Paul II was the other] as people who he admired. Really?
Andrew West, writing in New Matilda [online, but only available on subscription] reflects on these "heroes":
"Let’s start with Thatcher....
She remains unrepentant in her support of apartheid South Africa. She opposed sanctions against the White minority government and declared Nelson Mandela a terrorist who would never lead his country. She never supported a South Africa with one-person, one-vote, one-value, which is the essence of democracy. Only six weeks ago, one of Thatcher’s successors as Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, repudiated her support for apartheid but Howard still lauds her as a role model.
Thatcher’s other great pin-up boy was the homicidal Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, responsible for the deaths of 3,000 and the torture of 35,000, including the near incineration of university activist Carmen Gloria Quintana. In 1999, when a British court ordered Pinochet be detained for human rights abuses, Thatcher rushed to his bedside, and then to the stage of the Conservative Party conference to eulogise the man who in 1973 seized power from the democratically elected Allende Government.
Pinochet was also Reagan’s main man in Latin America. Even after the CIA established Pinochet’s connection to the most significant act of pre-9/11 terrorism on American soil — the 1976 car-bombing of former Allende diplomat Orlando Letelier and US citizen Ronni Moffit — Reagan embraced Chile’s terrorist regime. Pinochet was, you see, a bulwark against communism, no matter how grotesque his behaviour, which included knowing about and allowing a former Nazi officer, Paul Schaefer, to sexually abuse children in his ‘Colonia Dignidad’ in the Chilean countryside. That the current Chilean Government has validated at least 28,000 cases of torture, and agreed to compensate the victims, does not seem to have tempered the Right’s love of Pinochet.
But Pinochet was not Reagan’s only man in the Americas. In his first term, Reagan also supported General Jorge Rafael Videla, an architect of Argentina’s dirty war, and later General Leopoldo Galtieri. In addition to the standard operating procedure of ‘disappearing’ their political opponents and applying electrodes to their genitals, their regime also coddled escaped Nazi war criminals and, in a particular specialty, harvested babies from imprisoned mothers, whom they later murdered."
Hmm! And these are people to admire or hail as heroes? Meanwhile, check out New Matilda here to subscribe to a very worthwhile weekly online journal.
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