Thanks, but none of your points amount to a rebuttal. "The degree to which opposing parties were suppressed under Pinochet far exceeds the measures taken under

Thanks, but none of your points amount to a rebuttal. "The degree to which opposing parties were suppressed under Pinochet far exceeds the measures taken under Allende." That's like saying if Stalin didn't kill people directly, it'd have been 'all good'. The 'widespread interventions' by these Communist tin pots is 'very destructive' to people's lives and they touch everyone. That is the measure of oppression, not the number of 'protesters that got arrested'. Pinochet was about as bad as 'early Putin', and many other turds that we deal with today. It was 'acutely' bad for the socialist usurpers who imprisoned, but it wasn't a horrible state for most others, and that matters a lot. Pinochet was a pendulum swing as a direct result of a clear and unambiguous Soviet-supported takeover, that doesn't justify much of his actions but it certainly explains it. "By "takeover" you mean the 1936 election where the left won power?" I mean the left in 1930's Spain were agitating murderous thugs using every means to take over the country, including rigging elections (including 1936), voter intimidation and suppression, rigging ballots, violence/murder etc. and that Franco was a reaction to that. In that story, the Communists/Anarchists are absolutely the violent instigators (and inspiration for Orwell's writings) and definitely without material popular support for their revolutionary terms (obviously some support but not the kind of supermajority you need to socialize everything). And so, the pendulum swings. And that's not even the only analogy, there are a handful of those in the 20th century.