HE WAS WHO THE LEFT INSISTS PINOCHET WAS (via Tom Morin):

It's time to bury the myths (Carlos Alberto Montaner, September 27, 2005, Firmas Press)

The first hammer blow against the sugary memory of a heroic Allende came from Chilean historian Víctor Farías, the author of Salvador Allende: Anti-Semitism and Euthanasia. Farías unearthed the dissertation written in 1933 by Allende to get his medical diploma.

Allende's thesis bore the title ''Mental hygiene and crime'' and could have been signed by any fanatical supporter of Hitler. It was something like a handbook for the perfect Latin American fascist. Homosexuals were described as repugnant. People with mental illnesses should be chemically castrated so they couldn't transmit their biological heritage. Jews were characterized as usurers, swindlers and slanderers.

When Allende wrote this, he was only 25, but at age 40, a health minister, he tried to put his eugenic theories (so typically Nazi) into practice by introducing a bill to sterilize the mentally ill. Fortunately, that bill was rejected by Congress.

At 64, when he was president and Simon Wiesenthal, the late Israeli Nazi-hunter, asked him for the extradition of Walter Rauff (a Hitler henchman who ordered the murder of thousands of Jews), Allende rejected the petition.

Deep in his heart, though a sexagenarian, he remained the same ardent anti-Semite he had been in his youth.

The second blow against the falsified image of Allende comes from other historians: Vasily Mitrokhin of Russia and Christopher Andrew of Britain. [...]

The late Chilean president was a KGB collaborationist, who received money, transmitted information and contributed to Soviet plans for the conquest of Latin America.

Allende was known as a confidential contact, someone who Moscow counted on to undermine democratic regimes and -- in accordance with the great Soviet project for world hegemony -- to eventually achieve the political defeat and destruction of the United States.

In reality, there is no contradiction between the young Allende, captivated by the fascist ideas prevalent in the 1930s, and the old Allende of the 1970s, a KGB collaborationist. Mussolini was an admirer of Lenin, while Hitler, along with the communists, felt a deep antipathy toward liberal democracy and the United States, a country that he thought was dominated by the Jews.

Helping get rid of him was one of the few decent things Nixon and Kissinger did.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 9, 2006 12:09 AM