Is It Easier in a Dictatorship?

Our Internet is out at the moment, so I'm Blackberrying it tonight. This will probably be shorter than it would've been otherwise, but we must acknowledge the passing of Augusto Pinochet. He manhandled Chile in the 1970s, usurping control from the democratically elected socialist Salvadore Allende and thrilling the hearts of rightwingers everywhere. Pinochet was a classic strongman. He set up a by-the-numbers authoritarian regime and turning his back on human rights. Thousands of Chileans were killed or disappeared. Disappear became an active verb under Pinochet. Dissidents were kidnapped and never heard from again.

Free elections were ultimately held again, and Pinochet stepped down. In 1998, he was arrested in the U.K for some of the murders carried out during his regime. Many of his international supporters came to his defense, most prominantly, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Thatcher was saddened at the news of the dictator's passing). The Clash song "White Man in Hammersmith Palais" rails against a number of things, but one of its targets is the growing conservatism of the U.K. at the time of the song's writing. Here's a representative verse:

All over, people are changing their vote
Along with their overcoat.
If Adolph Hitler flew in today,
They'd send a limousine anyway.

The Clash wrote this some time before there was an Internet, Usenet, or Godwin's Law. So I don't have a problem with the Hitler namecheck. But twenty years later, the reaction given to Pinochet proves the group's point. Ever since Thatcher came to the defese of Pinochet, every time I hear his name, I drop it into that Clash verse to replace Hitler. Not only would they send a metaphorical limousine to pick him up, they did, Pinochet provides the example of truth to that line. He also reminds us that we haven't moved that far in the last sixty-one years.