Where’s the liberal guilt?

On Sept. 18, I picked up the RN&R with fear and trembling. I was afraid that, after both Jake Highton and Dennis Myers had grabbed the opportunity that the 30th anniversary of the anti-Allende coup in Chile offered for U.S.A.-bashing in their Sparks Daily Tribune columns, the RN&R might miss the boat. But Steve Gingold’s column relieved my mind. Now, allow me to dissect Gingold’s arguments.

First, horror of horrors, this was interference in Chile’s internal affairs. Doesn’t that touch your heart? Did anyone ever hear any liberal caterwauling about any of these American interferences in other countries’ internal affairs?

Why don’t we hear yelling about Yalta, where that great liberal hero Franklin Roosevelt generously handed the countries of Eastern Europe to Stalin on a silver platter?

Or how about Cuba, where the liberal idiots in our state department interfered to overthrow Batista and install Castro, making the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 possible?

Finally, where’s the moaning about China, where American idiots and/or traitors like Gen. George Marshall and Owen Lattimore successfully undermined Chiang Kai-shek, and in effect installed Mao, making possible the greatest mass killing in history?

The difference is that these interventions replaced anti-Communist governments with Communist ones. In Chile, it did the reverse.

Next point: Salvador Allende was democratically elected. So was Hitler; did anybody ever hear any liberal defend Hitler for that reason? Or did anyone ever hear any liberal outrage when democratically elected governments were overthrown by Communist coup, as in Grenada in 1979? Apparently, the real outrage is not that a democratically elected government was overthrown but that a Communist government was overthrown.

Finally, let’s assume that all the charges made against Gen. Augusto Pinochet are true. There’s still one very important point to be made in his favor. Under his rule, Chile was no threat to the United States or any other country. Yet, liberals were always willing to make every possible allowance for much more brutal Communist dictators who did threaten the United States.

This brings up a question which liberals have consistently failed to answer: If liberals aren’t driven by guilt and self-hatred, why do they not only have these double standards, but always set them up so that their own race or country gets the dirty end of the stick?