I really don’t care wether I am being imprisoned or killed for my opinion in Moscow, Santiago under Pinochet or Cuba under Castro. And I utterly reject the fools who continue to believe that Castro is somehow better and good. My views would certainly have brought me prison or bullets under any of these regimes.

Fact, however, remains that Allende fundamentally respected democratic rule. There is nothing to indicate that he was on a path of ultimately rejecting Chiles old and in this respect well functioned constitutional democratic institutions and violently coerce his political opponents. Yhe only reason why the right went to the guns and not to the polls was that they feared that Allende would win the next election too. And this, Flint argues, is ground enough to support Pinochet??

Now respect for the democratically elected government is in my view paramount (even if I find its policy utterly unacceptable or indecent and lacking in integrity as in case of the ‘children overboard’ affair) as long as this government respects people’s right to be in opposition and right to vote them out of power at the next election.

Flint disguise his argument slightly behind some rather doubtful constitutional arguments. Yet it remains rather obvious that he disagrees with the fundamental principle of democracy, insisting on old extremists arguments used many times by the far right as well as by the far left, that there is a right to do away with democracy if the wrong people are in power.

This is rather thought provoking. It appears that Flint's monarchist views have led down the track of powerful antidemocratic tendencies and sympathies.

This article is worth reading. It parallels the issues which Chile faced and contexts a crisis in Australian politics.

Certainly one of the strategic reasons for supporting Pinochet was to keep Castro off the SA mainland. When nations face a common enemy, the expediency results in some strange bedfellows.

Certainly comments which compare Chilean coups to democratically elected British and Australian Governments (Liam, Iluvatar) display a naivety and lust for hyperbole which beggars belief. Grow up you sound like a pair of hysterical school girls reading the latest copy of “Dolly”

It seems to pass our biasd freind Col's attention that it was the extremist author of the article that was the first to make this silly comparison

It is extremist black-or-white fallacy thinkers like Flint that has brought mad and catastropical policies on the US such as bay of pigs, Vietnam, the overthrough of democratically elected governments in Chile and elsewhere and more lately the invasion of Iraq and the re-introduction of US torture and human rights abuses. Reality is that it is the policy of loosers and it has never done anything but damage the struggle for democracy.