Tea at Trianon: General Pinochet and the Nazis

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 5, 2025

General Pinochet and the Nazis

From It Can Always Get Worse

By the time the Chilean military stepped in to remove Salvador Allende’s Marxist government in September 1973, the question most Chileans had was what had taken so long.1 Allende had been an asset of Soviet intelligence since 1961,2 and after taking power in 1970 via an election where KGB interference might well have been decisive,3 he surrounded himself with Soviet “advisers” and troops drawn from the Soviet colony on Cuba administered by Fidel Castro.4 Allende’s socialism brought economic catastrophe and societal chaos, and his totalitarian political project was almost complete: the Supreme Court had declared in May-June 1973 that Allende had demolished the legal order, and in late August the Chilean Parliament passed a resolution noting that there were no constitutional mechanisms left to rein Allende in, concluding with an all-but-open appeal for the military to intervene. A coup was seen as the only way to avoid the civil war most Chileans thought was imminent, which Allende was preparing for by importing more Communist Cuban troops.5
When the moment came, the Cubans were almost the only forces willing to defend Allende, but that does not detract from the morality of his decision to accept that the game was up. Rather than encourage further bloodshed to try to retain power, Allende issued no incitement for his supporters to confront the military, and he bravely refused the offer of safe passage into exile, choosing instead to make a final speech on the radio and kill himself with a rifle Castro had given him. Castro himself quickly claimed Allende had been murdered by soldiers under orders from the coup leader, General Augusto Pinochet, and the rumour spread far and wide, becoming an article of faith for many Leftists. For the Western and international Left, Allende’s status as a martyr quickly transitioned to that of a saint; the Soviet Union skilfully encouraged the development and leveraged it into a secondary cult around Luis Corvalán, the leader of Moscow’s “fraternal” Communist Party in Chile, who had been arrested in the aftermath of the coup.6 (Read more.)