General Augusto Pinochet died yesterday.
He was one of the most evil people to be alive during my lifetime. One of the more evil people to ever live that I can think of off the top of my head. He died of natural causes at age 91 in his homeland of Chile, after years in exile in England.
Well, you’re not going to get an argument out of me.
Woohoo! A point for my dead pool team! 
I guess the moral of the story is that evil people live a long time.
Only the good die young.
The demon in your mind will rape you in your bed at night
The wisdom of ages, the lies and outrages concealed
Time it waits for no man
My future is revealed
Time it waits for no man
My fate is sealed
If I cancel tomorrow the undead will thank me today
Fly in the face of the prophets I mock your morality plays
The moon is red and bleeding
The sun is burned and black
The book of life is silent
No turning back
Only the good die young
All the evil seem to live forever
Only the good die young
All the evil seem to live forever
Only the good die young
Only the good die young
Mystery madman, a victim of cruel charade
Some innocent pawn in an end game, one more stalemate
Is death another birthday?
A way to kiss your dreams goodbye?
Do the undead live within us?
And look through our eyes?
Walking on water are miracles all you can trust
Measure your coffin does is measure up to your lust?
So I think I’ll leave you
With your bishops and your guilt
So until the next time
Have a good sin
Only the good die young
All the evil seem to live forever
Only the good die young
All the evil seem to live forever
Only the good die young
Only the good die young
Seven deadly sins
Seven ways to win
Seven holy paths to hell
Seven downward slopes
Seven bloodied hopes
Seven are your burning fires
Seven your desires
Also (about Pinochet): about fucking time. Bastard should have died a long time ago.
Heroes get remembered,
but
Legends never die
Follow your heart,
kid
and You’ll never go wrong.
- Babe Ruth, “The Sandlot”
It seemed so appropriate at the time.
Hitler didn’t live long.
And good riddance.
once a great tit
always a great tit
-Skankin’ Garbage, “Skankin’ ass hos”
50-something is good enough. And he commited suicide. That’s like cheating.
Bastard should have faced trial a long time ago. As it stands now, good riddance.
And in a much more unpleasant manner, away from Chile.
I think death is a freeing force. What he deserved would be a few years of suffering alive before his death.
Should he really have had a trial, though? It seems to me that when world-renown despots who have by all accounts committed numerous atrocities, the trial really is meaningless, as in the one of Saddam Hussein most recently. Could the trial of Hitler been any more than a complete farce? The ideal way to dispose of a monster is what the Italians did with Mussolini, shoot him and his mistress and string them up upside-down in the middle of Milan, for anyone and everyone to defile however they see fit.
Nuremberg worked, didn’t it? 'Cept for that other crazy Nazi who managed to commit suicide in custody.
It’s different with the head honcho.
Society always dooms who the media deems, whether they’re innocent or not. I suppose it actually would have been a good thing if that happened to Pinochet, though, with him diong all sorts of horrible stuff and all. As far as I know, you have to do quite a bit to be exiled from some countries.
I don’t think it’s meaningless. In Greece for instance, the trial of the perpetrators of the junta (1,2) brought closure. Especially since the legal system here is a bit messed up, so many who get sentenced for life end up free in a couple of decades. The PM of the time became famous for saying “And when we say for life, we mean for life”. I digress.
The problem is that these trials are often hypocritical. There was no need for tricks in the trial of Saddam Hussein, for he would be found guilty in any just court of law anyway. Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging over the killing of 148 Shia Iraqis in 1982. According to Reuters 1850 Iraqis died in November alone (and who’s to blame?). There is a certain disrepancy there that immediately undermines the trial.
Mussolini’s hanging seems a bit barbarian to me, yet of course I didn’t have to live under his regime and the enthusiasm at the time may not have allowed much thought. A Hitler trial? He marked an era but I’m afraid he was mostly publicly denounced only for governments and individuals to later have many of his methods employed toward their own ends. Anyway, trials can be held only when one’s enemy has been battered to the ground and then one may go overboard without repercussion (Nagasaki, Dresden bombings). Life. Don’t talk to me about life 
edit: btw Alessandra Mussolini is also the niece of Sophia Lauren. Heh, I’d be caught dead before having such a surname.
That is a good point; there is a point when courts of law cannot adeuately sentence someone for what they have done, and the Mussolini treatment is more appropriate. Hence my saying “it should’ve happened sooner and more unpleasantly.”
It would’ve been nice, in theory, for him to have a trial, but given the fact that he got out of having one for so long, he, of all people, would’ve gotten out of the repercussions of one, or they wouldn’t have been severe enough, or it would’ve ended up a joke.
On the other hand, a body stating him guilty of atrocities against humanity is a symbolic victory, even if the court doesn’t/can’t give him nearly what he deserves or even do much of anything to an old, sick man. The idea of it is the victory, that he has been found guilty. The same way that, even if saved from Death Row, being wrongly found guilty of a crime is still infuriating because it is such a massive statement.
I hope this isn’t going to start a trend where murderous dictators die before paying for their crimes. First it was Milosevic, and now this… They got the easy way out, if you ask me, and that could have been avoided if courts hadn’t been so slow.