Bursting the Leftist Bubble about Salvador Allende

Salvador Allende has long been the great role model, icon, demigod, and bath toy for the Moonbat Left, which has a long history of distorting his biography and turning him into a prophet of "democratic socialism", an oxymoron if ever there was one. Much of the debunking and demystifying has been the work of Mark Falcoff, in Commentary Magazine and elsewhere.

Among the leaders in debunking the Allende myths has been the Der Spiegel news magazine in Germany. This week Spiegel runs what may be its most damaging expose on the Chilean Marxist.

The article's theme is that, leftist icon or not, Allende was a racist, homophobe, and anti-Semite, and it presents documentation to this effect. In part, the article is based on the findings of scientist Victor Farias, 65, who actually bothered to read Allende's doctoral thesis. Farias had been a great admirer of Allende and fled Chile just after the 1973 military coup out of fear he would be prosecuted. He later had second thoughts. The thesis, claims Farias, who has taught at the Latin America Institute at Berlin's Free University since 1974, is crawling with racist slurs and innuendoes. Allende got a low grade on the thesis, by the way.

According to Farias, the dissertation wasn't merely a temporary phase for Allende. Farias accuses Allende of remaining loyal to racism and anti-Semitism for years -- at least until the days of the Popular Front government under President Pedro Aguirre Cerda.

Farias had previously published "Die Nazis in Chile", which showed how strongly his home country had once been influenced by the Nazi way of thinking and by Nazi emigrants. His newest book is titled, "Salvador Allende: Antisemitismus und Euthanasie" (Salvador Allende: Anti-Semitism and Euthanasia). It has been published only in Chile and Spain.

In the new book, the Chilean professor of philosophy claims that Allende revealed himself in his doctoral thesis (dated 1933) as being a racist, an anti-Semite and a proponent of eugenics and compulsory sterilisation. Farías accuses the socialist, who was later venerated by millions, of remaining faithful to his racist and anti-Semitic ideas for a long time, even as a politician. Eugenics and racist views were in fact widespread at the universities of Europe and America long before the Nazis, which is why Chile's largest daily newspaper "El Mercurio" is now coming to Allende's defence with the claim, "Farias is concealing the historical context."