Via:
"Progressivism is a cancer in America," said Beck, "and it’s eating our Constitution — and it was meant to eat our Constitution."
--Glenn Beck speech in in 2010
AND
"Only by destroying the old order, by rejecting liberal democracy in its Chilean variant, by purging the politicians and 'extirpating the Marxist cancer' could Chile be saved from the brink of disaster and create a new institutionality to guarantee political stability, economic recovery, and growth."
--Augusto Pinochet speech in 1979*
* from Brian Loveman, "Antipolitics in Chile, 1973-94." In Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, Jr. (eds.). The Politics of Antipolitics, 3rd Edition (Lanham, MD: SR Books, 1997): 269.
I've seriously been saying this for like ever. The US right/the Tea Party and Pinochet/Videla/the rest of the Condor Crew bear so many ideological similarities. And I'd bet anyone a considerable sum of money that if you tell a US rightist who Pinochet was and what he did, they'd approve of it 100%.
Let's take a look. Would a Teabagger not agree wholeheartedly with the following quotes from these Condor Dirty Warriors?
"In a dirty war the innocent pay for the guilty" - General Reynaldo Benito Bignone (Argentina)
"First, we must kill all subversives, then their sympathizers; then those who are indifferent; and finally, we must kill all those who are timid" - General Ibérico Saint Jean (Argentina)
"One becomes a terrorist not only by killing with a weapon or setting a bomb but also by encouraging others through ideas that go against our Western and Christian civilization" - Lieutenant-general Jorge Rafael Videla (Argentina) 1977.
"We practically wiped this nation clean of Marxists." - Augusto Pinochet(Chile)
"Rome cut off the heads of Christians and they continued to reappear one way or another. Something similar happens with Marxists." - Augusto Pinochet
And of course, the Pinochet quote above about how Marxism (or Progressivism, or any kind of leftism, mind you) was a "cancer," essentially being repeated verbatim by Glenn Beck, prophet of the Teabaggers.
The Condor parallels are there, impossible to ignore and frankly, kind of, no really, terrify me.
I'm not saying that there's going to be a military coup in the US and that we'll be ruled by the equivalent of these sort of bloody monsters quoted above. But the very idea and the very possibility of having people in this country who agree that left-wing political views are a "cancer on the body politik" is horrifying.
I'm sorry, but when you say that "Marxism/Socialism/Communism/Liberals/Democrats/etc is/are a cancer," I'm gonna assume that you would want and would support a full scale Dirty War in this country. And that's an assumption based unfortunately in reality.