Islam versus Europe

Along with Che and Fidel, Salvador Allende is one of the great heroes of the clueless Left. After he died during a coup d'etat mounted against his government by the military, the myth that he was deliberately murdered gained wide currency in Latin America. Recently, an investigative commission concluded that he had committed suicide. See a Guardian article on the subject here.

Far more interesting, however, are the revelations of Chilean historian Victor Farias. The French site Novopress has a long article on Farias' research, the core elements of which I have summarised below.

Farias found Allende's doctoral thesis written for the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Santiago de Chile. It was called "Mental hygiene and delinquency", based on lots of reading and Allende's own work as an intern at the city's psychiatric asylum.

In this text Allende, picking up on the work of researchers like Cesare Lombroso, Allende associates certain types of delinquency with ethnic or racial origin.

As Allende cites other authors without quotation marks or notes, it is difficult to distinguish between Allende's own opinions and those of his sources.

The text contains pejorative comments about gypsies, Arabs and Jews. Jews, he says, "are characterised by specific forms of delinquency: fraud, slander, calumny and, above all, usury." Allende concludes: "This information leads one to suspect that race has an influence on delinquency". Allende also writes that Jews as a whole are naturally delinquent.

In 1939 Allende became Minister of Health in the Chilean government. He lost no time in issuing a decree on "Racial Improvement" to be implemented by the "National Institute for the Health of the Race and the Optimal Use of Free Time". One of those he picked as a director of this institute was General Francisco Javier Diaz Valderrama, founder of the Chilean National Socialist party, who had received the blessing of his counterparts in Germany.

Part of Allende's plan for racial improvement was to sterilise insane people. A law for this purpose was elaborated between 1939 and 1941 by a commission Allende appointed. Included in it were Hans Betzhold and Eduardo Brücher, who were familiar with the techniques then being applied in Germany. Hans Betzhold later wrote a book called Eugenesia. In the foreword to the book, he praised both Mein Kampf and Salvador Allende, without whom, he says, the book would never have come to light. In the event, the law was never implemented. Opposition from Chilean medical staff forced the abandonment of the idea.

Farias claims the Nazis were funding government ministers of the Chilean Socialist party but does not know whether Allende himself was receiving some of the money. Allende did have a personal relationship with Walter Rauff, however, who was an SS officer and friend of Reinhard Heydrich and was involved in developing the gas vans used by the Nazis to kill some of their victims. Rauff had settled in Chile after the war and was allowed to remain there until his death despite numerous extradition requests from the German government. During his presidency, Allende might have been expected to be sympathetic to these requests or to demands from various trade unions that Rauff's factories be taken over by the state. But he was not. Farias believes Rauff had part-financed Allende's electoral campaign.

Source: Novopress