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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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If he was granted asylum due to fear of torture by Pinochet, then he was a communist who should have been handed over to operation condor at the time, and was ineligible for asylum under US law. Finding and deporting such cases is a stated priority of the Trump admin.

While Pinochet surely detained a few people who turned out to be innocent, only communists would have reason to fear- it's not like you can flee to the US from inside a prison.

I assure that not only communists have reason to fear if people in power can execute/imprison random people with "they were communists" excuse

In the same way not only anti-communists or capitalists had reason to fear communists - they executed some actual communists under one pretext or another. Or how not all people accused of rape, murder, antisemitism or racism actually were guilty.

(if people in power can execute/imprison people under some pretext, then you WILL get some people going "this woman is pretty, I will tell her to fuck me and threaten to execute her family under $PRETEXT if she refuses" or doing some other kind of abuse, which reasonable people will try to escape)

If you expect that all people are guilty of what they got accused - are you a Japanese judge?

Sûre, but this guy wasn’t alleging any specific reason. Reasonable fear of getting targeted is true for communists and those who associate with them.

And also for anyone who would be falsely accused. (not familiar how often it was happening under Pinochet, though I bet that "never" is not the answer)

The conditions for asylum require a specific threat, not a general atmosphere of high crime rates or a punitive justice system with few rights. If this guy was a left wing journalist or a member of the communist party or whatever then he has a specific threat given that Pinochet was suppressing them. If there’s an off-chance that he gets arrested for no reason then that’s not a specific threat.

Otherwise everyone who lives in Japan, Singapore, or other countries with few rights of the accused is eligible for asylum. They’re not.

Again, thé claim is not ‘no bad thing could ever happen in Pinochet’s chile that would not happen on the USA’. It’s ’there is no reason to think the bad things that happened under Pinochet would happen to him in particular’.

then he has a specific threat given that Pinochet was suppressing them

then it could be "I am being persecuted under pretext of being communist", this does not require someone to be a communist

(rather than "I live in a terrible country and it can happen to me")

Insofar as I've understood the specific criteria for ineligibility for asylum in US is membership in a Communist or otherwise totalitarian party, which is something that might apply to a Pinochet regime opponent but by no means was guaranteed to be the fact.

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