And if the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy had used his shameless demagoguery to expose suspected Hitler sympathizers, instead of Stalin's covert admirers, he would have been hailed as an all-American hero. Yet since the end of the Cold War, KGB files show that McCarthy exposed a veritable communist conspiracy to undermine and co-opt the U.S. government.

No one symbolizes the brutality of military rule in Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s more than Gen. Pinochet, we are told by the dominant media culture. The success of his coup, they say, and the ensuing terror helped deepen conflicts in South and Central America by inspiring generals to believe they could resist democratic reform. Orwellian newspeak and Soviet-style disinformation have been resuscitated. Anti-anti-communism remains in fashion.

What has Fidel Castro been doing since 1959? Running a political charm school and minding his own business -- or practicing state terror and trying to foment revolution throughout South and Central America from the 1960s to the 1980s? Were the Contras resisting democratic reform in Nicaragua --or fighting the puppet Marxist regime of a Soviet satellite in the Caribbean?

Since institutional memories --as opposed to the selective pre-programmed kind -- are as rare as snowflakes in the Sahara, it might be useful to recall what the "democratically elected government" of Salvatore Allende (with 36 percent of the vote) inflicted on Chile before Gen. Pinochet decided to roll out the tanks. Gen. Pinochet did not suddenly decide the communists had to go. In fact, generals had participated in three of Allende's Cabinets and reluctantly agreed to act when they had proof positive of what the communists had in store for Chile. Communist agents were inciting rebellion inside the armed forces, which had been the proverbial straw that broke the dromedary's back in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1965.

A Bolshevik-type insurrection was in the works. Some 14,000 foreign agitators had moved into Chile with a wink and a nod from Allende. They ranged from Cuban DGI agents, who were in charge of reorganizing Allende's security services, to Soviet, Czech and North Korean military instructors and arms suppliers, to hard-line Spanish and Portuguese Communist Party members. They were organizing revolutionary brigades to take on the Chilean army.

Regis Debray, a prominent French armchair revolutionary, friend of Mr. Castro and Che Guevara, saw Allende one month before Gen. Pinochet's 1973 coup. He wrote in France's leftist Nouvel Observateur: "We all knew that it was merely a tactical matter of winning time to organize, to arrange, and to coordinate the military formations of the parties that made up the Popular Unity government. It was a race against the clock."

And Gen. Pinochet won the race. A frustrated left has demonized him ever since -- and young journalists who know nothing about the period have parroted liberal distortions of history.

Shortly before Gen. Pinochet's coup, the Chilean Supreme Court and parliament ruled that Allende's government had repeatedly violated the constitution. Allende was a lifelong Marxist who had espoused Trotskyism in his youth. The lily-red revolutionaries saw him as a transition figure -- some saw him as another Kerensky -- to a full-fledged communist regime a la Cuba. His daughter Beatrice, known as Tati, was married to Luis de Ona, the Cuban DGI agent responsible for coordinating Che Guevara's ill-fated expedition to Bolivia.

Chile's communists prior to Allende's election in 1970 were hardly benign. They were the first outside the Warsaw Pact nations to applaud the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Gen. Pinochet's exactions did not take place in a vacuum. It was a life-and-death struggle throughout most of Latin America. Tupamaros and other urban terrorists and rural guerrillas were on the move from Montevideo to Managua. Gen. Pinochet fought fire with fire.

To head off the civil war the revolutionaries would have triggered if the plan outlined by Regis Debray had succeeded, Gen. Pinochet ordered the arrest of thousands. Many were tortured and killed, including foreign agitators. The deplorable excesses of Gen. Pinochet's rule averted a civil war that would have been a lot worse. One million were killed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and Francisco Franco was reviled for much the same reasons as Gen. Pinochet: He defeated the communists. KGB documents have now revealed that there was indeed a Stalinist attempt to take over Spain in the guise of a helping hand for the Spanish Republicans fighting Franco and his Nazi and fascist allies.

Both Franco and Gen. Pinochet went on to rebuild their ravaged economies and laid the foundations for a prosperous economy, the cornerstone for the solid, viable and enduring democracy that followed. A Third World basket case under Allende, Chile became an economic miracle under Gen. Pinochet.

Interestingly enough, Augusto Pinochet is hated by liberal establishments the world over for the same reason he is lionized in today's impoverished Russia.

On a recent visit to the United States, Russia's ousted liberal reformer Boris Nemtsov startled his American friends and admirers when he said Gen. Pinochet is the only foreign hero in post-communist Russia. Asked why, Mr. Nemtsov replied, "Because he threw out a communist regime, admittedly killing a few hundred people along the way, and established the foundations for genuine political democracy and a thriving market economy." Which is what all Russians long for, and which Castro-backed Allende had destroyed in Chile.

Liberals accuse the CIA of meddling in Chile and helping Gen. Pinochet's anti-Allende coup. The coup itself took the CIA by surprise, but it was certainly involved against Allende.

As it was in Italy in 1948 with lavish covert funding to prevent what otherwise would have been a "democratically elected" then Stalinist Communist Party taking over Italy.

Europe's Marxists and leftist intelligentsia and what Stalin once called "useful idiots" were hoping Allende's Chilean experiment would lead to similar ballot box communist victories.