Creepy plump mass-murderer, torturer and thief Augusto Pinochet (91), former usurper and dictator of Chile, finally went to his eternal reward on December 10th, 2006. His grieving family will continue to grow fat on his embezzlements. The Church and the Army gave him a suitable sendoff. But as the lawyer for some of his victims observed, when Pinochet arrives in Hell he will find it strangely familiar, resembling some of his own torture chambers.
The corpulent corpus of Henry Kissinger, Pinochet's erstwhile puppet-master, is 83 and still apparently alive. Eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing - that sort of thing.
The odiousness of tyrants is not mathematical. Pinochet, in his gory days, killed only a few more than the amateur terrorists of Northern Ireland over three decades. Peanuts, compared to Stalin (20 million or so). Six thousand of Stalin's victims for every one of Pinochet's. So do we hate Stalin, or Hitler, six thousand times as much? It would be difficult. Augusto lacked charm.