Com­ment: Chilean Pres­i­dent Sebas­t­ian Pin­era recent­ly raised eye­brows by uti­liz­ing the old lyric Deutsch­land uber Alles, banned in Ger­many after the offi­cial col­lapse of the Third Reich.

The world’s first bil­lion­aire pres­i­dent, Pin­era is Chile’s first right-wing leader since Pinochet, whose cab­i­net includ­ed Pin­er­a’s father Jose.

Jose Pin­era ” . . . is the archi­tect of Chile’s pri­vate pen­sion sys­tem based on per­son­al retire­ment accounts. Piñera has been called ‘the world’s fore­most advo­cate of pri­va­tiz­ing pub­lic pen­sion systems’[1] as well as ‘the Pen­sion Reform Pied Piper’ (by the Wall Street Jour­nal).[2] He was Sec­re­tary of Labor and Social Secu­ri­ty, and Sec­re­tary of Min­ing, in the gov­ern­ment of Pres­i­dent Augus­to Pinochet. He is now Dis­tin­guished Senior Fel­low at the Cato Insti­tute, a lib­er­tar­i­an think tank based in Wash­ing­ton, . . .”

Note that the Cato Insti­tute was found­ed by the Koch broth­ers.

One can but won­der if Sebas­t­ian Pin­er­a’s com­ment was tru­ly just a slip of the tongue, or was it a wink­ing ref­er­ence to the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work, deeply entrenched in Chile and else­where in Latin Amer­i­ca? (Pinochet’s dic­ta­tor­ship made lib­er­al use of Third Reich alum­ni in its pro­gram of repres­sion.)

Might the Pineras–Junior and Senior–be part of the Under­ground Reich eco­nom­ic net­work?

“Chile Pres­i­dent Apol­o­gis­es for Nazi Gaffe” [Reuters]; tvnz.co.nz; 10/26/2010.

Excerpt: Chilean Pres­i­dent Sebas­t­ian Pin­era has apol­o­gised for writ­ing a mes­sage asso­ci­at­ed with Nazism in a Ger­man vis­i­tors log dur­ing his tour of Europe this month.

Pin­era explained that he jot­ted “Deutsch­land uber alles” (Ger­many above all) with­out real­is­ing that it was part of a Ger­man nation­al anthem dis­con­tin­ued after World War Two because of its asso­ci­a­tions with the Third Reich.

“I had no idea that the phrase could be linked to the coun­try’s dark past, and so I regret and apol­o­gise for the sit­u­a­tion,” said Pin­era. . . .