Reader Gringo, commenting on Side-by-side #Nisman, recommended The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina. I bought the Kindle edition and can’t put it down.
In it, author Uki Goñi describes the following,
During these long walks, I came across a disturbing sign of the times that I should perhaps have heeded better. On the broad Nueve de Julio Avenue that divides Buenos Aires in half – ‘the widest avenue on the world’, according to some Argentines – stands a giant white obelisk that is the city’s most conspicuous landmark. In 1974, the landmark lost its virginity in the strangest of ways. A revolving billboard was suspended around the Obelisco, snugly encircling the huge white phallus. Round and round the ring turned, inscribed with an Orwellian message in bold blue letters on a plain white background: ‘Silence Is Health.’
I found a YouTube via the Plaza de Mayo blog,
Forty-one years ago. Has anything changed?
Thank you, Fausta.
Forty-one years ago. Has anything changed?
What has not changed: the Vivo, unethical aspect of Argentine culture is still very much alive it its political life. See your previous post. What has changed: it is not likely that there will be a repetition of the 1930-1983 involvement of the military in politics. The military has been justifiably been discredited as a political player.
It is very fitting that “Silencio es Salud” begins with a group of black Ford Falcons. The black Falcons became a symbol of the Junta’s “disappearances,” as Junta operatives using the black Falcons often snatched people off the streets.
While the main topic of his book is what occurred in the 1940s, Goñi also discusses more recent history. In his capacity as a reporter for the Buenos Aires Herald, Goñi played a leading and courageous role in bringing the Junta’s human rights violations to public awareness. Because he was involved in making others aware of the Junta’s human rights violations, he also noted the reactions- or lack of same- of many Argentines to the junta’s human rights violations. From the book:
Conclusion: there was a lot of complicity with the Junta’s human rights violations. The insanity -call it what you will- of the military was not confined to the military.
In Nobel prize-winning V.S Naipaul’s prescient 1972 article on Argentina,The Corpse at the Iron Gate, written before Peron’s return, we see that the military was not the only foul actor in Argentine politics.
He quotes a trade union leader- Peronist trade union leader. “Depende de quien sea torturado.” “It depends on who is being tortured. Sounds like a Junta general- a gorila– talking, doesn’t it?
The military wasn’t the only player in Argentine politics with plastic ethics.
Naipaul interviews an “Priest for the Third World”- priest of aristocratic origins.
And the father, abashed, explained that Peronism was really concerned with the development of the human spirit. Such a development had taken place in Cuba and China; in those countries they had turned their backs on the industrial society.
A priest who believes that “development of the human spirit” takes place in totalitarian societies- places where the human spirit is degraded- is someone whose thought processes are full of delusions. The military simply had different delusions- geopolitical fantasies of Antarctica, or anti-semitism. Jewish plot to take over Patagonia, and the like.
The madness and plastic ethics in Argentina of that era were not confined to the military.
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