|
40e35f8
|
People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla [...], I went to [...] check in with : the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. ( as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. ) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people 'disappeared' all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one's former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [....] I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that 'terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that's why she's detained.' I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn't understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. 'We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.' Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general-- --had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. [...] In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied-- : 'roundly' denied--holding Jacobo Timerman 'as either a journalist or a Jew.' While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors: [...] We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as 'evidence' by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there's the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of... we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it's one, two, three... go!
|
|
christianity
marx
death-squads
jacobo-timerman
einstein
freud
jorge-rafael-videla
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
f82fd3a
|
At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.' In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King's phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict 'New Order' that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman's case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan's first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn't seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman's memoir, , was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the : the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has 'disappeared.' In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with or 'death squads,' of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.
|
|
human-rights
death-squads
jacobo-timerman
henry-kissinger
jorge-rafael-videla
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
3ae798f
|
"I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. ' ' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: ' ' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Peron, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all--and Peron had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library--but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: . 'A , you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a is a trafficker in cunt: in Anglo-Saxon we might say a 'cunter."' Had not the very itself been evolved in a brothel in 1880? Borges could talk indefinitely about this sort of thing, perhaps in revenge for having had an oversolicitous mother who tyrannized him all his life.)"
|
|
bawd
edmund-blunden
evelyn-waugh
jorge-rafael-videla
juan-peron
lingustics
jorge-luis-borges
|
Christopher Hitchens |