KurvyKate
Magistrate
Hello Silent_Water,As far as I understand your opinion (I am German, you know, and I do not understand every word without dictionary or translator, e.g. "skimpy", "tarts", "kit off" ???), your opinion honors you, but in wars - and this in Argentina was "a secret undeclared war against so-called 'subversive' parts of the own population" even in the words of their own government - people can become even more "degenerate" than we all believe in our usually very peaceful democracies.
In Timerman's words, Argentina between 1976 and 1983 was a militarily governed nation with a parallel world of madness with several military secret services partly working against each other and the normal police somewhere in between. I once really studied political science and Argentina was an example how fast and unbelievable a "not stable democray" can turn into a crazy dictatorship. I remember parts of Timerman's book which I will quote here from my memory just to show the madness in the development there.
Between 1970 and 1976, there were really street fights between left- and right-wing extremists and terrorists in some Argentinian cities, bank robberies and kidnappings from both sides and Timerman as a brave neutral newspaper-publisher once received on the same day two letters - one from a left wing and one from a right wing extremist organization who told him both he was sentenced to death for being on the wrong side in the nations fight for freedom! He published both with the cynical remark he will be interested who will claim his death first. Then the military made a "Coup d'état" and because they were "rather" right-winged themselves, they hunted the left-wing extremists in particular with all their means.
At first, there was silence and "peace" with the military openly on the streets and most of the Argentinians were at first glad that the street wars were over because one half of the "war participients" suddenly disappeared - but it was certainly the silence and peace of a cemetery because so many persons suddenly disappeared and Timerman had a special trick how to find out where some persons could be:
The secret services of Argentinian army, marine and air force did not work together and he simply claimed in his newspaper that Mr or Mrs X was abducted by the marine. The secret service of the marine felt insulted of such a public claim and started its own research and after 24 hours, Timerman received an anonymous call or letter that Mr X was abducted by the air force and was most probably arrested in a secret prison of the air force!
Certainly, he could not do this too often and this "trick" once was the reason for his own abduction and torture because the secret service who kidnapped him was interested in the informations of him how he knew that this or that secret service had abducted Mr or Mrs X.
Concerning the secret prison where he was held, he described absolutely unbelievable conditions of human madness in a militarized society of madness.
For example: One female student was tortured there and after the soldiers and guards came to the conclusion that she was innocent of all what other tortured prisoners had told them about her but their guards now knowing everything about her family, they let her go and "hired" instead her jobless father as professional electrician who was then responsible for maintenance and repair of the electrical machines which were used there to torture other prisoners.
He was then a kind of hostage for his family instead of his daughter but this way, he even became a part of the torture machinery.
Timerman also described examples of tortured young beautiful women of whom he could hear their cries at night in his cell that they never were "city guerilleras", "communists" or "socialists" but he was of the opinion that they were sometimes only tortured by electric shocks without leaving any traces on their bodies until they gave up every hope and mental resistance against their torturerers (following quotation by Timerman: ) "... until they were accessible to all the guards' sexual desires."
In such a world of a dictatorship gone mad, the boundaries are fluid between the political goals of the new rulers and the crimes and / or secret sexual desires of their henchmen.
Even after the end of the dictatorship, the torturers sometimes were gangs on their own and one example was so incredible that there was this movie made of it:
The Clan (2015 film) - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Timerman probably only survived because he was a relatively famous publisher, sometimes telling the torturerers exactly what they wanted to hear because speculating for surviving long enough for a "show trial" like in Stalin's Soviet Union. Indeed, one Argentinian officer once said to him, his statements will be interesting for the process against the "communist Jews" in Argentina - by the way: partly absolutely crazy statements like "Israel will invade Patagonia as soon as possible"! (Sounds for me similar crazy as a statement I once heard from a historical "show trial" in Stalin's Soviet Union in which one Russian nuclear physicist confirmed after his torture to have sold the plans for an H-bomb to the USA! This only shows how mad these dictatorial regimes sometimes can become on their hunt for imaginary enemies which they need desparately to keep up their measures of suppression in order to stay in power. When there were no more living enemies for this crazy military Junta in Argentina, they tried to conquer the Falkland Islands which led to the war with Great Britain in 1982 and 1983 to their fall in Argentina in the end - but probably more than 40.000 Argentinians disappeared until then and never came back!)
And because Timerman also had connections to the USA and Israel, he probably had more influential friends abroad than he himself had thought.
We all can only be happy that probably most of us never had and hopefully never will have to experience such a horror of an unstable democracy turned into a such a temporary dictatorship with secret services out of any control!
Sorry, I didn't treat your post with the gravity I should have and my comment was frivolous and ill considered. Never mind "skimpy, tarts and kit off." They don't matter now I understand your interest in Argentina.
Nations have always been run by governments put there by self interested parties who desire the nation to be run for their own profit rather than for the benefit of the population. This happens in privileged Western nations through the mechanism of marketing, where those with the biggest advertising budgets buy the votes they need with a larger, more vocal media presence. John Kenneth Galbraith is good reading here. Now the power behind the sale of democracy is global capitalism, in past times it was the landowners who actually did own the country and for a few hundred years it was the Catholic Church, in Europe that is.
Dictatorships are a brutal corruption of the same system but devoid of any of the carefully orchestrated diversions which seduce the population into believing they have a choice. I mean that in a dictatorship negative incentives to behave take precedence over positive ones such as consumerism. Negative incentives are of course punishment.
I always like to think of government as something of a protection racket. This is certainly how Republicanism works in the USA. The population need to be threatened with something those in power can promise to protect them from. The dark days of the Cold War are a good example of this. I don't believe there ever was any real risk of WW3 but the tension kept the populations of the Soviet Union and the USA scared shitless and reliant on their government's belligerence to keep them believing "the enemy" was held at bay. George Orwell, 1984, spot on! It's called a balance of power.
This is why Galtieri's administration started the Falklands war. It's interesting that in the UK, Margaret Thatchers's government were in desperate straights and highly unpopular for the deprivation and destruction deregulation had caused. The war saved her as Conservstive leader simply because she was able to present herself as the Nation's saviour, in the media. Galtieri handed her a spectacular marketing coup.
On the subject of torturing women. I have a friend who lived in Mexico for a while. She told me it was not uncommon for the police to tazer women in the genitals. Why? Because they want to. Recently here in the UK there's been a high profile case of a Policeman who arrested, raped and then murdered a young women. It's brought into the public's consciousness the vulnerability of women in police custody. The difference between a dictatorship and a democracy bought via the media is a dictatorship's control over the media prevents any real accountability of the police.
Sometimes it unnerves me to take part in the erotic fun we enjoy here on CF when I know perfectly well that fantasy persecution of those who want it, by those who want to do it, is only different from the real horror by a few degrees of perception.
I'm going to read your reply again. I enjoyed it. Sorry if you have to look up any of the words in mine!
