Are You Mediocre?
You can't blame the horrors of the Argentine dictatorship on losers
Two German political scientists argue that underperforming military officers used service in units carrying out savage repression during the 1976-83 Argentine dictatorshp as a detour around a meritocratic system that would otherwise have ended their careers.
Assuming that the NYT article linked above summarises their work accurately, I think their argument doesn’t stand up well.
The first and most significant problem is that they treat the Argentine Dirty War - as it’s usually called - as though it was primarily an army affair, with Battalion 601 at its centre. In fact, the 1976 coup was a joint enterprise of the three armed forces: army, navy, and air force, which divided administrative and repressive responsibility between them in rough proportion to their size.
The navy played an enormous role in the terror. Its most emblematic institution, the ESMA concentration camp in Buenos Aires, was the site of some of the worst atrocities of the entire period. Its commander, Admiral Emilio Massera, was not a peripheral figure; he harboured open political ambitions and regarded himself as a rival to the army leadership, whom he considered insufficiently ruthless. To read the article, one would not know any of this.
Beyond the armed forces, the repressive apparatus extended considerably further. The state intelligence service, the SIDE, was deeply implicated, as were the intelligence branches of the major police forces, particularly the federal police and those of the most populous provinces.
In many instances, members of the local judiciary provided the legal cover, or at least the studied indifference, that allowed detentions and disappearances to proceed without challenge. Any account of who got their hands bloody in this period must reckon with this broader institutional landscape.
By focusing exclusively on army officers seeking promotions, the authors give the impression that the machinery of repression was a relatively self-contained military affair, operated by a specific subset of underachievers. The reality was much more diffuse.
There is also a subtler problem with the framing. The article implies, without quite stating it plainly, that the more capable officers were off doing something else: clean soldiering, proper military work, activities untouched by the ugliness of the repression.
The armed forces of the period understood themselves to be engaged in a life-and-death struggle against what they saw as a near-demonic subversive enemy. Defeating that enemy was not a distasteful side hustle left to the less able; it was their principal strategic objective, particularly during the first three years of the dictatorship, when the overwhelming majority of the killings and disappearances occurred.
Another problem with the argument is the insinuation that systematic and successful state repression can be carried out by morons. But historically, some of the most efficient perpetrators of state violence have been highly competent administrators and organisers. One of the uncomfortable lessons of twentieth-century authoritarianism is precisely that brutality often requires organisational talent, discipline, logistical skill, and ideological commitment, not merely mediocrity or resentment.
Even if the authors do not intend this, the implication is that the repression was disproportionately carried out by career failures rather than by the institution as such. But the Argentine dictatorship’s violence was systematic, coordinated, and centrally organised. That scale of repression required broad institutional consent and participation from people across the competence spectrum.
The thesis that atrocities are primarily committed by mediocre people offers a flattering consolation to educated readers. It implies that evil is fundamentally a pathology of the untalented and the frustrated. The possibility that ambitious, intelligent, socially successful people might participate enthusiastically in horrendous levels of repression is far more disturbing, not least because history repeatedly suggests that they do.