Sunday the 24th was the 48th anniversary of the coup d'état that brought the armed forces to power in Argentina. A few thoughts on it, and human rights in Argentina today. And a note on Walter Benjamin, Portbou and Gaza.
1.
The 1976-1983 Argentine dictatorship was genocidal in nature, uniquely terrible in the country's history.
2.
Montoneros (Revolutionary Peronismo) and ERP (Marxist Guevarista) were not human rights organisations that reluctantly took arms to bring democracy to Argentina. They regarded liberal democracy and human rights as bourgeois tricks and achieved their greatest strength and level of violence under the democratic government that preceded the dictatorship. To portray them today as youthful idealists whose only wish was a just and fair world is an insult to their memory. Their ideologies were totalitarian and their crimes unforgivable.
3.
The crimes of the dictatorship were much worse because they were *state*crimes; its full power was directed to achieving its criminal ends. No one knows the exact number it murdered but the US State Dept estimated 10,000 by the end of 1976 alone.
4.
The four kirchnerista governments that ruled Argentina from 2003 to 2015 and again from 2019 to 2023 absorbed the country's human rights organisations. Generously subsidised they became staunch defenders of all aspects of those governments’ policies, not just those related to the legacy of the dictatorship. “Human rights activist” in Argentina in those years became synonymous with participating in the personality cults of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernádez de Kirchner and supporting their every decision.
It’s important to remember that Kirchner and his wife along with the rest of the Peronista movement supported the military’s self-amnesty when it abandoned power in 1983 and opposed the 1985 trial and imprisonment of the fallen tyrants. Their interest in human rights was limited to its political usefulness for strengthening their administrations.
5.
On Sunday the Argentine government, a shower of the fanatical and deranged, released a shameful video that seeks to justify the horrendous crimes of the dictatorship.
6.
On one side in Argentina today we have “human rights activists” who with few exceptions are hypocrites, former kirchnerista sinecure holders, and fans of Hamas. On the other we have a government that thinks the state terrorism of 1976-83 was basically fine.
So much for “Truth, Memory, and Justice”, the slogan of the human rights movement.
7.
I wrote here about my family and the legacy of the dictatorship here
Gaza in Portbou
On Sunday Virginia and I took a day trip to Portbou because I have always been interested in Benjamin and the Frankfurt School and wanted to see the village near the French border where he took his own life when, as it seemed, he was going to be forced to return to France the next day.
We joined a guided tour of about 20 people, it was in Spanish and Catalan. About 3/4 were Spanish and the rest were long-time foreign residents like us. The guide was excellent and there's more to the village than Benjamin; the coming of the railway and the huge station that served as one of the key overland entry points to Spain for more than a century, how in its glory years the village was one of the richest in Spain. the bust when the high speed railway line to France was constructed 20 km away and much else besides.
When we got to the Walter Benjamin part of the walk the guide said, "Before we start this section I just want to say that I won't accept comments or comparisons of any kind about Israel, the war in Gaza, or anything related to the Middle East today. I'm going to talk about Jewish people fleeing from the Nazis and in particular Walter Benjamin, and nothing else"
No one objected but you could feel a slight shiver in the air.
Given the current atmosphere in Europe It's not difficult, I think, to figure out why he felt it necessary to say this.
…….
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