I awoke in that strange place and, in vain, awaited madness. I was seated with my eyes blindfolded and hands tied behind me. Close by—it seemed quite close—a barking dog had been tied up, and every once in a while at uncertain intervals I could hear soft steps, and then, near my ears, the crash of an iron tool striking a metal surface. My body trembled in agitation; sharp points, dazzling in their dizziness, settled in my brain.
The dog barked, more ferocious than ever. Protesting the metallic explosion, and correctly so, for he too had his rights.
Madness did not come. Later, when no longer incommunicado, I met some prisoners at Puesto Vasco. I told them I thought I was insane, and they convinced me it wasn’t so. They assured me that I was simply somewhat confused, but that everything would fall back in place. One of them said: “Don Jacobo, keep going. That’s the important thing, not to let them knock you down. If you keep going, everything will someday be resolved.”
Yes, tenderness was the enemy.
I awaited the protective mantle of madness, but it did not come.
I was unable to tame the beautiful bull of suicide, nor did I fling myself on its horns or drench its back with my blood.
I kept going, and here I am.
8
A woman doctor is dragged by her hair, hands tied behind her, through the long corridor of a city hospital in Buenos Aires. The man dragging her is fat and dressed in civilian clothes. At a particular moment her legs are also bound, she’s covered with a blanket, placed on a stretcher, and put into a small truck. About fifteen armed men participate in this procedure.
They arrived in three automobiles, entered without any identification documents, asked for the place where the doctor practiced her specialty, psychiatry, and then took her away. No one questioned that group of men as to who they were or whom they represented. No one intervened on behalf of the doctor. The hospital authorities, other professionals, nurses, patients, everyone knew what was going on.
During the first months after the armed forces’ seizure of power in Argentina, no sector of the population suffered more from the wave of kidnappings and disappearances than psychiatrists. The intelligence services of the armed forces had reached the conclusion that psychiatrists knew many behind-the-scenes details about subversive urban guerrilla activities, and that the mission of certain psychiatrists was to bolster the spirits of guerrillas when they were depressed as a result of the hardships of clandestine life.
By what process does an intelligence officer in the Argentine armed forces arrive at the conviction that a psychiatrist with a patient linked in some way to subversive activity is privy to the guerrilla activities of that individual and his entire group?
The world of the Argentine armed forces is a closed, hermetic structure. Most of the officers’ wives are the sisters or daughters of men in the military. Nearly all are related, and whenever there’s a military regime, the civilians who participate are mostly relatives of the military or individuals who have frequented military circles, in precise anticipation of that moment when the armed forces will take power. In Argentina, a show of deference to the military has for fifty years been almost a political career in itself, yielding juicy benefits whenever a military coup takes place.
This pattern has separated the military from the most elemental currents of modern life, and has instilled in them a series of fantasies about the true meaning of the scientific, moral, literary, and religious elements that mankind has incorporated into its normal daily existence in recent decades. The ideology motivating the Argentine military stems more from a notion of the world they reject than from a world they would like to attain. They would be unable to pinpoint or outline the reality they care to see materialize in Argentina, but could quickly describe what it is that they hate. If asked what they want, their answer will be: a decent country, respectful of family life and patriotism. But ask them what they don’t want, and then you’ll be able to understand their view of the world and the difficulties they encounter when they must govern in accordance with such hatreds. On the other hand, as in every totalitarian mind, hatreds are transformed into fantasies and conform to a view of the world that matches these fantasies, and these very fantasies lead to the development of their operational tactics.
Thus there’s nothing surprising, for example, about their assumption that the anti-militarist movies about Vietnam produced by Hollywood are part of a global scheme to defend human rights.. And when they discover that a producer, actor, or director in one of these films is Jewish, or of the Left, their thesis of world conspiracy involving Jews and the Left is confirmed.
The chief obsession of the totalitarian mind lies in its need for the world to be clearcut and orderly. Any subtlety, contradiction, or complexity upsets and confuses this notion and becomes intolerable. Whereupon an attempt is made to overcome the intolerable by way of the only method at hand —violence. Recourse to politics, strategy, and the gradual resolution of conflicts becomes unlikely. The power monopoly is at its disposal, and it employs this monopoly with utter ruthlessness in its compelling need to simplify reality.
The president of the Argentine Federation of Psychologists was dragged by her hair through the hospital corridors where she practiced her profession because—according to the mentality of the Argentine military—an arrest with intent to question, without infliction of violence, would have been an acknowledgment of the validity and logic of her existence. And this in turn would mean acknowledging the existence of a world other than its own hermetic one. Which is intolerable.
The Argentine military government officially imposed strict moral codes of censorship on films, theatrical and literary works. It modified university curriculums, eliminating majors in sociology, philosophy, and psychology. It forbade the use of Freudian techniques in psychiatric services inside state hospitals. It imposed obligatory Catholic education on pupils in the secondary schools. In its formal aspects, this would all suggest a reactionary or conservative conception of reality.
But at the same time it strove to eliminate physically all those who in any way participated in the world it wanted to modify. A mere modification of sociology education was considered inadequate; it was preferable to exterminate those in Argentina who at some future point might reimplant modern sociology. Based on this concept of physical extermination as a final solution to the problem of one’s conception of the world, the government of the armed forces eliminated thousands of individuals in Argentina who had no relation with subversion, but who (according to the military) formed part of, or represented, that world which they found intolerable and incomprehensible, and who hence constituted the enemy.
In converting hatred into fantasy, the totalitarian mind is carried away by political hallucinations, whose extent may seem absurd to a logical, rational modern mind. Yet these political hallucinations determine courses of action that can lead to situations of unexplored violence, seemingly impossible in the contemporary world.
This kind of mechanism, during the late seventies, triggered off in Argentina an outbreak of violence that seemed inconceivable after the Nazi madness and the political hallucinations in Russia. It seemed inconceivable because its justification was based on the same arguments as those of Hitler and Stalin. It characterized the same enemies; felt persecuted by the same opponents; and elaborated the same fantasies.
In 1979, a novel by Valentin Pikul was published about the last years of czarist rule in Russia prior to World War I. The work incorporates new discoveries about court life and the role played by Rasputin, and contains details and anecdotes hitherto unknown. But the most interesting aspect is its thesis, and the fact that the author considers himself a historian rather than a novelist. The thesis goes as follows: Rasputin, the czar and czarina, as well as the court, were all pawns in a Zionist-Jewish conspiracy that aspired to destroy Russia.
In the need to provide its hatred with a historical, moral, or ideological formulation, the totalitarian mind transforms that hatred into a fantasy capa
ble of reaching any conclusion regarding the enemy’s characteristics. If in Communist Russia the Jew is an enemy because he’s considered to be cosmopolitan, or an Israeli sympathizer, or unadjusted to a Socialist society, then he can likewise serve—indeed, he must serve—as a receptacle for every sort of hatred. He must encompass one’s total capacity for hatred. According to the totalitarian mind, the Jew in present-day Russia must be considered an enemy not only of socialism but of everything that is Russian, everything that has ever constituted Russia, to the point even of being accused as the enemy of the last Russian czars, despite the fact that the elimination of the czarist regime was simultaneously and enthusiastically lauded.
This mechanism of political hallucination—hatred transformed into fantasy—is what enabled Naziism, with all due “logic,” to regard abstract art as the enemy of Aryan Germany because it destroyed the notion of the archetypal Nazi; or to consider a man of the Left to be linked to the Jewish capitalist conspiracy because of the “anti-German” label that the Jew imparted to leftist activity.
These political hallucinations also governed the Argentine armed forces, constituted their ideology, and simultaneously prevented them from consolidating an idea of their self-ordained mission. The unacceptable world determined their tactics. Although such mechanisms were easy to perceive in Naziism and less apparent but equally discernible in communism, in the case of Argentina two elements impeded their visibility. First of all, Argentina did not implement its thesis on an international scale; it remained a domestic affair in a country whose destiny was not of world interest. Second, Argentina is a land of euphemisms, and the government has decided never to acknowledge its use of violence or the reasons for using it.
Many journalists in Argentina tried to investigate the causes that led to the repression of modern psychiatry and the physical elimination of psychiatrists. All inquiries, however, could reach only approximate conclusions.
The fact is that members of the military do not resort to modern psychiatry when there’s a family problem that warrants treatment from this branch of medicine. Generally, they will seek the aid of a Catholic priest, his counsel to patient and family, his invocation of patience. This is indicative of their distrust of psychiatrists, comparable to the distrust felt by the totalitarian mind toward the unknown and toward anything pertaining to the realm of ideas that doesn’t revolve around Catholicism.
What may have actually happened, if the process can be reconstructed, is that the intelligence services during interrogations discovered that certain terrorists or guerrillas were either in individual or group treatment, generally of a Freudian orientation. Probing further in these interrogations, they compiled and analyzed the various replies, and came to the conclusion that militants resorted to psychology in search of solutions to concrete problems, or in order to resolve emotional instabilities. In their daily quest for fresh elements in the worldwide anti-Argentine conspiracy, and in their need to have that conspiracy provide ample formulation of their irrational hatred, it was merely a matter of time before psychiatry was incorporated into the conspiracy. The role of psychiatry, they concluded, was programmed by the Health Command of the guerrilla forces and functioned along the same principles as a doctor’s extraction of a bullet or treatment of a wound. All the “stress” and fears of clandestine life that affect a terrorist are emotionally channeled by psychiatrists. Psychiatry conditions the urban terrorist to wage his clandestine battle.
The search for psychiatrists was immediately launched. And, as happened on other levels when an individual was found who conformed to their fantasies, that is, to their descriptions, they felt that their thesis was justified, which led to the death of scores of psychiatrists who had never seen a guerrilla in their lives.
The centralization of action based on particular phobias and buttressed by impunity, whereby corpses simply disappeared after interrogations, wreaked havoc particularly among psychiatrists, sociologists, journalists, and university students.
These phobias conformed to the ideology of the armed forces and in turn imbued their operating tactics with such violence that all sectors of the population, with very few exceptions, preferred to ignore what was happening, even when it was totally pervasive and widely known—at least among political and religious leaders, newspaper publishers, and political journalists. It paved the way for the “postwar” era that will assuredly occur in Argentina, a situation identical to that of postwar Germany where it was hard to find a single German who would admit to having known about the existence of concentration camps, gas chambers, or crematorium ovens.
The incapacity of the Argentine military to formulate a structured ideology leads to their general acceptance of the phobias of reactionary groups, with whom they feel more closely aligned than the democratic sectors. This phenomenon has been often repeated in Argentine life. The recurrence of the pattern, plus the degree of violence that Argentina underwent in the decade prior to the armed forces takeover of 1976, led the military to accept as well the final consequences of Fascist ideology: physical extermination of whoever is considered the enemy. In other words, the Final Solution.
The official argument of the armed forces when they took over the government in March 1976 was not complex; subversion and public corruption were the enemies. Enemies, therefore, were easy to identify. And no one doubted that the methods would be those fixed by the Constitution, whose legal repressive scope was quite adequate. Yet the military in charge of repression seemed to require not merely an adequate margin for solving the problem, but also sufficient leeway to implement with impunity their phobias, fantasies, notions about reality, and vision of the future. Only communism or fascism could provide a solid program for embarking in the late seventies upon such an absolute violation of human values. Logically, they chose fascism. Other alternatives existed in the contemporary world, but they failed to conform to Argentine cultural, political, economic, and social standards. Violence based on a religious leadership, as with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, or situations combining superstition, cannibalism, tribal struggle, as in Uganda or the Central African Empire, are inapplicable in a country like Argentina.
As publisher of La Opinion, I often attempted to correct the irrationality that had been converted into ideology by the armed forces in charge of repression. I had only one permanent, unswerving companion in this arduous battle: the English-language newspaper, the Buenos Aires Herald. Occasionally, some provincial papers joined our attempt to channel the Argentine military process within constitutional or juridicial norms; or certain Catholic publications, such as the magazine Criterio. This activity in some instances succeeded in saving a life, although it never actually modified the course of events. Almost a year before my detention, I learned that the military had resigned themselves, in the course of lengthy debates, to the existence of the English newspaper, but had decided to initiate steps leading to the suppression of La Opinion. In April 1977 I was detained, La Opinion confiscated, and the publisher of the Buenos Aires Herald forced, through a campaign of threats, to abandon Argentina in December 1979, although his newspaper was not successfully silenced.
In the interests of greater effectiveness, we often endeavored at La Opinion to attempt an objective approach to the ideology of the armed forces, though it was always impossible. It was clear that they hated Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl. But it was hard to understand that they hated Zionism more than communism, and considered it a more significant enemy; and that they regarded Israel as a more dangerous foe than Russia.
If someone were to discuss the subject privately with a military officer, he would obtain an explanation of sorts. Communism was more visible than Zionism, therefore easier to identify, and hence less dangerous, although both ideologies had as their ultimate intention the destruction of nationality. Even if one were to grant this statement, it would still be hard to understand the outpouring of violence that was used to eliminate Both these enemies—a violence that far exceeded th
e prevailing guidelines of repression observed by any moderately civilized government.
One could listen to their arguments against Freud and Freudianism, classified as the chief enemies of Christian family life, a school dedicated to placing sex at the center of family life; and one might regard these arguments as antiquated, anti-scientific, obsolete. But what was the mechanism underlying those concepts that led to the kidnapping of the publisher of Padres (Parents), a magazine devoted to modern parent-child relationships, and condemning the man to death? The campaign undertaken by my newspaper to save this journalist resulted in obtaining pardon for his life, but only on condition that he promise to suspend publication of his magazine and leave the country. He sent a message to me from abroad by secret emissary: “They told me I’d been saved by your campaign, but that you would not be saved.”
While incarcerated in the clandestine prison known as Puesto Vasco, I was asked by an interrogator if I knew this journalist. The interrogator was proud of having tortured him. He spoke freely, knowing that he enjoyed impunity, convinced of his mission and never doubting that history would justify it. The psychological, ideological equation that animated Nazi officials in the concentration camps was being repeated.
Even the most irrational being finds it necessary to formulate a certain coherence around his irrationality in order to be able to maintain its continuity. The Argentine military tapped their vast reservoir of hatred and fantasy so as to synthesize their action into one basic concept: World War III had begun; the enemy was left-wing terrorism; and Argentina was the initial battleground chosen by the enemy.
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