THE MANY TRIALS OF JACOBO TIMERMAN
Wieseltier, Leon
Perhaps the best way to describe the great debate about American foreign policy in recent years is that it no longer has a place for Henry Kissinger. Nobody, except business, is interested in...
...he wasn't born an enemy...
...Yet between 1974 and 1978 the violation of Jewish girls in clandestine prisons had a peculiar characteristic: Jewish girls were violated twice as often as non-Jewish girls...
...The apparatus of repression that defeated them remains...
...Suppose we take the Office of Budget and Management and its chief, David Stockman...
...Timerman's critics say that the Jews of Argentina are "doing well," that they are prominent and prosperous, that they are not leaving Argentina...
...America's commitment to freedom must be translated into a management of its many abuses...
...the danger is real...
...Only a few now maintain (Senator Helms among them) that the United States has no responsibility to intrigue against the denial of freedom in other countries...
...Timerman has not called the crisis in Argentina a Holocaust, and he has not called upon the Jews to flee...
...These governments provide their own enemies, and ours, with something much more deadly than arms—they provide them with plausibility...
...What is the definition of danger...
...As Timerman writes, "Argentina did not implement its thesis on an international scale...
...They cannot comprehend that he, and we, can do battle with both communism and fascism...
...The American people are instructed by Reagan's advocates, and by the Administration too, that they may judge the ruin of a family or the murder of a man according to its political convenience...
...It is not the antifascism of American liberals that threatens to rob the American people of moral clarity, but the anti-antifascism of American conservatives...
...Those who make the apology for Argentina do not know this difference...
...And his testimony is impugned...
...But there is a more important reason for going slowly in the support of such right-wing regimes...
...He was repeating the fate of his forefathers, and it filled him with despair...
...2 Timerman is accused of exaggerating...
...Thus the very distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian, insofar as it is based on the claim that the latter but not the former are vulnerable to successful revolts, is nullified by the "praxis" inferred from the "theory" asserting the distinction in the first place...
...Nazism in Argentina is not a new phenomenon, nor is it marginal, and the resurgence of Nazi literature and organizations in the past decade has been scrupulously documented...
...That is the funniest sentence he has ever written...
...They should express their determination to make antiSemitic abominations of any kind a "political problem...
...Timerman was even "disturbed" in his habitual place of residence...
...Finally the army confiscated it, and decorated its editor with electrodes...
...transl...
...He seems to have been prepared, if that is possible, for an oldfashioned right-wing repression, but not for the extra measure of brutality, the extra kicks and the extra volts, that befell him as a Jew...
...There are no gas chambers in Argentina...
...And it was lost on nobody that all these enemies were Jews...
...He believes his life was saved by the intervention of the Carter administration's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Patricia Derian, and he enjoins his readers with great eloquence to oppose dictatorship in Argentina as they oppose it elsewhere...
...The view that there is no reason for alarm, however, is ridiculous...
...Seems far-fetched, and I certainly do not want to pursue this through the 120-plus nations, but it does raise an eyebrow, does it not...
...They are maddened by ideology...
...Suppose a nation believes in more than one god, is that the same as believing in God...
...They all have their partisans...
...The beautiful people weep for him, while his other supporters prepare to hand the country over...
...The answer, after the extermination of the Jews in Europe, is simple: any danger at all...
...There is certainly not, as the New York Times shrieked, "the Final Solution in Argentina...
...It is a contest between crusades...
...Surely, the struggle against Soviet imperialism is not furthered by setting the United States against the populations of these countries...
...And there the trouble begins...
...That is what Jacobo Timerman has challenged...
...and so they are more concerned to know that Argentina is not the worst than to know that Argentina is bad...
...Timerman is accused of confounding evils...
...suffer the most...
...The repression has outlived its justification...
...This government raids its citizenry...
...No matter...
...It is not the great anti-Communist phalanx that the Reagan administration imagines...
...And the strong arm of the military falls upon all the citizens of the country, not only upon its Jews...
...And they provide their foes on the left with a rare opportunity to act like their friends...
...There totalitarianism, too, has a place for hope, because it comes from outside, and from above...
...Of course, there are instances of conflict in which a center does not come forward, in which the United States has to choose between monsters who are Communists and monsters who are not, but that may be in part because the protection of the United States cannot be counted upon by democrats who are weighing the risk...
...This flattery was conspicuous in Kirkpatrick's 1979 Commentary essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," which the president enormously admires...
...Timerman is foiling the philosophy, and he is foiling the plan...
...Timerman, and many of his defenders, need no lessons in combating Soviet totalitarianism...
...Totalitarianism, according to the neoconservatives, is wickedly incapable of what Kirkpatrick calls "progressive liberalization and democratization," while authoritarianism, as in Greece and Portugal, has often given way to democracy...
...All those columns about Argentina that could have been about Russia...
...A soft line on Argentina, it is argued, is sound geopolitics...
...Let the junta reform itself...
...The nations of Eastern Europe have governments modeled on that of the Soviet Union imposed upon them and maintained in power to this day by the military might of the U.S.S.R...
...by Toby Talbot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, $10.95...
...he managed the Montoneros' money (ransoms have made Argentinian terrorists quite affluent...
...I would have been placed against a wall and shot...
...Timerman, in short, was not a plain political prisoner...
...The main lines of attack were established in Midstream magazine in December 1980...
...A most illuminating example of a Catch22, or, more portentously, of an inherent contradiction between theory and practice...
...429 A totalitarian country is being transformed...
...Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family...
...Midstream is to be congratulated for having conquered its hysteria...
...the difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism, they say, is moral...
...The terrorists, it is commonly agreed, have been defeated...
...4 This, then, is their final word on torture in Argentina...
...it remained a domestic affair in a country whose destiny was not of world interest...
...there are not, after all, many democracies in the world...
...but their adversaries are not, in the main, America's...
...and it would divert the resources of the United States, the morsels of military and political might that remain, from the competition with the Russians...
...A standard for Jewish suffering has been established: it starts at six million...
...There is no Auschwitz in Argentina, they say...
...He compares his sufferings to the sufferings of the Soviets' victims, and thereby, it is argued, blurs a fundamental distinction...
...They are, he insists, in danger...
...Does she believe in God...
...There is no Holocaust there...
...Perhaps that, too, makes some American Jews nervous...
...It is casuistry...
...and while there are crucial differences between Argentina in the '70s and Germany in the '30s, there are also similarities between the kinds of violence with which these Jewries met and, more ominously, between the kinds of ideology that were used to justify them...
...The man is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't...
...but we must not influence them to change their ways, because they are our friends...
...The Soviets must be faced down, but the beastly colonels will not accomplish that...
...or, more precisely, since everybody prefers a world that is everywhere just, there is bad torture and worse torture...
...The generals are hoarse with denunciations of communism, but they display a notable ease in doing business with the Bolsheviks, even to the extent of fracturing American policy...
...He told the New York Times that "the real question is whether the Jews in Argentina are facing a Holocaust, whether the situation is so serious that Jews should flee for their lives...
...And this would not be the first time that the United States had the help of scoundrels in the fight for freedom...
...If so, then antiSemitism does not exist in Argentina, and it becomes a matter of accidental, coincidental situations, as the leaders of the Argentine Jewish community claim...
...Their predicament is not unlike the predicament of the Jews of Germany...
...Timerman anticipated all this: "What you can say is that recent events in Argentina have demonstrated that if an anti-Semitic scenario unfolds, the discussion on what constitutes anti-Semitism and persecution and what does not will occupy more time than the battle against anti-Semitism...
...the latter rule without a philosophy of history, and they are indifferent to an amount of freedom in unpolitical lives...
...and he owned half of Timerman's newspaper...
...Why have some American Jewish intellectuals shown him such hostility, and some American Jewish organizations such reserve...
...and "Human Rights in Argentina: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations," Committee on International Relations, U.S...
...He describes the difference: In Argentina, the attitude of military examiners or police toward left-wing terrorists was the way you might feel toward an enemy...
...And the ugly, unspoken assumption of this contest is that the government of the United States must choose...
...And there also is no doubt that terrorism must be dealt with harshly, and that the harshness may spill over into the society...
...it will gain what it most lacks, and that is legitimacy...
...Its many instruments of force "disturb" people at work and people at leisure...
...Satan...
...and this is not the first time that such a transformation in the heart of totalitarianism has been tried...
...The Reagan people's rationale is that these oppositions receive some support from the Soviet Union and its Communist allies and contain in any case a "totalitarian potential," too, should they come to power...
...There are evils with which you cannot deal...
...Nobody is suggesting, as one of Timerman's critics wrote, that Jews "dismantle" the community in Argentina, only that they defend it...
...Authoritarianism in those countries did indeed yield to democracy, but no thanks to the United States...
...They do not, to be sure, flock to the revolution, as the apologists for extremism on the left claim, but they will, sooner or later, have their freedoms...
...And the United States need not look on helplessly as everything it stands for is debauched...
...But not for Timerman's critics...
...As for nongovernmental claques, how are we to know, under the simple guidelines as proclaimed, whether Irving Kristol, Midge Decter, and their affiliated cultists are friend or foe...
...When the Argentinian authorities elected to fight terror with terror Timerman went into opposition...
...They make haste to point out that Timerman did not Timerman's critics like to cite his description of Israel as "fascist...
...He was, for the security forces of Argentina, something special, an uncommon kind of villain, who deserved something more...
...Buckley even had the impertinence to scold Timerman for his "manners...
...The idea of human rights is the moral essence of anticommunism, the consideration that promotes the interests of the United States into the interests of the world...
...Timerman's commitment to Israel is not to be impugned...
...Sitting comfortably in New York City," he observed in the course of one of his briefs for Timerman, "I do not feel it especially appropriate to discourse on the best way to ensure the continuing well-being of the Jews in Argentina...
...They believed that Zbigniew Brzezinski was a Jew who led a Jewish conspiracy against Latin America, which Timerman represented in Argentina...
...Whatever the extent of anti-Semitism in Argentinian society, and it appears to be considerable, it is the anti-Semitism of things...
...But more people are murdered by the state in Argentina than in Czechoslovakia, more in Guatemala than in Romania...
...In view of the sort of journalism I practiced, the possibility of my arrest and assassination fit into the rules of the game...
...The Triple A [American Anti-Communist Alliance] engages in killing Montoneros, or those they assume to be Montoneros...
...It was not long, however, before the Videla regime unleashed, in the name of peace and public order, a savage repression, which Timerman characterizes as "intrinsic, systemized, rationally planned terrorism...
...The Argentinian authorities, according to Kristol, had cause...
...He wants them to raise their voices, to resist...
...Human rights, to be sure...
...This distinction between dictatorships has furnished the Reagan administration, and its intellectuals, not only with an analysis...
...Jacobo Timerman courageously located himself not in the middle, because there is no middle between these orders of violence, but outside...
...The distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism as made by Kirkpatrick only makes the world safe for fascism...
...Timerman's captors could not comprehend that he could do battle with both the Montoneros and the military, and his critics have copied his captors...
...His interrogators wanted to know about the Andinia plan, the Jewish plot to take over the territory in the south, "the road to Antarctica...
...Still worse: Argentina has become a collection of petty warlords, each with his own troops and torturers, who together keep the central authority at bay...
...Granted, religion and belief should be a private matter, but then I've only tried to clarify a piece of policy...
...He is sapping the nation's will...
...The situation of Argentine Jewry, he is admonished, is not nearly so dire...
...But this statement does not deny the difference between domestic rule and foreign conquest...
...He was taunted for his "clipped prick...
...They should put the anti-Semites of the world on notice that they will have to answer to the power of the Jews in the United States and the power of the Jews in Israel...
...But fascism, which used to be fought, is now flattered...
...And there is this rather remarkable paragraph: As is necessarily the case in any urban setting where the forces of order must contend with the virtual invisibility of the enemy, a blanket repression is often the only means which offers any hope of success...
...to my knowledge all that he has said in print is that there are tendencies in Israeli politics that produce in him a fear of fascism...
...Timerman does not deny this...
...Dissidents everywhere know that fame is their sole means of survival...
...and the military, in whose world view these satanic myths play an important part, is running riot...
...Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses...
...They brandished The Protocols of the Elders of Zion...
...Hannah Arendt, the leading theorist of totalitarianism, wrote that "the totalitarian dictator rules his own country like a foreign conqueror...
...Authoritarianism," on page 400, I should like to present a less sophisticated dilemma as articulated by our President and General Haig...
...but interrogating Jews was a pleasure or a curse...
...What god do they and he worship, these weirdos who believe in human sacrifice...
...That, too, is hyperbole, Israel's new minister of defense notwithstanding...
...Take it down to cases: We are about to sell arms to China...
...Kristol and the others learned of David Graiver, no doubt gladly, from Varon...
...He was, from 1971 until 1977, the editor of La Opinion, a more or less liberal newspaper that eventually consecrated itself to combat with eqUal fervor the killings on the left and the killings on the right...
...Must all antiSemitism wind up in soap...
...It was only yesterday that they decided that Jimmy Carter was the enemy of the Jews and Ronald Reagan their friend...
...There are those, wary of what President Carter called "an inordinate fear of communism," who wish to accommodate the Soviet Union, and those, wary of an inordinate fear of anticommunism, who wish to accommodate Argentina...
...They are at the gates...
...The ideologues of the military dictatorship proclaimed that Argentina has three enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society...
...Suddenly there is democracy in hell...
...It is they, America's anti-Communist allies, who create the conditions in which communism can look like liberation...
...The book is a series of ruminations on torture and tyranny, on the political and moral meaning of Timerman's experience...
...The United States has the power to make the case for human rights, and it has the privilege...
...Is a torturer less guilty because he believes in God...
...Timerman is an Argentinian journalist who was arrested, robbed, tortured, and exiled by the Argentinian military...
...434 If we cared to formulate a historical equation, we could say that the conditions do exist: a profound political crisis, an economic crisis with an annual 170 percent rate of inflation that has lasted for several years, impotence on the part of the political parties to come up with a minimally coherent response, the incapacity of the Jewish community to face straightforwardly its own reality, a totalitarian mentality among the majority sectors of the population, with a serious tendency toward messianic beliefs...
...The behavior of certain prominent American Jewish writers and groups toward this man does not inspire confidence in their political judgment or moral authority...
...Timerman now lives in Israel, an Argentine in exile, a Jew at home...
...It does not, therefore, exactly qualify as an emergency...
...q P.S.: Commentary published, in its July issue, a long rejoinder to Timerman by Mark Falcoff...
...and the moral content of America's position in the world is the standard by which it shall be measured...
...He was a democrat, pleading vainly for a return to legality...
...And that they not delude themselves that there is no need...
...and the United States will be held to account for having stood in their way...
...Now that Hitler's Germany was only a memory, he was firmly in the American camp because he hated the Communists...
...they murder liberal politicians because their demands for legal trials of arrested are regarded as a form of complicity with the Left...
...The neoconservatives talk tough, but they are afraid...
...It may be an unsavory country, but it is anti-Communist...
...His book deserves to be counted among the classics of Zionism...
...the juntas come and go, but the people, who will not put up with punishment forever, remain...
...And when the army seized power in 1976 Timerman "breathed a sigh of relief...
...Politics, too, is a significant factor...
...Yet, as the present Administration will learn, a value is not a policy...
...Pressed to explain the distinction between totalitarians and authoritarians, more precisely how you use the distinction to determine who is friend or foe, they have come up with the blinding answer: friends (however tyrannical) believe in God...
...and fear of the terrorists has been replaced by fear of the gangsters...
...The issue is whether or not one may tell the truth about Argentina, and other authoritarianisms, without being accused of stabbing America in the back...
...In 1975 he maintained that "the only recourse left for preserving the existing political institutions was to make use of all legal channels in order to put an end to all brands of violence, and that the army was the only group in a position to do this...
...There are no gas chambers in Argentina, and this leaves many with a clear conscience...
...They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations...
...and leftist journalists who are opposed to violence and hence plant confusion in the minds of Montonero guerrilla fighters...
...He is said to have made the repulsive remark in conversation...
...but Timerman never said there was...
...The examples of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland show that they are clearly not immune to popular internal revolt...
...The Western democracies opposed Germany under Hitler and after the war their former totalitarian ally, the Soviet Union—not because these nations were totalitarian, but because they were great military powers threatening their neighbors...
...The people of Poland suffer from ideology, but they suffer more from empire...
...It is their principles that will be responsible for policies that will determine the destiny of Jews in Argentina, the Soviet Union, and of course Israel...
...The new conservatives in particular have a lot riding on the correctness of President Reagan's vision...
...Varon, apparently, can forgive a lot...
...That is precisely what his critics are up to...
...They can do this because the Soviet Union is a great power, a fact that is independent of the distinction between totalitarianism and other forms of political rule...
...The psychology of such a choice is all too familiar, though Timerman's comparison with the Judenrate is really cruel...
...That is the old distinction, which Jeane Kirkpatrick has installed as the basic principle of American foreign policy, between totalitarianism and authoritarianism...
...There is even a little air in the Polish Communist party...
...He has no favorite evil...
...His torturers' obsession with the Jews, their hallucinations about history that reached into the high councils of government, terri432 fled him...
...and it was by Benno Weiser Varon, a retired Israeli diplomat who has many friends in Latin America...
...But there is no fight, and there is no help...
...What is bad for the Russians is good, but that is because they are the most formidable offender against the standard of morality in politics that the 18th century, in a sublime bout of universalism, called human rights...
...A political problem—no more, but no less...
...Thus the neoconservatives...
...Love, THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE 435...
...It is rather a short-sighted interpretation of the American interest...
...and not since William Kunstler announced that he "does not believe in the public denunciation of socialist countries" has the difference between morality and ideology been made so clear...
...He has written a book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,' which is one of the century's great works of conscience...
...The remonstrations may take many forms...
...The alliance against communism will surely be strengthened...
...The attack was personal and political...
...In part, no doubt, because they are sincerely confused about the circumstances in Argentina, and will not rush into a reaction that might worsen them...
...These people have inquisitorial tendencies...
...And what about the international staff...
...There is another argument for letting the Argentinians get away with it, which is that it is a practical matter...
...Indeed, in its campaign against Timerman the New Right has reproduced some of the most repulsive features of the New Left—its doctrinal delirium, its raging thirst for the destruction of anything or 431 anybody that is uncongenial to its picture of the world...
...Torturing a Jewish prisoner always yielded a moment of entertainment to the Argentine security forces, a certain pleasurable, leisurely moment...
...3 Moreover, Timerman never said he was detained because he was a Jew...
...it falls, fortunately, far short...
...There has always been a strain of defeatism in the neoconservatives' reading of international affairs— as when they conclude about any nation that deals, however slightly, with the Soviet Union, or any movement that makes reference, however rhetorically, to Marx, that it is lost to the free world...
...Terrorism must be wiped out, but it is not simply a military problem...
...and therefore it is in need of tanks...
...That is the precise description of the methods of power and the symbols of power that the authoritarians employ...
...They regarded Israel as a more dangerous foe than Russia...
...Timerman, we are told, "was not a great defender of liberal democratic values"—though it is difficult to see what other values were served by La Opinion's register of missing persons...
...Some of them agree that "the third world war" has begun...
...All these military machines now run on their own momentum, in a kind of general derangement...
...Timerman's flat was besieged, a blanket was thrown over his head, he was hustled off somewhere without being told why, a pistol was put to his head, he was tied to the table through which the electricity flowed...
...Its political universe, by most accounts, consists of gangsters, who govern, and terrorists...
...The issue is not anticommunism...
...Timerman's political habits were formed in the 1930s, when he agitated against Franco and Hitler and Stalin...
...Of course they did...
...And Timerman has come to distract us from the danger...
...The Soviet leaders profess to believe in the "irreversibility of the transition to socialism" (the basis of the Brezhnev Doctrine) and are prepared to use military force, most recently in Afghanistan, to uphold it...
...enemies do not...
...It is not Hitler, and the goyim are catching it, too...
...It was after these allegations were made public," writes Kristol, "that Jacobo Timerman was arrested, along with members of the Graiver family...
...As Jabotinsky said, there is the antiSemitism of men and the anti-Semitism of things...
...Nor is the failure of Argentina's Jews to cry foul the evidence that all is well...
...The United States is not being asked to topple the Argentinian regime...
...Authoritarianism, they claim, has a place for hope...
...If the outbreak of anti-Semitism has not until now assumed greater and more pronounced characteristics, that is because the balance of power within the armed forces has been under permanent debate in recent years, with the moderates weighing the potential international repercussions and concluding that these would be hard to withstand...
...What about her deputies...
...And he was saved not because he was a Jew, but because he was a famous Jew...
...The satraps of South America are our friends, and so we can influence them to change their ways...
...There is good torture and bad torture...
...The political interpretation of American idealism is not a pretty thing...
...They, who are unmoved by many regions of misery, who classify crimes to give some cover, who slander the victims of governments they like, make opposition to the Soviet Union seem little more than a political preference...
...Some consolation...
...but there are the humans in Moscow and the humans in Buenos Aires...
...I could be wrong, but does Carl Gershman believe in God...
...He felt no fascination for what he calls "terrorist sensuality...
...But there is something more behind the complaisance of American Jews in this matter...
...General Haig has remarked that there are other experts on Argentina, but Timerman does not come as an expert...
...He argues that the choice is unacceptable...
...All this, of course, was true of Germany in the early Hitler years, too...
...They cleave to a kind of anticommunism that could not care less about many of their brethren...
...The conclusion drawn is that the United States must be "hard" on totalitarianism and "soft" on authoritarianism...
...His analogy was with Germany from 1933 to 1939...
...he fell into the hands of Nazis...
...These political prisoners were not spared when it came to torture or murder...
...Hearts are hardened on the right and on the left...
...Nobody, except business, is interested in that kind of cunning...
...Support for human rights is not support for revolution...
...or, rather, it should not be...
...and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space...
...Kirkpatrick, in particular, is a gifted casuist...
...The real question is whether the Jews in that country are in trouble...
...Arrested, indeed...
...This is no mean achievement, so soon after the isolationist temptation reared itself in the aftermath of the morally motivated adventure in Vietnam...
...Idealism has been restored to foreign policy...
...It is now the "new nationalists" who warn that if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem...
...But can there be antiSemitism without soap...
...q 430 might have put it at the service of the Soviet Union...
...It goes to the heart of the neoconservative view of the world, which the present Administration shares...
...La Opinion published lists of those who were arrested, and demanded to know the whereabouts of those who disappeared...
...It won't...
...There the "traditional autocracies" south of the border are portrayed as something like the embodiment of the ideals of Edmund Burke...
...And I didn't raise it first, anyway...
...Who speaks against human rights...
...see, for example, his moving essay "Coming Home" in the New Republic (Dec...
...Politics, for this "traditional autocracy," is only the continuation of war by other means...
...We'll be against the dictators you don't like the most if you'll be against the dictators we don't like the most...
...Timerman's analysis of the condition of the Jews in Argentina should be heard in full, not merely because it has been misrepresented, but because it is wise: Many times I've been asked whether a Holocaust is conceivable in Argentina...
...second-rank politicians who are friends of first-rank politicians 425 who refuse to make deals with the Montoneros...
...There are too many mixed signals...
...It is artificial...
...It is hard to know with any certainty about the peril of Argentina's Jews...
...Norman Podhoretz summed it up...
...Not much new here...
...it sees only good will...
...Sakharov has proposed a useful rule: "a specific human rights matter can be solved only when it has become a political problem for the leaders of a violator country...
...I haven't heard...
...Timerman is no more accountable for comfort he brings to Stalinists than Kristol for comfort he brings to the John Birch Society...
...and they murder writers and leftist journalists, even though the latter may be antiguerrilla, because their denunciations of rightwing terrorism are regarded as weakening the repressive will of Argentine society...
...He has not, as Kristol maintains, "cast himself in the role of a Solzhenitsyn-of-thePrisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, by Jacobo Timerman...
...E.G...
...Visitors tell of a place much less wholesome...
...Graiver was responsible for the collapse of two American banks, from which he plundered as much as $40 million...
...But it sees no anger in Washington...
...its form of political organization might be called a feudal security state...
...Totalitarianism, moreover, has an international agenda...
...Interrogating enemies was a job...
...Shortly after Timerman's book appeared it was attacked by Irving Kristol in the Wall Street Journal and by William Buckley in the Daily News...
...Totalitarian systems of government have ideological and structural features—a fearfully centralized bureaucratic control over all aspects of the individual's existence—which authoritarian systems do not...
...Timerman reports that the Jewish question dominated virtually all his interrogations...
...Timerman describes the dazed situation in Argentina in those years: The Montoneros [guerrillas] assassinate those engaged in their suppression...
...The professor and the patrician fear that Timerman is bringing comfort to their adversaries, as no doubt he is...
...They brutalized Timerman for information about Andinia and the Elders of Zion, about which Varon comments "Not all the questioning was hostile, there was also some genuine intellectual curiosity...
...It all wound up in a fresh moan from a beloved person being tortured...
...The Argentinian contribution to the defeat of the Soviet Union is not very great...
...He proposes instead that it was the consequence of Timerman's association with David Graiver, an Argentinian high roller who vanished in a plane crash...
...There is no doubt that if the terrorists in Argentina had won, they would have transformed the country into a totalitarianism and In God We Trust...
...Why are they so driven to discredit him...
...And for this, too, Timerman is attacked...
...The personal attack upon Timerman has to do with the reason for his arrest, which was not, according to Kristol, "simply because he was left-wing...
...Timerman's claim, however, is that in prison he became paramountly a Jew...
...But if the United States follows this practice and props up unstable authoritarian regimes, then these regimes become incapable of being overthrown in exactly the same way that is true of the allegedly "totalitarian" Communist regimes in Eastern Europe...
...There is a difference, however, between a government at war with an insurrection and a government at war with a population...
...current political discourse offers few examples of the art more fine than her observation that "the doctrine of human rights" is problematic because it "makes illegitimate the use of force by governments...
...The Jew was born a Jew...
...If it fails in Poland, as it failed in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, that will be not because of Leninism, but because of the Russian army...
...Greece and Portugal are cautionary examples, from which the neoconservatives draw all the wrong conclusions...
...Never mind that night has fallen and the barbarians have not come...
...The system of evil that Kirkpatrick calls supreme is, above all, airless, but there is air in Poland...
...There is a term missing from the discussion, as Norman Podhoretz would say, and the missing term is fascism...
...There is Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...They have become habituated to it...
...426 left," as "symbol and spokesman for those who are less interested in using the 'human rights' issue against left-wing . . . nations .. . than against the right-wing . . . governments...
...D. W. q 427 schemes...
...All that America earned with its support of the strongmen was the enmity of whole peoples...
...21, 1979...
...It is, in any event, that same possibility for change that the neoconservatives celebrate about authoritarianism— the characteristic impermanence of regimes that are rooted in nothing more than an army—which should dissuade the United States from making a very bad bet...
...It would confuse its citizens, whose sense of purpose is not yet healed of "the Vietnam syndrome...
...The persecution of the Jews in Germany should have established at least that wealth and assimilation, economic advantage and social success are no guarantee of political safety...
...Timerman's critics are giving anticommunism a bad name...
...Timerman was tortured under pictures of Hitler...
...When Timerman's book was published the head of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires arranged a press conference at which he pleaded for quiet...
...Sometimes, because of the individual nature of the people involved, or a passing frame of mind, it was even a relationship of mutual adversaries...
...it is a false alarm...
...but the psychological relationship was simple—confrontation with one's enemy or adversary, and the desire to destroy, to eliminate that individual...
...It is being asked to remonstrate with it, quietly or loudly, but with grim resolve, for the sake of the unhappy victims, and for the solidarity of the free world...
...Timerman is no tool...
...But what about the members of this Administration...
...Timerman's book is about this Jewish despair...
...He comes as a witness...
...The incident struck me as so brutal and comical . . . I felt genuinely curious to know who would wind up with my corpse...
...The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father's genitals, a smack on the mother's face, an obscene insult to the sister, or the sexual violation of a daughter...
...The political attack upon Timerman is only a little less contemptible...
...No charges were ever filed...
...Timerman's Jewish critics misrepresent him...
...Germany, again, should have established something about the morale of people who live in fear...
...The captors and the critics say that it is a national emergency...
...The political character of Varon is epitomized in this bit from a piece about his years in Paraguay: "President Stroessner was a soldier and as such he could not fail to admire the prowess of Israel's army...
...With Jews, however, there was a desire to eradicate...
...May liberty be trampled upon when it's 428 not done in the name of Lenin...
...The Jews, in fact, are flourishing...
...Further proof of Timerman's dubious liberalism is his support of the coup in 1976...
...This is not as sensible as it seems...
...it may not be exactly free, but it is a friend...
...There is merit to this distinction, as political taxonomy...
...The enemy can be converted...
...and Argentina frequently collaborates with the Soviets at the United Nations...
...He sounds a tocsin for the Jews of Argentina...
...And now they come along to say that the fight against fascism is more than this country can afford...
...The expostulations of Timerman's critics come down to this: that the United States is too weak, morally and politically, to fight fascism while it fights communism...
...It is now a serious political liability in those political cultures to be proAmerican...
...It is not a moral distinction, except for the macro-morality of the cold war, according to which whatever is bad for the Russians is good...
...Can it be said for all of them that they trust in God, and if they do not, how in hell can we depend on them for a plain foreign policy...
...There will be no reform, however, unless the junta is convinced that the United States is angry...
...In such situations—let us not mince words—the distinction between terrorist and suspect, between sympathizer and activist, indeed, between innocent and guilty, is often lost—but in the end the job can be done, if there is the will to do it...
...The grain embargo of last year, which was the only concrete American retort to the seizure of Afghanistan, was undone by Argentina, which coolly made up the wheat...
...Among the contributions of Timerman's book is an anatomy of the authoritarian mentality...
...They surrender their support to an Administration whose pro-Jewish words are many and pro-Jewish deeds few...
...He must have had a reason...
...But the fight against communism is not hurt by Timerman...
...politicians who they imagine might at some point interfere with their future plans because these politicians are liberals and would attract leftist youth...
...As for the sanctity of the family, Timerman recounts, in a shocking passage, how it is routinely violated: Of all the dramatic situations I witnessed in clandestine prisons, nothing can compare to those family groups who were tortured often together, sometimes separately but in view of one another, or in different cells, while one was aware of the other being tortured...
...and they had better be right...
...and it is nothing less than the totality of a man's life that a junta controls when he has been buried in its prisons...
...Many sectors of the society have been infected...
...They were sure that Menahem Begin was tutoring the Montoneros...
...it fought in alliance with Stalin, after all, to defeat Hitler...
...Tattletale though I be, I was under the impression that he listed toward atheism or, at least, agnosticism...
...Timerman bitterly indicts the soldiers who strapped him to the rack, the politicians who tolerated and even justified his torments, the society that surrendered to all this sadism...
...those who they believe are so engaged...
...They do not see that the purgatory of Argentina no longer has very much to do with the terrorist threat...
...Timerman himself was not arrested for being Jewish...
...The Jews of Argentina are not confronted, as are the Jews of the United States, with iso3 See Robert Weisbrot, The Jews of Argentina (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979...
...It is hard to see what such an analysis can make of Eastern Europe, especially of Poland...
...those who speak up against the violence of both the Right and the Left because of their belief that members of the violent Left are accomplices of the Right...
...In Argentina that mentality included a diabolical anti-Semitism...
...There was a day on which Timerman was sentenced to death by both the paramilitaries and the Trotskyists...
...Jews should be stirred, not soothed, by what is taking place in Argentina...
...The suffering of the Jews in Argentina does not meet that standard...
...They worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos...
...The government tried to cripple his paper with economic sanctions...
...How much has to happen to a Jew before the Jews speak up...
...not so, the other...
...Timerman puts it succintly: "A government that adopts legal methods of repressing violence prevents the guerrillas from finding circumstantial allies among democratic men who are unable to accept the use of methods that inevitably recall those of Hitler, Stalin, or Idi Amin...
...it is a danger beyond its own borders, which authoritarianism is not...
...The Jews are used to the very worst...
...The Jewish leaders of Argentina have chosen to deal...
...An open society is pressing to be born—out of a totalitarian society...
...they murder defense lawyers of arrested Montoneros, regarding them as a branch of the guerrilla force...
...Jacobo Timerman fell not merely into the hands of authoritarians...
...It is the controlling compulsion of their culture...
...therefore he is pilloried...
...It is hurt by the government of Argentina, and by governments like it...
...433 lated anti-Semitic incidents, but with a tradition in Argentinian politics...
...One could hate a political prisoner for belonging to the opposite camp, but one could also try to convince him, turn him around, make him understand his error, switch sides, get him to work for you...
...Get Timerman...
...The concept is invaluable in understanding the terrifying politics of the 20th century, but it cannot by itself provide clear-cut directives for the conduct of foreign policy by nontotalitarian states...
...The alliance with Argentina is defended as a strategic necessity in the effort to prevent the expansion of Soviet influence...
...Timerman's hostility to the Soviet slavery is plain...
...They are crazy...
...quite the contrary, he was freed for it...
...It was the true end of the civilization I'd been reared in...
...He knows what awaited him at the hands of the left...
...Yet they may be making a fatal mistake...
...28-29, 1976...
...Spokesmen for the Reagan administration, politically sophisticated about the novelty and distinctiveness of totalitarianism, have argued that the United States ought to support "merely" authoritarian states , even ones that brutally exploit and oppress their subjects, against domestic oppositions striving to overthrow them by force...
...His descriptions of the Argentinian dungeons—"I'd move an arm or a leg merely to view a movement that was non-violent"—are shattering...
...The attack upon this Jewish hero by these American Jews is profoundly disturbing...
...American Jews are not prepared to suffer a disappointment so soon...
...And he was a Jew...
...He does not believe, however, that anticommunism requires the blood of thousands of innocent Argentinians...
...Zionism, not socialism, was uppermost in the twisted minds of the men who beat him...
...This argument does not require that Americans admire Argentina, only that they make common cause with it...
...Is Irving Kristol suggesting in the Wall Street Journal that torture is an appropriate way to get at the truth about white-collar crime...
...But how can a Jew be changed...
...A little like Reagan's other allies, the Saudis...
...The Timerman affair has dramatically disclosed the hold of the Holocaust upon the political perception of American Jews...
...Well, that depends on what is meant by a Holocaust...
...Timerman has exposed many things, and one of them is the malevolence of the American right, old and new...
...So far as we know they are atheists but it might be said that until recently they did believe in a sort of God, M-o Z-g (Lest His Name Be Taken in Vain...
...Now that is precisely not the real question...
...Each officer of a military region had his own prisons, prisoners, and forms of justice...
...those whom they regard as doing nothing to oppose those who suppress them...
...2 The article was called "Don't Rescue Latin American Jews...
...This nation has not been laid so low...
...Timerman was printing facts that embarrassed them...
...They hated Zionism more than communism...
...They are robbing it of its reason...
...In international relationships this can get very entangled...
...An official of the United States government (Carl Gershman) plants a pack of lies in a newspaper column (William Buckley's) to make Timerman out as a friend of terrorists...
...Prompted by Michael Walzer's article "Totalitarianism vs...
...The barbarians are coming...
...This, Argentina...
...his "The Siege of the Argentine Jews," in the New Republic, June 27, 1981...
...Perhaps the most disgraceful aspect of the campaign against Timerman is that it was begun by Jews...
...The disposition of power in Argentina, then, is not quite so morally estimable...
...It should give the Reaganoids pause...
...They can only be fought and, with the help of the Jews of the free world and their governments, perhaps overcome...
...Kristol knows, too, that no evidence was ever produced, not even by the wretched man's diligent prosecutors, that links Timerman to Graiver's Catch-22 or Reaganite Political Theory • Totalitarian rule is by definition difficult to overthrow from within, for the term "totalitarian" was adopted to characterize regimes that not only suppressed their domestic political opponents but subjected all forms of autonomous group life to political penetration and control...
...He has forgiven Timerman's torturers, too...
...Alexander Cockburn, for example, rose at once to play Zola...
...This was the bargain that Daniel P. Moynihan sought to strike at the Democratic platform committee in 1976...
...The United States is called upon by all parties in the debate to pursue not only its interests but its principles...
...Yes, they had better be...
...They describe a country in an advanced stage of civil chaos and moral decay, of brutality and lawlessness, of a sexual spoliation so profound it has distorted the very character of society...
...House of Representatives, Sept...
Vol. 28 • September 1981 • No. 4
