The Timerman Conspiracy

Fein, Leonard

THE TIMERMAN CONSPIRACY LEONARD FEIN In whose interest is it to smear Jacobo Timerman, to cast doubts upon his person and his testimony? It is in the interest of the Argentine government, which...

...According to Kristol, Timerman himself "has cast himself in the role of a Solzhenitsyn-of-the-left...
...As against Falcoffs persistent effort to trivialize both Timerman and anti-Semitism in Argentina, we have the conclusion of many others, most notably Robert Weisbrot, author of the only full-length study of Argentine Jewry {The Jews of Argentina, Jewish Publication Society, 1979...
...To torture him...
...To argue that a distinction "crucial to the Reagan administration's human rights policy" is opposed only by people with sinister motives is to try to railroad a dramatic shift in American policy in much the same way in which the Reagan budget was recently railroaded through the House of Representatives...
...For if that be established, then—presumably—doubts will naturally arise regarding the rest of Timerman's story, and, more important still, regarding the wisdom of Timerman's insistence that violations of human rights must be vociferously denounced—in Argentina, in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, wherever...
...Timerman was arrested...
...But Falcoff, Kristol, Kirkpatrick, et al...
...Writing in The New Republic (June 27, 1981), Weisbrot asserts that "Anti-Semitic attitudes, far from being confined to a few extremist elements in the military and elsewhere, are widespread in Argentine society," and that "the active partnership among fascists in and out of government remains vigorous...
...He is a sophisticated and articulate man, and his words about torture and about human rights have the power of personal experience behind them...
...Because they assume that if the Jews of the United States can be persuaded that Timerman is merely a disreputable leftist, that he was tortured not as a Jew but as a "political speculator," then the Jews of the United States will lose interest in Timerman, and in Argentina, and in human rights in general...
...For the fact is that even if Timerman was not tortured as a Jew, even if his perceptions of anti-Semitism in Argentina are wildly exaggerated, the abuse of human rights in Argentina remains a matter of grave concern...
...What Timerman does claim is that he was tortured as a Jew...
...Over and over again, the victims themselves—whether of the right or the left, whether out of the Soviet Union or out of Argentina— have pleaded for intense public pressure and diplomacy...
...Those who now attack him assert that he was arrested because of his association with one David Gravier, himself suspected of close ties to urban terrorists...
...Timerman's book (Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number, Knopf, 1981) is so eloquent, so passionate a document that it has become a fact of history and not merely a chronicle...
...Others, however, testify that quiet negotiations are sometimes more helpful...
...There Marc Falcoff, its author, recites once again the facts of Timerman's association with Gravier, in order to establish that Timerman was not arrested as a Jew...
...Having sought to belittle Timerman's credentials as a liberal, and having characterized his kidnapping by 20 armed men as an example of those in Argentina "who have fallen afoul of the forces of order," Falcoff must somehow explain away the "unspeakable cruelty...
...First, he argues that "the contemporary position of Jews in (Argentina) resembles that of the community in the United States during the 1920s," an utterly silly remark that is intended to evoke images of KKK-like vigilantes disturbing an otherwise peaceful and progressive social order...
...That left, according to Kristol and Falcoff and diverse others, is—let us not mince words—soft on communism...
...Smarting from the defeat, afraid that too many people might agree with Timerman's assertion that "silent diplomacy is silence, and quiet diplomacy is surrender," the smearers began their work in earnest...
...Why, then, such emphasis on this one point...
...The former chief of police of the province of Buenos Aires, now General Ramon Alberto Camps, asserts that "Timerman did not suffer any harm" during the 30 months he was held prisoner...
...Honorable people will disagree as to how, in any particular instance, human rights may best be defended and protected...
...The Senate hearings on Ernest Lefever's nomination coincided with the publication of Timerman's book and with Timerman's visit to this country to promote the book...
...locked in a struggle of incalculable consequence with a major world power that is also . . . courting" the authoritarian regimes we criticize (Falcoff s formulation...
...the effort suggests that Jewish participation in the struggle for human rights is taken very seriously...
...He asserts that the entire episode is part of the legitimate effort by the ruling junta to bring order to Argentine chaos...
...But to hold him for 30 months...
...Add both, and there follows, as Falcoff acknowledges, the "unspeakable cruelty" Timerman suffered...
...Timerman speaks with comradely respect of the victims of Soviet repression, but despite the inconvenience he causes the trendy promulgators of empty distinctions between one clandestine prison and another, he describes for us his experience at the hands of the "forces of order" of Argentina...
...All else, includes, quite clearly, both American law and the American soul...
...It is they, of course, who preach and practice such selection...
...Others—say, those on the left and also, for that matter, in the center— manage quite well to register their disgust with the torturers, no matter the swamp they inhabit...
...Take both of those away, and there is no Timerman case...
...It is in the interest of the Reagan administration, which prefers to cast a blind eye (euphemistically called the practice of "quiet diplomacy") on violations of human rights committed by regimes we otherwise favor...
...Falcoffs second line of attack is still more startling...
...But nowhere does Timerman claim that he was arrested as a Jew, so the vehement denial is beside the point...
...Those who now argue that in the name of a higher purpose we should turn a blind eye to repression on the right have invested a good deal of energy in the Timerman affair...
...And that may be the best explanation of why they find it necessary to set up the straw man they do when they accuse those who think them wrong of selective disgust...
...Until last week, no one had had the gall to contest that claim...
...he had named names, and he was a Jew...
...That association might have provided sufficient cause for the regime to question Timerman...
...One is bound to ask why they have taken it so very seriously, and why, in particular, they have gone to such great lengths to seek to disprove the gravity of Argentine anti-Semitism...
...It is in the perceived interest of the Jews of Argentina, who prefer to make their compromises with repression in the hope that a better day will come...
...Thus far, at least, Timerman's American critics have not gone so far...
...And Timerman was guilty of not one, but two such sins...
...They deny, vehemently, that he was arrested as a Jew...
...He believes that he was arrested because of his (relative) outspoken criticism...
...This he deftly does in two different ways...
...It insists, they say, on calling attention to the horrors of fascist regimes, but is silent with regard to repression, torture, murder in the Gulag and its branches...
...To this sad tale of universal import there is a parochial postscript...
...As against the importance of that struggle, all else pales...
...But it is insulting to be thought so parochial that if the Jewish question were removed, our interest would wane...
...No critic has suggested that Timerman would have been arrested, imprisoned and tortured merely on the grounds of a business association with Gravier...
...Over and over they have told us that it is the publicity their suffering is given that has sustained them during their imprisonments...
...And the left and liberal-left, Kristol tells us, are now mounting "a major intellectual and propaganda campaign . . . against this distinction," a distinction that is "crucial to the Reagan administration's human rights poliey...
...symbol and spokesman of those who are less interested in using the 'human rights' issue against left-wing totalitarian nations . . . than against right-wing authoritarian governments...
...One is inevitably reminded of the current effort to deny the fact of the Holocaust...
...The stakes here are very large...
...Lefever was forced to withdraw his name from consideration, and there is little question that Timerman's book and presence were important factors in the unraveling of the Lefever nomination...
...It is in the interest of the Argentine government, which Timerman accuses of Nazi-like behavior...
...But in the end, it was the right that was in power when Timerman was arrested, not the left...
...the feudal governors of Argentina preferred to kill their enemies, real or suspected, or to cause them to disappear...
...Those of us who prefer the rule of law—an experiment that the junta in Argentina has simply refused to undertake, as Timerman painstakingly documents—are, presumably, part of what Falcoff terms the "foreign-policy establishment of the American Left...
...Even if Timerman were not all we might wish our heroes to be, the issue of defending human rights remains at the heart of the matter...
...It is, perhaps, flattering to be the object of this effort to lull the conscience...
...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 that offers any hope of success...
...I have met and talked with Jacobo Timerman, and I am quite certain that he would agree that his harrowing experience is hardly the central issue here...
...He failed...
...Indeed, even Irving Kristol acknowledges that it is "impossible to doubt the authenticity of Mr...
...first the victim is debased, then he is denied...
...he describes Timerman as "an exceptionally able political speculator who had played his game with remarkable agility" but who "had the misfortune to fall" into the hands of the extreme right, whose "residual influence at the higher ranks of the military" accounts for the anti-Semitic treatment he encountered in prison...
...In the Wall Street Journal of May 29, Irving Kristol weighed in with a fierce attack, arguing that Timerman had been less than honest in his book, and, more strenuously, that Timerman was being used by the "left" and the "liberal-left" to pursue their own "sophisticated political intentions...
...In what has become Ronald Reagan's depressingly typical fashion, the President had nominated for the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights a man whose public utterances on the subject had plainly established his hostility to the laws of the United States that deal with human rights matters abroad...
...With almost tedious regularity, every indictment Timerman levels at the right is balanced by an equally tough indictment of the left...
...will not have it that way...
...Those who have read Timerman's book will know that he does not, in fact, spare the terrorists of the left, including the Soviet Union...
...Timerman's account...
...That same argument, considerably expanded, was presented in the lead article in the July issue of Commentary...
...Neither Falcoff nor any other critic of Timerman has suggested that Timerman could not easily have played a much safer "game" had he cared less for human rights...
...And those who are familiar with the "foreign-policy establishment of the American Left" will not recognize the invidious distinction between right and left repression it is accused of promoting...
...Timerman, publisher and editor of La Opinion, sought through his contacts and his editorials to force the anarchic Argentine regime to deal with terrorism through the abundant legal means that the Argentine constitution provides...
...It is one of those rare books that has the power to change the course of events...
...One can imagine their chagrin and almost feel sympathy for their discomfort when, opposed only by a ragtag battalion of pinkos, naifs, anachronistic leftovers from an earlier era, Timerman's book appeared, and Timerman with it...
...The most eloquent rebuttal to such an insult is a renewed commitment to the defense of human rights wherever they are systematically violated, whoever the victim of their abuse...
...else why are we so warm to the People's Republic of China, which is authentically totalitarian...
...It is enough for them to establish that he was not, as an editor, nearly so "liberal" as he now pretends, and that he was involved, somehow, with unsavory characters...
...The first round went to Timerman...
...On the contrary, they have, each of them, uttered the appropriate commiserative sounds in referring to Timerman's experience in jail...
...A crude "expose" of Timerman, which had appeared to little notice in the December 1980 issue of Midstream, was exhumed, its allegations regarding the Timerman-Gravier connection widely reprinted...
...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...
...Now it* too, is in dispute...
...There is no justification for seeking to avoid serious public debate on the radical change that is now proposed—unless, of course, those who propose it fear the result of such a debate...
...at least one other, more palpable sin was required to "justify" such harsh measures...
...No, so far as the Reagan people are concerned, the ballyhooed distinction between "authoritarian" regimes and "totalitarian" regimes is not the heart of the matter...
...The "game" Timerman was playing was the naming of names— specifically, the names of some of the 15,000 desaparecidos (those who have disappeared following their arrest) in the pages of La Opinion...
...For the fact is that in the current debate, there is only one group that insists on that distinction, and that is the group that proposes—nay, insists— that we subsume all other considerations under the anti-Soviet banner...
...The story is disarmingly simple, despite the sandy debate it has occasioned...
...It is in the interest of a small group of intellectuals and writers who seek to establish anti-Sovietism as the one fundamental criterion for the international relations of the United States...
...For Timerman is no wistful do-gooder...
...Each time some newly embarrassing episode of repression on the right is made public, they seek to convince us that (I) it really isn't so bad as it appears, and (2) the Soviet Union is worse, and (3) even if it is as bad as it appears, even if it is as bad as it is in the Soviet Union, we are "a country...
...And just when things seemed to be going so well for the newly-empowered proponents of laissez-faire (Russia and its satellites excepted, of course) in human rights abroad...

Vol. 6 • July 1981 • No. 7


 
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