José Pablo Feinmann, in Part 6 of his ongoing history of Peronism which comes with Pagina/12 on Sundays, says,
Ah, the truth! Yes, that’s quite a topic. He who believes himself to be in possession of it doesn’t know what it is. The truth isn’t. To establish the truth about something would be to kill it, reify it, give it a definitive sense among the infinite number which it undoubtedly possesses. On the 17th of October [1943] there were thousands of people on the streets and at the end of the day a colonel called Perón gave a speech to the multitude gathered in the Plaza de Mayo. Is that the truth? No, it’s a fact (hecho). The truth is not a fact. […] Nietzsche famously said “There are no facts only interpretations.” […]…that phrase is worth its weight in gold […] We all know, more or less what occurred on the 17th of October. We know the facts. But what interpretation do we give them? Thought is a struggle between interpretations. Truths collide. There are no innocent truths. Truths represent interests.
He goes on a bit in the same style before concluding that the facts are mute and only serve as a starting point for hermeneutics.
Let us now apply the same interpretative framework to the events which took place in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The basic facts are no longer in dispute: during this period the country was governed by the armed forces and there was no effective brake on their control over the population; no elections, no Congress, no free press, nothing remotely resembling an independent judiciary, no nothing. Thousands died violent deaths, many of these were “disappeared” and almost all were tortured. Defenders of the dictatorship are inclined to put the number involved between 6000 and 9000 while its opponents generally quote a figure of 30000.
According to Feinmann’s interpretative scheme, these facts tell us little or nothing; they are mute and serve simply as a starting point for a war of interpretations with each interpretation responding to a particular set of interests. I find the idea of a country entirely under the unchecked control of its armed forces to be an extremely alarming one and not to be in need of much hermeneutic labour but I suppose that Feinmann might regard it with equanimity given that he probably regards things like a free press and an independent judiciary as no more than masks on the reality of oppression but we`ll let that pass and move with his scheme.
The basic facts of what happened in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 not being in doubt the two main interpretations of them in play are (i), that the armed forces committed genocide, or something pretty similar to it, against the civilian population and especially that part of it that was involved with left-wing organisations, these organizations being understood to have been struggling against injustice and (ii), some mixture of a painful but necessary extirpation of a foreign organism -Marxism/revolutionary Peronism or whatever – from the national body politic, an operation which led to unfortunate excesses but amounted in effect to a tragic necessity and a civil war between the forces of the true Christian Argentina and the bearers of a repulsive imported ideology which would have laid waste to the true essence of the nation had the heroic inheritors of the mantle of San Martín not stepped in to stop it.
The interests supporting interpretation (i) would be – according to taste – the poor, the people, the Peronist masses, the proletariat, those who want/ed a better future for the country and those supporting interpretation (ii) would be some combination of the native oligarchy, international capital and the more reactionary elements of the Church.
Remember now that Feinmann thinks that neither of the interpretations sketched above – or any other – is true. They are just competing interpretations and each one represents interests. So let us think about what that means to the victims of the dictatorship, for instance to the teenage activist in the JP who was kidnapped from the street by the military, taken to the Campo de Mayo where she was savagely tortured for weeks or months and when she wasn’t being tortured was kept chained hand and foot with a bag over her head much of the time and who was in due course put on an a military aircraft and thrown to her death in the sea.
I would say, and I am sure Feinmann would agree with me, that such people were victims of the most outrageous crimes, crimes that should never be forgotten and that deserve the firmest punishment. According to his epistemology as set out here though, that’s just an interpretation, an interpretation that responds to certain interests and which is in no sense the truth. Without some regulative concept like the truth to guide us it’s difficult to know what we might say to a defender of the dictatorship who maintained that the fate of thousands who suffered and died in the manner described above were subversives who deserved what they got or unfortunate but inevitable victims of excesses in an otherwise just war.
It can’t be said often enough. Without some concept of the truth there is no such thing as justice and the torturer’s excuses and justifications are as valid as his victim’s cries of agony. And those who believe that human beings have inviolable rights had better lay off citing Nietzsche.
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