Gelman and Good Dictatorships

Juan Gelman is a poet, is widely regarded as being a human rights campaigner and when he was younger he was an active participant in revolutionary Peronism. Regular readers of this increasingly neglected blog will know that I don’t have a high opinion of Gelman.

However, even I was surprised by the depths he stoops to in a piece published in Pagina/12 today. It’s an acceptance speech for some bauble awarded to him under the auspices of the Chinese government. Here are some choice quotes:

On the 13th of April last the Chinese government published a national action plan for human rights which guarantees the basic civil rights of the entire population including women, children, the disabled and ethnic minorities…

In the introduction to the action plan the government recognizes that “China has a long way to go with its efforts to improve human rights.” As it proceeds along this path the death penalty will undoubtedly be abolished, the independence of the judiciary will be strengthened, censorship of publishers and the media will be softened, political prisoners who have not committed acts against the security of the state will be released, those responsible for disappearances, especially those of children, will be caught and punished and other relaveant measures will also be adopted…

The USA and western powers support terrorist groups and separitists who are trying to break China up into weak feudal domains and satrapies, the better to dominate them. Tibet and Taiwan form part of China since time immemorial.

Can Gelman possibly believe that the Chinese government is going to abolish the death penalty? And note that he only hopes for a softening of censorship and thinks its fine to hold political prisoners if they have committed acts  against state security. Guess who will be deciding whether they have or not? Yup, the judiciary whose non-existent autonomy he’d like to see augmented.

As anybody who has read a tiny bit of history knows, some of the most infernal regimes have had constitutions bursting with good intentions and have claimed to be passionate defenders of human rights. The Soviet Union was one such and Cuba today is another. Rather than judge the government of China on its decades of repression, torture and mass murder, the sainted Gelman decides to judge it on yet another blast of hot air  from the regime.

So, if you’re Taiwanese and you’d like to continue to enjoy the benefits of living in a liberal democracy, well, screw you. The great panjandrum of the human rights movement in Argentina thinks you should forget about all that nonsense and rejoin the motherland, where you’ll do well to keep your opinions to yourself if you don’t want to end up in a “reeducation” camp.

And if you are a Tibetan or an Uighur who doesn’t regard yourself as part of the Chinese nation,  who doesn’t want your culture and people to be turned into theme park amusements for tourists  and would like to assert your national rights, you are in even worse luck. As  far as Gelman is concerned you can quite literally fuck off and die. All you are is tool of imperialism.

Gelman is a hypocrite and fraud who never saw an anti-American dictatorship – no matter how monstrous – he didn’t like. This article also gives us a fair insight into what Argentina would look like today if he and his comrades and triumphed in the struggles of their  youth.

Irán y los Defensores de los Derechos Humanos

El gobierno de Irán está fusilando opositores en la calle, un artículo de Juan Gelman explicándonos como todo es resulto de un complot sionista-neoliberal no puede demorar mucho en salir a la luz.

Pakistan in the North Atlantic?

John Banville writes,

Surely the systematic cruelty visited upon hundreds of thousands of children incarcerated in state institutions in this country from 1914 to 2000, the period covered by the inquiry, but particularly from 1930 until 1990, would have been prevented if enough right-thinking people had been aware of what was going on? Well, no. Because everyone knew.

If by “knew” he means were aware of the general application of  gross physical, psychological and sexual torment, I can say with certainty that I – born in Galway in 1963 and resident in Ireland for the following 25 or so years – did not know.

I was aware of the existence of industrial schools and my mother, at moments when my siblings and I gravely tried her patience, would threaten to have us sent to one of them, Letterfrack. In so far as I thought about them at all, I imagined them as being a full time  version of the primary school I went to. The savage who ran the place regularly slapped pupils in the face/across the head, or grabbed their ears and twisted hard when they didn’t answer fast enough. I generally escaped the worst of this but I still remember more formal punishments that involved getting caned across the hands with a bamboo switch. Bad enough, but light years away from what went on in the industrial schools.

Loose talk about us all – Banville, me  and everyone else –  “knowing” and the idle comparison he later makes with the Jewish and Armenian genocides tends to dissolve the guilt among the population at large and lessen the share of those directly responsible, every last one of whom was a uniformed agent of the Catholic church, and those indirectly so, the secular authorities who cringed before the crozier and let the religious have their evil and perverted way with huge numbers of children.

As Sean Coleman puts it,

… there was a kind of cultural deference, a national stoop, which meant that what the Church was doing simply wasn’t seriously questioned. The report makes this quite clear: ‘The deferential and submissive attitude of the Department of Education towards the Congregations compromised its ability to carry out its statutory duty of inspection and monitoring of the schools’; ‘The Departments’ Secretary General, at a public hearing, told the Investigation Committee that the Department had shown a “very significant deference” towards the religious Congregations’. In effect, the state ceded its jurisdiction to the Church; indeed, in certain circumstances the Church became the state.

Perhaps now would be a good time to give some renewed thought to exactly what kind of state Ireland has been for a considerable part of its existence. To what extent can it be said to have been democratic during the first 50 years of its existence, when there was practically no limit on the power of the church? Instead of comparing our history in that period to that of Denmark, would we not be better off looking at, say, Pakistan?

The Catholic Church in Ireland: A Vast Criminal Conspiracy

So, there’s yet more evidence that the Irish Catholic Church was up to its oxters in child abuse all the way from the foundation of the state up to the 1980s.  If a secular organization had been found to have committed such horrors it would be well on the way to being closed down and its leaders would be looking at long prison sentences.

You can find the best commentary on the new revelations here, here, here and here. There are even some interesting comments.

Raúl Alfonsín, 1927 – 2009

En el día de la muerte de Raúl Alfonsin vale la pena recordar la importancia histórica de su decisión, tomada poco después de asumir la presidencia en el año 1983, de derogar el decreto de autoaministía de los militares, – decreto que el candidato peronista había apoyado durante su campaña  – y de enjuiciar a la cúpula de la dictadura militar.

Si hubiera ganado el peronismo en el 83, hoy estaríamos preguntándonos ¿Qué desaparecidos? ¿Qué genocida? El juicio a las juntas es un acontecimiento hasta la fecha único en la historia. Un gobierno democrático   logró romper el pacto de impunidad de la dictadura militar sin intervención  extranjera. Ningún país en circunstancias similares ha logrado algo comparable.

En circunstancias infinitamente más difíciles que las actuales,  Alfonsin logró encarcelar con sentencia firme más jerarcas del proceso que el kirchnerismo después de más cinco años de gobierno.