Sunday, August 13, 2017
SMALL DIFFERENCE
The polite, mannerly, country club racism of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is at base indistinguishable from the Alt-Right White Supremicist Neo-Nazism on display in Charlottesville, VA yesterday, save that the perpetrators of the Charlottesville violence run the risk of being arrested, whereas Sessions is the Attorney-General of the United States. Let me say that again. Sessions is the Attorney-General of the United States. This is an appalling country.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
The country-club set never gets touched almost anywhere. From what I know, in countries where there's no country-club, say, Cuba or Venezuela, there's a nomenklatura who are equally too big to blame.
This morning I was listening to the weekly Sunday morning TV news interviews. The stable panel features Sergio Melnick, ex-minister of Pinochet, now reinvented as a futurologist with a minor in esoteric studies (Jung and the tarot) and Pilar Molina, long-time journalist for El Mercurio newspaper, which not only received money from the CIA to undermine Allende, but also covered up (at times with very complicated duplicity) Pinochet's crimes. At times a guest criticizes them, but they both laugh it off.
There are three other panelists, none of them associated with the dictatorship.
One of the three interviewed guests was Joaquin Lavin, currently mayor of Las Condes (the upmarket section of what people call "Santiago", since Santiago is really only the downtown of that larger area called "the Metropolitan Region"), editor of El Mercurio newspaper during the Pinochet dictatorship and author of a best-selling book of apologetics for it, at present rebranding himself as a defender of animal rights (yes) and of tolerance for gays and lesbians.
None of those who directly blooded their hands with murder and torture during the dictatorship, the infantry so to speak, would get invited to that or any other TV program: in fact, most of them are in jail for human rights violations. But those who cheered them on, even who gave the orders, even who financed rightwing death squads are still in the country club and on network TV on Sunday morning.
It's always the infantry who gets sacrificed and screwed, except when the generals lose the war, as in the case of the Nuremberg trials.
Thank you for this. It is extremely valuable to have a detailed account of analogous circumstances from an entirely different venue. Your observations are spot on.
You're welcome.
It's pretty incredible when you think of it. Melnick, described above, now claims to be a liberal (in the classical sense, not in the U.S. political sense). What's more, I saw a poll a few months ago in which he was one of the most highly rated TV news panelists (there are 4 TV news panels each Sunday in different channels) by TV viewers. The fact that he was a minister for Pinochet and one of the most publicly outspoken ones in singing the praises of the dictatorship (economic growth, modernization of the public sector, etc.) does not seem to matter to all too many people.
Post a Comment