6.20.2003
Remembering Young Idealists
[Posted 12:20 PM by Anthony Daniels]
An article in The New York Times, reprinted in
The International Herald Tribune for June 20,
reported that the newly elected President of
Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, wants to re-open
the question of the military’s legal responsibility
for the dirty war in which 30,000 Argentine
citizens were abducted and killed.
Kirchner himself was a young man during the dirty war.
The Times quoted the writer and human
rights campaigner, Horacio Verbitsky, as saying that
Kirchner came from “not just any
generation. . . . It is one that wanted to change the
country, rebelled against everything that
was rotten, made mistakes, paid dearly for them and
after all that still wants to govern
on an ethical basis.”
The article made no comment on this, except to add
that “the devastation inflicted on that
generation . . . is hard to overstate” and that “a
large proportion of the 30,000 who
’disappeared’ were bright and idealistic young people
who were often singled out because
they were leaders.”
The phrase “bright and idealistic young people” should
be quite sufficient to alert any
sensible person to the likelihood that an important
aspect of the story is being omitted
for ideological reasons (or rather, purposes).
In pursuit of their ideals, the mistakes that some of
those bright young people made
included armed robbery, widespread kidnap,
assassination and random murder. By the time
the army carried out its coup in 1976, over 3,000
people had been killed in the political
violence unleashed by the young idealists. The dirty
war, terrible and unforgivable as it
was, did not arise by spontaneous generation.
It is quite right that the dirty war should be
remembered. But the part played by the
bright young idealists should also not be forgotten,
though it almost always is: for
otherwise, precisely the wrong lessons will be
learned. Total amnesia would be preferable,
in fact, to blatantly ideological selective memory.