Argentina Wants to Punish Deniers of Crimes Against Humanity

Worldly and otherworldly topics
Post Reply
Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Argentina Wants to Punish Deniers of Crimes Against Humanity

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Tue May 04, 2021 3:31 pm

This was interesting.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7bbwk/ ... t-humanity
“Those who deny the 30,000 figure are in reality denying the existence of the disappeared,” said Patricia Mounier, a legislator from the province of Santa Fe. “Denying is, I think, in some sense, defending what the military did.”


She is among a group of legislators from the ruling Frente de Todos coalition who have introduced three separate proposals to punish the denial, apology, minimization or justification of the state terrorism committed by the dictatorship. They have modeled their bills after laws in Germany, France, Belgium, Spain and Switzerland against Holocaust deniers.
What do you think the approach to misinformation like this should be? For me, one concern regarding things like this is how the status of something as misinformation is decided, and by whom.

I'm old enough to remember supporters of the Iraq War throwing around charges of antisemitism against opponents, for instance.

Tags:

User avatar
HighlyIrregular
Posts: 601
Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2021 2:20 pm
Location: New York
Formerly: BarIII

Re: Argentina Wants to Punish Deniers of Crimes Against Humanity

Post by HighlyIrregular » Tue May 04, 2021 4:01 pm

Well, I think Germany has some anti-holocaust denier laws that the US doesn't have but in a Google street view of Bonn I quickly found racist graffiti on a school. If they didn't have those laws and whatever else they're doing to fix their people it would probably be worse. I don't know anything about Argentina but I'm not necessarily against the policy. I wouldn't normally read a vice article though and I didn't read that one.

(The headquarters of the UN is in Bonn Germany and I did some volunteer work for them remotely)

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: Argentina Wants to Punish Deniers of Crimes Against Humanity

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Tue May 04, 2021 4:26 pm

HighlyIrregular wrote:
Tue May 04, 2021 4:01 pm
Well, I think Germany has some anti-holocaust denier laws that the US doesn't have but in a Google street view of Bonn I quickly found racist graffiti on a school. If they didn't have those laws and whatever else they're doing to fix their people it would probably be worse. I don't know anything about Argentina but I'm not necessarily against the policy. I wouldn't normally read a vice article though and I didn't read that one.

(The headquarters of the UN is in Bonn Germany and I did some volunteer work for them remotely)
Yeah, that's the counterexample. Germany has laws like that and they don't seem like a bad place to live.

I guess I'm just wary of hate speech laws being used as a cudgel to punish people like Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tilab.

User avatar
Madrigal
Posts: 619
Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2019 8:59 am

Re: Argentina Wants to Punish Deniers of Crimes Against Humanity

Post by Madrigal » Wed May 05, 2021 1:19 am

I don't know when the European laws this idea is based on were enacted, but I suspect it was at a very different moment, when the right was weak.

In the case of Argentina, this debate is resurfacing because the right gained strength in the last few years and is refusing to give up the space it has been occupying. Old leftisms are coming back across the hemisphere and so there is a renewed battle over who controls the official narrative. This is happening in the US too, of course.

I should probably clarify that, in the case of Argentina, the narrative has changed three times since the dictatorship. The first was the dictatorship's narrative - that armed guerillas were plunging the country into civil war and they had to be fought against, as in a war. The second narrative was crafted upon the return of democracy in the 80's, popularly referred to as the "Two Demons Theory": there was State terrorism on one hand, and civilian terrorism on the other, and both of these things are bad. Third narrative was when the left wing peronists returned in the early aughties (on the crest of a populist wave across the continent, with Chavez, Lula, Evo, etc): there was no terrorism but idealist dreamers who took up arms as guerrila fighters trying to change the world (a la Che Guevara), and State terrorism stepped in to crush that.

For the record I think it was none of those narratives. I think there was a revolutionary process underway in Latin America and it was mobilizing huge working class contingents, not just a few guerrilla fighters, who had largely disbanded or were pretty much overshadowed by events like mass strikes and uprisings by then. This is the politically dangerous narrative that neither the establishment's right nor its left want to talk about.

I've digressed. I don't know how I feel about whether there should be prison or fines for distorting the historical narrative. I think people in positions of power and in educational roles (such as teachers) should be cancelled for denying what happened. But it's more important to think about why we're talking about this right now, I guess.

User avatar
Ferrus
Posts: 270
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2021 11:10 pm
Location: Barcelona

Re: Argentina Wants to Punish Deniers of Crimes Against Humanity

Post by Ferrus » Wed May 05, 2021 1:51 am

Madrigal wrote:
Wed May 05, 2021 1:19 am
For the record I think it was none of those narratives. I think there was a revolutionary process underway in Latin America and it was mobilizing huge working class contingents, not just a few guerrilla fighters, who had largely disbanded or were pretty much overshadowed by events like mass strikes and uprisings by then. This is the politically dangerous narrative that neither the establishment's right nor its left want to talk about.
One thing in Spain that is interesting is that Peron is largely seen as a right-wing figure here because of his close personal ties to Franco. He bailed Franco out after WW2 when he was international isolated under Soviet pressure - Stalin wanted a intervention to remove him given Spanish volunteers* had taken part in Operation Barbarossa, at least until Franco was scared enough of an invasion of Spanish ports by American and British forces to quietly pull them out - and the wartime alliance through the UN was still intact. Before the cold war heated up and Franco repaired ties with US with a military alliance under the 1953 Pact of Madrid. Before that Spain was struggling to feed itself given the international embargo and Peron supplied lots of Argentinian grain and meat to Spain which may well have prevent a collapse of the regime - there were still pockets of Maquis resistence at that point. Famously Eva Peron was a guest of honour in Spain in 1947. After Peron was removed in 1955 he spent most of his time in exile in Spain as a return favour from Franco... although Franco grew increasingly paranoid that he had become a freemason (who were part of his conspiratorial worldview). Nonetheless... from accounts of his stay Peron played off both his left and the right supporters while in exile in Spain, and indeed would often give conflicting reports on his intentions to different visitors from both sides when they came to visit him. And it is complicated as in some ways after the 1950s Franco was able to present himself in the Spanish-speaking world as an anti-imperialist (as seen by his relations with Cuba and Chile - although Pinochet was the only head of state to visit his funeral) and of course his campaign in the UN over Gibraltar. Perhaps, like Peron himself, there was an ambiguity that he could take advantage of stemming from of the shared unease about the post-war geopolitics that the old pre-neo-liberal conservative Hispanophone right (nostalgic for the old imperio) had with the Hispanophone left.

* The División Azul. Interesting I was reading some of their songs and it seems they had intentions (and Franco nearly ordered it) to invade Portugal and make it part of Spain, despite the Catholic dictatorship of Salazar there... to this day many on the Spanish right think that Portugal should be part of Spain (I have read the comments section of the old Francoist newspaper ABC, that you can see here: https://www.abc.es/historia/abci-trauma ... ticia.html), and that Portugal is only an independent country due to the machnications of their old ally England back in the 17th century.
Ex falso, quodlibet

User avatar
Madrigal
Posts: 619
Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2019 8:59 am

Re: Argentina Wants to Punish Deniers of Crimes Against Humanity

Post by Madrigal » Wed May 05, 2021 2:20 am

Ferrus wrote:
Wed May 05, 2021 1:51 am
One thing in Spain that is interesting is that Peron is largely seen as a right-wing figure here because of his close personal ties to Franco. He bailed Franco out after WW2 when he was international isolated under Soviet pressure - Stalin wanted a intervention to remove him given Spanish volunteers* had taken part in Operation Barbarossa, at least until Franco was scared enough of an invasion of Spanish ports by American and British forces to quietly pull them out - and the wartime alliance through the UN was still intact. Before the cold war heated up and Franco repaired ties with US with a military alliance under the 1953 Pact of Madrid. Before that Spain was struggling to feed itself given the international embargo and Peron supplied lots of Argentinian grain and meat to Spain which may well have prevent a collapse of the regime - there were still pockets of Maquis resistence at that point. Famously Eva Peron was a guest of honour in Spain in 1947. After Peron was removed in 1955 he spent most of his time in exile in Spain as a return favour from Franco... although Franco grew increasingly paranoid that he had become a freemason (who were part of his conspiratorial worldview). Nonetheless... from accounts of his stay Peron played off both his left and the right supporters while in exile in Spain, and indeed would often give conflicting reports on his intentions to different visitors from both sides when they came to visit him.

* The División Azul. Interesting I was reading some of their songs and it seems they had intentions (and Franco nearly ordered it) to invade Portugal and make it part of Spain, despite the Catholic dictatorship of Salazar there... to this day many on the Spanish right think that Portugal should be part of Spain (I have read the comments section of the old Francoist newspaper ABC, that you can see here: https://www.abc.es/historia/abci-trauma ... ticia.html), and that Portugal is only an independent country due to the machnications of their old ally England back in the 17th century.
Peron is only seen as a right wing figure by anarchists and foreigners. Kinda makes you wonder whether peronists are onto something when they claim this movement was unique to Argentina... seems nobody understands it. To me it was just garden variety populism like we've seen many times before. It's true that he did change his discourse according to whoever was in front of him, and this fakery is part of the reason I can't stomach him despite my typical love for populist strongmen. :p In classic peronist style he riled up his leftist base while he was in Spain, and when he returned to Argentina and got off the plane in Bs As he all but spat in their faces, calling the leftist peronists a bunch of "beardless idiots".

I suppose letting Spain starve wouldn't have had a huge amount of backing in Argentina, for obvious reasons of blood ties to the country. There had just been a huge wave of immigration from Spain - and lots of them were from Galicia, which was and probably still is pretty fascist in comparison to the rest of Spain. In Bs As you wouldn't have the Galician community so much as open a measly playground without a fucking priest at the scene to bless the event, and I think that also speaks to their natural fascism.

Portugal? Bunch of Spaniards got lost and forgot how to talk. :ph34r:

User avatar
Ferrus
Posts: 270
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2021 11:10 pm
Location: Barcelona

Re: Argentina Wants to Punish Deniers of Crimes Against Humanity

Post by Ferrus » Wed May 05, 2021 2:37 am

Madrigal wrote:
Wed May 05, 2021 2:20 am
I suppose letting Spain starve wouldn't have had a huge amount of backing in Argentina, for obvious reasons of blood ties to the country. There had just been a huge wave of immigration from Spain - and lots of them were from Galicia, which was and probably still is pretty fascist in comparison to the rest of Spain. In Bs As you wouldn't have the Galician community so much as open a measly playground without a fucking priest at the scene to bless the event, and I think that also speaks to their natural fascism.
That's true, although on a personal level Peron was an admirer of Franco of how a military man could take control of a country and protect it from foreign interests - quietly ignoring the extensive Italian and German support that Franco got in order to achieve power in the first place - although he did manage to outfox them by staying out of WW2. It should be remembered that at this stage the Falangists were at the height of their power in Spain with corporatist and autarkic economic ideas which on an economic level held a lot of resonance with Peron - he was also influenced by Mussolini's economic model too (before Mussolini's Fascist ideology got irretrievably intertwined with and changed by Nazism around 1938 due to the Abyssianian war and the Anschluss of Austria among other thing). This was all before Franco quitely eliminated them from power and replaced them with capitalistic Opus Dei technocrats and various housing developer spivs who built concrete jungles in tourist resorts and big cities from the 60s onwards who turned Spain into what was basically the wild west boom economy of Western Europe for a time. Largely due to his new found friendship with the US, although he remained antagonistic with the UK (over Gibraltar) and France - supporting the OAS far-right paramilitary movement who felt betrayed by De Gaulle. De Gaulle got his revenge by giving ETA a safe harbour for Basque operatives to train in to gun down Guardia Civil officers. Although what I have read of Carlos Menem's policies suggests that this kind of economically liberal volte-face wasn't exactly entirely alien to Peronism either.

I was surprised to find the empanada galega being sold in Argentina, which is basically what an empanda a secas is in Spain.

Going back to the OP, I was also unaware there was a Holocaust denial law in Spain. Aparently this was done by the PP in 2013, which is extremely ironic given the Pacto de Olvido that the Socialist party agreed to in order to secure a transition to democracy (and power for them) that has had a long effect on Spain and is actually one of the reasons promoted by Catalan nationalists as to why Spain is still a fascist country (that and given the PP was founded by said Opus Dei technocrats) - and which is still highly controversial to this day and basically amounted to official denial of historical events as state policy for decades. It has only started to break down now because the far-right under Vox have (in response to the Catalan issue) become publically prominent for the first time since the end of the regime and it has led to a semi-official cancellation of the old pact, such as the removal of Franco from the Valle de los Caidos, which I would say ties in to what you are saying about these issues being closely connected to the political currents of the day and how threatened people feel by rising forces that were assumed buried by history. Although the sudden revival of information, the exhumation of mass graves from the Francoist past and the litigation of certain Guardia civil like Billy El Niño has led to a counter-wave of right-wing hostility to these policies under a sort of cultural victimhood status that ties to what they see as the disintegration of Spanish culture under fear of a law like that being proposed in Argentina were to be introduced here. It is also ironic given how closely the PP used to be associated to Franco's regime whose belief in a Jewish-Communist-Mason conspiracy meant that the regime was closely tied to Arab states against Israel for many years - Spain only recognised Israel in the 80s under a socialist government - but of course the discourse and geopolitical alignment of recent years undoubtedly made it politically expedient for them to do so.

It makes me somewhat suspicious of similar laws/executive orders in other European countries - and those surrounding the status of the Armenian genocide that you saw in the US, France and Russia over the last few years - that seem to be more political signalling of foreign relations with Israel and Turkey that laws or regulations intended to be used seriously.
Ex falso, quodlibet

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: Argentina Wants to Punish Deniers of Crimes Against Humanity

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Tue May 11, 2021 4:15 pm

Interesting-looking responses here. I promise I'll read them when I have more time. I got my second microchip this weekend so I didn't really have the energy to pour over all of this stuff, but I appreciate the opportunity to learn more about context. I'd say the Latin America country whose history I know the most about is probably Chile (and naturally, I know of the U.S. involvement there).

Post Reply