Replies to post #289577 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

With Julie C's Don't Cry For... Four decades after coup, people power is driving change in Argentina

"How fascism works"

INSERT VIDEO

Julie Covington - Don't Cry For Me Argentina

MrHaggis64
Published on Jun 3, 2010

*Video shown courtesy of the audio content owners UMG*...Great song from 1977 off the sound track album of the musical
Evita and sung by Julie Covington.Her vocal performance in this song gives me chills,it's stunning and beautiful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adUPdnzCAk8

March 25, 2016 12.07am AEDT


Jorge Rafael Videla takes the presidential oath after the 1976 coup.

Author Juan Pablo Ferrero
Lecturer in Latin American Studies, University of Bath

The visit to Argentina .. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/23/argentina-barack-obama-mothers-plaza-de-mayo-1976-coup .. by US president Barack Obama on the 40th anniversary of the coup in which the now-infamous military Junta seized power has opened up a lot of barely healed wounds. The families of more than 30,000 people either killed or “disappeared” during the seven-year dictatorship of the generals are boycotting memorial ceremonies, instead staging their own mass demonstrations to call for justice.

Forty years on, the coup against the Peronist government still reverberates through Argentinian society. It was carried out by senior army officers on March 24, 1976 after two years of planning. This was a sharp reaction by the upper echelons of the armed forces, in cahoots with landowners (the “terratenientes”) and industrialists. The takeover was a response to what Argentina’s elites perceived to be a threat from the increasingly active working class and unionised middle classes .. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3539776?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents .

This threat was massively overplayed. Successive Peronist regimes had adopted an explicit anti-Marxist orientation .. http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/latin_american_research_review/v038/38.3levitsky.html .. and any communist threat was more rhetorical than realistic in Argentina. But in the wake of a series of popular revolutionary uprisings in Latin America – especially Cuba – there was heightened concern in Washington.

The US role in the events of March 1976 has never fully emerged, despite the release by the Clinton administration of documents in 2000 which detailed US involvement in the Chilean coup of 1973. Certainly, many Argentine military officers were trained in the US at the School of the Americas at this time. This training was to become notorious .. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2246205 .

Obama has pledged to release more documents in the hope that “this gesture helps rebuild trust that may have been lost between our two countries”.

Impetus for change

In a strange way, the rule of the Junta actually paved the way for the development of a particular form of liberal democracy in Argentina in which human rights organisations, women’s groups and other non-government actors .. http://cps.sagepub.com/content/26/3/259.short .. drive the political process as much as politicians.


Children of the ‘Disappeared’ demonstrating in Buenos Aires in 2015. EPA/David Fernández

It was Argentina’s defeat in the Malvinas/Falklands war, which eroded the Junta’s legitimacy in the eyes of most people in Argentina and gave impetus for political change .. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/argentina.htm . But it was the demand for “truth” and “justice” by human rights groups (later extended to include the promotion of museums, historical sites and the like .. http://lap.sagepub.com/content/21/2/38.extract%20%20to%20educate%20new%20generations%20on%20past%20atrocities ) that really paved the way for the democratic government in Argentina.

Victims of human rights abuses were unwilling to trust the state – during the Junta, the state had acted more as an executor of political violence than a guarantor of the rights of its citizens. But despite this, the opposition did not become anti-institutional, instead seeking “memory, truth and justice” within the existing institutional framework (international and national) in order to produce changes in the Argentinian state.

Trying times

The results were mixed. Before finally scheduling elections, which were won by the opposition Raúl Alfonsín .. http://www.jstor.org/stable/796904?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents , the Junta had granted a blanket amnesty for all offences connected to the “Dirty War”. This was overturned by the government of Alfonsín, however, and a number of trials took place between 1983 and 1989, although under pressure from the military Alfonsín’s government brought in an amnesty for lower-ranking military and security officials on the basis that they were carrying out orders.

This was extended by pardon laws .. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/09/world/pardon-of-argentine-officers-angers-critics-of-the-military.html .. under the presidency of Carlos Menem – and it looked as if many of the people behind the thousands of murders and disappearances would simply get away with their crimes.


Ricardo Miguel Cavallo, alias ‘Serpico’ was sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for crimes against
civilians during the Junta. EPA/Cezaro de Luca

But pressure from Argentina’s courts and civic groups as well as international campaigns by global human rights organisations led to the reopening of trials .. https://www.essex.ac.uk/armedcon/story_id/001096.html .. during the administrations of Cristina and Néstor Kirchner.

Among the most visible of those civic groups were the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They developed from a group of women seeking information about children who had vanished during the Junta years into a massive social movement commanding global recognition and wielding enormous power within Argentina.

Both groups announced that they would boycott the 40th anniversary ceremonies – preferring to organise their own marches across the country.

People power

Argentina’s modern democracy reflects the power of these popular movements. Contentious issues, such as pay and working conditions, the defence of public education, the struggle for gender equality and protection against police abuse, are seen as issues for public debate by NGOs including trade unions, women’s groups and neighbourhood associations.

As a result, Argentina has developed a number of alternative means, beyond the hard-won institutional mechanisms, for forcing problematic issues on to the political agenda and challenging the dominant political culture that – in Argentina’s bloody past – was able to normalise injustice.

https://theconversation.com/four-decades-after-coup-people-power-is-driving-change-in-argentina-54973

[gunballs]

Really good piece. I appreciate that.
I tend to simplify how I think of fascism into two concepts. Outward expansion and internal cleansing. Outward expansion such as stacking the justice system with loyalist, wrestling the media under control, and assuming the power of law enforcement for personal use. Obviously Trump has been working towards those aims every day. War is an inevitability especially if that expansion within the country is successful. We already have a trade war under way.
We have a disturbing amount of the population whom think taking people's children away forever and locking them up in detention facilities because their parents crossed the border without documentation, is a fitting punishment. Destroying families and children's lives for a misdemeanor requires people to view immigrants as not human. The will to betray humanity is strong in this country. We're in a bad place.

As far as the poem, I do feel Democrats are culpable for our lack of will to be hold Republicans accountable. For instance in the Beto O'Rouke and Ted Cruz debate Beto brought up the things Trump said about Cruz, his wife and dad, and now Cruz supports Trump. Cruz turned it around and said he he put hurt feelings aside because he has a job to do for the people of Texas. The conversation ended with Cruz putting a positive spin on it.
Democrats traditionally let such issues go. Maybe they bring it up later with the same results. As a party we are reluctant to get in the mud. But the conversation shouldn't change. Their should be commercials and billboards everywhere that say "If Ted won't stand up for his own wife or dad what makes you think he will stand up for you." Its not about mud slinging. It's about holding him accountable to his lack of integrity and not allowing him to simply lie his way out of it. Their would be push back, probably vicious push back, but it's naive to expect that holding people accountable doesn't come with push back. Conversations about dignity and integrity need to be kept in the forefront because, as a country, we are failing on a human level.

[fuagf]

I live among the neo-Nazis in eastern Germany. And it’s terrifying
Anonymous

"How fascism works"

Read this and you will be reminded of the kind of nasty people who feed on fear, then hate, which leads them to be bad people. The
kind of people that authoritarian, bully-boys that Trump is one of. The kind of people that the hate speech of Donald Trump enables.

Chemnitz is the tip of an iceberg. Media equivocation and a failure to prosecute hate crimes has made the far right stronger

Wed 31 Oct 2018 20.08 AEDT
Last modified on Thu 1 Nov 2018 09.05 AEDT


There were voices saying we should try to understand those among the protesters
who were ‘of goodwill’. Photograph: Martin Divisek/EPA

Media coverage of racist riots in the east German city of Chemnitz earlier this year showed just the tip of the iceberg: what lurks beneath the surface remains hidden.

I’m a university student and an antifascism activist living in Saxony, not far from Chemnitz. For a long time I underestimated the extent of rightwing extremism in Germany. Before I moved to this area a few years ago I didn’t know Saxony, and took antifascism for granted. I’d never come across “real” Nazis or violent racists.

More than 4,000 attacks on foreigners have occurred since 2015, some with molotov cocktails

I grew up in Berlin, I’m the child of a metropolis where it is normal not to be white or have a German name. My French grandfather fought for the Allied air force – that’s how my father came to Germany. My mother, a German, was born in West Berlin, that western enclave in the middle of the German Democratic Republic, a refuge for “alternative” people, punks and conscientious objectors.

For a long time I told myself that the east-west divide didn’t concern me. I was born after the Berlin Wall came down. But when I moved to the east, I started thinking more deeply about my western upbringing. I also tried to dispel my prejudices and started thinking more critically about how Germany handled reunification.

I want to stand up against discrimination everywhere and at any time, but in these small towns that can be hard, and exhausting. You’d think Germany’s history would be enough to ensure that fascism and nationalism are denied even the slightest encouragement. That should matter to everyone, shouldn’t it? Unfortunately that’s not how things are.

[...]

But what remained largely unnoticed were the attacks on foreigners and asylum hostels. More than 4,000 have occurred since 2015, some involving the use of molotov cocktails, baseball bats, and with armed neo-Nazis even raiding children’s rooms. In 2016, an average of 10 hate crimes each day against migrants was officially registered.

What does that mean for daily life in the places where these attacks happened? To take the full measure of it, you have to live here. There’s the conversation at the bakery where an old woman complains about the “bad” foreigners, and the woman serving her agrees. There’s the conductor on the tramway who deliberately checks only the tickets of the black passengers. And there are the attacks on leftwing cultural projects or community centres – stones thrown, beatings, the violence you experience when you try to get involved. And there’s the passivity of the so-called civilian population – locals who stand by when a black person is beaten up in the town centre. Racist, fascist normality sets in.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/neo-nazi-eastern-chemnitz-germany-saxony

This is yet another good anti-authoritarian meme.


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