Fluent Essays

For this assignment, you are to read the article provided about Argentina. The report is to be 5-6 pages in length. Please be sure to use both a title page and works cited page. You are also encouraged to follow the MLA or Chicago formats to develop this report. Please double-space your review. And in your works cited page, please list the name of the article that you will be summarizing and analyzing. This an example of the type of the format you should follow:“Argentina in 1983: Reflections on the Language of the Military and George Orwell, by Alberto Ciria. Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Vol. 11, No. 21 (1986), pp. 57-69.In terms of the content of the report, I am looking for two main points of discussion. First, you should devote the first half of the report to a summary of the main points that the author is trying to convey to the reader. To help you to address this issue, consider some of these questions: What type of article is this? Is the author presenting an original feature, or is he/she conducting a book review? If this is a book review, what book (or books) is being reviewed? What is the author’s purpose for writing this article? What is the author’s academic or professional background?As for the second point of discussion, this is where you provide your opinion or perceptions of the article. In other words, what did you think about it? What were the strengths or weaknesses of the article? How did the article relate to the class? You are definitely encouraged to write in first person singular (I feel that..., I think..) as you provide your opinions. As a general rule of thumb, your JSTOR review should be about 60\% summary and 40\% commentary. Thus a 5-page review with about 3 & 1⁄2 pages summary and 1 & 1⁄2 pages commentary is an ideal proportion. argentina_1983.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Argentina in 1983: Reflections on the Language of the Military and George Orwell Author(s): Alberto Ciria Source: Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes, Vol. 11, No. 21 (1986), pp. 57-69 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41799589 Accessed: 03-09-2019 00:56 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latinoaméricaines et caraïbes This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:56:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Argentina in 1983: Reflections on the Language of the Military and George Orwell Alberto Ciria Simon Fraser University The author analyses the way in which public discourse was used and perverted by the Argentine military régime of 1976 to 1983 in order to obscure or justify torture, repression , murder and wholesale abuse of human rights . He shows how the militarys use of language conforms to the model of Newspeak as defined by George Orwell. This perversion of political discourse has obvious parallels in Chile , Uruguay and other Latin American countries subjected to repressive régimes, where terms such as democracy and liberty have been systemically used to describe their polar opposites . While this practice reached its most extreme manifestations under the military régime, the author argues that the crisis of the public language has been a matter of record in A rgentina s political life for quite some time and that the problem has not entirely disappeared with the return to democracy since 1983. Lauteur analyse la façon dont le régime militaire argentin, entre 1976 et 1983, a usé et abusé du discours officiel pour occulter ou pour justifier la torture, la répression, le meurtre et la violation généralisée des droits de la personne. Il montre comment lutilisation du langage par les militaires se conforme au modèle du «Novlangue» («Newspeak») comme le définissait George Orwell . Cette perversion du discours politique trouve un parallèle évident au Chili, en Uruguay et dans dautres pays latino-américains soumis à des régimes répressifs, où des termes tels que «démocratie» et «liberté» ont été systématiquement utilisés pour décrire leurs contraires. Bien que cette pratique ait atteint son paroxysme sous le régime militaire, lauteur soutient que «la crise du discours officiel est sensible depuis un bon moment dans la vie politique de lArgentine » et que le problème nest pas entièrement disparu avec le retour à la démocratie en 1983. 51 This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:56:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms In Genoa the word Libertas may be seen on the doors of all the prisons and on the fetters of the galleys. This use of the motto is excellent and just. In fact , it is only the malefactors of all states who prevent the citizens from being free. In a country where all such people were in the galleys , the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed (Jean- Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract, trans, by Maurice Cranston , Penguin Books, 1968. Nine years ago [1974] the penitentiary called Libertad (Freedom), 60 kilometres west [of Montevideo ], was built to house political indésirables. It has since operated at full capacity with 1,200 male prisoners. Four hundred are kept in tiny two-man cells while the remaining 800 are in permanent solitary confinement (The Vancouver Sun , September 16, 1983: A12) An introduction Argentina is undergoing a series of political, economic and social crises that, in different forms and manifestations, can be traced to the 1930s. This is neither the time nor the place to indulge in a structural explanation of those multifaceted events.1 Alternation of military dictatorships with civilian administrations is perhaps the most visible element of the crises, which include among other features control over policy-making and policy- implementation and struggles among corporate groups as well as political parties. The most recent manifestation of this pattern has been the countrys redemocratization. But such return to civilian rule retains many structural features of the crisis cycle of Argentine politics.2 In this essay I will be concentrating on some concrete aspects of the military newspeak, which has not completely disappeared from the South American country. Some perceptive observers have suggested that in Argentina the relations between the real and the secret country (common to all nations in the sense of areas of power where the uninitiated never enter [Neilson, 1983: 32]) are much more profound and complicated than the average case. This feature of contemporary Argentina can be seen as one of the obstacles for a permanent implantation of bourgeois democracy in the nation. I have further developed this insight into a two Argentinas interpretive model about the variety of crises and their overall effect: Language was one of the first victims of the combined impact produced by the successive, accumulated crises. Of course, in every society language not only informs but also hides or deforms, according to a wide variety of messages, senders and receivers. But the ways in which language is utilized in Argentina seem to move beyond the normal tolerance threshold (Ciria, 1983: 35). The crisis of the public language has been a matter of record in Argentinas political life for quite some time.3 The erosion of language is not 58 This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:56:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms restricted to official statements and speeches, though. It has included, at times, unexpected linkages between the language of sports (soccer) and that of politics-cum-war, as in the 1982 Malvinas/Falklands bloody confrontation4. Necropolitics can be found in repeated references to Eva Perón (19191952) and Juan Perón (1895-1974) as living presences in Argentine society and politics5. The writers writer Borges (1984: 8) has emphasized the customary vocabulary of our hypocrisy with fascinating examples of standard Spanish as it is practiced in the River Plate; his erstwhile collaborator Bioy Casares (1978) has compiled a dictionary of the exquisite Argentinian in which he recreates a variety of instances in which journalese, bureaucratese, etc., are abused to the limit, along the lines of an underdeveloped Flaubert or a Latin American Ambrose Bierce. The military rulers and their civilian advisors that misgoverned Argentina between 1976 and 1983 supported an economic program favoring financial and banking elites; they also de-industrialized the country and engaged in reckless spending while accumulating a foreign debt which jumped from about 7 billion US$ to 42 billion6. This public face of the Military Juntas was awesomely complemented by an organized and brutal program of (literally) eliminating all those individuals the military themselves considered to be a part of the subversive opposition7. The ruling military, since 1976, utilized different policies to pacify/ depoliticize sectors of the population. For example, and due to a deliberate overvaluation of the local peso, thousands of middle-class travellers went overseas to indulge in comprismo - a local version of consumerism that included shopping sprees in Miami, South Africa and Europe - and tourism. And, on the other end of the scale, direct but clandestine repression kidnapped, tortured and killed between 10,000-30,000 human beings according to varying estimates: the desaparecidos (disappeared ones), in itself a concept of the Argentine newspeak, became a haunting reality. Among the mainstream policies that dealt with the public language, and at times with a degree of overlapping, the regime employed desinformation and deformation of reality, together with periodic appeals to an international conspiracy against Argentina being launched by ill-defined sources in the United States and Europe: subversive exiles in cahoots with assorted liberals and leftists . . . The subversive organizations - like the Montoneros and the Peoples Revolutionary Army (ERP, Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo) were responsible for having engaged in an undeclared war against the nation, the official argument ran, and thus the Armed Forces had been justified in retaliating in kind: inevitable excesses had occurred in the dirty war! At times, the dictatorship attempted clumsily to build up some sort of popular consensus: the World Soccer championship won by the Argentine team in 1978 prefigured the catastrophic Malvinas/Falklands militaristic adventure in 19828. During the last two years of the military in power, some of the previous arguments were tactically adapted to a society that was slowly awakening from its manipulation by the ruling elites. So, the victors in a war did not give explanations about their actions: only God and/or History would eventually pass judgement on these military crusaders of the Western, Christian World!9 59 This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:56:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms It is from this period (1983 precisely) that I have selected two examples of self-justification by the military as proofs of the relevance of using some of George Orwells descriptions and interpretations about language and politics, as they prophetically anticipated the Argentine case. An intermission The textual analysis I am presenting in the next section of this paper can be made more intelligible with some help from the well-known Orwell. In an Argentine context of media manipulation, censorship and selfcensorship - many disappeared were professional journalists of different political persuasions - the militarys Secretariat of Public Information (Secretaría de Información Pública) performed activities comparable to the ominous Minitrue in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1981). Revision of history and reinterpretation of the past were frequently used in areas other than human rights: in Argentina television, radio and the popular dailies and weeklies devoted not a few efforts to the construction of a sanitized present under the complaisant watch of the military rulers10. One cannot fail to remember: Who controls the past, ran the Party Slogan, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past (1981 : 31). In the oft-quoted Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four , The Principles of Newspeak (1981: 241-252), it is possible to find similarities between Orwells invented language and the militarys public discourse: the suppression of definitely heretical words. Torture became apremios ilegales [illegal compulsions]; the demands of victims of the repression and their relatives for elemental justice became las secuelas [the sequels], etc. This was combined with the reduction of vocabulary (1981: 242). The us-them emphasis of most military leaders speeches usually contrasted the morality and patriotism of the self-appointed custodians of the nation with the evils of the subversive and corrupt enemies of the Fatherland11. Newspeaks B vocabulary (1981 : 244) was frequently employed by the military in all official communications. It consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say ; which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them (. . .) The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language (1981:244). And also: No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms (...). [They] meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean (1981 : 247). The analysis in the next section will provide several examples, starting with the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional itself (Process of National Reorganization), or Proceso : this grandiose title was in reality a synonym for one of the most brutal dictatorships in Latin America. Orwells famous 1946 essay on Politics and the English Language 60 This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:56:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms (1983a: 143-157) can partially be applied to a description of official Spanish as it had been used in Argentina during the last forty-odd years, both under military and civilian regimes. Dying metaphors (143); elimination of simple verbs (146); pretentious diction in which high-sounding, noncolloquial terms ... are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments (147); and meaningless words (148), can also be found in the Southern Cone12. This description seems particularly applicable to the Argentine military when indulging in speech-making: The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx , but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again , he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church . And this reduced state of consciousness , if not indispensable , is at any rate favourable to political conformity (1983a: 152-153 ). And this appraisal may well define the overall impression one gets after critically analyzing the militarys public language: The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between ones real and ones declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink (1983a: 154). In his 1945 essay titled Notes on Nationalism (1983b: 155-179) Orwell rightly anticipated many features of the Argentine experience with it, before, during and after the 1982 war with Great Britain. The military believed that Actions are held to be good or bad , not on their own merits but according to who does them , and there is almost no kind of outrage - torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians - which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by our side (1983b: 165). And still further: The nationalist not only does not disprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them (165). (Many foreign observers have commented on the extremely emotional nature of Argentine nationalism in its popular manifestations. They also underlined the self-preservation features of the no te metas [do not get involved] attitude vis-à-vis real or alleged atrocities perpetrated by the military). TWo documents: repression and self-amnesty An additional quote from Orwell will serve to place my analysis in the proper perspective: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible . Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for 61 This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:56:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. The political language has to consist largely of euphemism , question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets : this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more that they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of ir onzxs. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures vf them (1983a: 153). On the evening of April 28, 1983, the Military Junta made public through radio and television, and immediately after in the press, a final document on the struggle carried over by Armed and Security Forces against terrorist aggression3. In a context of increasing polemics at the societal level about the nature and scope of the military actions against subversion, this document was interpreted as a further attempt for a compromise with the major political parties that were getting ready for the electoral campaign later in the year. The lengthy text reiterated the official justification of the military. The country, they reasoned, had been suffering since the early 1960s from a violent terrorist aggression. Subversive terrorists had violated human rights and had exercised their power against all innocent sectors of the community. After the inauguration of a constitutional government headed by Héctor J. Cámpora, on May 25, 1973, many terrorists had managed to infiltrate the administration. Under the legal presidency of Isabel Perón - Péron had died on July 1, 1974 - subversion had moved from selective terrorism to indiscriminate, frontal attacks against the State and its Armed Forces. The final document made some extraordinary assertions. This is only a synthetic selection of the militarys reasoning and language. a) At the beginning of 1975 the constitutional government had ... declared the state of siege in the country at large and ordered the employment of the Armed Forces to neutralize and/or annihilate the terrorist focus which was active and growing out from Tucumán province (EL BIMESTRE, 8, 1983: 90). That constitutional government , by the way, had been overthrown by the military on March 24, 1976: one of the first documents issued by the Military Junta, the Acta para el Proceso de Reorganización Nacional , clearly violated the Constitution itself on many crucial instances4. Appealing to a source of legitimization that you yourself have destroyed shows, to say the least, a very primitive juridical mind. b) The nature and characteristics of this sudden, systematic and permanent attack forced the military and security agencies to adopt procedimientos inéditos (procedures that had not been previously known), under the most strict secrecyT in their war against the terrorists (92). The 62 This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:56:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms non-conventional struggle (90) faced the Armed Forces with an exceptional and borderline situation (95). Duhalde (1983) has amply documented the scope of the real state terrorism practiced in Argentina , from torture to cold- blooded ... Purchase answer to see full attachment