Sale!

A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford World’s Classics)

Amazon.com Price:  $19.66 (as of 02/05/2019 03:48 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

“We were all out in la charca, and there they were, coming over the ridge, a battalion ready for war, against a schoolhut full of children.” Tanks roaring over farmlands, pregnant mothers tortured, their babies stolen and sold on the black market, homes raided at nighttime, unusual citizens kidnapped and never seen again–such were the horrors of Argentina’s Dirty War. Now, in A Lexicon of Terror, Marguerite Feitlowitz fully exposes the nightmare of sadism, paranoia, and deception the military dictatorship unleashed on the Argentine people, a nightmare that would claim over 30,000 civilians from 1976 to 1983 and whose leaders were recently issued warrants by a Spanish court for the crime of genocide. Feitlowitz explores the perversion of language under state terrorism, both as it’s used to conceal and confuse (“The Parliament will have to be disbanded to rejuvenate democracy”) and to domesticate torture and murder. Thus, citizens kidnapped and held in secret concentration camps were “disappeared”; torture was referred to as “intensive therapy”; prisoners thrown alive from airplanes over the ocean were called “fish food.” Based on six years of research and moving interviews with peasants, intellectuals, activists, and bystanders, A Lexicon of Terror examines the full affect of this catastrophic period from its inception to the present, in which former torturers, having been pardoned and released from prison, live side by side with those they tortured.
Passionately written and inconceivable to put down, Feitlowitz shows us both the horror of the war and the heroism of those who resisted and survived–their courage, their endurance, their eloquent refusal to be dehumanized in the face of torments even Dante could not have imagined.
Argentina still struggles as a nation with the shame and horror of the so-called “dirty-war” of the decade following Juan Peron’s death. Right through that horrific time, torture and kidnapping were the instruments of choice for the enforcement of political will. Feitlowitz unflinchingly examines life under sadistic military rule with detailed descriptions of the experiences of prisoners in concentration camps. The Argentinean vocabulary now includes words like desaparacido (disappeared person) and chupado (sucked up or kidnapped), vivid reminders of how commonplace kidnapping and murder became. Sufferers, incessantly guilty only of nothing more than practicing psychology or journalism or being Jewish, have not been forgotten.

Though Feitlowitz touches on the linguistic effects of government terrorism in Argentina, her book’s greatest strength lies in the voice it gives the Sufferers. The writer spent years talking to survivors of the terror as well as one of the most people responsible for instigating it. What A Lexicon of Terror does particularly well is capture the ongoing consequences of the dirty war–Sufferers encountering their tormentors on the streets, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo still marching to remind their government that the fates of thousands of disappeared are still not known, a government held hostage by the fear of army uprisings must any attempt to bring culprits to justice be made. Argentina is the subject of this particular Lexicon, but surely the citizens of other nations such as Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador might see their own experiences mirrored here.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford World’s Classics)

Recent Products