bs2Jul 17, 2024
> "This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies can not distinguish between right and wrong.  And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want."
#HannahArendt #OriginsOfTotalitarianism
#ArendtOnLying
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> .. human rights groups.. referred to the Reagan Administration as “an apologist for some of the worst horrors of our time.” #HumanRightsSecretaryAbrams ... particularly notorious for his denials of human rights violations or apologetics for them, in #CentralAmerica and Turkey particularly, and for his attacks, in the familiar style of his Stalinist models, on human rights advocates. In recognition.. Abrams was placed in charge of #LatinAmerican affairs... #TurningTheTide #ElliotAbrams
Jul 17, 2024 at 5:49amWeb
Show threadbs2Jul 17, 2024

> The 1982 strategy of the Ríos Montt regime, defended by President Reagan and his Human Rights specialist Elliott Abrams, as we shall see, was described at the time by a respected journal:

> > The army strategy is to clear the population out of the guerrilla support areas. Troops and militias move into the villages, shoot, burn or behead the inhabitants they catch; the survivors are machine-gunned from helicopters as they flee.
#RiosMontt #Guatemala #ElliotAbrams

Show threadbs2Jul 17, 2024
> Another useful device is extensive paraphrase of Administration spokesmen, as.. Elliott Abrams.. who “said the only way to satisfy the security concerns of the United States was with a democratic government in Nicaragua.” No doubt Abrams produced such words, but when the columnist reports them in her own paraphrase, this helps blur the difference between fact and opinion.. incessant repetition, overwhelmingly one-sided, the doctrine approved by state propagandists soon becomes “fact,”...
Show threadbs2Jul 17, 2024
> Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams added that the violence and refugees should be blamed “on the guerrillas who are fighting the government”; violence and refugees are “the price of stability.” As for the refugees in Mexico, their testimony can be discounted, Abrams held, because some may be “guerrilla sympathizers”; in any event, they “are not a representative proportion of the population.”..
Show threadbs2Jul 17, 2024
> LeMoyne writes that “the villagers’ account has not been confirmed, and it may be colored by.. sympathies for.. guerrillas.” What would count as “confirmation” he does not say.. it is.. the norm for reports of atrocities to come from.. victims, who are not likely to be sympathetic to the murderers of their families and friends.. to raise doubts.. is permissible only in the case of atrocities conducted by #USClientStates.. ignored or.. with.. skepticism the US role..omitted..
Show threadbs2Jul 17, 2024

> Abrams stated categorically that well-documented massacres.. #LosLlanitos, had never taken place.. and another massacre.. #AtlacatlBattalion at the #GualsingaRiver, where the toll may have reached several hundred, Abrams stated that “neither of them happened...there were no massacres in El Salvador in 1984.” Abrams also claimed that the US Embassy.. always investigated.. The US Embassy denied investigating either massacre...the.. reactions of #PresidentDuarte

#ElSalvador #CentralAmerica

Show threadbs2Jul 17, 2024
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> No less startling was Duarte’s denial that there were.. bodies at #ElPlayón and his claim that stories about this charnel house were “fabricated.”.. after the press.. discovered.. even Elliott Abrams conceded was a “hellish place,” an “infamous body dump”—.. with transparent falsehoods about army innocence... reporters.. “a macabre scene from a surrealistic canvas,” a huge mass of skulls with a single bullet hole in the back, skeletons mixed in with rotting garbage..
Show threadbs2Jul 17, 2024

> “This is horrible. This is inhuman. But this is not my problem. It’s the problem of the subversives’ terrorist actions and they have to be responsible,” not the perpetrators of the massacre against defenceless civilians. The surviving victims see it differently: “Duarte’s men went after our children, and now he’ll go on television to say he didn’t do it,” a survivor of the #LosLlanitos massacre commented bitterly.

#ElSalvador #PresidentDuarte
#NoamChomsky #TurningTheTide