In Defense of Offense
A dark country
I was born into a Jewish family in Buenos Aires, Argentina in November 1974 and my first political memory mixes the presentment of nearby violence with the hushed tones of overwhelming fear. My Argentine upbringing afforded me the chance to taste the terror that comes with the state making good on the promise of violence in a totalitarian state; my Jewish upbringing offered me the chance to taste ferocious force of threat and delivery of public violence that moral, religious and political certainty can afford one's fellow citizens, the mob.
It was likely late 1983 or early 1984 that the first rumors of the cries from the torture chambers deep inside the bowels of the Argentina's dirty war repression machine began to sip out onto the streets and suffuse the fibers of the Argentine public sphere. For the child I was, those were the stories of parents and children taken in the dead of the night never to be seen or heard of again. Fathers, pregnant mother with their young children, uncles, aunts, grandmothers and grandfathers, friends, acquaintances. All of them gone.
What came after and which informed much of my adolescent political views was the overwhelming pornography of violence that accompanies classic small dictatorships such as torture cells, rapes, electrocutions, summary executions, mass graves, prisoners thrown of airplanes. I spent months reading the most minute details of the repression. The tearing, the maiming, the mutilating, the flesh, the blood. The only thing that I was looking for in the pages of the reports–chief among them, the Nunca Más, the report of the National Commission on the Disappearances of Persons put in place by the nascent democratic government to try to account for the unspeakable destruction of the dark years between 1976 and 1983–was to keep my sense of outrage intact.
What took considerably longer to bloom was the understanding that the rules of patriotic decency imposed by the military that had silenced singers, novelist, journalists and intellectuals, that had eradicated from bookstores and libraries authors and their volumes, that had forbidden the study of certain historical figures and their political or economic ideas, that had publicly castigated scientific theories while prohibiting offense to certain religious sentiments and inciting it against certain others, that had made certain forms of laughter subversive, that had banished the naked body from any public space, in short had offered what might have been seen as reasonable condemnations of offense had also been the conditions on which murderous violence was built. In fact, to a large degree torture chambers, the infamous "flights of death", the electrocution stretchers, the clandestine delivery rooms, the mass graves across the country were filled by those who decided to read, to hear, to write, to say, to sing, to believe or to love in manners that offended the moral intuitions of the junta.
Prohibition was a promise of the violence that was soon to be delivered to meet these trivial acts of subversion. Not only acts against the state but also thoughts and sentiments against public virtue. The socio-cultural compact, from the public square to the bathroom and the bedroom was not merely demanded to act according to the moral certainties of the junta but was obligated to think and feel in accordance to their favored ideological commitments.
The Jews
Another shadow projected unto those early ideas of power was just as sinister as the promise of state violence but had been cast much earlier than the casual spasm of political violence in South America. If these demons lacked the power conferred by the immediacy of the brutality of the Argentine Process of National Reorganization–that was the official title of the choreography of violence under which the disappearance of many thousands was performed–it more than made up in the length of the catalogue of horrors that they carried with them. Antisemitism in Argentina in the seventies and eighties had a trivial attire and waited in hiding among a population that, by and large, did not host antisemitic passions.
As in most old tales of antisemitism, the antisemitism of my youth had some echoes in the spheres of power but by and large, it brewed in the streets among the public. The spasms of violence, none of them profound enough to make a full page in the universal history of antisemitism, where fed by the indignation of citizens who wanted redress for the Jew's ancient crime, that fear the Jewish plots of global domination, that feared the sinister forces of the international Jewish conspiracy and so on and so forth.
In some powerful sense, the public with its small preoccupations, homely moral postures and darling indignations all built on some sense of offended dignity, aided and abetted the brutality of the state and were the coauthors of its murderous violence. It was the housewife who envied the neighbour, the taxi driver that resented the bourgeoisie, the pater familias that feared for the chastity of his daughter that became the most important accomplices of the regime. All of these people who feared not the emergence of a communist regime in Argentina but the offense to the moral ideas that they held sacred. The intuition that tied the brutality of the state with the banality of the public evil was a phrase that became infamous in the aftermath of the barbarity: "por algo será" which roughly translates to "they must have done something" was the phrase with which the housewife, the taxi driver, the pater familias, the waiter and business man justified disappearances.
This phrase became an important foil to explain a passage that I found many years later somewhere in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who said that in more or less words that evil is justifying the suffering of others. Of course, the phrase demanded many caveats but the point had been taken long before I found those words. The meek docility of the mob could quickly become murderous.
The moral intuitions that bloomed in the political soil of my youth moistened with the blood of desaparecidos and the ominous shadow of catholic antisemitism was bound to be a profound commitment to toleration, to justice and to its handmaiden, the rule of law.
Tolerance
Informed by the concrete fear of brutal violence that first I could only intuit but then I came to understand in minute detail, these three commitment were, for me, never abstractions. They were not merely concrete but they were built of the unpretentious childish urgency of saving keen and kith. Even years later after I turned my academic attention to a more mature elucidation of these intuitions that had guided me, these three shields remained the concrete instrument that one day I hoped to wield to protect my father, my mother, my brothers, my wife, my child, myself. These were their forms:
Toleration was then and remains now a demand to grant sanctuary to the object of discomfort however profound that discomfort may be. It was and it remained the haven in which I would choose to protect from my own inclinations, the vexations and unpleasantness that I, instinctively or pushed by moral, political or religious taste, would like to see shattered, crashed and destroyed. Toleration could never be of things that I find agreeable but would always present itself as a challenge.
Furthermore, one of the most important lessons from those early brushes with the ferocity of political violence and equally ferocious appetite for violence of its public was the understanding that tolerance is the child of offense. Things that are innocuous or inoffensive, let alone those that we like and love, demand no tolerance from us. It is those things that offend and aggrieve us that summon our hostility and thus demand our tolerance.
And in this regard, tolerance can be said to be the measure of our physical or intellectual endurance. In matters public, tolerance is the measure of our civic fortitude and as all other forms of fortitude it issues from the salutary effects of confronting and coping with offense. It is for this reason that tolerance is also the mark of maturity: tolerating boredom, tolerating pain, tolerating tedium, tolerating discomfort, tolerating the works and the days and learning perseverance and patience, both forms of tolerance. A commitment to tolerance would mean a commitment to abandon the political opportunity of using force to redress a perceived moral, intellectual or spiritual offense.