#ellacuría — Public Fediverse posts

.> ... it is more gratifying to bask in praise for courageously protesting the abuses of official enemies, a fine activity, but not the priority of a value-oriented intellectual who takes the responsibilities of that stance seriously.
.> The victims within our domains, unlike those in enemy states, are not merely ignored and quickly forgotten, but are also cynically insulted. One striking illustration came a few weeks after the murder of the Latin American intellectuals in El Salvador. Vaclav Havel visited Washington and addressed a joint session of Congress. Before his enraptured audience, Havel lauded the “defenders of freedom” in Washington who “understood the responsibility that flowed from” being “the most powerful nation on earth”—crucially, their responsibility for the brutal assassination of his Salvadoran counterparts shortly before.
.> The liberal intellectual class was enthralled by his presentation. Havel reminds us that “we live in a romantic age,” Anthony Lewis gushed. Other prominent liberal commentators reveled in Havel’s “idealism, his irony, his humanity,” as he “preached a difficult doctrine of individual responsibility” while Congress “obviously ached with respect” for his genius and integrity; and asked why America lacks intellectuals so profound, who “elevate morality over self-interest” in this way, praising us for the tortured and mutilated corpses that litter the countries that we have left in misery. We need not tarry on what the reaction would have been had Father Ellacuría, the most prominent of the murdered Jesuit intellectuals, spoken such words at the Duma after elite forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union assassinated Havel and half a dozen of his associates—a performance that is inconceivable.

In Japan, a Korean man tells of his reading of this Japanese translation of a Korean and I'm thinking of dying Jimmy Carter and crucified El Salvador. A couple times a year I have to re-read parts of _#DeterringDemocracy_(1991) for clear eyes, to avoid limited views and sycophant bullshit. In #Korea families told their young men to go away before they got themselves and their families tortured. #Ellacuria's "#LaceratedReality" comes to mind.
#ParkLaegoon #ManabeYuko #日本語 #韓国 #NoamChomsky

.> Father Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the Jesuit University before he was assassinated along with Father Martin-Baro, described El Salvador as "a lacerated reality, almost mortally wounded." He was a close associate of Archbishop Romero and was with him when the Archbishop wrote to President Carter, pleading in vain for the withdrawal of aid from the junta. The Archbishop informed Father Ellacuria that his letter was prompted "by the new concept of special warfare, which consists in murderously eliminating every endeavor of the popular organizations under the allegation of Communism or terrorism . . ." Special warfare---whether called counterinsurgency, or low-intensity conflict, or some other euphemism----is simply international terrorism-and it has long been official US policy, a weapon in the arsenal used for the larger sociopolitical project.