The American Horror Story: Death Squads and the Disappeared in Central America: A lot here, so digest in bite-size morsels.

 

The Monument to the Memory and the Truth in San Salvador commemorates 75,000 people who died in the Salvadoran civil war between 1980 and 1992

The American Horror Story: Death Squads and the Disappeared in Central America

A lot here, so digest in bite-size morsels.

Vileness Metasux Fats

5 min read

I was heavily invested in the antiwar movement during the early 80’s, to the degree of spending days and nights in jail and having agents of the FBI showing up at my places of employment a few times; of being abused by cops; of having my phone line tapped; and being followed by persons unknown. So, if I sound a bit “passionate” when these subjects are broached, there is good reason.

No doubt…. These are touchy political matters. Iran-Contra, to the mind of many, permanently de-legitimized the American political system, if the US-funded and orchestrated “civil wars” in Central America hadn’t already. As manager at New World Resource Center, and as an active member in the Sanctuary Movement, I had many opportunities to meet both American activists and refugees from Central America, hearing horror story after horror story of friends and family members being killed and/or disappeared simply because the victim happened to be a school teacher, a union member, a religious person, etc.

Like I said, historical memory is not easily erased. Neither are the cultural and political repercussions linked to those memories. Forty years may seem like a long time ago for those of us living in the spectacular now. But we didn’t have our parents macheted to death in front of us; or witness our brother being beaten, kidnapped, thrown into a van, and then driven away — never to be seen again. Again and again and again.

Nicaraguans celebrate the revolutionary victory in Managua, July 19, 1979

Our tax dollars, just like the massacre of thousands in Gaza, paid for the training of death squads and the endless supply of weapons that killed a countless number of innocent people in Central America. And while we rightfully fear that our complicity in supporting Israel could breed a new generation of bin-Laden-like”terrorists,” how could our complicity in the death and destruction in El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America NOT create its own manifestation of blowback in the form of emigration to here?

If we are to acknowledge the wrongs of our past, where and when do our responsibilities and obligations end with respect to rectifying them? When did they end for indigenous Americans? For blacks? For women? For gays? For animals?

Ben Linder (left), an American engineer working in Nicaragua, was killed by the Contras in 1987

***In the wonderful show, Northern Exposure, the Indians celebrate Thanksgiving as the Day of the Dead with various traditions including costumes, parades and throwing tomatoes at white people.***

To quote our new president, “We’re not innocent.” We may not be able to totally reverse the wrongs of our history, but at minimum we need to own them — to compassionately admit and submit. This country never misses an opportunity to engage in wars; it’s long overdue for it to begin waging peace. Let it begin at home.

The Sanctuary Movement in Chicago

The sanctuary movement in Chicago arose in the aftermath of civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, funded in part by the US government, during which nearly one million refugees sought asylum in the United States between 1980 and 1991. Among those who had been killed in El Salvador were four US missionaries, and they became the face of a new organization: the Chicago Religious Task Force for Central America. It advocated for federal foreign policy changes toward Central America and encouraged domestic communities to host Central American refugees. In Chicago, they created a framework that connected undocumented immigrants with churches that were willing to provide them sanctuary.

The Sanctuary Movement in Chicago - Chicago History Museum

This blog post has been adapted from an essay by CHM intern Megha Khemka, based on her work in the summer of 2022…

www.chicagohistory.org

Central America Wars, 1980's

+During the 1980s, the United States supported a counterinsurgency war in El Salvador and directed a guerrilla insurgency in Nicaragua.
+In December 1981, the Salvadoran Army massacred close to 1,000 men, women, and children in the village of El Mozote and in neighboring hamlets. +Denying that a war crime had taken place, the Reagan administration certified to Congress that same month that the Salvadoran government was making progress in human rights and requested more U.S. aid for the government.[1]
+In April 1985, former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner testified before a Congressional committee that the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan guerrillas, known as Contras, had engaged in numerous acts of “terrorism.”[2] Only the previous month, President Ronald Reagan had praised the Contras as “the moral equal of our founding fathers.”[3]
+In response to a suit by Nicaragua, the World Court ruled in June 1986 that the U.S.-directed war against Nicaragua constituted illegal aggression under international law and that the U.S. must cease its support for the Contras and make reparation payments to Nicaragua.[4] The U.S. refused to comply.
+After Congress had temporarily banned aid to the Contras, administration officials illegally raised money through arms sales to Iran and other means. The covert operation came to light in the Iran-Contra Congressional hearings in the spring of 1987, leading to the prosecution of fourteen U.S. officials and agents.[5]
+Although Congress had banned U.S. aid to the Guatemalan government based on human rights abuses, the Reagan administration aided this government’s counterinsurgency war as well.
+Between 1981 and 1990, an estimated one million refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala fled repression and violence in their homelands and entered the United States.[6]
+In late 1987, the Reagan administration’s Office of Public Diplomacy was forced to shut down after an investigation by the General Accounting Office concluded that the agency had engaged “in prohibited, covert propaganda activities designed to influence the media and the public to support the Administration’s Latin American policies.”[7]
+U.S. citizens opposed to U.S. intervention formed the Central America movement, a loose-knit coalition of over 1,000 local, state, and national organizations. Their efforts reinforced those of Latin American leaders promoting peace negotiations and an end to foreign intervention.[8]
+In the aftermath of the wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, truth commissions determined that state security forces and associated rightist paramilitary groups were responsible for 85% of assassinations and murders in El Salvador, and 93% in Guatemala, while leftist rebels were responsible for 5% in El Salvador and 3% in Guatemala.[9]

Central America Wars, 1980s

This essay places the Reagan administration's Central America policies and justifications in historical perspective…

peacehistory-usfp.org

Salvador Film

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/salvador

Romero Film

Sanctuary Movement

Us Foreign Policy

Central America

Death Squads

Immigration

Look Up!: Air Rights: Drone Delivery's Inconvenient Truth

 

Look Up!

Air rights: Drone delivery’s inconvenient truth

Vileness Metasux Fats

2 min read

On its surface, this topic seems incredibly boring BUT it IS incredibly important. The future of package delivery hinges on future legal battles over property rights and the ability of powerful companies like Amazon to literally capitalize on the greediness and neediness of individual property owners and towns in rural areas, particularly, which may be in need of outside funding to replace/repair old and decaying infrastructure. Stockton, where I live in Illinois, comes readily to mind.

Air rights: Drone delivery’s inconvenient truth

Technology isn’t the problem here. That’s easy. That’s been done.

The problem is airspace rights.

It works like this — basically, everything above 600 feet in the air is owned by governments. This is where your commercial vehicles operate. Airplanes, helicopters, etc. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has the authority to regulate air traffic, and impose all sorts of restrictions and requirements on aircraft, such as type, speed limits, routes, etc.

Airplanes soaring above your property are not trespassing, because they are flying in what Congress has declared as a sort of public highway.

But the airspace below 600 feet isn’t owned or regulated by the government. Nope, in most of the developed world, this space is owned by landowners.

And this is exactly the airspace where most of the new air services are trying to operate:

Air Rights: Drone Delivery's Inconvenient Truth - Alts.co

Ten years ago, Jeff Bezos promised drone deliveries. Go beyond the hype to understand what's holding the industry back…

alts.co

Drones In New Jersey, New York And China
Using Constitutional Property Rights Leads To Growth

On the United States East Coast, drones are flying around without restrictions or permission. The reports are sketchy, but dozens of drones appear to be coming off the ocean with no heat signature. The data collection seems jammed, and the legally required emitter to intercept their details is not in place. The drones have a 10-foot wing span and can evade the police drones. Residents say they are experiencing electromagnetic interference on the radio in cars near the drones.

Drones In New Jersey, New York And China

Using Constitutional Property Rights Leads To Growth

flyingcar.sky.trade

Drones

Air Delivery Service

Airspace Rights

Monetization

Property Rights

 

Peter Blume. The Rock.

Between “The Rock” and a Hard Place: Towards a Conception of Populist Art and Aesthetics

Vileness Metasux Fats

8 min read

Every gushing opposition is characterized by the fact that on occasion it perceptively exposes the contradictions of capitalist society, that it combats them with genuine embitterment and apt mockery, but also by the fact that it is incapable of comprehending the essence of this society. In most cases this results in an exaggerating distortion of the problems and leads to a point where true criticism turns into a social untruth.” — George Lukacs

With this paper, I will be going against the grain of what I believe to be the general direction or drift that this class has taken with respect to aesthetic critique. By this I mean that instead of focusing on the formal elements or aspects of a given painting, I will address the issue of context, which, as Joshua Taylor has noted, has the potential of “sharpen[ing] our awareness of the subtleties of [an artist’s] vocabulary and often reveal[ing] new content which to our direct view may not have been accessible” (139).

My adoption of this particular tack reflects the frustration that I have experienced thus far in attempting to adopt a personal criteria by which to judge art. While a few of our readings have ameliorated some of my frustration, our recent sojourn to the Art Institute only served to pique that frustration once again. For still missing from our face-to-face meetings with our chosen masterpieces was any reference to a given artist’s life — his or her times, whom he or she associated with, whom their influences may have been, and so on. In other words, the sort of stuff Taylor elaborated upon in his discussion of the French painter Jacques Louis David (140–8). It is here that the author addresses the important question related to the subject of art-historical context; that is, “How much of the artist’s style is his own, and how much does it simply hold in common with the time” (140)? It is questions like these that most most interest me, and while Taylor certainly acknowledges their immanent centrality to aesthetic critique, the fact that he accords such concerns second-class status. I guess this is where I would differ with those who would claim that Taylor’s book is devoid of ideology, or free of a particular ax that the author sees fit to grind. Because, after all, the privileging of one area of aesthetics over another (e.g., form over content/context) could hardly be characterized as free from controversy; and it’s my estimate that Taylor is taking a side in this controversy via Learning to Look.

Obviously our trip imposed certain unavoidable logistical restrictions upon what we could actually examine at the Art Institute; that doesn’t mean, however, that it wouldn’t have been “nice” to have had some art-historical context injected into our analyses, nor, I hasten to add, would it be so “horrible” to make this area of inquiry part of our presentations.

In light of our recent trip, I’d like to outline a “counter-experience” to what we had, which I would appreciate some feedback on:

1. Pick just one artist whose work interests you and you’d like to know more about
2. Obtain biographical and autobiographical works on or by the particular artist
3. Research the movement that the artist may have been associated with
4. Research the history of the times and places that the painter worked in
5. And then finally unite all of the above with the formal tools obtained via our class readings and discussion

It’s my contention that if one doesn’t take steps similar to these, our analyses remains at the level of style only, and thus we miss the artist’s outlook and ultimately fail to truly appreciate his body of work.

This is not, however, the method I used to critique Blume’s painting, ‘The Rock.” I did implement the method when viewing the overly-hyped Georgia O’Keefe exhibit some years ago, which I thought was a perfect antidote to the “sight-bites” that most fellow attendants seemed perfectly happy with. And in the end I unmistakably benefited from the enhanced experience that my method brought me. Unfortunately, as I just noted, the exigencies attached to this particular paper prevented me from adopting this holistic approach here. But in my view, with Blume, not much is lost in the process. For in a way the painting “speaks for itself,” to borrow the rather worn cliche; and a deeper examination, while certainly potentially providing us with added insight, may not in the end contribute all that much to an analysis of such a transparent work.

Now before criticizing me for seemingly contradicting myself so brazenly, let me explain. As I see it, there is something about the very nature of Blume’s painting that mitigates the need for a deeper examination. And this I believe is its overt political message.

As the caption in our book tells us, Blume was responding to the aftermath of World War II, in particular, I suspect, to the devastation that was was wreaked upon Europe. The depiction of people of various nationalities in the painting would seem to lend credence to this observation. Moreover, given the extent of the destruction portrayed, in particular the leafless trees in the background, it might be argued that Blume had some knowledge of atomic bombs. The damaged Coca-Cola sign in the foreground would seem to implicate America at some level as well. In fact, it’s difficult to ignore the feeling that the painting doesn’t so much depict a European apocalypse as an American one, with “the rock” at the center perhaps being a European apocalypse as an American one, with “the rock” at the center perhaps being a metaphor for the atomic bomb, and the rest of the painting symbolizing what the United States may in the future reap as a result of what it was (in 1948) in the process of sowing. Minus any biographical data on Blume, one can only speculate on such matters. But if we recall the early documentary film of U.S. nuclear tests, sampled in contemporary agit-prop films like “Atomic Cafe,” placing “The Rock” within this context does not seem so far-fetched.

With this much in mind, clearly Blume’s painting is meant to convey an anti-war message--be it nuclear, or what we now refer to as “conventional.” This is what I meant earlier by the “transparency” of this painting. Its politics are loud and clear. And at this point I’d like to return to the quote of Lukacs’s that I began my paper with. I would argue that Blume’s painting epitomizes the sort of art that Lukacs finds problematic. His argument is rendered particularly salient in light of the hindsight acquired in the fifty years that have elapsed since the work was completed. Not only has Europe successfully rebuilt itself, but he Cold War is over; and with the U.S.S.R. having been perestroiked out of existence, the threat of nuclear Holocaust and the much-anticipated reign of the “road warrior” have been dispensed with into the dustbin of history. Blume’s painting was an “exaggerating distortion” in the forties, to use Lukacs’s words, and must certainly today be regarded as a depiction of a “social untruth.”

What Blume’s painting gives the lie to and what Lukacs criticizes is the notion that art can be effectively used as an instrument of or for political expression. In effect, art in the hands of the likes of Blume is a tool — one other media by which to coax people out of their apolitical stupor. Unbeknownst to Blume and apparently a good number of his students, the idea of “using” art for a political end negates what art must forever be: useless. By this I mean “autonomous,” and free from the instrumentalizing effects of capitalism, whereby the logos of the market — its “means-ends” rationality--is resisted. By turning art into what amounts to a banner, albeit without the requisite slogans inscribed upon it, Blume and company not only fail in their attempts to resist capitalism, they merely mirror a process that is constantly going on behind their backs: the commodification of culture. Art during the “hyper-capitalist” phase of market society is not only flattened into a means by which products are sold, but it becomes a product itself, mass-manufactured and advertised. Thus, we not only hear Baroque music being used to sell beer, but we find reproduction after reproduction of original works being sold to “middle-brow” consumers. “Art” is now everywhere but may as well be nowhere. Instead of retaining its uselessness to society, art reverts back to its original form. In ancient societies art was used to impart tradition and to serve ritual purposes; today, however, it is devoid of tradition and serves a myriad of purposes, none of which escape the reach of the many-tentacled market.

The concept of autonomous art, outlined above, and propagated my more than a few critics and practitioners, does not stand freely from its own immanently-derived critique, however. If taken to its logical conclusion, autonomous art must forever be dodging the co-opting capacity of what T.W. Adorno has termed the “culture industries.” In music, it is referred to as a musician or band resisting the temptation to “sell-out”; that is, signing a contract with a major recording corporation, and thus refusing to compose dissonant music. In art, works become more and more abstract or absurd. In the end, both “alternative” music and other so-called “bohemian” or “counter-cultural” art forms either find themselves limited to complete obscurity, and are therefore ignored; or they become caught up in the desire to “shock” society “by whatever means necessary.” Neither trend is very conducive to a much-needed theory of art. In the first case, the relationship between art and society is nullified, and in the second, it is reduced to a pseudo-conflict. A revised theory of art, it seems to me, needs to pose an alternative to both of these flawed aesthetics. And this is where the title of my paper comes in.

For all of his book’s flaws, Tolstoy’s What Is Art? at least points us in the direction of a third way. For not only does Tolstoy have the gall to insist on criteria by which we are to judge art, he has the wisdom to remind us that art has had an intimate historical relationship with cultural tradition. He understood, in my view, that art must have an intimate relationship with the society from which it emerged. Not only that, but he recognized that art should not have a relationship with only the elite of society. In other words, he thought that art could have and should have mass appeal, but in doing so did not have to be reduced to the pablum of mass culture.

One artist who seems to be in this vein is Thomas Hart Benton, a painter best known for his murals of the 1930’s. A writer of similar temperament would be James Agee, author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Benton’s vision--the hope for an art rooted the regional and local cultures of the United States--, along with the tradition of writing represented by Agee and others--a “tradition that is native, rooted in local customs, and challenging in form and substance” — should be held up against the political Right’s glorification of “patriotic” art, as well as the likes of Blume and others, who for all intents and purposes kowtow to the avant-garde. As my friend Kevin Mattson has written, “A populist culture should be neither dismissive of people’s values nor degenerate into schmaltz.” And that native American tradition is out there, just waiting to be recovered. This paper should be regarded as a gingerly-laid step in the direction of that very process.

Populist Art

Leo Tolstoy

James Agee

Peter Blume

Thomas Hart Benton