Walter Salles’ new film on the disappearances of regime critics in 1970s Brazil is a powerful reminder that the ghouls who defend the slaughter in Gaza are biding their time.
Monument to the victims of torture in Recife, Brazil. (marcusrg, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Walter Salles’ new film I’m Still Here, is a moving, true-story, Oscar-nominated portrait of a middle-class, leftwing family in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s struggling to come to terms with the father’s disappearance — 25 years later confirmed as murder — by the Brazilian military dictatorship.
The mother and a teenage daughter spend time inside a regime torture camp too, before being released.
What struck me powerfully in the film was the endless supply of compliant regime officials who impassively, conscientiously carried out the abuse of men, women and children.
It was a reminder that plenty of these people live among us — and that they have been doing very little to hide who they are over the past 16 months.
They are the politicians mangling language and international law by terming as “self-defence” the collective punishment of the people of Gaza through carpet bombing and starvation — crimes against humanity.
They are the police officers raiding people’s homes, and detaining and arresting independent journalists and human rights activists, including Jewish ones, for protesting the slaughter in Gaza.
They are the establishment journalists pretending the carnage inflicted on the people of Gaza is just another routine news story, less important than the death of an elderly actor, or the latest outburst from serial misogynist Andrew Tate.
And, more than anything, they are the army of ordinary people on social media:
- Mocking the families of children shredded by U.S.-supplied bombs;
- Reciting endless claims of “Gazawood” (Gaza-Hollywood), as if the levelling of the tiny territory, visible from outer space, is a fiction and that the only victims are Hamas fighters;
- Defending as a legitimate legal procedure the abduction of hundreds of doctors and nurses from Gaza’s hospitals into “detention camps” where torture, sexual abuse and rape are routine;
- Justifying the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals — leaving premature babies, pregnant women, the sick and the elderly to die — on the basis of entirely unsubstantiated, and self-serving, Israeli government claims that each is a Hamas “command and control centre”;
- Cheering the erasure of the only documentary on Gaza humanising its children because the father of the 13-year-old narrator is a scientist appointed by the Hamas government to oversee what was the agricultural sector before Israel destroyed all the enclave’s vegetation.
Director Walter Salles and lead actress Fernanda Torres promoting I’m Still Here in 2024 in London. (Raph_PH, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
These people live among us. They grow more confident by the day. And one day, if we don’t fight them now, they will be putting a hood over our head to take us to a secret location.
They will be across the desk, asking us the same questions over and over again, making us pore over photo albums to find faces we recognise, people we can inform on.
They will lead us to dirty cells, where there is a hard shelf for a bed, no blanket to keep us warm, no chance to shower, a hole in the ground for a toilet, and one meal to sustain us through the day.
They will escort us silently through long dark corridors to a room where they will be waiting for us.
There will be a chair in the centre of an empty room. They will nod for us to sit down. And then it will begin.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
It has all been said before — and must be said over and over again. Hannah Arendt: ‘the banality of evil’; Martin Niemoller: ‘First they came for the communists and I did not speak out…..’
We are not a rational species, but rather a reactive one (like all the other animals). Our history shows this clearly! The myth of Cassandra is and will be our legacy. This not to say that those who realize a larger truth should give up; no, argue and demonstrate (fight for) our visions of humanity and ecological integrity, but with the understanding that the vast majority of humanity can only respond within a narrow and immediate presentation of of social and political reality; that that is ground upon which to make a stand.
I sadly appreciate the reality of Salles’ new film and the reality of people around us today
that participate in the serious damaging of innocents. Astonishing, how one can live
so long to discover the reality of the ethical/moral/psychological core of so many fellow
citizens.
Thank You Jonathan
On the subject of both the Brazilian military dictatorship and the “monsters among us,” and one reason among myriad others (from printing jihadist textbooks still used by the Taliban to financing involuntary mass sterilization in Peru) that I cannot help but get more than a bit of schadenfreude from Trump’s recent actions against the US Agency for International Development (USAID):
“Of the many dark-red blotches in USAID’s record, none compares to the agency’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) program — and its most notorious official, Dan Mitrione [police chief and family man from Richmond, Indiana, and a childhood acquaintance of Rev. Jim Jones – see “Q782 Transcript,” June 24, 2021, and Jim Hougan, “The Secret Life of Jim Jones: A Parapolitical Fugue,” Dec. 22, 2022, both available at Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple at San Diego State University].
[…]
By the end of the 1960s, when Mitrione left for Uruguay, USAID had trained over 100,000 of Brazil’s police in the dark arts of rule-by-terror; another 600 Brazilian police were brought to the US for special USAID training in explosives and interrogation techniques.
[…]
Mitrione began teaching human anatomy and the human nervous system to the elite Uruguayan police officials hand-picked by USAID for counter-insurgency training in America. Then — according to a CIA double-agent secretly working for Cuba, Manuel Hevia, and corroborated by journalist A. J. Langguth — Mitrione began performing gruesome live torture demonstrations on homeless beggars plucked off the streets of Montevideo. Four of Mitrione’s human guinea pigs were tortured to death, including one woman — according to Hevia, testing on street beggars was something Mitrione learned to do while training Brazil’s police.”
Source:
Mark Ames, “The Murderous History of USAID, the US Government Agency Behind Cuba’s Fake Twitter Clone,” Pando, April 8, 2014 (archive.is/ASNtt)
If you are interested a google for Dan Mitrione USAID lots of stuff including a good article at Spartacus Educational. – Not a very nice man, at all!