Abstract
The 1970s in Argentina are associated with heightened political violence. Research on this period has focused on the main actors and organizations on the political stage: military officers, guerrilla groups, political parties, labor unions, student associations, and others. Less attention has been paid to those who were not part of clearly defined institutional structures and did not play an active role. Although possibly the majority, this population has been largely ignored. Sebastián Carassai’s The Argentine Silent Majority contributes to filling this gap by studying the portion of society that stayed on the margins. The focus is on the nonactivist middle classes—the “silent majority” who did not participate in politics and did not suffer from the military repression directly. The goal is to reconstruct this population’s perceptions and attitudes about the political violence.
The author presents two types of material. The first type comes from interviews with people of middle-class backgrounds who were not actively involved in politics. To take their memories back in time as “directly” as possible, the author created a documentary with photographs, footage, and music from these years that he showed to his interviewees. The second type of material is “cultural goods” that this population consumed during this period, particularly TV shows, commercial advertisements, and newspaper cartoons that the author presents and analyzes in the book. So that his observations would not be restricted to the main cities, which is where most research has focused, the author conducted research and presents material from three distinct locations (Buenos Aires; Tucumán, a provincial capital; and Correa, a small town).
The book moves away from a relatively accepted story about the Argentine middle classes in the 1970s: that while in the early 1970s the middle classes sympathized with the guerrilla groups, they later changed their position and supported the repression. The book challenges the “myth of initial sympathy” for the guerrillas (p. 103). First, the author questions the public opinion polls that have been used to suggest this support, concluding that the portion of the middle class that radicalized was much smaller than has been assumed. Second, the author analyzes both his own interviews with nonactivists and popular TV shows from the 1970s to reconstruct what emerges as an explicit rejection of guerrilla violence. Even though the middle classes were often critical of the military government, guerrilla violence was largely unaccepted.
The next element in the story the book challenges concerns the middle class’s alleged “complicity” with state terrorism in the second half of the 1970s. The author questions this interpretation by putting the middle class’s perceptions and attitudes during these years in context. In an environment that was perceived as chaotic, the middle classes accepted the state’s “return” in 1976 as a necessary condition to restore order. If the period right before the military coup was close to the “state of nature,” the period after it “resembled Leviathan” (pp. 156–7). Rather than being complicit with state terror or holding a particular animosity against the victims, the middle classes operated out of an uncritical (and almost primal) belief in the necessity of the state to monopolize violence.
Contrary to what many have assumed, the author suggests that the “silent majority” did not support either the guerrilla’s armed struggle (in the early 1970s) or the military’s state terror (after 1976). Even in so polarized a context, the nonactivist middle classes stayed on the margins. And the book seeks to reconstruct the discourses on these margins. Nonactivists “may not have been the protagonists of history,” writes the author in the introduction, “but they were no mere spectators” (p. 4). They may have been “silent,” but they still had a voice. But how can these “silent” voices be heard? The book is somewhat ambiguous about this question. For one thing, the interviews are not about the nonactivists’ lives but about their memories of other people’s lives; they are not about how the “silent” lived outside politics but how they saw politics from the outside. For another thing, while showing the participants a documentary is useful to refresh their memories, it also reinforces their role as “spectators.” Once again their voice is limited to reacting to what they watch on TV. The book wants to recover the “silent majority’s” voices, but it seems to define their voices as commentary on the voices of others.
The author’s observation about interviewees switching “from the personal to the impersonal register”—from “I” to “one”—when the discussion veered toward issues of personal responsibility seems to capture this tension (p. 170). The author interprets the impersonal register as the participants’ difficulty with confronting their own historical responsibility. But how could they use the first person to discuss events they were not involved with? The impersonal subject (“one”) seems the only way to discuss politics from the outside.
The last chapter of the book extends the analysis from the “conscious” to the “unconscious” scope. The author examines commercial advertisements from the 1970s and shows that guns were ubiquitous in ads for all kinds of products (even chocolates or cough drops). Advertising sought to associate products with values like danger, aggressiveness, and mercilessness—and to play up the appeal of anything that promised to be quick and final. “At odds with the ideas of patience, tolerance, and moderation,” the author argues, “guns are perfect metaphors for urgency, intolerance, and the extreme” (p. 226). The use of these images suggests the extent to which violence was in the air. The nonactivist middle classes may not have supported political violence explicitly, by either the guerrillas or the military, but they did seem to crave violence. As much as it was rejected, the ads suggest that violence was also desired.
The book points to a conscious/unconscious “contradiction” as the middle classes both rejected and embraced violence. They rejected violence as embodied in specific political actors; they embraced violence as a sort of fantasy to wipe society clean and start from scratch. Some readers will disagree with this and other controversial ideas in the book. Most readers will appreciate the book’s innovative methodology, theoretical imagination, and attempt to look at politics as it takes form off stage—the nature and discourse of “political silence.” This book is likely to inspire much interesting research at the intersection of social history and political sociology.