Face of Fascism

By George Russell

PRISONER WITHOUT A NAME, CELL WITHOUT A NUMBER by Jacobo Timerman Translated by Toby Talbot Knopf; 164 pages; $10.95

Half a century ago, the Republic of Argentina was one of the most promising countries in the West. In the past two generations, behind a fac,ade of "European" style, the country has degenerated into narcissism. Where some countries have aspirations, the Argentines have dreams. These they inflict upon each other in spasms of nationalism, socialism, Peronism, fascism and pure terrorism. As Jacobo Timerman points out in this harrowing account, violence amounts to a national characteristic in Argentina today.

Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number is part memoir, part meditation. Timerman, a Ukrainian Jew whose family moved to Argentina in 1928 to escape the pogroms, was one of Buenos Aires' most influential journalists and newspaper publishers. That placed him dangerously close to the center of events as Argentina imploded in the late '60s and early '70s, during the second coming of Juan Domingo Peron. The country's civil identity virtually disappeared, with "Peronists assassinating Peronists, the military assassinating the military, union members assassinating union members, students other students, policemen other policemen." Ideas were replaced by the license to kill for them. Timerman was a Zionist, a social democrat, a moderate--and altogether too intimate with key figures on all sides of the Argentine vortex. His privileged position could not last. In April 1977, one year after the military took power in a coup, he was kidnaped by members of the ultraright Argentine First Army Corps.

"When electric shocks are applied, all that a man feels is that they're ripping apart his flesh. And he howls." Thus Timerman recalls his torture after capture.

His testimony is most telling in its human details: the agony of solitary confinement, the humiliation of being smeared with one's own feces, the ecstasy felt on meeting the eye of another prisoner through an unguarded peephole.

More difficult to comprehend is Timerman's story of why he was abducted in the first place. He recounts crude anti-Semitic insults and the paranoid belief in a Jewish plot to seize Argentina's windswept Patagonia region for a new Israel.

Timerman claims that his life was spared only because high military commanders hoped to conduct a show trial against international Zionism. But if that is all there is to the story, then his title is misleading. For among the thousands of "disappeared" persons who have been tortured and murdered in Argentina, Timerman is one whose name is very well known.

After the initial brutal months of his captivity, Timerman was held under relatively civilized house arrest, while an international campaign was waged for his release. His experience with neo-Nazism does not begin to explain the atrocities committed against thousands of non-Jewish Argentines, Uruguayans and other Latin American refugees. The official shibboleths of state terrorism included the "safeguarding of democracy" and of "Western Christian values." The slogans raise the specter of a fascistic form of liberalism, a new Jacobinism, which Timerman fails to address. Still, if he is no political analyst, Timerman offers an invaluable contribution to the lengthening shelf of witness literature. To date, his testament is the most painful and searching document available on the inner life of a land that could produce the imaginings of Jorge Luis Borges but that Borges himself could not imagine. --By George Russell

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