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The Shadow of Heidegger

Argentina (much as Werner Rolfe wanted it) had its Fourth Reich. But it wasn’t led by Eichmann. Neither the omnipresent colonel of the people, who died six or seven months after returning to the country, unable to arrange anything, victim of contradictions, contradictions that he, from his exile, from the myth of his distance, from his fascination as forbidden object, thought he could manage and no sooner had he stepped on the chaotic territory of the nation, no sooner had he historicized himself, then history ate him up, as the next simple step of making him one more contradiction. His heart only lasted a short while and left behind a damned inheritance, that played roughly against his memory.

Leading the Fourth Reich were the usual liberal and democratic military men, the old rancher oligarchy, the new financial oligarchy, business groups, the great capitalists, and the United States. They believed, the slaughterers of the wretched great country of the South, that they were fighting the first battle of the Third World War. Henry Kissinger came by. He authorized them. A vice-admiral, I believe, told him that they would need to kill in the next three or four months or, better, disappear (this was the name of Argentinian murder), more than twenty thousand people. Mr. Kissinger gave his approval, but he had a pious gesture, perhaps linked to faith, to the Redeemer, to the crèche, to beautiful Christmas, or I don’t know what, really, shit, but he suggested: “Do it before Christmas”.

The Argentinian Reich was as rational as the German. They ended up installing 340 concentration camps. They used torture as the only form of intelligence. Intelligence was to rip the necessary information at the necessary time out of the tortured. They established rigorous relations between volts and kilos of weight. So many volts if the prisoner weighs seventy kilos. More and they would kill him. Less they wouldn’t extract the confession. Medical staff controlled this. The discarded, those from whom there was nothing else to extract, were injected with Pentothal, lifted into airplanes and thrown alive into the Rio de la Plata. When the assassins returned, solicitous clergy told them that what they had done was done in the name of God, protected by his Grace. That in the fight against evil, they told them, everything required was blessed.

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