[lbo-talk] The Balcony

[Mark Bennett]

Actually, the torture took place under the Videla regime in Argentina.
There is an interesting reversal of roles in the documentary, as the
torturer, Julio Simon, was the good cop figure in the concentration camps,
who tried to illicit confessions from detainees with small kindnesses; while
his former victim, "Hernardo" (?) now interrogates him as a good cop, trying
to illicit the names of former accomplices with vacuous promises of
"complete redemption" and possible transfer if Simon gives up his former
colleagues.  Hernardo even muses on the role reversal during the one of the
interviews, and he clearly enjoys it.  He admits that he long harbored
dreams of vengeance against Simon and his other torturers, but he let those
go.  Given what he went through, you can hardly blame him.  I don't know how
"high-level" either man was: Hernardo was a 24-year old Uruguayan journalist
when he was kidnapped and disappeared; and Simon appears to be a typical,
witless operative, who now lives in fear that either his former colleagues
or victims will kill him, and who tries to regale Hernardo with stories of
how much the torture affected *him.*

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 9:28 PM, Chuck Grimes <c123grimes at att.net> wrote:


> Meanwhile John Yoo gets the RT Tool Time award while RT also presents some
> fascist clone for Center for American Progress... The comedy goes on.
>
> Well nevermind again. I just watched the most powerful existential
> documentary I've ever seen. It is People and Power, on AJE. It follows a
> high profile torture victim who interrogates a high profile police state
> torture administrator under Pinocet. You can't imagine a better theater of
> the absurd. They shake hands in the realm of a deception and ambiguity so
> vast that it staggers the imagination. Maybe The Wire gets to something like
> this level, but even The Wire seems speechless in this domain. Wow. Just
> knock out stuff. Even Beckette couldn't invent this.
>
> The sides changed with such fluency I could no longer tell who was the
> bastard who used torture and who received it. It was Genet, The Balcony. Yet
> these men were not Genet. They probably had never read Genet. They were
> Genet.
>
> CG
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