Searing Reminders of the Realities of the World

Chomsky's MIT office had many important things in it.

Take a careful look at this painting:

How much do you know about the subject of the painting?

Chomsky said this about the painting:

I keep it there to remind myself of the real world. Also, it’s turned out to be an interesting kind of Rorschach test. I ask people often if they know what it is. Americans, almost nobody. Europeans, maybe 10 percent. Latin Americans, it used to be all of them, but younger people don’t know.

These photos show the painting in Chomsky’s MIT office:

Chomsky explains what the painting represents:

For one thing, it’s pretty horrible, but for another it’s of enormous historic significance. That act culminated ten years of terrorist atrocities in Central America. The decade began with the murder of Archbishop Romero, it ended with the murder of the six Jesuit intellectuals. In between, two hundred thousand people were slaughtered. The United States was condemned for its involvement in some of these atrocities at the International Court of Justice, rejected it, and expanded the war. It was a really horrifying period. And that’s not all. It also culminated something longer. In 1962, President Kennedy changed the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security.”* Internal security means something. It means war against your own population. And that set off a hideous record of crimes and atrocities. In fact, Charles Maechling, who was the head of counterinsurgency and defense strategy under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, later said that this changed the United States from merely tolerating the rapacity of the Latin American military to directly supporting some of the methods used by Heinrich Himmler. Which is correct. And there’s more: 1962 was Vatican II. That’s when Pope John XXIII tried to return the church to the gospels, to what it was before Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. That was taken seriously by the Latin American bishops. They pursued the preferential option for the poor, they tried to get peasants to read the gospels, to organize them. That set off a war against the church. It was a brutal and bloody war. Religious martyrs all the way through, and plenty of others. Neo-Nazi-style national-security states in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina. Finally they came to Central America in the 1980s. It was a hideous period. And it basically ended on November 16, 1989, with the murder of the six Jesuits in El Salvador. That is an event of very great historic significance. People in the United States ought to know about it. We’re responsible for it. It’s much worse than anything that happened in East Europe in that period.

Let’s move to another issue.

How much do you know about the Santa María School massacre?

The massacre was a jaw-dropping event:

The Santa María School massacre was a massacre of striking workers, mostly saltpeter works (nitrate) miners, along with wives and children, committed by the Chilean Army in Iquique, Chile on December 21, 1907. The number of victims is undetermined but is estimated to be over 2,000.[1] It occurred during the peak of the nitrate mining era, which coincided with the Parliamentary Period in Chilean political history (1891–1925). With the massacre and an ensuing reign of terror, not only was the strike broken, but the workers’ movement was thrown into limbo for over a decade.[2] For decades afterward there was official suppression of knowledge of the incident, but in 2007 the government conducted a highly publicized commemoration of its centenary, including an official national day of mourning and the reinterment of the victims’ remains.

Chomsky made this 2007 comment about the massacre:

Comment on the Iquique massacre

Until a year ago, I am embarrassed to say, I knew nothing about the Iquique massacre a century ago, or its backgrounds in Chilean labor struggles and in the remarkable history of Chilean anarchism. While visiting Chile in October 2006, I had the opportunity to visit the mines and the Escuela Santa Maria. I was shocked to learn the story of this vicious crime, the worst massacre in labor history to my knowledge, and also to see something of the grim conditions of work and life in the mines. The direct experience is, quite literally, unforgettable. What I have learned since, particularly from Sergio Grez Toso’s highly illuminating study Los anarquistas y el moviemento obrero, has enriched my understanding of these dramatic events and their great historical significance.

Thanks to the kindness of activists I met in Iquique, and the personal friends who accompanied me, I was able to obtain a photograph of the simple and very moving monument to the victims, standing outside the Escuela. The photograph is now on the wall of my office at MIT, along with a painting that depicts the Angel of Death standing over an image of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, assassinated while saying Mass in 1980 for the crime of serving as a “voice of the people,” and the images of the six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, whose brains were blown out in 1989 by an elite Salvadoran battalion, with a bloody record of atrocities. The painting vividly frames the horrors of the US-run state terrorist campaign in El Salvador in the 1980s, one chapter in the tragedy of those shameful years. The solemn memorial to the men, women, and children slaughtered by state terror in Iquique faces the victims of later years, a searing reminder of the realities of the world that are hidden by the doctrines of the powerful, realities that it is the responsibility of historians to unearth, so that the rest of us can act more effectively to bring such awful crimes to an end.

Noam Chomsky

Dec. 12, 2007

This image shows the “photograph of the simple and very moving monument to the victims”:

This photo (look at the bottom-left corner) shows the “photograph of the simple and very moving monument to the victims” in Chomsky’s MIT office:

We should never forget these searing reminders of the realities of the world.

Reminders like these can help us to combat amnesia.

Illegitimate power loves amnesia. Tomorrow, there might not be amnesia. If amnesia ever ends, illegitimate power will probably end soon after.

Chomsky wrote this:

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

Chomsky’s MIT office contained many more treasures like the two discussed above, and I wonder what happened to all of these treasures.

Chomsky told me about another searing reminder of the realities of the world: a “painting of a Kurdish boy, screaming in horror, given to me by an artist in the regions of Turkish Kurdistan where terrible atrocities were taking place, funded almost entirely by Bill Clinton”.

Unfortunately, Chomsky told me that this painting from Turkey could not be put into the public domain due to risks to the artist who painted it.