The Americas

In 1969, Richard Nixon, coined the term “silent majority” in a famous speech in which he outlined his plans for the Vietnam War. Rather than presenting the “secret plan” to end the war as he had promised in the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon appealed to the country’s “silent majority” to support a “peace with honor.” Nixon’s silent majority cut across class lines and included the American working class who, the newly-elected Republican president rightly believed, overwhelmingly supported the war and opposed an ignominious withdrawal of American troops before victory.

Sebastián Carassai, a sociologist at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, deals with a very different silent majority in Argentina. Unlike Nixon’s, Carassai’s is solidly middle class, specifically the “non-activist middle class in the 1970s” (p. 13). The appropriation may seem somewhat odd (it is also unattributed), but the phrase does pose an interesting historical question about the period, so often characterized as one with a radicalized middle class whose members made up the ranks of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), the Montoneros, and other revolutionary groups.

Carassai chose three different sites to gather his oral histories: Buenos Aires, Tucumán, and Correa, a small town in Santa Fe province with only 5,000 inhabitants. There are some sharp, sometimes stark contrasts in the recollections of the residents of these various places, as in the case of Tucumán, a site of extreme political agitation and violence before the 1976 coup and brutal state terrorism under military rule, in comparison to Correa, which seemed insulated from all the country’s turmoil and troubles. On the other hand, middle-class residents in all three places had similar attitudes on a range of issues. According to Carassai, middle-class memories reveal considerable sympathy for the violence of social protest, very little for that of the guerrilla vanguard, and an appalling indulgence of the military’s objectives (if not its methods) for annihilating the “subversives” during the 1976–83 military dictatorship. Carassai dissects these memories with great acumen and insight. He adopts an innovative methodological approach, opening his interviews with a presentation of his own documentary on the period as a way to prompt recollections and emotions. Predictably, the responses were often confused, even contradictory, with dark but imprecise memories of violence, nostalgia for an idealized, peaceful past (often associated, even if subconsciously with the dictatorship) and condemnation of a decadent present, with its drugs, crime and disrespectful youth.

The final chapter is the book’s most interesting. Supported by a wealth of powerful graphics, the chapter analyzes the increasing presence of violent images, especially guns, and language exalting death in advertising, directed largely at middle-class [End Page 112] consumers. Such images served as metaphors of manliness and sensuality but above all “the readiness to embrace drastic solutions” (p. 209). Absent is the now-infamous shop window display of a gun-toting guerrilla clad in camouflaged fatigues in the chic Harrods department store, but Carassai scoured the print media and found a wealth of other images glorifying weapons and violence. Even the comic-strip character Mafalda lamented an out-of-fashion model who failed to carry a machine gun on the catwalk. What the chapter demonstrates is also a certain disconnect between memory and history, in particular the positive connotations of guns and violence at the time among the middle class—a violence that had become “acceptable, naturalized, that which is converted into the rules of the game” (p. 262), but which years later many would repudiate in their testimonies.

When the book strays from memory, it occasionally falls into factual errors. Listening for many hours to the fragmentary and not always accurate recollections about the past can lead the researcher to lose sight of history outside the obscure recesses of memory. For example, in discussing the ERP’s kidnapping of Fiat executive Oberdan Sallustro in 1972, Carassai notes the “confusion” of an interviewee who conflates that kidnapping with the Cordobazo, Carassai finds this understandable, claiming that "in 1969 the Fiat company unions, SITRAC-SITRAM, had one of the principal roles in the Cordobazo.” (p. 91). In fact, the Fiat unions in 1969 were still company-controlled sindicatos amarillos and played absolutely no role in the Cordobazo. In 1971, under the recently elected clasista leadership, they would play a seminal role in the Viborazo, but none in the Cordobazo.

Such errors, very few in number it should be emphasized, do not in any way detract from the richness of Carassai’s reflections on the memories of his interviewees, but they do drive home the distinction that must be made between memory and history. Memory can teach us a great deal—more about the present than the past, I suspect—but memory-based studies lack the specificity and evidence of history. Memory and history, though linked, are not quite in the same category. It is a virtue of Sebastián Carassai’s book that it teaches us something about both.