Journal articles on the topic 'Argentina Dirty War, 1976-1983'

The U.S. Human Rights Policy Towards Argentina During the “Dirty War” 1976-1983 The paper aims to provide an analysis of the question of violations of human rights during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) and the impact of this problem on bilateral relations with the United States. The article will focus mostly on the presidency of James “Jimmy” Earl Carter. The political line adopted by him, known as “the Carter doctrine” or “human rights policy” was the basis of restrictive attitude towards the Argentine dictators. In order to provide a complete analysis, the topic of the paper was treated broadly, covering not only bilateral, American-Argentine issues, but also multilateral forms of exerting pressure on Argentina, mainly at the United Nations and Organization of American States. The article also provides an analysis of the human rights policy itself, as well as of the state terror introduced by the Argentine military, known as the “Dirty War””.

A political transformation that has started in Argentina in 1983 put an end on the reign of military junta, but at the same time it was related with a number of challenges for both first democratic governments and the argentine society as a whole. One of the most problematic issues resulting from the confrontation with the crimes from 1976 – 1983 was so called transitional justice and the problem of identity and collective memory of societies coming out of the period of trauma, which are characterized by a high polarization due to different, even contradictory at times interpretations and ideas about the past. The article attempts to analyze the difficult process of settlement of the dirty war period, including the characteristics of the preceding events, the policy of the first democratic governments and the original strategies developed by the argentine movement for human rights, which on the one hand aimed to combat with the impunity of the perpetrators, and on the other hand to counteract the social amnesia and to keep the memory about the tragic past events alive.

No rhetorical flourishes: this work-in-progress is intended to provoke a long-overdue public dialogue on an ugly topic that refuses to stay disappeared. It treats a hidden battleground of Argentina's Dirty War (1976–1983), a ‘petite war,’ a war within the war, directed by a military-appointed doctor against the mentally deficient inmates concentrated at the national psychiatric hospital, the Colonia Nacional Dr. Manuel A. Montes de Oca in Torres, and its sister institution, the Colonia Psiquiátrica Domingo Cabred, in Lujan, both in Buenos Aires province. Buried in the historical, statistical, legal, and archival records, along with the key informant interviews, ethnographic observations, and photos is shattering evidence of medical human rights abuses committed under the necropolitics of the Dirty War against an abandoned population of mental “defectives” who were condemned to gratuitous suffering and early deaths at the psychiatric colony (see Figure 1). In the worst instances, the abuses were crimes against humanity.

In December 2001, Argentina underwent the worst socio-economic crisis in its history. Strong criticisms were raised by society against almost all the social injustices encouraged by the policies promoted by the former governments. Forgiveness of the crimes committed by the dictatorship during the “Dirty War” which took place in the late 70’s, and reconciliation between the members of the dictatorship and society, was the position held by the post-dictatorship governments. However, the official discourse has radically changed since 2003, because of the administration of elected president Nestor Kirchner (2003–2007). The aim of this paper is to explore some of the changes in relation to the creation of two time-frames (TF1/TF2) to represent actors from the past and the present, and reinforce the current exceptionality of Néstor Kirchner’s political stance. To do this, I will analyse four political speeches given by ex- president Néstor Kirchner to commemorate the anniversary of the coup d’état of March 24th, 1976, the date which marks the beginning of the 1976–1983 military dictatorship.

ABSTRACT The primary goal of this essay is to introduce and situate the “anachronotope.” The anachronotope is an inversion of Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope” (literally, “timespace”), which describes the fundamentally symbiotic and inextricable relations between time, space, and narrative in the novel. The anachronotope describes a novelistic condition in which the narrative and the timespace, or setting, are discordant—as the prefix ana- implies, the narrative works against place and against time. Disconnected thusly from the narrative, the anachronotopic setting becomes merely a container or reliquary for anxieties, fears, and desires that, in a sense, “belong” somewhere else. This will ultimately be explained and clarified in the treatment of Nathan Englander’s 2007 novel The Ministry of Special Cases, which takes place in Argentina in 1976 during and after the ouster of Juan Perón’s widow and successor President Isabel Martinez de Perón, a period of state terrorism euphemistically termed the “Proceso de Reorganización Nacional,” or more colloquially, the Dirty War. The article also explicates the Jewish-American anxieties produced by the so-called Holocaust “memory boom” of the 1990s and 2000s, reflections on that anxiety in sociology and literary studies, and Julian Levinson’s contention that contemporary Jewish literature should be read as “counterethnography.”

Em agosto de 1976 um golpe militar derrubou Isabel Perón e instalou um dos regimes militares mais violentos da América do Sul (1976-1983). A política internacional do Estado argentino sofreu alterações relevantes, tais como o alinhamento com o “Mundo Ocidental Cristão”, o qual era capitaneado pelos Estados Unidos. Em poucos anos, a Argentina se tornou um “pivot” de diversos momentos de tensão e de conflito no Cone Sul, como o litígio de Itaipu-Corpus, o conflito argentino-chileno pelo controle do canal de Beagle e a Guerra das Malvinas/Falklands (1982). Como resultado dessa estratégia, o país se isolou profundamente do restante da sociedade internacional. O presente texto apresenta os eixos das relações exteriores argentinas entre 1976 e 1983, com ênfase nas tensões entre a Argentina e os países contíguos, com objetivo de analisar criticamente a atuação internacional da Casa Rosada a partir da ótica do realismo clássico.Palavras-Chave: Argentina; Política externa argentina; História da Argentina. ABSTRACTIn August 1976 a military coup overthrew President Isabel Perón, installing one of the most violent military regimes in South America (1976-1983). When compared to previous Peronist governments, the international policy of the Argentine State has undergone relevant changes, such as an alignment with the Western Christian World. In a few years, Argentina has become a pivot of different moments of tension and conflict in the Southern Cone, such as the dispute over Itaipu-Corpus, the Argentine-Chilean conflict over the Beagle channel and the Malvinas/Falklands War (1982). As a result of this strategy, the country has profoundly isolated itself from the rest of international society. This text presents the axes of Argentine foreign relations between 1976 and 1983, with an emphasis on tensions between Argentina and the contiguous countries, with the aim of critically analyzing the international performance of Casa Rosada from the perspective of classical realism.Keywords: Argentina; Argentine foreign policy; History of Argentina. Recebido em: 12/08/2020 | Aceito em: 10/02/2021.

The article examines the South Atlantic Conflict the Falklands (Malvinas) War between Great Britain and Argentina in 1982 in terms of geopolitics as the military regime in Argentina (1976-1983) considered that geopolitical motives were very important in foreign policy. According to military elite the South Atlantic was an ocean of increasing strategic and the growing economic importance. The Falklands (Malvinas), South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands were much more than islands for Argentina. They represented the basis of her maritime domain and had economic importance due to their wealth in fish, oil and minerals. Without access to the South Atlantic it would not be possible far Argentina to transform into regional power. This was the reason that made Argentina occupy the islands on April 2,1982.

ABSTRACT:The last military dictatorship to come to power in Argentina is most well known for its atrocious human rights violations. However, this campaign of terror represents just one act carried out in the regime's efforts to counter leftist activities. The military sought to provide responsive administration as a means to pacify the nation. In the national capital, Buenos Aires, the military pursued a comprehensive set of urban reforms meant to streamline and control the metropolis. Cold War ideologies deeply penetrated the every-day and profoundly changed how citizens lived in Buenos Aires.

Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship was, in the words of scholar Marguerite Feitlowitz, "an intensely verbal takeover" (Feitlowitz 22). The language of the military junta was one that spun an illusion of reality out of abstractions and absolutes, while in fact, it cloaked real events to produce a culture of denial. I discuss my translation of María Negroni’s lyric novel about The Dirty War, The Annunciation, which enters the dysfunctional language of dictatorship as a site of poetic play. Negroni dramatizes how this language prohibits, above all else, grief. Specifically, it deploys a language of melancholy as a radical gesture in a linguistic-political context where the body, and the embodied, have disappeared. Drawing from passages in my translation I highlight translation as it participates in problems of loss, silence, and absence, and ultimately, as it performs the recuperative work of mourning.

I argue that fictional representations of the Dirty Wars in Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990) allow for the possibility of forgiveness and healing, while non-fictional representations such as testimonies and conversations do not. Focusing on a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts, I analyze why and how state repression inflicts trauma and violence upon its victims and survivors. The novels I analyze are no place for heroes by Laura Restrepo, El Angel’s Last Conquest by Elvira Orphée and Bedside manners by Luisa Valenzuela. The non–fictional works I analyze are Nunca Mas: A Report By Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People, That Inferno: Conversations of Five Women Survivors of an Argentine Torture Camp, Circle Over Death: Testimonies of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and We, Chile: Personal Testimonies of the Chilean Arpilleristas. The theoretical underpinnings of my arguments are Paul Ricouer’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) and Avishai Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory (2002), both of which attempt to think through the relationship between forgetting and forgiving.

RESUMENEl objetivo de este artículo es reflexionar sobre los mecanismos de financiación y de control de las instituciones religiosas por los laicos en las primeras décadas de la conquista y colonización de Hispanoamérica. Investigar sobre la inversión laica en lo sagrado supone en un primer lugar aclarar la historiografía sobre laicos, religión y dinero en las sociedades de Antiguo Régimen y su trasposición en América, planteando una mirada desde el punto de vista de las motivaciones múltiples de los actores seglares. A través del ejemplo de restituciones, donaciones y legados en losAndes, se explora el papel de los laicos españoles, y también de las poblaciones indígenas, en el establecimiento de la densa red de instituciones católicas que se construye entonces. La propuesta postula el protagonismo de actores laicos en la construcción de un espacio cristiano en los Andes peruanos en el siglo XVI y principios del XVII, donde la inversión económica permite contribuir a la transición de una sociedad de guerra y conquista a una sociedad corporativa pacificada.PALABRAS CLAVE: Hispanoamérica-Andes, religión, economía, encomienda, siglos XVI y XVII.ABSTRACTThis article aims to reflect on the mechanisms of financing and control of religious institutions by the laity in the first decades of the conquest and colonization of Spanish America. Investigating lay investment in the sacred sphere means first of all to clarifying historiography on laity, religion and money within Ancien Régime societies and their transposition to America, taking into account the multiple motivations of secular actors. 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AbstractWhether religious groups advance or limit human rights has been a topic of recent debate among human rights scholars. This article studies the conditions under which religious leaders advance human rights in the context of Argentina's Jewish community during the country's 1976–1983 military dictatorship. Three major influences on religious support for human rights—autonomy from a religious community's establishment, a missionary‐reformer identity, and congregational mobilization—are highlighted. Original archival research from the papers of U.S.‐born rabbi Marshall T. Meyer illustrates his defense of human rights in Argentina, contrasting his work with the inaction of a major established Jewish organization. Quantitative cross‐national analysis extends the case study findings by showing a relationship between religious institutions’ autonomy from the state and defense of human rights.

Can religious leaders who oppose state violence reduce its use? Communal elites, such as religious leaders, may oppose human rights violations. This article argues that these leaders, part of institutions embedded in local communities and with influence based on traditional power, reduce repression when they oppose dictatorships. The argument’s main implication is tested in Argentina during the Dirty War of its 1976–1983 military dictatorship, using original archival data on the country’s Catholic bishops. Opposed bishops are associated with reduced disappearances and killings. A variety of evidence is consistent with opposed bishops taking two types of actions to resist repression: assisting likeminded local agents and participating in human rights advocacy campaigns. The findings point to the importance of influential civil society actors in reducing state violence.

Following the return to democracy in Argentina, the definition of new roles and missions for the armed forces became imperative in order to establish civilian authority over the military and contribute to the consolidation of the democratic regime. After seven years of military dictatorship (1976–1983), the transformation of repressive and war-prone armed forces into law-abiding and peaceful ones was needed to achieve three key political goals: To strengthen the newly restored yet weak rule of law, to rebuild the country’s battered international image, and to help professionalise an ill-reputed military. This article argues that since the return to democracy in 1983, successive governments have pursued these goals by linking issues traditionally falling within the military and security realm to the country’s external agenda. Building upon the defence diplomacy literature – that is, the use of defence and military cooperation as a diplomatic tool – the article develops a conceptual framework to apply to the Argentine case, focussing on how defence diplomacy is developed in three stages which we conceptualise as inward-looking, outward-looking, and symmetrical military-to-military relations. Overall, we contend that defence diplomacy – though still a recent and weakly systematised concept in the field – is a useful tool which should be taken into account when analysing the democratic transitions and the pursued civilian control over the armed forces in Global South countries like Argentina.

In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. 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