Those people bawling about death panels and Obama's dictatorship trigger some very bad memories. Of growing up in a place where those existed. For real.
Like Jara, killed for a song
the bones in his hands were broken as were his ribs... Fellow political prisoners have testified that his captors mockingly suggested that he play guitar for them as he lay on the ground. Defiantly, he sang...
Kids were taken from their parents, Parents from their family.
the baby was born on the floor of a clandestine detention center .. Now, 29 years later.. searching for the sister she never knew. Her mother disappeared soon after the baby was taken away
Simple words could get you arrested or worse. Parents used the little money they had to send hot headed kids to foreign lands, lest them be killed for saying what they felt. I had to grow up in a foreign land, because of a government to be feared. A right wing government. Teabagger heaven.
The song was composed for a big recording company, to be played on it's show in May 1973. Since the censors had forbidden the lyrics, it's two authors had decided to sing only the melody at the show, marking it's rhytym with only one word: "calice" (Shut up)
In the day of the show, when the two had started to sing " Cálice " someone had disconnected their microphone. "I have the impression that it had been presented to the censors, and we were recommended not to sing it, but we made a civil disobedience and wanted to sing it", concludes Gil the song's second author . Extremely annoyed with the dead microphone, Chico tried another one and it was also cut.
Chico's family shipped him out to Europe. Gil's family did the same. They've seen the fate of those who talked. Sometimes death was preferable to the fate of those who lived...
September 29, 1969, was a rainy day. In spite of the downpour and distance, the terrible screams of those being tortured had no trouble in crossing the doors, walls, and the parking lot to get to the three common cells that held ten men each. It is hard to describe the sounds made by men being tortured. They come out involuntarily, deep from the lungs. They cannot be reproduced, but one who has heard them never forgets. It is also impossible to tell how one feels while being tortured but it isn't only pain... When the machine stops for a moment, the muscles relax and the body goes back to its original position. The shocks are so intense that if the prisoner's mouth is not stuffed with a piece of cloth, his tongue shrinks inside his mouth and he bites himself to such a degree that for several days he is unable to speak or eat.
This is a government that you fear. They do this to their own citizens. All in name of anti-communism or some other BS of the day. Some governments did it PRO communism, but the ones in South America did it for right wing ideas. They bombed their own people coming to a music concert, to prevent "socialism" from taking "their country". They tortured people who gave a taxi ride to "someone from the left". They tortured people who had the left party's color on their shirts. They killed people whose neighbors got jealous and coveted their new car, or new TV. The neighbors called in to denounce "a leftist"
This is the world of those who don't want others to talk, who want to drown out all the voices but their and of their party. This is the kind of government they create. Left or Right, it doesn't make a difference. What marks them all is their eagerness to drown out dissent, facts, reality, science and anything that doesn't fit their world view.
This is the world teabaggers and deathers would feel at home. And we rational people would fear the government.
And the biggest irony is that over 4,700 of US finest have died and are dying right now on foreign lands to save Iraqis from this world the teabaggers want. The world where "the other" should be shot, his words drowned out, his tongue injured, his hands broken or burned so that the teabaggers never have to listen to any opposing views. So that they "win"