Cultures of Denial: Avoiding Knowledge of State Violations of Human Rights in Argentina and the United States

Abstract

Why and how do individuals distance themselves from information about their government's participation in torture and other human rights violations? Such citizen (non)response implicitly legitimates and thus facilitates the continuation of abusive state actions. Drawing on a model of socially organized denial, we explore how sociocultural contexts and practices mediate individuals' avoidance, justification, normalization, silencing, and outright denial of human rights abuses in two sites: Argentina during the last military dictatorship (1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983) and the United States during the "war on terror" post September 11, 2001. The study is based on 40 in-depth interviews with members of diverse civic, religious, community, and political organizations in both countries (20 in each site). Comparing the political circumstances of a dictatorship and an electoral democracy, the analysis shows the roles of patriotic and national security ideologies and practices of silence and talk as organizers of cultures of denial. , and anonymous reviewers.We also thank Elizabeth Doggett and Elmira Alihosseini for their research assistance at different stages of the project. All of the quotes from interviews conducted in Argentina and other sources originally in Spanish were translated to English . 4 See Brysk (1994) on the difficulties of offering an exact count of the number of people "disappeared" during the dictatorship. The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, formed right after the military regime ended, estimated at least 8,960 disappearance cases, recognizing that this was a partial list. Human rights organizations have customarily invoked an estimated number of up to 30,000 disappeared.

Collective Memory and the Language of Human Rights

“…We were particularly interested in the way that different people distanced themselves, rationalized, minimized, normalized, or outright denied illegitimate state violence. One product of this research (Sutton and Norgaard, 2013) is a comparison of "cultures of denial" (Cohen, 2001) of state violations of human rights in the United States and Argentina, looking at the role of ideologies of patriotism and national security and the social organization of silence and talk in relation to such events. In contrast, this article is largely centered on the Argentine case and the advancement of a torture-rejecting culture in the context of memory and human rights struggles in the country.…”

“…Information about extraordinary renditions, waterboarding, and cruel treatment of detainees in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo had been available in the media. While a number of interviewees were critical of these developments, others ignored, avoided thinking about, or justified state-sponsored human rights violations, including torture, under particular circumstances (see Sutton and Norgaard, 2013). Justificatory attitudes were consistent with the political environment in the United States after 9/11 and with the George W. Bush administration's authorization of harsh interrogation tactics, including some denounced as torture (see, e.g., Constitution Project, 2013).…”

“…Their responses ranged from not being aware of, having bits and pieces of information but not imagining the magnitude of the atrocity to knowing people directly targeted (e.g., relatives, friends, acquaintances) and/or being themselves survivors who experienced imprisonment, torture, disappearance, and/or exile in the flesh. Instances of denial, including situations of "knowing and not-knowing" (Cohen, 2001), also appeared in the narratives (see Sutton and Norgaard, 2013). How much people really knew about or turned a blind eye to state terrorist activities is still the subject of contention and hard feelings in Argentine society.…”

“Its Own Kind of Torture”: Denial, Acknowledgment, and the Debate About Force Feeding at Guantánamo Bay

“…Stanley Cohen () documents three rhetorical strategies that state officials use to deny torture: literal, interpretive, and implicatory. Cohen's typology has proven remarkably adaptable, applying to the claims of political elites, media elites, and citizens (Sutton and Norgaard ). Here, I present, update, and extend Cohen's typology, incorporating findings from recent scholarship of torture and discourse to do so.…”

Public Support for International Human Rights Institutions: A Cross‐National and Multilevel Analysis

“…So far scholars have been preoccupied with the question of why states support this institutionalization process (Cole , ; Goodliffe and Hawkins ; Hafner‐Burton et al. ; Hathaway , ; Moravcsik ; Simmons ; Sutton and Norgaard ; Vreeland ; Wotipka and Tsutsui ). There is obvious conflict between human rights and another fundamental international principle—national sovereignty, that is, a state's ability to exclude external actors from its internal affairs (Jackson ; Krasner ).…”