Word: ei
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...difficult, even impossible, to discuss the situation in EI Salvador without expressing some sort of political viewpoint. Didion makes her own position clear, sometimes explicitly, but usually implicitly. Her unflattering portraits of rightist leaders like Robertod' Aubisson, and her constant comparisons of the Salvadoran reality she perceives with the White House's roster view demonstrate her opposition to current U.S. policy. And she mocks the notion that true progress has been made on the human rights front Indeed, she finds a language common to Washington and the Salvadoran Right that has replaced the word "change" with the word "symbol...
...provisionally living, that it occurred to me that there was a definite question about why a man and a woman might choose a well-known body dump for a driving lesson. This was one of the number of occasions, during the two weeks my husband and I spent in EI Salvador, on which I came to understand, in a way I had not understood before, the exact mechanism of terror...
...masterwork The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that Hitler and Stalin used terror as a tool to fabricate a new kind of man devoid of individualism and self-respect, Didion correctly sees a similar phenomenon taking place in EI Salvador Indiscriminate, random killing deemphasize the value of human existence Murder no longer shocks Salvadorans; it is a natural part of life...
...fought the impulse to blow it our. We continued talking carefully. Nothing came of this, but I did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized undone humiliated by fear, which is what I meant when I said I came to understand in EI Salvador the mechanism of terror...
WHAT IS to be done? Didion offers no soluction, but clearly lays out the problem it is at one political and moral. So any remedy has to be two pronged. It must seek to eradicate the political tension EI Salvador is living and also counter moral decay...