Authority 16

When the social body of the country has been contaminated by a disease that corrodes its entrails, it forms antibodies. These antibodies cannot be considered in the same way as microbes. As the government controls and destroys the guerrilla, the action of the antibody will disappear, as is already happening. It is only a natural reaction to a sick body.

Quoted by Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada, p. 113

César Augusto Guzzetti (1925-1988) was foreign minister during the Argentine junta that took power in 1976. Although he survived being shot by left-wing guerrillas in May 1977, he had to leave his post.

Disease metaphors have been and still are frequently used in politics to refer to complicated social processes and to justify drastic political measures. The Nazi doctor Fritz Klein said ‘The Jew is an inflamed appendix in the body of mankind.’ The Khmer Rouge justified mass executions in Cambodia this way: ‘What is infected must be cut out’ (cf. Klein 2007: 114). Susan Sontag (1981) wrote that the use of disease metaphors such as cancer justifies strict measures and is “as such implicitly genocidal.”

*Susan Sontag (1978): Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

1976