Sense and Absence

The photographs displayed here are deeply moving, brilliantly conceived and superbly executed. They are part of an exhibition called Absences, by an Argentine photographer named Gustavo Germano, and each of them is worth a good deal more than any thousand words I could produce.

I confess to a certain discomfort at the idea that the Argentine dictators' war on their critics has "been described as genocide; the calculated extermination of dissidents". Genocide is the extermination of a people, a nation or a culture, as attempted by the Hutu against the Tutsi, the Nazis against the Jews, the Turks against the Armenians, the Europeans against the native Americans and the British against the Tasmanians. Dissidents are not a people, a nation or a culture. The calculated extermination of dissidents is not genocide. It's tyranny, oppression, state terrorism, state kidnapping, torture and murder. Is that not enough? I suppose it is possible that Jacqui Smith believes in a dissident genome, but unless its existence can be demonstrated by more reliable sources I fail to see why anyone should find it necessary to describe a crime by referring to it as a different crime. Even as a metaphor, such as might be thought clever by certain postmodernist commentators and their groupies, the proposition is inane; one might just as sensibly describe burglary as bank robbery. They're both species of theft, and all honest taxpayers are bankers now.