Alien to Modernity: The Rationalization of Discrimination
Abstract
In the introduction to the report of the Peruvian Truth andReconciliation Commission, published in 2003, its president,
Salomón Lerner, had some harsh words to say about the history of
discrimination in his country. He charged the army and the police,
on the one hand, and the insurgency on the other, with atrocities and
deaths during the Civil War of the eighties and early nineties in
which an estimated 69,000 people were killed or disappeared and
thousands were forced to leave the south-central sierra region. Of
every four victims three, he pointed out, were peasants whose
maternal language was Quechua. Though denying that the war was an ethnic conflict, he wrote that “these two decades of destruction
and death would not have been possible without the profound
contempt towards the dispossessed people of the country, expressed
equally by members of the insurgent Sendero Luminoso and the Army, a contempt that is woven into every moment of Peruvian everyday life.” On the part of Sendero, extermination of entire communities was rationalized as a strategic means to an end. Like the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, it sought to destroy the infrastructure of the existing society under a leadership of intellectuals and construct it anew, breaking down community loyalties in the process. What I want to examine in this essay is the language and discourse of discrimination not only in its obvious form of degrading insult but also as “common sense” and political philosophy.
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