Dictators, torturers, inquisitors: the terror has its officials, just as it has post offices and banks, and they apply it because it is necessary. It isn’t a case of a plot by the perverse. General Pinochet may look like a figure in Goya’s “black art,” a prize specimen for psychoanalysts, or the inheritor of a savage tradition from the banana republics. But the clinical or folkloric roots of this or that dictator, which provide seasoning for history, are not history. Who would dare maintain today that World War I broke out because of the complexes of Kaiser Wilhelm, who had one arm shorter
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