Brainwashing, for better or worse, has already been weakened. So someone using that term today is using it in a very different context. Time and context matters.
Now, you add in things like torture and detainment. I mean, whatever. Feel free to die on this hill. My post's point is that the vast majority of society does not think of the Dirty War, or any sort of violence, when they hear the phrase "I was disappeared".
> Now, you add in things like torture and detainment
I'm sorry, where do you think the unmarked van is going? "Now you add in detainment" — detainment at least. If somebody disappears, it's either because they're being kept somewhere secretly or because they've been killed.
Hedges hasn't been literally "disappeared", made invisible, any more than he's been a victim of what "to be disappeared" has come to mean.
The protagonist here chose to be a useful idiot to help the Russian state attract self-described dissident voices to a Russian propaganda outlet. If you chose to make your living that way and care about your work, embracing backups is a good idea.
Unlike his kremlin patrons, western society doesn’t generally “disappear” people like him, we just ignore.
He deliberately compared the deletion of his stuff by YouTube to people being captured, detained, more often than not tortured and too often killed. He wanted to invoke this image to paint YouTube in as bad a light as possible.
In doing so he not only compared apples to oranges but also showed quite strongly that he is missing empathy and a sense of proportion.
I strongly suggest that he slept in a real bed last night. Ate a good meal. Did not get hurt by prison guards. Wasn't punched in the gut, starved, electro-tortured, got his fingernails ripped out, had to stand on a box with his underpants over his face while wires hung from his hands fearing electrocution. And so on.
I doubt that the victims of being disappeared (nor their families) would see what happened to him and his spinning of the story and say: 'Oh yeah. There is someone who had the same fate as we.'
It actually doesn't matter that you or others did not get the reference. Making this reference is the problem, even if not a single one of his audience would miss it. He intended it and devalued the horrible experiences of real victims to blow his felt victimhood out of proportion and generate more enragement.
The only way you could justify a statement like this is by ignoring at least two events that both hit closer to home to Americans - the kidnappings done by the Gestapo in the 30s and the Mafia in the 20s. I stand by my statement that the Dirty War in Argentina is not something that comes to mind for most Westerners when someone uses the phrasing of being "disappeared"
Both of those predate the invention of the particular use of “disappear”, a passive voice construction implying an active voice transitive use with an animate direct object (the active voice form of which was not actually in use yet, but is sometimes seen since), which was invented in the late 1970s specifically in reference to the Dirty War in Argentina. It has been used since somewhat more broadly, but only because it invokes the intense coverage (including in the American media) of the Dirty War.
While certainly for a large number of young and/or particularly historically ignorant Westerners the specific referent may not be immediately recognized, the upthread comment that “ To anyone as allegedly historically literate as the author, especially one who's focused on the crimes of US imperialism and foreign interference, there is no question they would be familiar with what that term specifically refers to - the dirty war in Argentina” is absolutely correct.
It was not invented, that was the first time the euphemism was correlated. Having knowledge of the history of "to be disappeared" and having knowledge of what "being disappeared" brings to mind, are two very different things.
Well maybe something else would hit closer to home, like ferrying off supposed terrorists to Gitmo without due process or other secret prisons in quite a few countries should come to mind.
I believe that to be intentioned by the author.
The term "disappearing people" was used for describing the US practices outside the US to describe these practices. And the author for sure knew this.
Still doesn't make the use of the term by the author any better in my book.
But given his agenda I would actually think he intended to associate himself with these cases as much as with the victims of other governments to show once more how bad the US is from his view and to his intended audience/bubble.
I don't want to discuss the actual practices of the US and other governments. Nor compare them. This thread isn't the place for that. Just that the author intentionally conjured these images.