Grief, grievance and perspective

The commemorations of the Falklands War today are for the conflict of 30 years ago.  Strange to think, that I remember the 20^th and 25^th anniversaries so well and where my life is now, but that’s another story.  But there was little of the bitterness five and ten years ago as there is today.  Argentina’s political and media elite have embarked on a self-righteous crusade to paint Britain and the Falkland Islanders as the bad guys, swaying much of Latin America and even attracting sympathetic hearings from the US State Department (Antarctica is close to Argentina; why don’t you ‘enter into dialogue’ with Buenos Aires about handing over the American slice of it, Hillary?).

When President Cristina Kirchner abuses the language, saying that British control of the South Atlantic cluster of rocky outcroppings is ‘unjust’ and ‘absurd’, it is reminiscent of 1984’s Ministry of Truth, turning meanings inside out.  It would be funny if it wasn’t serious in the cold war between Port Stanley and Buenos Aires, the iron grey curtain of sea seemingly wider than ever.  I don’t agree with Max Hastings that it was a romantic adventure, a Boy’s Own tally-ho with the hounds!  Human life should not be so cheapened and every individual matters – at the very least, they all had mothers.  Rather it was a fool-hardy expedition which, if it failed, would have reduced Britain’s navy to not much more than coastal defence and a titchy nuclear deterrent.    An Israeli analyst, writing at the time of Israel’s 2006 incursion into Lebanon in pursuit of Hizbollah, said the decision to pursue war should rest on two precepts – it is just and is it wise.  An unprovoked invasion of the island group when talks could yet have delivered it over to the mainland made it a just conflict but hardly a wise one, which is maybe why passion ranks above rationality now.

There are some who focus on the statistics that those who died at the time and subsequently from Falklands-related trauma who try to undermine the case for war and, by extension, the legitimacy of the Falkland Islanders to choose their own masters.  You might as well say that Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay should be annexed to the land of the Pampas because they are all or part in the geo-historical ambit of the Vice-Royalty of Rio de la Plata, with its regional centre of operations at Buenos Aires.  They are all closer than the Falkland Islands and why should the interests of the people in these places be respected.  They must join with Argentina to stop their counter-productive independence.  Every death in the Falklands War is tragic but there was a principal of self-determination at stake as well.

Argentina is like a bully.  Meek and submissive when the UK was the most powerful country in the world, it tried to throw around its weight when it thought Britain was on the way down and got a bloody nose for its troubles, limping away to lick its wounds like a coward rather than throw everything into the fray.  Ultimately, the Falklands were not important enough.  And Britain should receive thanks not odium for hastening the departure of one the continent’s most despicable regimes.  Would Kirchner even be alive to deliver her diatribes if the military junta had continued for many years after?  Would she have been ‘disappeared’ to add to the 30,000 who have not been accounted for in the official tallies?  How many more thousands, if not tens of thousands, would have perished under the victorious generals?  That is the overwhelming benefit of the war and knocks into a cocked hat those who equate the numbers of dead in the battles to the number of Falkland Islanders.  Not that Britain will receive any gratitude for it but such is the way of the world.