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COMMENTARY
April 4, 2012
Falklandia
Rocks and tear gas again, at the British embassy in Buenos Aires, as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Falklands war. More evidence that little changes. The Argentines learned nothing from the lesson administered in 1982. The British are once again unprepared.My favourite wars are fought in remote locations, where not too many civilians get killed, and military ingenuity can enjoy free play. Relative to, say, Verdun, the Falklands offered a jolly little theatre in that respect. Up on the glaciers of Kashmir was another, when Pakistan and India needed a contest. Finns versus Russians was good, in the Arctic wastes during the Second World War; and, British versus Japanese in the Burmese jungles. Were it not for inevitable environmental considerations, I would recommend that, next time round, the world's powers have it out in Antarctica. But please, not with conscripted armies. Call me fey, call me a pacifist, but I have long felt a serious distaste for the "total war" that arrived in our world with mass democracy. I have a strong preference for the voluntary principle in human affairs (freedom is possible, equality is not). I think war should be restricted to the people who enjoy it. As it was, more or less, over centuries of our supposedly "barbaric" past. Say what you like against feudalism, but to this day such principles of justice as apply to war in international law are part of our medieval heritage. Dynastic, as opposed to national, wars, could be fought among the interested parties, and it was a matter of honour not to molest the peasants, going innocently about their labour in the fields. But the Thirty Years' War (1618-'48) was the harbinger, the first whiff of what was to come, with the aid of ever advancing technology. The modern nation state was being forged, the new age of "the people." Soon we will celebrate the centenary of Sarajevo and 1914 - "the war to end all wars," which ushered our "post-modern" world into being, of violent "modernism" gone completely mad. The public, nationalist hysteria whipped up by Argentina's dictators in 1982, for their Falklands invasion, was itself an echo of the public, nationalist hysteria expressed on the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, whipped up by the demagogues of 1914. From his wonderful book, The Rites of Spring (1989), to his latest, Solar Dance, the Canadian historian Modris Eksteins has been shining light into this dark history, through which mass democracy, and variants on fascism, emerged as two sides of one coin. Nationalism, ethnicity, race, "social justice," mythmaking and meaningless abstractions: this has been our world of power politics for a century now. Argentina was in the forefront of nations that had it all - at least, all the conditions for prosperity, stability, and peace - then blew it up for 20th-century illusions. A nation endowed with vast resources: among the most advanced countries in the late 19th century, when she overtook Canada and Australia in per capita wealth. Which fell in a swoon for progressive politicians, for juntas, for Juan and Eva Perón, for Leopoldo Galtieri, and now for a woman named Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, promising things no government can deliver. A nation that trashed itself, repeatedly, now dreams again of restoring pride, by finally conquering the "Malvinas" - and appropriating all their oil and gas. 30 years ago, the war ended not badly. The Argentine dictatorship destroyed itself; Margaret Thatcher rose from oblivion in Britain. But we learned some terrible things: the power of an Exocet missile (precursor to the Chinese Yingji) to thread the defences of any ship. The easy sinking of the Belgrano ("Gotcha!" to the tabloid press), full of the ketchup from 323 mostly conscripted human souls. No cause is ever permanently lost, including the worst causes. A mature Argentine electorate would no more take interest in seizing the Falklands after 18 decades of continuous British habitation, than a mature Canadian electorate would fuss over the status of St. Pierre and Miquelon. Those islands belong to the French; and maybe they have hydrocarbons, but so what? Ditto with protecting our fish: we can probably hash it out with Paris. It begins with acknowledging things as they are, with who owns what, and trades on the table. Civilized men are traders not raiders. They understand property. But in the end they become rich and vain. They assume transient things are immortal. They forget the hunger of the savage. Argentina is full of civilized men and women, as every other settled nation, under "normal" circumstances. But the siren cry of the demagogue crosses boundaries in the human brain. One thinks back to the huge crowds in the Plaza de Mayo, hopping up and down for Galtieri. Of the Peronist crowds hopping in a generation before that. Of the fresh crowds, getting ready to hop, for another round of national self-destruction. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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