Bald Men and Combs
April 2 2012
IT is thirty years to the day since Argentina, led by a drunken general by the name of Galtieri, invaded the remnant British colony of the Falkland Islands nearly 300 miles off its eastern coast. In the end, it turned out to be a stroke of luck for Margaret Thatcher, who was easily the least popular Prime Minister on record at the time after three years hectoring feckless voters and fellow Cabinet members into agreeing a programme of tax and spending cuts that eventually condemned Britain’s industrial north to a long and agonising decline.
She launched a naval mission that most believed to be reckless and ended up prolonging her career and burnishing her reputation both at home and abroad, giving her the impetus to embark on an even more radical path in the subsequent years. Still, most pundits concede the irony that Thatcher’s 1981 defence spending review could easily have doomed the islands’ 1,500 or so British settlers. If the Argentine junta had waited just another few months, vital taskforce vessels – the aircraft carriers Hermes and Invincible and the assault ships Fearless and Intrepid – would have been on the scrapheap or sold to the Aussies.
As it turned out, the Argentine military was even more moribund and inefficient than ours. Many of its explosives failed to detonate and Britain managed to retake the islands with surprising speed and with relatively few casualties . But by now, even Thatcher’s friendliest biographers accept the conflict was a Pyrrhic victory fought primarily for honour and burdening Britain with the upkeep and defence of a remote territory some 3,000 miles away from our own with no feasible opportunity to reach the sort of negotiated settlement with Buenos Aires that most thought necessary, and committing it to decades of inflated naval budgets.
Some point out that the burden is not as onerous as first imagined, with the economy in the islands stronger than it has ever been, largely as a result of the global explosion in sushi demand. Britain’s foothold in the Falklands could also give it access to the South Atlantic’s substantial oil and gas reserves, though developing them will be politically challenging.
Borges didn’t invent the phrase, but he popularised it: as far as moral credentials are concerned, this really was (and is) two bald men fighting over a comb. Bearing in mind what happened to native populations in North and South America, the descendants of the conquistadors should be especially careful about criticising British “colonialism” in los Malvinas. The British settlers were there long before Argentina even existed as a country, and they didn’t (in this case) have to wipe out an indigenous population. But this sort of argument is always futile and usually illogical. Such claims tend to involve centuries of complex and ambivalent history that bear no relation to the situation as it stands.
What matters, surely, is not what history says but what the local population wants, and the Falkland Islanders are unanimous. If we are only allowed to lay claim to the territories that happened to be held by our distant ancestors, regardless of what has happened in the meantime, then perhaps we all ought to be repatriated to the Congo. If we are all to be judged by the “original sins” of our nation’s founders, then we are all colonialists and ethnic cleansers and no one anywhere in the world would deserve a home at all.
