England-Argentina Game Thread

The year after I graduated from college, I taught English in South Korea. There, I noticed that a lot of the drink cans had pictures of these random rocks in the ocean. Finally, I either asked what was up or someone just told me. See, these rocks were owned by Japan. But by God, those should be KOREAN ROCKS! Now, these rocks were useless. It’s not like you could have a port on them. No one lived there. But how dare Japan own these rocks!!! Nationalism takes weird forms and so do land claims with extremely dubious histories. Koreans have a lot of reasons to be resentful of Japan of course, but this was totally ridiculous. I do get national resentments where your nation once had land and it was lost in a war. I once saw a statue on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca expressing what would happen when that nation eventually reclaimed its path to the sea stolen by Chile in some distant war of the 19th century. It showed Bolivian soldiers shoving their bayonets through the throats of Chileans with a ton of blood spurting out. Bolivian iconography is full of blood, even more than the rest of Latin America, which says a lot about their history. Evidently, owning the Port of Antofagasta would bring Bolivia massive prosperity or something. Sure, OK.

Anyway, all of this is how I feel about Argentine claims to the Falklands, or Malvinas as they are called in Argentina. There has effectively never been Argentines living on these islands, 300 miles east of Patagonia. Very briefly, the nation had a governor out there. But there’s not a colonized Argentine population there. Nearly the entire population is of British descent. They are sheepfarmers on rough land that has effectively no military value and very little economic value. And there is essentially 0 people who live in the Falklands who want to be Argentines.

Now, we know of the Falklands because of the idiotic and disastrous war the Argentine dictatorship started against the British in 1982. Do you know what it takes to make the government of Margaret Thatcher be clearly in the right? Yeah, it takes the fascists of the Argentine dictatorship trying to prop up their failing government by engaging in a nationalist war they had no chance to win. At least 907 people died in this idiocy, so that’s just great.

So maybe you blow this off because, well, it was Galtieri and his military idiots. That’s kind of what I thought. Then I visited Argentina last month. And Argentines are as obsessed by the “Malvinas” as Koreans are with those damn rocks in the Sea of Japan (or “East Sea” as Koreans insist it is called). And it’s not just in right-wing spaces either. There’s a Peron-tribute bar. It’s kind of amazing. It not only plays up Juan and, of course, Evita, but left-wingers in contemporary Latin American politics–Chavez, Castro, Morales, etc. Not to mention the Kirchners. And there, what is prominently displayed so everyone can see it? A big outline of the Falklands. Also, the Peron bar has its own beer and I have to say, it’s absolutely the worst beer I had on my trip, very much 70s era Peron quality, not that good early 50s Peronism.

I really wish I had gone to the Malvinas Museum now, which I avoided because I was tired and emotionally exhausted after visiting ESMA, the museum to the Argentine disappearance victims, which this other museum in next to. But I saw it and there’s a lot more money behind this than ESMA, that’s obvious from the very fancy structure.

Based on this complete nationalist idiocy, I have no choice but to root for the English today.