The Falklands 25 Years Later.
- Thread starter Stanley Edwards
- Start date
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Belushi said:
In the event, the Argentine air force wasn't that effective.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
fela fan to my mind war occurs when peaceful diplomacy and politics have failed when the diplomats and politicians have failed in their duty to jaw jaw until their teeth fall out.
Could strong relations with the Falklands and with Argentina have prevented them invading the Falklands at all, I think it might have. After all the Spanish would if they are honest like to have Gibralta back but because of the strong relations between Spain and Great Britain they are simply not going to try anything military to achieve this because Spain and Great Britain are friends. Had Argentina and Great Britain been friends they might not have invaded the Falklands, people do not attack friends.
Hitler however, how could he have been stopped by jaw jaw? he seemed hell bent on creating a Nazi empire, could we have been friends with him and prevented war? I am not so sure.
What about the Scandinavian countries? what about Switzerland? how do they as countries live their lives?
Could strong relations with the Falklands and with Argentina have prevented them invading the Falklands at all, I think it might have. After all the Spanish would if they are honest like to have Gibralta back but because of the strong relations between Spain and Great Britain they are simply not going to try anything military to achieve this because Spain and Great Britain are friends. Had Argentina and Great Britain been friends they might not have invaded the Falklands, people do not attack friends.
Hitler however, how could he have been stopped by jaw jaw? he seemed hell bent on creating a Nazi empire, could we have been friends with him and prevented war? I am not so sure.
What about the Scandinavian countries? what about Switzerland? how do they as countries live their lives?
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
MikeMcc said:
The numbers of Argentine dead to British dead, if you please. I think you'll find that the Argentines came out worse - non? Unless there is something that you're not telling us....
The Argentine Air Force was/is much smaller than that of the RAF.
likesfish
You can't park here sir
fortunately we'd sold the argies the bombs that failed to set the torry canyon oil slick alight 
also to avoid air defenses they had to fly so low the bombs had no time fuze.
after the belgrano the argie navy played no further part half the argie casualties were on that ship
also to avoid air defenses they had to fly so low the bombs had no time fuze.
after the belgrano the argie navy played no further part half the argie casualties were on that ship
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Belushi said:I thought that was the French
So did I.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Aye, well that's capitalism for you.
Not in relation to the number of aircraft that were sent down there. Comparing the number of aircraft in theatre, the British were out-numbered but had more capable aircraft.nino_savatte said:
The majority of the Argentines killed were due to the land battles and the sinking of the Belgrano. A significant portion of the British dead were due to air operations (HMS Sheffield, Atlantic Conveyor, and the Sir Galahad). That also highlights the point that you made though about the differnce in the standards of the land forces.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
MikeMcc said:
Aye, the British did have more capable, if not more technologically advanced, aircraft, which gave it the advantage over the Argentines.
All of this for a couple of shitty rocks in the South Atlantic.
dylanredefined
Not a house elf a tiger
Not the rocks the people ,And giving a fascist regime a kicking ,Pitied we used pinochet to help ,but,needs must .Actually had some of the officers responsible for crimes in their dirty war in captivity unfortunatly geneva convention said we could not send them to trial .
.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
fela fan said:
?
and yet ...
fela fan said:
Well, this is one of the lessons to be learnt.
By commemorating the Falklands we can open a discussion about the motives of those who "started" it, to those (like me) who are too young to have been involved in any debate at the time it was happening. And it's also useful to revisit these things with a bit of hindsight and knowledge about issues that may not have been obvious at the time.
Over the past few days I've done a fair bit of reading about the Falklands (on here and elsewhere) as a result of the upcoming commemoration / anniversary. I think that's a healthy thing.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
nino_savatte said:
Maybe if more people learned more about the lessons of history (on both sides) we would be witnessing less violence.
nino_savatte said:
Sometimes, perhaps. Although, at the beginning, there was a lot more popular support than there is now - albeit based on false information.
The more opposed the population is, the less likely the state is to ignore them. And the more aware they are of past disasters the more likely they are to be opposed. And one way of making sure people are aware of past disasters is to commemorate them.
nino_savatte said:
There may occasionally be a justification (or need) for self-defense, though, unfortunately.
Sadly, although war is definitely "bad" , it's not always a viable choice not to become involved.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
dylanredefined said:Not the rocks the people ,And giving a fascist regime a kicking ,Pitied we used pinochet to help ,but,needs must .Actually had some of the officers responsible for crimes in their dirty war in captivity unfortunatly geneva convention said we could not send them to trial
You mean the people that hardly anyone outside the FCO were aware of (the majority of the British public had never even heard of the Falkland Islands until 1982).
IIRC, the garrison at Port Stanley numbered around 20 or so marines before the hostilities, so it was hardly considered important until the Argentine invasion.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Ah, bless.
weltweit said:
But weltweit, you have to go back further in the chain. Why was this 'peaceful diplomacy' needed in the first place?
My simple and short answer is that diplomacy and politics is defaulted on lies, the former are nice sweet lies, the latter blatant criminal ones.
War is a game between politicians and political-minded people. It just so happens that because they're a nasty cowardly bunch of people, and so they get us, the real people, to do their bidding.
It's not wars we have to fight off out of our humankind, it's politicians. They are the scourge of our planet.
Leaders vs peoples in my book. Stop commemmorating war, it just continues the political monster that we have developed to organise ourselves. Us people need to assert ourselves over the political criminal class.
teuchter said:
Fair point, but i hope it's good historical objective stuff you've been reading...!
The single lesson that people need to learn about all wars is that they are created by political masters. They divide us, then rule us. Nationality, race, religion, are their methods to divide us.
Wars are their games, not ours.
We are told war is an inevitability. This is bollocks, and the moment enough of the world's peoples get this (critical mass), then we start to reign in the criminals running our countries.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
likesfish
You can't park here sir
Why The Falkland Islands will never be Argentine
By Professor Carlos Escude
2003
It is sufficient to talk to any Buenos Aires cabdriver to understand that the Argentine people know that the Falkland Islands will not be ‘recovered’ by Argentina. The only locals who appear not to understand this basic fact of life are a group of war veterans, a small bunch of nationalist fundamentalists, and practically the entire lot of Argentine politicians.
Needless to say, however, in so doing the politicians are cheating and lying. The great majority of these politicians know that the Falklands will not be Argentine again, but they choose not to acknowledge this for fear of losing votes.
Indeed, within Argentina’s ‘political class’ there are two types of lies regarding the Falklands: the benign and the malign ones. The Falklands discourse of the late foreign minister Guido Di Tella was plagued with paradigmatic examples of ‘benign lies’. He wanted Argentines to believe that Argentina was going to recover the Falkland Islands through peaceful means, ‘seducing’ the Islanders while accumulating a sufficient number of national successes so as to actually make it convenient for the average Islander to accept Argentine sovereignty. Di Tella did not accept the Islanders’ right to self-determination, but he was conscious of the fact that if Argentina did not succeed in making itself an attractive country, it would be impossible to get the British Government and Parliament to accept a transfer of sovereignty.
This type of lie is benign because the costs of failure, to Argentina, are low. Di Tella’s Christmas cards to the Falklands population will be remembered in Falkland history as the eccentric gesture of a well-meaning official who represented a neighbouring country that once threatened the Islanders. The most important cost of this type of lie is the attempt to deceive the Argentines themselves. Because the Argentines already know intuitively that the Falklands will not be theirs again, this lie leads to an increase in the disillusionment of the Argentine people vis-a-vis a political class that is chronically dedicated to the ignoble art of lying.
Contrariwise, the ‘malign lie’ consists of claiming that Argentina will recover the Islands if it adopts a ‘tough’ policy. Most politicians from both major political parties, as well as many professional diplomats, engage in this type of lie, even if they are somewhat subdued with the present economic and political crisis of Argentina. Crisis notwithstanding, however, when it comes to issuing opinions about the Falklands they will usually agree that to attempt to ‘seduce’ is a waste of time, that the Islanders must be disregarded, and that the costs to Britain of not transferring sovereignty to Argentina must be increased.
This is a malign, arrogant, macho-type lie because it propounds a policy of confrontation that, if implemented, would be dreadfully costly to Argentina herself, and would never succeed in recovering what was lost as far aback as 1833, and which the war of 1982 made irrecoverable.
This second type of lie is also perversely naive. It proposes to increase the British costs of remaining in the Falklands, without taking account of the fact that in order to increase the British costs one much augment the argentine costs, and without realising that Britain has infinitely more economic, diplomatic and military resources than Argentina. There is no way of making Britain ‘spend more’ without Argentina herself spending more as well. And the increased British costs will always represent a much smaller percentage of total British resources, than the increased Argentine costs vis-à-vis total Argentine resources. Thus, increasing the British costs of not transferring sovereignty is necessarily a worse deal for Argentina than for Britain. And last but not least, these increased costs to Argentina will be felt much more dramatically by Argentina’s increasingly poor masses, than by the well-off elites who would profit emotionally and politically from such a reckless policy.
Whey then is this malign lie consistently repeated when the issue of the Falklands is debated? The answer would appear to be that, in Argentina, a perverse political dynamics is at work whereby professional politicians fear that to say the ‘painful’ truth about the Falklands (ie. that they will never again be Argentine) will make them lose votes to politicians who continue to engage in the fantasy that the Islands will be recovered. If politician A admits publicly that the Falklands will not be recovered, he or she will lose votes to politician B, who by continuing with the lie will succeed in reaping political profits from primitive popular emotions.
The end result, of course, is to the detriment of the country itself. But when politicians consistently sell their souls to the popular vote, that is of little or no import.
The author Professor Carlos Escude is a member of the Argentine National Council of Scientific Research and an academic at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires
By Professor Carlos Escude
2003
It is sufficient to talk to any Buenos Aires cabdriver to understand that the Argentine people know that the Falkland Islands will not be ‘recovered’ by Argentina. The only locals who appear not to understand this basic fact of life are a group of war veterans, a small bunch of nationalist fundamentalists, and practically the entire lot of Argentine politicians.
Needless to say, however, in so doing the politicians are cheating and lying. The great majority of these politicians know that the Falklands will not be Argentine again, but they choose not to acknowledge this for fear of losing votes.
Indeed, within Argentina’s ‘political class’ there are two types of lies regarding the Falklands: the benign and the malign ones. The Falklands discourse of the late foreign minister Guido Di Tella was plagued with paradigmatic examples of ‘benign lies’. He wanted Argentines to believe that Argentina was going to recover the Falkland Islands through peaceful means, ‘seducing’ the Islanders while accumulating a sufficient number of national successes so as to actually make it convenient for the average Islander to accept Argentine sovereignty. Di Tella did not accept the Islanders’ right to self-determination, but he was conscious of the fact that if Argentina did not succeed in making itself an attractive country, it would be impossible to get the British Government and Parliament to accept a transfer of sovereignty.
This type of lie is benign because the costs of failure, to Argentina, are low. Di Tella’s Christmas cards to the Falklands population will be remembered in Falkland history as the eccentric gesture of a well-meaning official who represented a neighbouring country that once threatened the Islanders. The most important cost of this type of lie is the attempt to deceive the Argentines themselves. Because the Argentines already know intuitively that the Falklands will not be theirs again, this lie leads to an increase in the disillusionment of the Argentine people vis-a-vis a political class that is chronically dedicated to the ignoble art of lying.
Contrariwise, the ‘malign lie’ consists of claiming that Argentina will recover the Islands if it adopts a ‘tough’ policy. Most politicians from both major political parties, as well as many professional diplomats, engage in this type of lie, even if they are somewhat subdued with the present economic and political crisis of Argentina. Crisis notwithstanding, however, when it comes to issuing opinions about the Falklands they will usually agree that to attempt to ‘seduce’ is a waste of time, that the Islanders must be disregarded, and that the costs to Britain of not transferring sovereignty to Argentina must be increased.
This is a malign, arrogant, macho-type lie because it propounds a policy of confrontation that, if implemented, would be dreadfully costly to Argentina herself, and would never succeed in recovering what was lost as far aback as 1833, and which the war of 1982 made irrecoverable.
This second type of lie is also perversely naive. It proposes to increase the British costs of remaining in the Falklands, without taking account of the fact that in order to increase the British costs one much augment the argentine costs, and without realising that Britain has infinitely more economic, diplomatic and military resources than Argentina. There is no way of making Britain ‘spend more’ without Argentina herself spending more as well. And the increased British costs will always represent a much smaller percentage of total British resources, than the increased Argentine costs vis-à-vis total Argentine resources. Thus, increasing the British costs of not transferring sovereignty is necessarily a worse deal for Argentina than for Britain. And last but not least, these increased costs to Argentina will be felt much more dramatically by Argentina’s increasingly poor masses, than by the well-off elites who would profit emotionally and politically from such a reckless policy.
Whey then is this malign lie consistently repeated when the issue of the Falklands is debated? The answer would appear to be that, in Argentina, a perverse political dynamics is at work whereby professional politicians fear that to say the ‘painful’ truth about the Falklands (ie. that they will never again be Argentine) will make them lose votes to politicians who continue to engage in the fantasy that the Islands will be recovered. If politician A admits publicly that the Falklands will not be recovered, he or she will lose votes to politician B, who by continuing with the lie will succeed in reaping political profits from primitive popular emotions.
The end result, of course, is to the detriment of the country itself. But when politicians consistently sell their souls to the popular vote, that is of little or no import.
The author Professor Carlos Escude is a member of the Argentine National Council of Scientific Research and an academic at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires
rekil
to menny cranks
Some perspective. Nearly 1000 people died for the 'freedom' of 1000 people 8000 miles away on some shithole nobody had heard of where they did not even have full citizenship. This allowed the tories to get re-elected and accelerate their war, the real war, against the working class, gutting communities, stripping workers of rights and introducing, with no shortage of violence, an era of privatisation, untrammeled greed and an anti-social fuck you attitude that became a virtue.likesfish said:
weltweit
Well-Known Member
fela fan said:
Diplomacy is the business of talking, of being polite, of having good manners according to the situation you find yourself in, of seeking solutions to the small disputes and moral dilemmas that we all face by talking through the issues and compromising, without resort to violence.
Diplomacy is entering the shop and being civil with the shop keeper and paying for the goods that you want rather then entering the shop with a weapon and stealing by force.
Diplomacy is taking the time to get to know your neighbours and to make friends with them because we all know that people do not attack their friends.
Diplomacy is what peaceful people and groups of people have always done amongst themselves and it could be described as civlised.
fema fan you say that diplomacy is founded on lies, but I could also argue that tact is founded on lies, yet tact I would argue like diplomacy is a requirement for peacefull human relations.
fela fan said:
War initially imho is the taking of things by force (Ghengis Khan, Hitler, Galtieri, Saddam), war is also the ultimate argument in a dispute (Iraq2), war is the tool that leaders who want an empire use to get it but war is also obscenity and death. War is not glorious.
What else could we have done in WW2 than fight? Hitler was like a ruthless expansionist Roman emperor, or a Mongul, Hitler wanted to build a Nazi empire.
What else could we have done after Galtieri invaded the Faulklands than fight?
What else could the USA have done after 9/11 than retaliate and attack the Taliban / Al Queda?
fela fan said:
For me commemorating the dead is a different thing. My parents were in WW2 and they commemorated the dead because the dead were their friends, you are almost suggesting that people should not go to the rememberance services held for their friends.
I can understand your dislike of our leaders and politicians in general but I would argue that even if we lived in much smaller groups, perhaps family or tribe groups, or even individual streets, there would still be such things as leaders and diplomacy and tact and on some rare occasions there would be such a thing as war.
When I was a youth there were mods and rockers and every weekend at the English seaside, there was war.
As individuals we always have the option to be diplomatic, and most all of the people of the world living today in all their different conditions are in fact very skilled diplomats, we can be, as mentioned, diplomatic with the shop keeper diplomatic with the family that live on the end of the street whose children have been causing us trouble diplomatic with the people that are different sexually, racially, age groups etc to us and nearly all the time we are.
I like to compare the macro to the micro.
I am my own state, I am my own society, I am my own parliament in the space between my ears, my very thoughts compete with each other for supremacy, I am completely democratic and legitimate in every action that I take, I am diplomatic, tactfull and I am civilised, but I am also my own armed forces, I am not a complete pacifist, and if needs be I will defend my kith and kin.
I suspect fela fan that you are the same.
Politicians and political leaders are arrogant by default, no one becomes a politician unless they have some belief that their solutions for the rest of us are superior to the solutions we ourselves can produce. They are no better than we but they think they are and this is especially true of political leaders, they think their leadership can provide better solutions than the people can provide on their own.
I am all for small government not big government, I know how to look after my family, friends and neighbours and I do not need meddlers in parliament to interfere with every detail of my life. Unfortunately at the moment GB politicians are meddling a lot and there is also no choice as New Labour and Conservative are, bar their colours, the very same parties but still government in the main is irrelevant to my life the only pain is that they take so much money from me because they obviously know better how to spend my money than I do.
I will not fight in the wars of my national government they are not my fight. I will not dedicate my working life to build more effective daisy cutters, cluster bombs, nuclear devices, land mines, chemical or biological weapons but I know that others will because others believe in such things and there is little I can do about that.
In all honesty I would prefer that my country, if I have to belong to one at all, were more like the Scandinavians, modern Germans, or the Swiss than as warlike as Great Britain seems to be.
Why should I fear a bearded caveman from Afhanistan/Saudi? I have done nothing to him and he has done nothing to me. I do not fear him, but my government, my nation does. How did he become the enemy of my national government, and how did we become his enemy?
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
likesfish said:
Nice cut and paste. Got a source for this?
Mrs Magpie
On a bit of break...
teuchter
je suis teuchter
fela fan said:
on U75? I doubt it! But a bit of subjective-ish stuff from various different viewpoints is better than nothing.
fela fan said:
Is this good historical objective stuff?
Seems like a wee bit of an oversimplification to me. But true to an extent.
The thing is, that even if you do accept that "lesson", what is the correct response when you are the ones being attacked and not the ones doing the attacking?
likesfish said:there was a plaque up in falklands hq claiming to be a quote from a royalmarine stationed there in 1700s to the extent that its the most god forsaken spot on the planet
It looks like the worst part of mid-Wales dumped in the South Atlantic.
I wonder what theyre suicide rate is like? I'd go fucking mental.
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