A Brief Follow-up by the Guest Writer of the Previous Post
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Since 1982, the diplomatic position of the British state on the Falklands-Malvinas sovereignty issue has deteriorated markedly from an already weak condition.
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Britain no longer has any support among the countries of Latin America.
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The US does not recognise Britain’s sovereignty claim and has been urging Britain to enter into discussions with Argentina on the sovereignty issue.
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Russia has questioned Britain’s claims and senior politicians have highlighted the brazen hypocrisy of Britain’s stance on the issue of self determination for the people of Crimea.
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China unequivocally backs Argentina’s sovereignty claims.
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The EU currently takes no position on the sovereignty issue but accepts Britain’s de facto administration of the Falklands-Malvinas on the basis of solidarity among member states, despite having a number of member states with profound and undisguised sympathy with Argentina’s claims. Surely, even this position of neutrality will disintegrate post-Brexit.
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Currently, the only countries I have been able to identify that continue to support the British arguments are Canada and Taiwan. (The latter for very obvious and self-serving reasons, Jac.)
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This must surely be the time for Wales, Scotland and Ireland to use the next meeting of the British-Irish Council to join the international consensus in urging the British state to commence discussions with Argentina immediately on the Falklands-Malvinas sovereignty issue.
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Jac adds . . . Until I started looking for links for this piece I hadn’t realised myself just how isolated Britain now is on the issue.
While digging I also came across the recently broken story that Israel had supplied Argentina with weapons during the war. Hardly surprising perhaps, given that Buenos Aires has one of the largest Jewish communities outside of Israel. So with Jewish boys in the conscript army we should not be surprised by this revelation.
Though many of the accounts I read, including the one linked to, personalise it by attributing the decision to Israel’s prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, who had fought against the British in the late 1940s. He was even quoted as having invoked the name of an old Irgun comrade hanged by the British by way of justification.
Other reports of this revelation inevitably described Begin as a ‘terrorist’, which got me to thinking . . . Why is it that all my life I have heard people around the world described as terrorists by the British media and British politicians – did these people come to England and terrorise people?
Of course not, these ‘terrorists’ – De Valera, Kenyatta, Grivas and all the rest – were in their own countries, defending their own peoples. Theirs was a fight against imperialism. Yet the British/English interpretation is that the empire was benevolence manifest, consequently only unhinged terrorists could want to break the imperial connection.
With the empire gone and England becoming isolationist the focus has changed, now the ‘enemy’ is anyone who isn’t English. Anyone who is different, and that includes us Welsh, unless of course we submit to the will of the xenophobes and reject everything that makes us Welsh. For in the new dispensation, to stand up for Wales and Welshness is to be an intolerant and divisive nationalist (© T. May).
This new and ugly Englishness, and all its ranting prophets and hangers-on – particularly those in Wales – must be treated with a combination of contempt and ridicule. And if that fails, then we must do to them as they do to others and shout them down.
This is no time to retreat to the moral high ground. Fight fire with fire.
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