12. It breaks two to tangle: constructing and deconstructing bridges

Bernard McGuirk

Ever-unfinished business

Books can be the blocks of bridge-building. As for the mortar and the steel, the design and the engineering, metaphors might not suffice. As a result of Falklands–Malvinas: An Unfinished Business, which was published on 2 April 2007 and launched on the 25th anniversary of the conflict in the South Atlantic, I have been invited consistently to reach beyond the role of commentator on the literary and cultural reactions to and consequences of that sad war to assume a role not unfamiliar in the climes of my ostensible expertise in the Castilian- and Portuguese-speaking countries of Europe and Latin America. Quite commonly there it is expected that an author or speaker on however esoteric a topic might step beyond an announced remit and express opinions thence to be (mis)quoted in press and sound media, whether out of respect, local interest or, it must be said, for manipulative political purposes. Yet caveat emptor can work both ways. For I have often gained, be it in knowledge, from weighing differing views and opinions, via introductions to other specialists from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, or through privileged access to informed sectors on both sides of the Atlantic, more than I have lost through calculated or accidental misrepresentation. At the time of researching for and writing the book, I had little idea that I was pioneering an approach to ‘unfinished business’, the terms of a subtitle that have grown ever-more relevant to Anglo-Argentine and other relations in the intervening decade.

The arrival at the London Embassy of the Argentine Republic in early 2012 of Ambassador Alicia Castro, after a nearly four-year hiatus, inspired a notable dimension of dialogue and influence in the area and perspective from which I have written in my capacity as president of the then International Consortium for the Study of Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation (ICSP-CRR), since 2015 the International Consortium for the Study of Post-Conflict Societies (ICSP-CS). It is my purpose here to meditate somewhat less, and predictably, on pertinent developments in the political and diplomatic relations between Argentina and the United Kingdom, but rather more on intellectual and cultural issues and challenges in a rapidly changing climate of international communications strategies and cross-disciplinary discourses and debates. In the aftermath of the November 2015 elections that brought to power the coalition, led by Mauricio Macri, called Cambiemos [Let’s Change] and the first non-Peronist government for twelve years, the very term ‘reconciliation’ has been thrown further into, and will no doubt be used pragmatically or dubiously in, a different light. But one instance of the shifting discourses that will challenge, if not invalidate, some of my reflections, pursued as they were initially at a juncture of resonant transition from the presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is the very word ‘reconciliation’, which already and predictably had been re-appropriated:

To such issues I shall return in a now necessary updating of a no less unfinished, unfinishing, coda.

The neat, and often conveniently separate, corridors of power and non-power wherein and whereby entities such as political parties, governments, embassies, the military, the judiciary or other legal authorities conduct their respective affairs have been paced and populated, perforce though not consistently, by specialists astute enough to look and consult beyond their discrete and ordered realms. Today, such professionals must also be not least attentive to unalleviated media power and the ever-less-controllable internet and its unmanageable social media off-shoots, whether within or, increasingly, beyond the rule and reach of laws national and international.

Alert, it may be presumed, to the plurality of interests, points of view, approaches and expertise across a broad range of disciplines and specialists, Ambassador Castro soon made her mark not only in the time-honoured manner of testing the waters of diplomacy but also by dipping the toe into the often-unfathomed currents of academe and its tributaries. As author of Falklands–Malvinas: An Unfinished Business, I found myself not only invited to meet with academics, journalists, trade unionists as well as politicians and diplomats with a long-standing interest in and commitment to the affairs, history, politics, literature and culture of Argentina but also, reciprocally, hosting the ambassador at one of the annual colloquia of the International Consortium. Here, participants could observe from the outset, was a listening as well as an articulate presence, more than able to explain and defend her own and her government’s stance. At the ICSP-CRR colloquium Anglo-Argentine Relations 1982–2012 in May 2012, ex-military veterans from both Argentina and the United Kingdom, international lawyers, media specialists, historians, cultural critics and psychiatrists from the fields of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma treatment spent several days together in the spirit of looking beyond respected differences towards necessary and inevitable pressures for reconciliation and negotiation. The 2012 colloquium, far from being the first coming together of Argentine and British colleagues, in the company of, variously, specialist professionals from Norway and Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the USA, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, was a successor to the momentous meeting of November 2006 when, for the first time, ex-combatant veterans from both sides and representatives of universities and research institutions worldwide had met in what was to culminate in Hors de Combat: The Falklands–Malvinas Conflict Twenty-Five Years On (2007) and in a second, extended, edition Hors de Combat The Falklands–Malvinas Conflict in Retrospect (2009), jointly edited by Commander (ret.) Diego García Quiroga and Major (ret.) Mike Seear. On a yearly basis ever since, the International Consortium has sponsored the participation of its members in international colloquia throughout the United Kingdom or elsewhere, for example in Amsterdam, Bologna, Madrid, Lisbon, Coimbra, Paris, Lyon, Lille, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Córdoba, addressing various aspects of post-conflict studies with particular reference to the period since the 1982 South Atlantic conflict.

Under the auspices of Ambassador Castro and her colleagues at the London embassy, what had been previously the sometimes isolated activities of academic-led initiatives regularly involved open, frank and healthily uncensored encounters whereby opinions were exchanged, debated and measured to the benefit of all interests, vested or otherwise, at the very heart of Argentine representation. Uniquely, the enterprise of the embassy extended also to an overture whereby I was invited, in March 2013, to visit the Instituto del Servicio Exterior de la Nación of the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina and to conduct in Buenos Aires a day school for the 2012 and 2013 intakes of graduate trainee diplomats. The visit to ISEN, following indispensable orientation offered by embassy specialist advisors, was supplemented by consultations involving Ambassador Juan Valle Raleigh, Professors Franco Castiglioni and Diego Lawler and Counsellor Javier Binaghi with a six-strong ICSP-CRR deputation of academics, veterans and a BBC journalist in what was to be but a first step in such international exchanges. The ISEN experience was replicated in March 2015 by day schools conducted by the historian of the Spanish Civil War and the contemporary legacies of the Franco regime, including the controversies over current exhumations and the work of Judge Baltasar Garzón, Dr Gareth Stockey, Director of the ICSP-CS, and myself, for the 2014 and 2015 intakes of trainee diplomats. In the United Kingdom, a similar initiative took the form of an invitation for me to address, in May 2015, in the House of Lords, members of the South Atlantic Council, a body including academics, former diplomats, parliamentarians, and others with expertise in legal, commercial and business matters. These and other overtures, including invitations to the Copenhagen meeting of the NORDEFCO (Nordic Defence Cooperation) Veteran Conference in April 2014 and the Maison de l’Amérique Latine and Argentine embassy in Paris in October 2014 and April 2015 to debate with the recently appointed Minister Daniel Filmus (as ‘Secretario de Asuntos Relativos a las Islas Malvinas, Georgias del Sur y Sandwich del Sur’) and internationally concerned parties on the legacies of the 1982 war, are prominent instances of urgent encounters and exchanges organised mutually and via the good graces of a diplomacy imaginative enough to delve into the niceties and complexities not always or easily evinced in the often cliché-ridden media reporting of relations between Argentina and Britain. Alas, there remain stubborn if unexpected pockets of resistance to any reading, let alone analysis, of the past and the status quo, even when no hint of threat to respectively entrenched, albeit thoroughly re-examined, positions is proffered. An egregious instance deserves airing, in the form of a communication received 48 hours after the following press release on a film-screening and a debate in the Argentine embassy in London on 4 November 2015:

Texts in contexts

Deserves? … Nay. Demands: for the understanding of the right to self-expression of all, and of any text … in context:

Having been the principal agent of friendship with Edgardo Esteban, and the mover behind the attendance of fellow-commando ex-combatants at the Embassy event, David ‘Charlie’ Brown, Regional Co-ordinator (North) of SAMA (South Atlantic Medal Association), duly received and curtly responded to the copy of the message and correspondence:

To be continued? Meanwhile; … cano

Et canam: I record and shall record again that my role has been and will continue to be the bringing together not of ‘[my] friends’ but, for example, of British and other specialists not only on the perennially urgent issue for veteran ex-combatants of the conflict in 1982 and its legacies but also on the shifting preoccupations of Argentine society of the last forty years. Thus, the film maker Stuart Urban ( An Ungentlemanly Act (1992)), Jeremy McTeague (former Platoon Commander, D Company, 1st Batallion, 7th Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Rifles), Tessa Morrison (University of London), reflecting on the deleteriously gendered discourses of a machismo both military and civilian, and Niall Geraghty (then of the University of Cambridge), addressing the structural underpinnings of the ethical and moral issues arising from the state’s treatment of PTSD victims, joined me at the said event. None mentioned either sovereignty or self-determination. They were not ‘used for political purposes’.

Wherein lies the difference in the various open and closed stances taken? Let but a few examples stand for the kind of attitudes that, albeit with difficulty, will have to be recognised, confronted and overcome; for plus ça a changé. Mike Seear, Operations and Training Officer seconded to the 1st Battalion, 7th Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Rifles and who served with them throughout the war, author of With the Gurkhas in the Falklands: A War Journal (2003), in his book, Return to Tumbledown: The Falklands–Malvinas War Revisited (2012), reports tellingly, in respect of Falklands–Malvinas: an Unfinished Business, as follows:

Of his most recent visit to the Islands, Seear continues:

The de facto censorship called fear – fear of words, of hyphens, of bridge building – prompts the question: can entrenched positions change? The news of the appointment in the Islands to the post of the government’s public relations media manager of Krysteen Ormond was strikingly relevant. She could be expected to carry out her duties with a high degree of professionalism, yet with a singular advantage. As an ICSP-CRR member, at the 2012 colloquium and subsequently, as the author of an original and impressively objective study of the sometimes surprising reactions of the Islanders to the respective occupation and re-occupation of their place and space between April and June 1982, she was able to meet, exchange views or share a platform with Ambassador Castro and her colleagues. Informed knowledge and mutual respect, deriving from such encounters as those inspired by the International Consortium, must be the keynote of any and all successful representation and negotiation. By the same token, it cannot be sufficient, intellectually, let alone politically, for such as an Argentine foreign secretary (Héctor Timerman) visiting the United Kingdom with the expressed intention of pursuing negotiations over ‘Las Malvinas’ to strike poses of the variety that there is no such thing as a Falkland Islander in the same breath as refusing to meet with a deputation on the grounds that the so-called non-existent party was present.

On goals and own goals

Whenever populism conspicuously rises to ‘nod home’, in football parlance, one might as well draw on the love-hate discourses of soccer fans since it is long established that the English admire Argentine football and footballers, never more so than now when the Premier League benefits from imported talents and the unprecedented effects of having the all-time lowest percentage of home-grown players available to represent the national team. Sic transit the uncontrollable economy of neoliberal open-market thinking: but to the diminishing power and influence of publically reluctant whilst privately compliant sovereignties one must return in respect of current Anglo-Argentine relations and the need to penetrate intrusive posturing in order to confront realpolitik. Thus, and reinforcing the challenge to any and all sovereign governments attempting to control events that can suddenly undermine the best efforts of politicians, diplomats and others in respect of reconstruction, communication and negotiation, two recent cases spring to mind. In retrospect, after the BBC’s eventual sacking of Jeremy Clarkson for the insulting of and physical attack on a producer colleague, it might be too easy to forget or underestimate the offence and hurt caused by Top Gear’s prank in Patagonia. Most attention revolved around the intentionality or otherwise of the H982FKL number plate: to be or not to be 1982 Falklands … that is the question. Whether ’tis (ig)nobler in behind to suffer the open boot of mud slings and the arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune – a pair, one white, one yellow, of registration plates bearing (baring?) BE11 END? read by some as a second Clarkson cock-up enhanced by the Daily Mirror’s prolonged treatment on 8 October 2014: ‘We know bellend doesn’t mean the end of the bell and is a word used instead to describe the head of the penis which is often employed as an insult in England’. Was I stretching the point too far to detect and opine on an obscene reference to the END of the BEl grano? Fanciful; an absurdly semiotic over-reading … with one ‘l’ of a différance (it must be all that over-exposure to the world of post-structuralist French letters, they will have thought).

Anything goes when it comes to populist mud-slinging, whether it be the Sun’s sensationalist coverage on 4 May 2012 of what the Buenos Aires media described as a high-impact publicity stunt which showed Argentine hockey captain Fernando Zylberberg in different captions running past iconic Falklands–Malvinas landmarks and ended with the slogan: ‘To compete on English soil, training on Argentine soil’ (the video went viral); or the Daily Mail’s question on 20 November 2014, ‘Haven’t you got anything more urgent to deal with?’, as, scornfully, it reported: ‘Argentina has passed a new law stating that all public transport and stations must display the inflammatory words: “The Falklands are Argentina’s”’. Instances abound, but an underlying problem here is the irreconcilability – a form of the cliché ‘Lost in Translation’ – of national discourses (and I emphasise national as distinct from linguistic: the use of castellano rather than español in Argentina is an early lesson for the first-time visitor).

Overarching considerations

A sad alternative to constructive approaches to the business of imbalance in international affairs is to claim as un-negotiable a given position amidst the clamour and in the knowledge that important obtruding factors continue to be raised, bruited, exaggerated – or ignored. One lamentably unresolved issue has arisen as much from ignorance as from obduracy on both sides: the plight of veteran ex-combatants, many suffering from PTSD. Whether as principal investigator of the European Union-funded project A Lesson for Europe: Memory, Trauma and Reconciliation in Chile and Argentina (2014–17) or from discussions and debates in many an ICSP-CRR forum with members of the South Atlantic Medal Association 82, Combat Stress, Ex-Services Mental Welfare Society, meetings with ex-combatants from both the UK and Argentina, with Dr Eduardo Gerding, Medical Coordinator of the Malvinas War Veterans, and Esteban Vilgré La Madrid, Director General of the Centro de Salud ‘Veteranos de Malvinas’, I have encountered broad agreement and indignation over the neglect of those who have never recovered from the trauma of the ten-and-a-half-week war, not least in respect of the high incidence of suicides.

In encounters with numerous agencies and individuals such as Lars Weisaeth MD, world authority on the psycho-traumatology and psycho-social support aspects of war and major civil disasters, Cliff Caswell, former editor of the British Army’s Soldier magazine with its circulation of 90,000, and invitations to debate with Edgardo Esteban, a Malvinas veteran and author of the book and screenplay of Tristan Bauer’s Iluminados por el fuego, controversial enough to have incurred the wrath of certain Argentine military precisely because it deals with, for many of them, the taboo reality of ‘trastorno por estrés postraumático’ (TEPT) and the effects of depression and suicide on families and loved ones in an imposed post-conflict omertà culture of ‘Don’t talk about it’, I have become ever more aware of the still-unfathomed depths of the unfinished business of my initial concern. In Argentina, in radio and television interviews including a recent broadcast with Malvinas veteran and radio journalist Darío Squeff (‘el Turco’), or in discussions with Nora Hochbaum, Director of the Buenos Aires Parque de la Memoria, and a harrowing visit to the Córdoba Museo de la Memoria with ex-detainee Elena Pacheco Quiroga, who had sat through the juicios of such as Luciano Benjamín Menéndez (‘la Hiena’ of ‘I’d do it all again’ notoriety), one signal fact stands out. The keynote has ever been and is the urgent demand for the lifting of impunity for the torturers and murderers of a criminal regime and compensation for the victims of tortures suffered at the hands of their own military, not least in the light of President Cristina Kirchner’s final congressional address on March 2015, which reiterated public support for the veterans and their appeal to the Court of Latin American States. De eso no se habla is a metaphysics of absence that, because of present vociferations, is, however, slowly being erased.

And deconstructing? ... post-

A future – however unpredictable – is gleaned each and every time, for example, the refuting or lampooning of an untenable stance, a xenophobic posture, a populist claim, occurs. It is on such a note that I ‘un-finish’; for there cannot be an end-note. Of the many slants and topics that I have been invited to take up with regard to Anglo-Argentine relations, it has habitually been the gently tongue-in-cheek projection of political cartoons – also the subject of my forthcoming book It Breaks Two to Tangle: Political Cartoons of the Falklands–Malvinas War – that has brought smiles of (mutual) recognition on either side of the Atlantic. I thus revisit the selection deployed in October 2014 at the Maison d’Amérique Latine at the invitation of María del Carmen Squeff, Ambassador of the Argentine Republic to France.

Cartographies 1989 – annus mirabilis? Imaginary islands or ‘unas islas demasiado famosas’?

Figure 12.1. © Wallis and Baron 1989.

In the United Kingdom rhetoric, official or parodic, had produced, before the decade of the war was out, a re-mapping of The Known World of Broadcast News (Fig. 12.1). In the cover illustration of Roger Wallis and Stanley Baran’s 1989 analysis of the media representation of the political and cultural imaginary of the 1980s, the hilarious cartography of British neo-Weltanschauung reflected many a spacious conviction. Anglo-centric and nostalgic post-colonial consciousness of newsworthiness situated the power-blocks and the debris of ideological walls breached or still-to-be-stormed. Amidst the perceived threats of the inherited prejudices of an all-too unknown world – Brussels ever at the explosive epicentre of potential loss of sovereignty – were the floating islands of real and virtual danger. The ‘Malvinas’ remained in their proper place; the ‘Falklands’ had been invented only to be displaced; to occupy a notional space and preponderant role in the Atlantic-laden imagination of a nation still struggling with its reality as a post-imperial power. There where Empire was will figment be; epigraph to last-gasp colonialism.

Figure 12.2. United Kingdom overseas and crown dependencies, administrative divisions. © widespread open map scheme.

A cartography including the South Atlantic with its UK crown dependencies highlights the prescience of what might have been easily dismissed at the time as mere caricature in the depiction of the virtual floating islands of international news and electronic media analysis by Wallis and Baran (Fig. 12.1). What has shifted in the interim is a form of riposte, a move onto the strategic real, not the imaginary, qua the perception – like it or not – of now solidarity-driven South (even Latin) American and West (even South) African nations voicing aspirations to a demilitarised South Atlantic upon which their coastlines, their borders and their political interests touch. The point is too easily masked by such slanging matches as that prompted by the visit to London and the Canning House presentation in April 2015 by Argentine minister Daniel Filmus, his condemning of the UK’s decision to increase its military presence in the area and his outlining of the criminal lawsuit against oil companies he claimed to be illegally operating in the Malvinas and warning of the environmental risks implied; to which UK foreign secretary Philip Hammond responded by accusing Argentina of an outrageous piece of bullying in starting legal action against companies drilling for oil and gas near the Falkland Islands. Similarly obfuscating had been the immediately preceding (pre-election) tit-for-tat summoning of respective ambassadors to account for their nations’ stances in a Cold War style of heated demonstrations of indignation and counter-reaction. The underlying tensions cannot simply be indulged as if the period since the 1982 conflict had not changed the stakes and the relative uncontrollability of supra-sovereign interests. However, before updating the insights and impact of more recent political cartooning of UK and Argentine stances and war dances, it is instructive to recall ever-urgent shared or comparable preoccupations amidst a seemingly frozen scenario of conflicting interests. What, for instance, of the treatment, on both sides, in the post-official conflict era, of ex-combatants? By way of illustration of the theme of the veteran as a political embarrassment, I recall one of Steve Bell’s most celebrated, and controversial, early cartoons depicting the London Victory Parade of 12 October 1982 (Fig. 12.3).

Aporia … a robot and the clones.

Figure 12.3. © Steve Bell 1982 first published in The Guardian.

The march-past of the navy, army and Special Air Service (SAS) and the salute from the Union Jack-bedecked rostrum of Margaret Thatcher and her entourage of husband Denis, defence secretary John Nott and a Blimpish retired officer (with incongruously ‘Latin-length’ moustache) are the staple ingredients of Bell’s lampoon. The killer touch comes in the last panel when, after the parading clones of a steel-jawed, neck-bepearled Thatcher herself, and of her then and since notorious hard-line cabinet ministers of (un-) employment and (3Rs) education, respectively, Norman Tebbit (shouldered bicycle pump with limp connector in place of cocked rifle) and Rhodes Boyson (nail-pierced educator’s cane erect and at the ready) have trooped by, an uninvited and unexpected ambulance with bandaged driver and passenger joins the procession. The reaction of the PM is to cover with her left hand the gaze of the diminutive onlooker immediately to her right and, with her right hand, her own unblinking stare. Her trio of acolyte grandees follow suit. ‘¿Qué pasa?’ [What’s going on?], the uninvited Argentine might have asked. Lawrence Freedman’s account, in the ‘Thanksgiving’ chapter of his Official History of the Falklands Campaign, of the background to the victory parade in October 1982 offers the outsider looking in a clue: ‘A small pacifist demonstration made little impact: more upset was caused by an initial reluctance to allow wounded servicemen in their wheelchairs to have a prominent position’ (Freedman 2005, p. 664).

What was ‘going on’, whether for semiotically inclined Argentine analysts or exo[ce]tically cross-channel post-structuralist French neighbours, and, simply, in the common parlance much-vaunted by pragmatically empiricist Brits, is as explicable now as it was then clear. The little attendant – the omnipresent infernal machine of state – is a configuration of humanoid camera and gun: ‘The Panopticon of Bentham is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based. […] All that was needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower. [...] Visibility is a trap’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 200). Bell had introduced Margaret and Denis to ‘Robot’ but recently, on a ‘Far Eastern jaunt’. Impressed, she had had it imported, her ‘Think Tank’ tasked to come up with the year’s ‘catchphrase’ for the 1982 Conservative Party conference. It spewed out two possibilities: ‘either “Crawl, you scum” or “Next Stop, Oblivion”’. The prime minister had opted for the latter. Potential, however, in the crossing of the prime minister’s hands – blinding and self-blinding simultaneously – was an erasure of both the all-seeing panopticon and (wilfully) of its self-benighted supervisor; Bell’s prolepsis to post-Foucauldian critiques of the device’s effectiveness. More alarming, however, is the less embryonic prefiguration in the (herself ever-under-surveillance) orchestrator’s double-armed gesture of a malformed swastika, a sign to be read in consonance with the accompanying iconography of cloned, look-alike, storm-troopers, unapologetically visible as they march past, in contrast with the facially invisible but powerfully influential SAS.

Shifting attention across the Atlantic to the Argentine military dictatorship’s self-entrapment in emergency powers and the supposed need and efficacy of placing ‘a supervisor in a central tower’, during the ‘process of national reorganization’ period of 1976 to 1982, we might judge that, pace Michel Foucault, and supplementarily, ‘[in]visibility is a trap’:

Facially, indeed, brazenly visible and more than powerfully influential in turning its nation’s military apparatus on its own perceived ‘enemy within’ was the Argentine dictatorship of the proceso years. To cartoon the however recognisable perpetrators of state-authorised crime, however, was not a luxury left to victims, morituri …

Penguin plaza

Figure 12.4. © Montag Humor 1982.

Amidst the apparently unyielding post-conflict plethora of political, drum-beating, commemorative, nostalgic or vituperative re-evocations of the conflict in the South Atlantic in 1982, to revisit the imaginative representations of war has continued to foster an understanding of other predicaments, other needs and different cultures. Thus, for example, a British social imaginary suffused for more than two decades with the penguins and politicians of Steve Bell’s cartoons in The Guardian both sought and found its Argentine counterpart in the exterminated bravery of the censored and eventually shut-down satirical review Humor. In bringing to the fore caricatural depictions of and in conflict, to adopt an international comparative approach to cartoonists who later, and elsewhere, whether in the Gulf War, the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts, analysts have begun, at least, to come to terms with a ‘radically foreign’ self-in-other/other-in-self, so that we, too, confronting Jacques Derrida’s animots, are tempted ‘to envisage the existence of “living creatures” whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity’ (Derrida, 2002, p. 409). The pages of Humor, in the immediate post-conflict phase of mid-to-late 1982, abounded with released animo(t)sity. The demons of a repressed national psyche, however, as was soon to become clear, often bore an uncanny resemblance to those of the adversary. From the many striking cartoon representations of the Argentine magazine’s take on the recently ended conflict and on a continuing struggle with the still-sullied mind-cast of a far-from-finished dirty war, the cartoonist Montag’s transmogrification of a populace’s plight is chosen because of its adjacency to what was to become, in the UK and in The Guardian newspaper, Steve Bell’s foundational configuration of his more than a quarter-of-a-century critique of Thatcherism and its aftermath, ‘The Penguin’ and his matelot matey ‘Kipling’. As contemporary Argentina has been obliged to demand international recognition of the unending pain of the citizen-victims long ago evoked by the cartoonist and to come to terms with a ‘radically foreign’ self-in-other/other-in-self, we, too, and currently, d’après Derrida, are re-invited to assess the ‘figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity’.

Montag’s mock epigraph to his cartoon ‘Viva la vida’ [Long live life] reads: ‘“Las penas son de nosotros, los pingüinos son ajenos” (Cantito folklórico japonés)’ [‘The pains are our own, the penguins someone else’s’ (little Japanese folksong)] (Fig. 12.4). It lays the path for a distancing effect that, to the uninformed observer, might do little to contextualise, let alone explain, the ostensible disparity between the depiction of the military figure, a hardly disguised and ever-perplexed head of state, à la General Leopoldo Galtieri, ensconced in the Casa Rosada, initially disturbed, irritated and eventually uncomprehending in the face of the mass protest of an identifiably caricatured Plaza de Mayo. The banners and placards glimpsed through the window of the presidential office carry the familiar demands of a nation’s urgent need for survival, for legality and for a future freed from the fear of the disappearances either of loved ones or, even, of the selves of an abject body politic. What the dictator sees, however, when he can be bothered to look, is a population transfigured … for his is an exclusively Malvinas-coloured perspective on the relationship between government diktat and civil society. The dye, the dying and the many dead were cast by Montag’s imaginative vision of what is seen and yet not seen of the body politic, whether by yet another in a long line of self-blinding military presidents or by an on-guard common soldier blithely off-guard (perhaps because of over-familiarity) to the repression on which he turns his back but, at the same time, serves to enforce, reinforce and perpetuate. Without a blush himself, he vacuously underpins the governmentality of the Casa Rosada.

The cartoonist drew on a classic trope of delay: seen from inside the presidential palace, the windows frame and disclose ‘QUE’; then ‘QUEREMO’, ‘DESAPAREC’ and ‘NO HA DERECH’ … less than prevaricating, more than provocative. The reader-viewer, proleptically more knowing than the superannuated misreader of the signs and sighs of a stutteringly anguished nation, namely el Señor Presidente, invests in decoding the metonymic populace’s ever-attenuated and too-often strangled cry. So persuaded is the dictator that the vox populi can be controlled and redirected by the slogan of the nation’s collective obsession that ‘Las Malvinas son argentinas’ [The Malvinas are Argentina’s] that he overlooks its inevitable inversion. For, in Montag’s ‘Viva la vida’ [Long live life] and in the transmogrified animot imaginary, ‘las argentinas son las Malvinas’ – the ‘Madres de la Plaza de Mayo’ [The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo], en masse, demand and achieve the completion of their plea, the full articulation of their and the nation’s sovereign right to self-expression and freedom of speech: ‘Queremos vivir’, ‘Futuros a desaparecer’, ‘No hay derecho’ [We want to live; Disappearing futures; You’ve no right]. Specters of Ma---s? Or The State of the [Argentine] Debt, the Work of Mourning, though hardly, as yet, for Argentina’s mothers and grandmothers, The New International.

For the penguin animot remains the abject oppressed; the nation is as yet protected, albeit preposterously, by the anachronistic man-at-arms of a haughty, oblivious, uncaring military against the overdue fall of the abject oppressor. In the state of siege of 1982, Montag’s depiction juxtaposed, brutally, a gender-marked confrontation of pregnant female protest and sterile male power. Clustered around the statue of a spear-holding warrior-maiden figure – ‘Liberty leading the penguins’ – the animots mothers-to-be, mothers nursing, or mothers bereft, beaks tight shut, conducted with improvised banners and placards their silent vigil cum demonstration. The solid edifice of bureaucratic institutionalism that sheltered the military dictator can be the better understood in the light of what Claire Johnston has defined as that dangerous iconography that ‘places man as inside history and therefore changing and woman as outside of it and eternal’ (Johnston, 2000, p. 23). Montag’s cartoon, however, inverted and subverted such a staged relationship by having the radical change engendered by female animosity towards the unchanging sovereign power of Argentine fascism outed as a uniform male preserve. Thus, both in the Plaza de Mayo and throughout the nation, ‘the time is out of joint’ in the rotten den marked ‘state’. Pace Johnston and her otherwise reasonable claim regarding ‘man as inside history and therefore changing’, many an Argentine male has had cause to resent the ostensibly eternal role of falling outside the official history of the Guerra de Malvinas and into the pit of neglect and despair. Little doubt can there be that Cristina Kirchner’s final congressional address was tapping in to that legacy of a shared victim status of resentment on the part of both women and men, veterans all, at the unchanging script of a history to be re-written. Being re-written, however, embrionically, against the grain of still power-driven forces resistant to … change.

Plus ça change

Figure 12.5. Anonymously distributed poster, March 2003.

Too late? Take your partners, please, for the next (war) dance? But wait… ipsa dixit: ‘There is no such thing as society; there are only men and women and their families’ (Margaret Thatcher, 31 October 1987). No meeting half-way?

The risk-taking response of the poster detects the chimera, the unreality effect of the easy passing of the spurious mantle of power; for so long as the silent image performs the farce – the fabula – of national delusion. The two shall not be one in the marriage of convenience made in hellish coupling; the third term – Il n’y a pas de hors-texte – is neither one nor the other. It is, inseparably in the genre of the cartoon, both animage and animot. If it is thus that the world moves on – sic(k) transit gloria (im) mundi – what chance does a present-day Argentina have of engaging the attention and interest of the UK government and public when subsequent further war engagements ever preoccupy the British voters … for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sic – ness or in wealth? It may well prove forever difficult, if not impossible, for ‘the British Establishment’ to ‘piss on victory’ (Jenkins, 2003, pp. 35–6), especially after so many ostensible or perceived defeats since 1982, by no means limited to the poster’s reference to Tony Blair’s intentions with regard to Iraq (Fig. 12.5).

Requiescat … (in pace?)

Figure 12.6. © Austin 2003; first published in The Guardian.

A British populace justifiably alert to tragic consequences of adventurisms, the fatalities of which were mourned never more publically than in Royal Wootton Bassett (granted royal patronage in March 2011 in recognition of its role in the early 21st-century military funeral repatriations which passed through the town), might hardly have paused to meditate on the unusual intervention of a government ministry in the statistics of supposed post-Falklands, directly related suicides. The assertion made by the South Atlantic Medal Association, representing veterans, that the number of suicides almost certainly exceeded the conflict toll of the 255 UK personnel who died in action, placing the blame primarily on a lack of care for those suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, is not borne out by statistics, according to a ministry of defence study from 2013. Whilst the MoD said that every suicide was a tragedy and urged veterans of any conflict needing support to seek help, it found 95 deaths were recorded as suicides or open verdicts. Disagreements over numbers – or dates – are undoubtedly inevitable yet rarely more capable of capturing the imagination than a single telling perception:

Whilst Argentines constantly stress the suffering of the nation’s citizens at the murderous hands of a criminal regime up to 1982, and whilst there may never be a fixed toll regarding the estimated thirty thousand desaparecidos of the period of el proceso, the ‘Galtieri’ factor retains a fixed image in the UK national imaginary, possibly one unlikely to undergo change ( à la Hitler, à la Franco) (Fig. 12.6). Even at the level of popular culture, the British admiration for an Argentine national hero may, alas, be tainted with an epitaph of monumentally stone-like fixity: ‘Maradona’ qua ‘great genius and … cheat’. Yet, more encouragingly, Argentine insistence on ‘Nunca más’ and the harrowingly moving experience, for any and all, of visiting, for instance, the River Plate-side Parque de la Memoria, of reading the names and the often shockingly young ages of the dead inscribed on the seemingly interminable memorial walls, stress the emergence of a newly educated generation of ‘Never again’ … Who, in the UK, might have anticipated that the ‘no’, ‘never’ and ‘not an inch’ man, Protestant extremist of the 1960s and of the ensuing so-called ‘troubles’, Ian Paisley, as Northern Ireland’s First Minister, would end up leading a power-sharing executive at the Stormont parliament in Belfast, 40 years on, sitting down with Gerry Adams – his former bitter enemy, the leader of militant republicanism – as the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein decided to work together in a power-sharing executive, going on to enjoy such a cosy relationship with his deputy first minister, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, that they became known as the ‘Chuckle Brothers’. As the BBC news reported to a disbelieving world, the seemingly impossible had happened; yet unlikely bed-mates can find each other across borders, seas … and oceans.

Apocalypse Now … and again Pinochet takes Thatcher for a ride … or for cucumber sandwiches?

Figure 12.7. © Steve Bell 2006; first published in The Guardian.

Even after the British public – habitually blithe in respect of affairs trans-Atlantic – had had explained or spelled out the Bell-cartoon reference to the Spanish judge Baltazar Garzón’s role in having the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, detained, albeit temporarily, in London, with the attendant if unintended consequence of a traditional English afternoon-tea hospitality, it is still pertinent to ask whether and how many of them were or are prepared to address or confront Margaret Thatcher’s support for and attitude towards a mass murderer (Fig. 12.7). ‘Shy’ apologists to this day will still elect to ‘remind’ the enquirer of the role of extreme-left guerrilleros in the 1960s and 1970s in the ‘creation’ of the criminal military right … as if it did not a priori exist. Distorted causalism, hardly disinterested, from fellow-travelling apologists? ‘He was a dictator, yes, but at least he was ours’, parroted the former diplomat.

Things appeared to be getting better by 2012 when the UK’s then ambassador to Chile, Jon Benjamin, was obliged to apologise for a Twitter teasing of Argentina over its defeat in the Falklands war: ‘¿Cuáles son las islas que te quitaron a quien por ser qué cosa?’ [Which islands did they take off whom and for being what?], in a most un-diplomatic echo of a Chilean football taunt: ‘Argentines, faggots, you lost the Malvinas because you are idiots’ [Argentinos, maricones. ¡Les quitaron las Malvinas por huevones!]. The self-styled ‘Hammers fan, Londoner at heart, Jewish atheist’, bombarded by threats of violence and anti-Semitic responses, deleted his offending tweet and apologised, saying it had been a private tweet and that he had ‘great affection for my Argentine friends and respect for their team’. ‘The Argentine sports daily Olé said that was no excuse. The Foreign Office said: ‘Our ambassador to Chile appears to have inadvertently caused some controversy in a tweet. He has deleted it’. Benjamin was tweeting as usual on Tuesday, but on safer ground: re-tweeting the Foreign Secretary William Hague’ (The Guardian, 16 October 2012).

Foreign Office sensitivity may be relied upon … but to foreign secretaries, their prime minister and the cabinet – Her Majesty permitting – in fine we shall return. Meanwhile, the perennial role of soccer in the popular imaginary and in populist manipulation has since been turned to different effect … with a gender twist. A visit today to the museum of memory that was the headquarters of the former Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada and notorious site of imprisonment, torture, murder and disappearance bears witness to a strategy adopted by the Abuelas [Grandmothers] de la Plaza de Mayo, notably expressed in that section of ESMA devoted to their recent engagement with modern science and, in particular, the resonance and revelations of DNA and related advances:

In recruiting such internationally recognised, and youthful, profiles as that of Lionel Messi, bearer of national aspirations, hopes and, here, the slogan ‘RESOLVÉ TU IDENTIDAD’ AHORA’, they refer to the lost children sequestered from disappeared or murdered mothers and clandestinely adopted by sometimes witting, sometimes unwitting, members or associates of the discredited criminal military. Thereby they render potentially illegitimate a whole generation of their fellow citizens in order to regain and restore a legitimacy for a nation, a state, a besmirched sovereignty in need of their more-penetrating-even-than-surgical intervention.

Figure 12.8. © Fútbol Rebelde, June 2014.

‘Resolve’ … ‘identity’ … ‘now’? ‘you/r’? Already, in response to the notion that the State could ‘disappear’ victims but not their genes, caveats have been raised to the effect that recourse to would-be solutions via DNA ‘evidence’ will have to take into account how many identified victims did not, do not, or will not want to know and might say (culturally) ‘No’. ‘I am not yours’. Are we to be further locked into dualist thinking, feeling? I think (therefore) I am to move away – now – from the notion of being and not being the other one and to suggest that here, indubitably, is an entrenched Cartesian binary: you and me; the self and the other. Momentarily, I want to mind-sweep aside – implausible task – one of the weighty legacies of our western (post-)conflictive thinking and to broach the Spinozarian alternative, namely the concept of becoming. And when I act thus I am (again) thinking, particularly, of the near-contemporary philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. For Lévinas was saying – amongst many poetic insights – something very political, namely, that the self is in the other and the other is in the self. ‘You’/ ‘I’ can see why and how this proposition is a calmative subverting of confrontational Greco-Roman ( donc – post-Hegel – transatlantic) binaries. The insight helps us also to address the oft-bruited notion that victimisation denies agency and, consequently, the possibility that, as a therapeutic response to victimisation denying agency, we might even concede that ‘recovery is impossible’. Yet what of healing? I would further suggest that reconstitution rather than recovery is what might be developed in the post-traumatic phase; and it is the Lévinasian and the Spinozarian notions of becoming that allow us thus to operate. Because, if I obliterate you, I have obliterated me; if, indeed, ‘self ’ is in ‘other’ and ‘other’ is in ‘self ’.

Alison Landsberg, in 2004, coined the term ‘prosthetic memory’ to describe the way mass cultural technologies of memory enable individuals to experience, as if they were memories, events through which they themselves did not live. Whereas the prosthetic operates after the body (politic) has been operated on, my proposed shift from damaged or incomplete, still-to-be-completed, being is not supplement but complement. Complemented by the becoming procedure of the graft – itself not on but of a reconstituted self which coincides with a former other ‘memory’ – post-memory promises that ‘il n’y a pas de hors-corps’ … For I wish to consider winning and losing, as I proceed. What is a winner, what is a loser? In a Spinozarian world, the winner is in the loser and the loser is in the winner, in the process of becoming a reconstituted alternative identity thereafter. Not in the ‘post-’ conceived of only chronologically, but in the space of the ‘post-’. Time is in space and space is in time in such a conceptualisation as I have outlined it, deriving not from a different but from a parallel philosophical tradition (that is, not in difference; ever in différance). Of course, I am speaking about constructs, about ‘meaning effects’; and I have already made the point that the burden of our sovereignties, of our responsibilities, of our citizenships propels us always to remember that the ‘post-’, as well as the past, are in the present. Here is what we can do about it, responsibly. Take up the challenge: to express and distribute memories – on such vehicles as might come to hand or to mind – as effects of meaning but, politically, too, as meanings turned to effect. Contemplate, even concede, that recovery is impossible in the post-traumatic phase; yet the talking cure may go on, never completing; ever reconstituting. ‘You’/ ‘I’ … ‘I’/‘You’.

And you, do you know who you are? Again, ‘Ecce animot’? – ‘assuming the title of an auto [biological] animal, in the form of a risky […] [chemical] response to the question “But me, who am I?”’… pace Jacques (à suivre).

Les animots

It might now be the moment to apply instrumentally, in focussed targeting, Derrida’s prior and broader interrogation to a familiar rivalry, with its attendant insults and expletives, to which the cartoon genre draws attention; evoked again by Steve Bell but with calculated echo of the philosopher’s reminder of the perhaps insurmountable difficulty of coming to terms with a ‘radically foreign’ self-in-other/other-in-self. Playing up, and on, a stereotyping and the puncturing of it that has been his iconography since his first cartoons appeared in The Guardian in the early phase of the South Atlantic conflict in 1982, Bell has latterly depicted his Union of Jack penguins as overfed (not noticeably oversexed despite their expletive-deleted ‘fucking’ chant) but assertively over there ( pace the British civilians and their originally WWII cliché re United States troops stationed in Blighty).

Animo(t)sities. ‘Stop the drilling, penguin bastardos!’

Figure 12.9. © Steve Bell 2010; first published in The Guardian.

In Animal Farm fashion, to assert one’s power by mere reiteration requires the subjection of an abject ‘other’, here as ever the plumage-and-power stripped albatross of Southern Cone climes. What at once conjures up a military cadence call at the same time draws on the classic double meaning of the word ‘drilling’. Hardly necessary for the exegete to explain the overt references to militarisation; so up pops a rare bird – uninvited, unwelcome, defeated intruder – to remind the cartoon’s reader-viewer of the (pre-)occupying protected interests of not ‘unas islas demasiado famosas’, à la Jorge Luis Borges, but resources, fisheries, minerals, hydrocarbons, tourism (‘penguins, ah!’) … oil.

Coda… decoder; and Scotland’s long-prior to the 2014 referendum cry: ‘It’s oor oil’

Re-arrange the following into a well-known phrase or saying

shell

exon

mobil

jet

q8

gulf

bp

total

Amoco

Cherchez Saddam...

Figure 12.10. The Daily Mirror, 6 January 2003.

Update: Sky News, April 2015

Gulf? Of Mexico? Ummm. BP? A drilling catastrophe… Ring a Bell? If so, then re-arrange the following into another well-known phrase or saying:

Which

     transnational insurance company

                                                    will cover

the risk of a Gulf-style spill

               off the coast

                                                    of the country

the emergency services of which

                         would have to be called upon?

Get real.

Note to the reader:

The task has been rendered the easier as the first steps of the re-ordering have been taken.

Caveat emptor:

Subsequent intelligence (London markets consulted): ‘Not a problem. Insurance premiums will rocket … and multinational financing will ride roughshod over national (sovereign?) stances. It’s an economic risk worth taking’. Take over ... and Argentina over a barrel? Which empty barrels make most sound? Falkland Sound … Sound investment?

Such presumptuousness cannot operate in a void; for in the echo chamber of transatlantic stridencies Argentine ears are pricked, Argentine voices, such as that of Carlos Escudé, cast into play, increasingly, less belligerent if still challenging ripostes:

Cherchez … la femme. Entente?

Figure 12.11.

One … is not amused

Figure 12.12. © Jeremy Selwyn Evening Standard PA.

[‘Queen Elizabeth Land’]

Figure 12.13.

… cordiale?

Figure 12.14. © Steve Bell 2012.

Cordiality one does not do; stony-faced dignity amidst Cabinet Bullingdon-boys’ riotous guffaws and arriviste pleb giggles of obsequious tie-touchers, hair-smoothers, knee-jerkers inter alia … all in a day’s (or sixty years’) ‘work’. Job done; public engagement; Cabinet assuaged.

Entente? Contente? The transition from photo opportunism self-control to caricatured grimace reflects what, in private, the British populace readily spots (diamonds are forever). Bondage to the slavery of duty above all as Her Majesty saves face amidst that mixture of respect and domestic pride, self-containment and smug insularity, of those with much to gain, politically, from the celebrating of her Commonwealth and post-Empire reign. ‘There Are Powers At Work’ [rictus] ‘… Of Which We Know Nothing’ echoes the revelations made at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana by Paul Burrell who ‘had joined the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace in 1976 and served the Queen for ten years as her personal footman […] Mr Burrell said he did not ask the Queen what she meant when she told him “to be careful” at the infamous “dark forces” meeting, the inquest heard’ (The Daily Mail, 15 January 2008). In dangerous waters, Ship of State QE2 is all-too-aware of supra-sovereign powers and the need to be careful of uncontrollable transnational politico-economic interests. Britannia waives the rules no more? Shhh … Keep it in the family. One is not to be embarrassed. One is not to be used. Understood?

At times, the press is at a loss to decide how to differentiate between the uncontrollable and the calculated political manoeuvre or, alas, gaffe. What could be wrong with the renaming of a piece of Antarctica as ‘Queen Elizabeth Land’, a gift to go with sixty decorative place mats as Prime Minister Cameron congratulated her on her ‘fantastic’ Diamond Jubilee year? Entirely innocent and perhaps, even, appreciated: as many a true-Brit would recognise: or would ‘one’?

Would ‘one’, indeed?

Figure 12.15. © Steve Bell; first published in The Guardian, 19 December 2012.

Misunderstood … Misunderstandings give rise to jokes; jokes quickly turn into insults. ‘UP YOURS ARGENTINA’ besmirches the Union Jack in front of which the monarch is faux pas marooned; the twelve fat penguins (born of the Thatchery) look on in dumb obedience … unaware, or in 98.8% approval, of the re-evocation of the Sun’s notorious out-of-Europe headline ‘UP YOURS DELORS’ from 1 November 1990. The sun ever sets on the British Empire … as Her Majesty knows best.

Lèse majesté … Slips of the tongue are inevitable; diplomats learn – or are taught – to avoid them. Their role is to cover up for their governments, for their prime ministers or presidents and, in extremis, for their foreign secretaries; whether, proleptically, at The Guardian’s Steve Bell end-of-the-telescope view of William Hague’s champagne-bottle de-launching, or at the finis terrae of the trademark Zimmer-frame stumbling of an Argentine career politician:

A number two?

Figure 12.16. Héctor Timerman © The Guardian , 5 February 2013

Please police me, oh yeah … Tonight the Super [Blooper] lights are gonna find me, feeling like a number [two] ( pace Abba … A blah blah). Timerman-zimmerman, zimmerman-Timerman … Either … neither? ‘Let’s call the whole thing off.’ The same old songs, whether in London or Buenos Aires: ‘Miró fijo al periodista de la BBC Mundo, en Londres, y se embaló: “Dentro del fin del colonialismo va a estar el fin del colonialismo en las Islas Británicas … eh, en las Islas Malvinas, y la Argentina va a recuperar los 5.000 kilómetros cuadrados de mar y tierra que hoy … eh, que le han sido arrebatadas en 1833”’ [He looked the BBC World reporter in London straight in the face and blurted out: ‘Within the ending of colonialism will be the ending of colonialism in the British Isles … er, in the Malvinas Islands, and Argentina is going to recover the 5,000 square kilometres of land and sea that today … er, that were snatched from it in 1833’] (Mayol, 2013).

His ‘K gag’ removed whilst playing away from home, a Héctor(ing) foreign minister, momentarily left to represent Argentine affairs in one capital, no doubt had to face the music, and the challenge, in the other, on his return to within clawing distance of Cristina. The gaffe, however, was blown: ‘“I’ll be the judge, I’ll be the jury”, said the cunning old Fury’…

‘I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’

Figure 12.17.

Looking Glass … or Wonderland? Alas. When would he be through? Twenty days, 20 weeks, 20 months … ‘“There’s glory for you!” “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory”, [Cristina] said’. Glory? Sick transit.

Imagine…

Figure 12.18. Anonymous.

Coda …

When, at an early juncture, I was asked by Alicia Castro whether I wished to join a pro-negotiation grouping, she understood at once and accepted without demur my response: namely, that the academic freedom without affiliation which I and others have enjoyed because it must be taken for granted was the very status that would allow me to continue to bring together individuals and views of the most plural, varied and often unexpected, at all levels, and without shifting my critical stance. These undertakings have been achieved in the most cordial and respectful frame of thinking, speaking and, above all, listening. In a future when multi-national enterprises will often compete with the very national governments upon which they albeit decreasingly also depend, not least, for instance, in the exploitation of energy and mineral resources, novel and imaginative approaches will be seen, in hindsight, to have anticipated the powerful discourses of threatening eras, approaches concomitant with, I stress, and therefore the less controllable by, the ever-challenging international communications strategies mentioned at the outset. The term ‘post-’ by no means suggests that conflicts are over and done with; on the contrary, it is lessons learned and deepened that will aid, though never guarantee, the courageous conjoining of the discourses of reconstruction and reconstitution through effective and inevitable negotiations of both mind and will. Consider the following texts:

Dialogue (open)? Negotiating regime change in 2015

Figure 12.19. © MercoPress, Friday 27 November 2015.

... dialogue (closed)

Figure 12.20. © Reuters, 21 January 2016

Ipse dixit David, pre-Brexit …

Stop press: ‘Blooper’ pooper … a fouler howler

‘The finest statesman Britain ever produced’. Ipse scribit Boris, post-Brexit, latter-day Goliath:

Figure 12.21.© BBC.

Author of The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, Boris Johnson was, until 9 July 2018, Foreign Secretary, charged to represent United Kingdom affairs in one capital, Buenos Aires, no doubt not to ‘face the music’, but perhaps to challenge Cameron’s successor, in the other, London, his former mayoral domain, on his return to within ‘at-heel’ distance of Teresa May. Whose heel? His gaffe never blown, for ‘He’ll be the judge, He’ll be the jury…’, ever Boorishly, ‘the cake and eat it’, ‘best of both worlds’ envoy, in the lens, again, of Steve Bell:

Figure 12.22.© Steve Bell.

Hell-bent on evoking many a ‘cunning old Fury’, inter alia, Winston, he yet ‘doth [not] bestride the narrow world/Like a colossus’ for, ‘under his huge legs’ walk not ‘petty men’ but just one mere ‘underling’, his erstwhile rival as would-be Prime Minister, Michael Gove, bespectacled, shat upon and semi-crushed, painted out of the dog-eat-dog political scenario not by canned Dulux but by uncanny Bolux-spieler Boris, already with trans-Atlantic ambitions in a post-Brexit free-trading, free-wheeling and free-loading adventurism:

Figure 12.23. © Steve Bell first published in The Guardian, 1 July 2016 and 15 July 2016

So why not include Argentina?

Figure 12.24.© Télam, 20 May 2018

No less ‘blooperista’ than a Héctor Timerman, the proleptic counterpart of a (dis)United Kingdom’s own foreign secretary, Boorish, the notoriously unpoliceable clanger-dropper, was soon to appear – the Argentine but not the international press excluded, no doubt in order to avoid the posing of awkward questions – on the red carpet of previously ‘alien’ territory, hosted by Macri ministers Jorge Faurie, Oscar Aguad and Patricia Bullrich. The first such British incumbent was there to pay respect to the Argentine fallen of 1982. Ostensibly; though, ever alert to the implications of this, as of any, G-20 gathering, that of 20–21 May 2018, Steve Bell’s take on, and advice to, Boris put a different face on matters. In the diplomatic domain of De eso no se habla/That is not spoken about, it took the cartoonist little time to find a cultural parallel closer to home:

Figure 12.25. © Steve Bell; first published in The Guardian, 7 June 2017.

Just two days before the G-20 summit, a transatlantic noise that could no longer be muzzled had been borne, in the same newspaper, by the simple headline ‘Argentina forced to seek IMF aid over fears for economy’ (The Guardian, 18 May 2018).

At the time of writing and no less alert to the ever ‘unfinished business’ of Falkland-Malvinas affairs, and though the then UK Foreign Secretary had other matters on his mind, one noted that what emerged from under the thatch – when it comes to international negotiations – remained, on 6 July 2018, substantially unchanged and predictably fecal; in his own words, those in disagreement with him are ‘polishing turds’. It might still break two to tangle but all the more so if the surface is that slippery.

Post-scriptum: 10 October 2020

Icy contempt… and now one is amused. Recalling, dare it be said, the 2012 gift to Her Majesty proffered by the then-smiling Cameron cabinet of a newly named ‘tract of frozen land about twice the size of the UK in Antarctica […] named after her as Queen Elizabeth Land’ (supra) – and of Steve Bell’s instant lampooning of the vapid gesture – a further slippery surface of signification has been more recently projected:

Figure 12.26. © The Economist from CLCS; COPLA; Flanders Marine Institute 10 Oct. 2020.

The Isle of Wight has got nothing on this; Guile of the White…? Last word then to – hardly a bastion of revolutionary British political thinking – The Economist?

‘Lie…’? Whatever will Roger Lorton Esquire have to say about this one? Will it be deemed just another ploy of ‘Argentina’s master propagandist Daniel Filmus’? Qui vivra verra … (translation available on request, post-Brexit, for those ‘rarely in the UK these days’):

Il n’y a pas de dernier mot … Whence, again, Falklands-Malvinas: an Unfinished Business.

References

Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism (London: Sage).

Carroll, L. (1871) Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There (London: Macmillan).

Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference, trans. by A. Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

— (2002) ‘The Animal That I Am (More to Follow)’, trans. by D. Wills, Critical Enquiry, 28 (2): 369–418.

Escudé, C. (2015) ‘Cuestionando lo incuestionable: hacia un intercambio negociado de tierras por recursos marítimos’, Agenda Internacional: Visión desde el Sur, 32: 44–52.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon).

Freedman, L. (2005) The Official History of the Falklands Campaign (London: Routledge).

García Quiroga, D. and M. Seear (2007) Hors de Combat: The Falklands– Malvinas Conflict Twenty-Five Years On (2007); 2nd (extended) edition (2009) Hors de Combat: The Falklands–Malvinas Conflict in Retrospect (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press).

Landsberg, A. (2004) Prosthetic Memory (New York: Columbia University Press).

Mayol, F. (2013) ‘Los papelones de Timerman. Sus bloopers en Londres y en el polémico acuerdo con Irán. Las Malvinas “británicas”, su rol en la dictadura y los retos de Cristina’, Política (12 February).

McGuirk, B. (2007) Falklands–Malvinas: An Unfinished Business (Seattle: New Ventures).

Seear, M. (2012) Return to Tumbledown: The Falklands–Malvinas War Revisited (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press).

Watts, J. and U. Goñi (2015) ‘Mauricio Macri has won Argentina’s presidency – but his work has just begun’, Buenos Aires Herald (23 November), p. 2.

___________

1 This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline ‘Alberto of the Antarctic’ (The Economist, online edition, 10 October 2020).