Re: [A-List] Analysis of A. Woods about Argentina

[Rob Schaap <bantam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

G'day Nestor,

> This historic consideration is very important in a country where history is much
> alive in the popular movement, and more important yet when we have a provisional
> President who (now I can confirm this) descends from a Federal, popular, leader
> of San Luis ("Lanza Seca", Commander Juan Saá), who was the Presidential
> candidate of the vast civil upheaval of the North and Cuyo against the pro-British
> regime of Mitre, an upheaval that was drowned in blood in the most tremendous
> way but which helped the heroic Paraguayan people to wage their struggle
> against the British-backed Triple Alliance of the oligarchies of Rio, Montevideo
> and Buenos Aires. This war is known as the War of the Triple Alliance in
> mainstream historiography. Popular historiography calls it the War of the Triple
> Infamy.
> 
> I repeat: failing to grasp this strong current in Argentina is the
> same as failing to understand the importance of the Chartists, the Paris
> Commune, and the Haymarket crime in the history of the global working class.

Perhaps I'm failing to grasp here, but if by 'history is much alive' you mean
that a decisive number of Argentinians and Paraguayans share a common
consciousness of their class- and colonial history, I fear your view of the
role of Chartists, Paris Communes and Haymarket outrages in the consciousness
of 'northern' proles is a little, er, sanguine.  

We know nothing of these things here.  Intelligent willing undergraduates in
the social sciences and humanities know nothing of these things.  Unionists
know nothing of these things.  Our history is the story mostly of white male
soldiers abroad, and partly a few white male explorers at home - with the odda
crowned head from 'the old country' thrown in.  

We have given up so much of what our antecedents fought for precisely because
we never knew it had been fought for, who'd fought for it, that we had
anything in common with them, and how their struggles made us who we are.  

We live in a perpetual now, peopled by free individuals in civil and fair
contention (although it is commonly and sadly admitted that a couple of very
rich blokes occasionally forget the 'civil and fair' bit) for scarce resources
(from which the grasping mits of foreigners must be kept at a safe distance). 
Any dissent from this is therefore an affront to each and all of us.  It would
be 'unAustralian' - uncivil and unfair.

Given what has happened to our media and education system over the last two
decades, it is a wonder to me that we have any young dissentors at all.  Dunno
what they're hanging their self- and world-view on - something mainly to do
with the words 'fairness' and 'environment', I collect - but the poor buggers
are having to make it all up as they go along - doomed to reinvent the wheel
again and again.  Tragedy and farce, maybe, but good on 'em.

Perhaps then there are currencies in which the poor and desperate of Argentina
are richer than their northern counterparts - an historically grounded and
social sense of self, an institutionalist sense of how things work, and a
self-conscious sense of how they might be transformed.

Cheers,
Rob.