Thanks to my great friend Magellan

["Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear friends,

Roberto Magellan, who is much tidier than me, has kept record of something I 
wrote down in 1999 and had sent to the Leninist-International list on that 
time. Since I think it is absolutely fitting (such as Roberto suggests) I am 
sending it again, with no additional comments. Of course, Roberto's words have 
been snipped.
------- Forwarded message follows -------
[comments by Roberto Magellan snipped]

List,

This is a mail I intended to send both to Marxism (where 
the debate began) and L-I. Mistakenly, I forgot L-I (could 
it be the recent bursts of noise into the signal are 
beginning to have me tired?).  I have been requested to 
resend it, and I am glad to do so.

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Subject:       Malvinas
Date:          Wed, 16 Jun 1999 21:08:11

El 16 Jun 99 a las 16:30, Jim Monaghan nos dice(n):

> Nestor writes
> > Oh, if Argentinians had put to prison all those who
> > opposed the Malvinas War, we would be living in a
> > different country now! 


> Nestor,

>  This is not very wise. The reality is that the military
>  would have
> dressed up putting you in Jail or dropping you into the
> ocean as a patriotic act.

Dear Jim, I suppose I may have a saying on this, since it is
the case that I may be quite ignorant on Balkan issues, but
at least I am a little involved in Argentinian politics and
history. So that allow me to explain you a few things you
certainly do not have an idea of (which is not to blame,
more or less for the same reasons I do not have idea of what
it is to understand Irish politics in depth). 

1st things 1st:  Mao aptly said that power was born in the
mouth of the rifle, but he forgot to add that it is not only
power. Also constraints are born there.

The fact is that, in order to go on fighting (not only to
win, just to go on fighting) the military _would have had to
change their allegiances in the same way they had turned
their guns to the opposite side_: that is they would have
been forced to side with  their own people, with the Cubans
who gave unrestricted support, with the Third World and the
Latin Americans against the imperialist bloc.  In fact, it
was this perspective which made them step back, overthrow
Galtieri (who wanted to go on fighting, whether due to
idiocy, patriotism or stubbornness we still cannot know...
but Haigh was really stunned by his mood and his warlike
countenance!), replace him with Bignone, and hand the
government over to civilian politicians who shared their
concern that Argentina would seriously confront imperialism.
_On this_, the whole gang of civilians (from the ultraleft
to the ultraright) that became the official politicians of
Argentina do not (not a typo: repeat _do not_) differ from
the pro-imperialist military. The military were not doomed
by genetic reasons to become pro-imperialistic, they could
(as they many times have, and WILL) become part of the
nation again. The war was so dangerous because this was a
logical path to follow if they wanted to wage a serious
struggle. 

By the way, the war could have been won, if "technical"
reasons had been the only ones. It was lost because the
imperialists counted on an ideologically colonized elite
here, both military and civilian. And both in government and
in opposition. And, moreover, both in the Left, the Center
and the Right. 


>  You would be like the
> Versaillais traitors of Nazi propaganda. The Malvinas
> adventure was to sustain military rule. 

But that was the _subjective_ origin of the battles (not the
"adventure", unless you call the Anglo-American war of 1812
an "adventure"), but _just_ the beginning, and what's more
it was not the only reason behind the April 2nd takeover of
Puerto Argentino (Stanley).

Things are more complex, and there were British 
provocations before. But what counts is the 
_objectivity_ of the situation, and in this sense 
the truth is that our Father Gapon could have 
been General Galtieri. This, of course, is shorthand.

> I would guess that
> the generals thought their CIA friends would not object. 

Certainly so. But the facts were hard enough to make this
belief shatter, and particularly so among  lower rank
officers.

This was the refraction within the armed forces of the
objective situation. The war was stopped, among other
reasons, because it risked triggering a meltdown of the
pro-imperialist ideology _within the Armed Forces
themselves_. And, in fact, dangerous things were beginning
to happen, such as former Montoneros acting as naval
commandos in Europe. That they proved lousy commandos is
politically meaningless, unless we take into account that at
the same time the officers who were on the front could
discover that "star" Navy officers during the period of the
kidnappings and tortures,  like Astiz, people who had proven
to be excellent torturers of their own countrymen, could not
pass the litmus test of actual warfare and behaved as lowly
cowards when sent to defend our land in the Georgias, a
strategic position they surrendered without a shot while an
Argentinian submarine was sunken at stone's throw of them.

This idea, that Armed Forces trained to oppress the 
Argentinians could not be useful to defend Argentinian
interests in the world scenario, was immediately detected as
a danger that had to be skirted no matter the cost if the
oligarchic command wanted to keep the Armed Forces in
control. And also if the imperialist powers did not want to
see the Argentinian Armed Forces discover that they had been
used against their own fellow countrymen and in the last
resort, against themselves (this was to be proven by the
full deployment of the imperialist programme under Menem
which has dismantled our Armed Forces, further corrupted
them to the marrow, and deprived them of any ability to
fight against, not the British troops, but, say, the Police
Department of Paris, TX).

> I
> dont know who objected to the liberation war. On the pro
> imperialist right there would be straightforward traitors
> or say English ex pats who regard England as their real
> country. Could I hazard a guess that some others regarded
> it as a military adventure putting a conscript army badly
> equipped up against an Imperialist regime.

Alfonsin objected, Menem objected, the whole spectrum of
center or right parties objected. And in their own comic way
(or I should say tragic, because this was another wedge cast
between the Argentinian Left and the mass of the people),
most of the "left" parties objected the Malvinas war, which,
of course, they did not (and still do not) understand as a
potentially liberatory colonial war. The right wing traitors
included no less than the then Minister of Economics, and
others simply wanted the war to end because (as Alfonsin
himself told to a delegation of my party) they feared that a
new wave of military nationalism would strike Argentina and
then, professional "democrats" like him would lose any
ground for good. "If we win", he said, "then democracy would
be seriously menaced".  He and most of the mainstream
politicians had been in talks with the predecessor of
Galtieri, Viola, who wanted the regime to reach a honorable
way out of power and was holding "secret" meetings with
these "democrats" so that the Generals could silently go
back to their "specific duties" after the main dirty work
was already done. 

Democrats! For Alfonsin and most of the semicolonial 
politicians, those who are always praised in the foreign
newspapers and monopolize "political correctness", democracy
is a democracy that cannot stand an Argentinian victory
against Thatcher, that is the downfall of Thatcher and the
Tories. 

These were the "democrats" who I would have liked to see in
jail in 1982. But there's more to this. It is the same
"democracy" the NATO is imposing now on the Albanians of
Kossovo. The democracy of the "social democrats", who in
1999 as in 1919 prove to be the mainstay of the imperialist
bourgeoisies. And it is true in many senses: the Radical
Party, Alfonsin's own petty bourgeois conservative party,
has recently been co-opted by the Socialist International, a
most reasonable though strange sounding measure.

> I am sure the
> regular army stayed safely out of the line of fire.

Not at all. There were more casualties, proportionally,
among officers than among soldiers. And the Argentinian
pilots even invented a new way to fly, which amazed anyone
with actual war flight experience. They manned surveillance
planes (for example, unarmed old Boeing 727s) that had to
dive from 10,000 to 1,000 meters as their only way to escape
British fire. And our fighter planes, which had to go all
the way from the continent to the islands and back (a round
trip of some 1,200 kilometers, some 750 miles, because the
aluminium airstrips were left behind, due to the belief
that, as Jim says, "our CIA friends will help us and there
will be no war") flew at between 5 and 50 meters (15 to 150
ft) above the waves of one of the most terrible seas in the
world in order to escape radars. 

The pilots flew with frosted foam on their windshields
because that was the only way they could reach the islands
unnoticed. There are lots of more interesting facts, but
suffice these to show that our officers were not lazy bums
sending children to death. Most of them fought bravely and
gallantly, and in fact this is one of the greatest assets a
well tuned revolutionary policy will have in the near future
within the Armed Forces. They _do_ know that it was not due
to "technical" reasons that we lost the war.

This does not mean that the conscripts were well treated,
nor that the best of our men (another derogatory tale: that
of the "poor children of the war", while Israelis the same
age are called "soldiers" here) were sent to the Malvinas.
The idiocy of the high command made them not see that they
could revolt the Chileans against Pinocho (the Chilean
masses were with us against Britain, this I know from first
hand), so that they stationed our best trained troops,
Patagonian troops, along the Argentina-Chile border. To
Malvinas they sent people from Corrientes (in the tropical
Northeast) and Buenos Aires. The BIM 5 -5th of Marines-
however (based and recruited in Tierra del Fuego), was very
hard to fight against and even the men from the North (I was
forgetting Jujuy, look at a map!) were hard fighters. All of
them knew in their bones the easy truth: no matter who is at
command, we are fighting the Empire.  That was the secret.
Most of what I am telling here comes from British sources
(see, for example, "No Picnic"), not from Galtierist
propaganda, which was by the way ridiculous, something I
also know from first hand experience.

> A Peoples
> uprising would be a real threat to NATO just as the fall
> of the generals gave them a few problems in Argentina.

Not a single problem. This is false. The only problems were 

a) how to tidy away the problem of the war (that is, how to
make people forget about the war or, at least, make them
think it was a horrible mistake, turn the popular rage
against the imperialists and their allies into a mournful
mood, and convince all of us that a country like Argentina
can _never_ confront imperialism) and 

b) how to shift all of the blame for the 1976-1983 
dictatorship from the whole government to the military only,
so that their civilian agents would work well.  In this, I
must say with great pain, not even the Mothers were the
least important piece of the machinery. Imperialism is wise.


> Hopefully as England continues to weaken the Malvinas will
> sonn be back in the Argentinian peoples hands not the
> generals. 

Not while Argentinians have sepoy governments. And had the
islands fallen into the hands of "the generals", they would
have fallen into the hands of the Argentinian people. Both
because the only entity  that may receive them is the
Argentinian _state_, not the _Argentinian oligarchic high
officers of 1982_, and because in order to obtain a victory
in the South Atlantic, the Argentinian armed forces would
have had to start a revolution within the country.

This sounds strange, I know. But the same Ovando Candia who
in 1968 murdered the Che was the one who, once in
government, in 1969 nationalized the Gulf Oil Company and
paved the way for J.J. Torres to get to power. 

"Lefts" and "rights" are a complex thing in Argentina, Latin
America, and ... Yugoslavia. The fact that the politics of
all these countries is a complex mix of struggles where
socialist and national struggle mingle and coalesce makes
many frontiers blur, and some definitions, like the one of
"right" and "left", become harder to establish than in full
grown, so to say, Western capitalist countries. 

[A short and final methodological sidetrack:
The frontier is not _impossible_ to establish, as our 
national bourgeois intellectuals (many of them fond 
quoters of Andre Gunder Frank and good supporters of Cuba if
need be, but always opposing socialists who do not share the
usual "antinational" mood of Argentinian Left) want us to
believe, and this certainly includes respectable "leftist"
ideologists like Feinmann, Ortega Penya or Duhalde, and even
Cooke or Hernandez Arregui:  all of them adequately Leftist
when it comes to defend Cuba, but certainly irrationalist or
at least dubious when it comes to debate the necessity of an
independent political organization of the working class in
Argentina. But it is just harder and more complex than in
fully mature capitalist formations like those of Europe. And
if it is complex to discern Left and Right in revolutionary
moments, imagine what a mess it is when you are traversing,
as the world is traversing right now, a transitional period
where the old conflicts give way to newly forming ones,
where the classes begin to take sides very slowly, and when
the new age still looks far away in the horizon.]

Now, following Jim on a flight from the sub-Antartic waters
to the Equatorial ones:

> Have you any opinions on St Helena and Ascuncion
> these iseland should belong to either an African or South
> American state at least so the inhahitants can travel 

Ascension was a mid way house between Britain and the 
Malvinas during the war. St. Helena was the place where the
British Tories poisoned Napoleon. What on earth do you want
my opinion to be? ;) And I am not stating things in
"classical" class struggle terms both because they would be
too complex to pose (more or less like explaining the
hardware of a computer in terms of NAND, AND and OR cells),
and because geopolitics is, in itself, class struggle.

Personal likings aside, however: I suppose both should
belong to Africa, as Nkwame Nkrumah proposed... in 1956! It
is not only a matter of inhabitants travelling, it is a
matter of security for anyone south of the Gulf of Guinea. 

As well as the Malvinas issue, from the point of view of the
Left in general, and not in Latin America only,  is not an
issue of conflicting populations, but of whether the
imperialist powers have a right to control the seas. 

It is not a crazy hypothesis:

Suppose the Panama Channel were closed due to some terrible
event (say, earthqwake, A-bombing, or worse yet victorious
revolution!). Then the only passage between the Atlantic and
the Pacific would be Magellan Strait. And suppose a
definitely revolutionary government took power in South
Africa, and decided to deploy the SA navy against the
oil-tanker routes off South African shores, as a warfare
measure against hostile imperialist powers. Would the
Georgias be a second-rate naval station?

So many consequences of a group of tiny islands... But to
discover them, you must be a Leninist, or at least an
anti-imperialist. This is why the Argentinian Generals did
not imagine that their "allies" in the "Third World War that
was being waged since the times of Plato" (General Cristino
Nicolaides, litterally! How could the Third war be older
than the First one is a mystery not even the Orphics might
explain!) would fight against them on the South Atlantic
issue. And since the war made all of this almost
uncomfortably evident, that is why all those who opposed it
were (at least objective) pro-imperialists. And that is why
I am absolutely _certain_ that if those pro-imperialists had
been put to prison in 1982, we would be living in a very
different, _and better_, world today. It is not an Argie
vaunting, the tale is that if _both Argentina (due to
military reasons) and Mexico (because they couldn't do
otherwise) had defaulted their debts in 1982_ the whole host
of Third World countries that electrically supported us on
the war would have probably followed us. And who can imagine
what would the events have been after that?

Nestor


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------- End of forwarded message -------

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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