Crass and brutal economicism

["Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: Malvinas etc, 
el 13 Oct 01, a las 0:25, Xxxx Xxxxxx dijo:

> 
>  there's a difference between a settler class oppressing and
> living off the work of a native population and a situation such as the
> Malvinas/Falklands where there is no indigenous population.
> 

Ignorance in the highest degree.

( a) There is no "indigenous" population, as I explained before, because that 
population was massacred after the rebellion led by the Gaucho Rivero in 1833.

(b) But even if there had not been any "indigenous" population, and even if 
Argentina (or Chile, if you want, I don't care about this at this point of our 
debate) hadn't had _every legal right_ to the Islands long before the _Clio_ 
frigate usurped our sovereignty with the previous help of an _American_ whaling 
ship, there is something else, something that Xxxx's crass economicism does not 
even realize: that imperialism and colonialism is a whole complex of 
relationships ranging from direct exploitation to subtle cultural domination 
and diplomatic/military control. The British population on the Malvinas (not 
Malvinas/Falklands: it is as insulting as "Zimbabwe/Rhodesia") is, simply, a 
colonial outpost, a "dormant" fortress to be used just in case. In fact, during 
World War I there was a naval battle between British and German units off the 
islands.

British Malvinas are a menace against Argentina and Chile, and a keystone in 
the control of the communications between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The 
similitude with the Canal Zone is so striking because the only reason why the 
Americans were in the Zone was to ensure these communications. That is NOT the 
only reason for the British to remain in the South, but it is a most important 
one. The Malvinas became more important yet when, in 1884, Argentina took full 
control of Eastern Tierra del Fuego and forced the Anglican Reverend Lucas 
Bridges to put down the British Flag he had been raising every day at dawn in 
his "estancia" at Harberton.

Thus, it is not a question of _direct expoliation_ ( 1 ) but of keeping under 
close surveillance a whole area of the planet.
> > 
> > Should the people in the Panama Canal Zone have the right to be part of,
> > say, the United States rather than Panama?
> 
> Here you had a transient population of American bureaucrats and technical
> support workers who were living temporarily in the Panama Canal Zone but
> considered the continental US to be their permanent home. Again, completely
> different from the population in the Malvinas/Falklands who had settled there
> almost 200 years ago. 

Not at all. To begin with, a good deal of today's population of the Malvinas 
settled the islands less than 200 hundred years ago (170 at most, and certainly 
less than that: 30 years are not a few years). But what matters is not the 
crass empyricism of our brutal economist Xxxx Xxxxxx (2), what matters is that 
the home of the settlers of Malvinas is not Malvinas but "the British Empire". 
Of course that nobody is thinking of forced eviction of the local population of 
Malvinas. Much to the contrary, one of the great mistakes of the reactionary 
command during the war was not to grant land ownership to residents against the 
Falkland Islands Company immediately upon arrival, and a special foreign trade 
system (among other possible measures). What irks our skin is that Union Jack 
under our skies. Yes, OUR skies, the skies of the workers and peasants of 
Argentina.

> 
> Who are the inhabitants of the Malvinas/Falkland Islands oppressing,
> exactly?

It is not only a matter of oppression. But to begin with, the weakness of the 
Argentinean state in Patagonia resulting among other from British occupation of 
the Malvinas made it much easier for the British-oriented Patagonian oligarchy 
to oppress the peones in the South. Did you know, Xxxx that still today, due to 
the strength of this cavernarian class, the estancias don't hire "peones" with 
families, so that there are lonely men living all over Santa Cruz and Chubut 
with nobody to speak to for months, stranded in loneliness for whole winters 
with no more company than a few sheep, with one of the highest rates of suicide 
in the world? This is _also_ a consequence of the British outpost in the 
Malvinas, an indirect one but a consequence.

The British outpost in Malvinas helps the Argentinean bourgeoisie in Mar del 
Plata and further South, and other bourgeoisies such as the Chinese, to 
superexploit the fishing crews operating under the situation generated by the 
indiscriminate policies of off shore fishing permits issued by the British 
invader's government in Stanley. The British outpost in Malvinas oppresses the 
whole of Southern America by providing a menacing station which will obviously 
help any measure against a popular upheaval here. The British outpost in 
Malvinas, and this is not a minor issue, "proves" that we Argentineans are a 
second rate population who can't take care of our own businesses intelligently 
(and this is not a minor issue because mental colonization is a fundamental of 
colonization when you don't have troops of your own in the colonized country... 
ah, but Xxxx believes that Argentina and Britain are in the same class. Well, 
you can wipe away this reason, Xxxx)

> 
> > In Lenin, the
> > division of the world between the two was one of the key characteristics of
> > the whole imperialist epoch.
> 
> Well, if the inhabitants on the Malvinas/Falklands have no right to
> self-determination because they've only been there for 200 years then do
> European settlers have any right to self-determination in Argentina?
> Shouldn't they just go back to Europe and leave the region to the remaining
> indigenous people? Shouldn't the same apply then to Australia, New Zealand,
> Canada and the US? Note, I didn't say and have never said that the inhabitants
> of the islands are a "nation" simply that they do have some rights to
> self-determination.

The ignorance of these last sentences will be duly answered and destroyed to 
the root by a posting that I am drafting on the process of miscegenation in 
Latin America. Xxxx projects the heinous attitude of Anglo-Saxon colonizers to 
Latin America and particularly to Argentina. Not a surprise, since there were 
that kind of "socialists" in our country during the early decades of the 20th. 
Century. Enough for the day.


N O T E S

( 1 ) Although there was some of this too: for example, forced labor of 
prisoners in the Ushuaia jail, which ravaged vast tracts of menaced forest in 
Southern Tierra del Fuego, provided the woodwork with which many of the houses 
in "Stanley" were first built. 

The prison guards thus made good, though illegal, business with the British in 
Malvinas. What's more, since they were military guards (the Ushuaia prison was 
a naval prison) they were demoralized, as Argentinean military, by trade with 
the immediate enemy in the area. 

More still: many of the large landowners in Santa Cruz and Chubut were of 
Malvinero origin. They constituted a Fifth Column in Argentinean Patagonia (in 
fact, a British Patagonia) and were able to use Argentinean military forces to 
massacre the strikers of the Patagonian estancias in what was known as the 
"Tragic Patagonia" events. Of course, the story -which was written among others 
by these landowners- put all the blame on the head of the military and of the 
popular President Hipólito Yrigoyen, not on the bloodthirsty, pro-British and 
partly Malvinas-born, wool oligarchy at Gallegos, San Julián and Deseado.

(2)  BTW: are you of German or Yiddish origin, Xxxx? If so, you are not up to 
what your family name means, which is "teacher": teachers must learn about the 
things they try to instruct others about, and do it _before_ they try to 
instruct people

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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