Re: Imperialist progressivism (was Re: Thatcher and nationalism)

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> If, as Tam Dalyell has shown, Thatcher prepared the war in order to
> win her elections...

How did Thatcher do that? Did she bribe the Junta to send troops to
the Malvinas Islands?

Brad DeLong


> The population in
> the Malvinas are the result of forcible eviction, by a British fleet,
> of the legal and recognized Argentinian settlement there. Argentina
> has never surrendered to the joint American-British invasion of the
> islands in 1833, nor have we ever denied the right of the
> transplanted populations of the islands to become full Argentinians
> with due respect to their cultural traditions provided they ceased to
> consider themselves a Plantation. On this, we shall be inflexible,
> and in the end we shall win. This issue is a basic question for our
> politics, and a good standing on the Malvinas issue may turn a rogue
> into a sometimes unexpected revolutionary.

Yeah. Right. <sarcasm> And the Palestinian population are the result
of the forcible eviction, by the Emperor Hadrian, of the Jewish
population after the Bar Kochba revolt </sarcasm>.

Germans today don't demand the reversal of Richelieu's conquest of
Alsace. Americans don't demand Canadian withdrawal from the northern
half of the Oregon Territory. Italians don't demand that the French,
the Spanish, the Greeks, the Turks, and the Egyptians recognize their
historical allegiance to the Roman Empire. And the world is a better
place for it.

Consent of the governed trumps historical connection.

Brad DeLong



> FYI, when Galtieri, the _majestic General_ of Haig and Reagan,
> discovered that he had been trapped by his supposed friends, he
> faintly discovered that in order to go ahead and win the war he had
> to mobilize the most progressive forces in the country, he had to
> organize a militant national front, he had to return the basic
> control of economy to the hands of the State, he had to confront in
> the arena of the Foreign Debt, he had to cleanse the Army of butchers
> (being one himself!), and he almost made some of those moves: in
> fact, the Argentinian Foreign Relations Minister gave a 180 degrees
> turn to our foreign policy, siding with Castro and other progressive
> regimes that were supporting us in the effort...


So Galtieri's strategy would have worked: the domestic opposition on
the left would have forgotten his crimes and thrown their support
behind his regime--if only he had won his war, and so distracted
giddy minds with foreign quarrels.

Who was it--Count Witte?--who said at the start of the Russo-Japanese
War that the only thing the Czar's government needed was a "short
victorious war"?


Brad DeLong