Michael Buerk's opinion on Argentina (2012)

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    Michael Burke, a veteran BBC reporter gives his opinion on Argentina and the Falkands war in an uncited opinion piece in 2012.

    Argentina's 'Breathtaking Hypocrisy' by Michael Buerk (2012)

    "Thirty years after the end of the Falklands War, Argentina's president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, has launched a diplomatic campaign to gain control of the islands of such breathtaking hypocrisy she makes Jimmy Carr look like Martin Bell.

    At the UN, in the breaks of the latest G20 summit, every time she opens her mouth it seems, she's been accusing Britain of naked colonialism, demanding we hand the islands, and the 3000 British citizens who live there, over to her.

    Colonialism - that's rich, coming from a country of European immigrants whose national policy has been to wipe out all trace of the people they snatched it from.

    I spent three months there during the Falklands War. Lovely food. Strange there are no black or brown people.

    Argentina's 97% white, according to the census. Wonder what happened to the Indian tribes who once flourished on the Pampas? Well, what do you know; they were deliberately exterminated in a series of genocidal military operations in the 19th century.

    Wonder what happened to those strange little folk Darwin found down in Tierra del Fuego? "Short, round, oily creatures, four feet fully grown, mostly stark naked despite the intense cold, with a curious talent for mimicry", was how he described them. Not any more. They were declared vermin and a pound was paid for every decapitated head.

    Wonder what happened to all those black African slaves - more than a third of Argentina's population at one time? Let me tell you. Thousands upon thousands of black men were forcibly recruited into the army, packed into the front line, deliberately used as cannon fodder in bloody campaigns against the natives and the neighbours. The black women and children either succumbed to disease or were simply assimilated into the floods of Italian and Spanish incomers.

    Blanqueamiento -"white washing" was official policy for generations. The blatantly racist constitution has only recently been relaxed.

    Result: Argentina is so white that the most prominent of the handful of blacks was arrested at the airport because officials just assumed her Argentine passport must be false.

    Don't get me wrong, I love the place and the people. They're brilliant at life but disastrous at government. They invented the Tango and thought politics should be broadly similar: a substitute for sex, performed on the streets, brainless, showy, exciting and doomed. That's how they've ended up being ruled by a succession of self-glorifying Ruritanian birdbrains and their molls.

    Inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong at regular intervals and they have to find a way of distracting the mob on the street.

    Mrs Kirchner stands high above that mob on the balcony of the Casa Rosada when she accuses us of the evils of imperialism.

    But the moral high ground, believe me, it isn't."

    Discuss.

    Jeez. Too bad he held back, instead of saying what he really thought. Perhaps the most disingenuous statement was this one: "Don't get me wrong, I love the place and the people."

    He seemed to start from his understandable distaste for Cristina Fernandez, and from there, he let his tentacles of disdain spread to the entire country. Is there any daylight between a reprehensible head of state and the country itself? Between the attitudes, posturing and yes, sometimes even mad ravings of an egomaniacal leader and his/her people, who usually are not in lockstep, but have widely disparate opinions and leanings?

    (The spotlight on Argentina's troubled history and very lamentable genocide made this reader recall periods of official cruelty on the part of Great Britain as well. What countries don't have shameful elements in their own histories?)

    I don't disagree with the writer's revulsion over the hypocrisy of the immediate past president. I do very strenuously disagree with his high-handed dismissal of the entire country.

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    The sad fact is though, many Brits have a very low opinion of Argentina, if indeed they have an opinion at all and the view of this country from the outside observer is still pretty grim.

    Worse still were the twelve 'Golden Years' under the Kirchners, during which Burke wrote this opinion piece (2012). Let's face it, that was not a very comfortable time, since Argentina was practically isolated what with the vulture funds, the snatching of the ARA Libertad in Ghana and CFK's rantings at the UN.

    I think if he were asked to write an opinion piece today, it may look a tad rosier.

    The article of Mr Burke, written in 2012, shows his very low understanding of Argentina´s history, especially when he blames the "genocide" we did in the XIX Century.

    1. The official policy of Spain reagarding the indians, was not of slaughtering them, but converting them to the Catholic Religion and organizing them in groups commanded by an "Encomendero", a Spanish offical who looked for their development and welfare. Of course, there were many corrupt officers who did not fulfilled the noble task ordered by the Kings (Especially at Habsburg´s time)

    The Spaniards were far more benevolent with the Indians. Thet established that the indians must not be taken as slaves, only they were new subjects of the Spanish King.

    2. Other important fact is that the whole territory of the current Argentina was virtually unpopulated, very few indians in the southern part and several in the northern provinces, but not so as it was in Mexico and Peru.

    That was the reason that the Spanish conquerors had little interest in that part of their official dominion in America. The Viceroyalty was created only in 1778, just 2 years after the American Revolution.

    3. A plain fact is that anyone of us, if we are going our the bubble of welfare where we live, and getting the suburban trains (The Sarmiento and the Roca line) could see that 50 % of the people have aboriginal traits. Caucasian are a minority. That means that if there was a genocide, it was minimal.

    4. The alleged "genocide" of the XIX century was made firstly by Juan Manuel de Rosas, who made an expedition to the Rio Negro to deal with the existing indians to get some kind of cooperation. The other one, and definitive, was made by General Julio A. Roca, in the famous "Expedition to the desert", 1879-1880, but his main purpose was to seize the Patagonia at the time when Chileans were at war with Bolivia and Peru. I must remind that before those times, the boundary between the state controlled territory was the Rio Salado, at only 160 kms (100 miles) from Buenos Aires, and this line went to west along the same latitude. The indians were always making raids to the small white population of the Pampas, killing the men and kidnapping and raping the women, and it was necessary to conquest them by good will or force.

    It is almost an ironic fact that Mr. Burke blamed us of being racists. It seems that he does not remember how the British Empire was made, (with all their lights and shadows too). Perhaps yes, we were a bit racist, but all the European and American white people were in the XIX century. He must judge the history within the proper context.

    Mr Burke must remind the Amritsar massacre did in India by the British troops in 1921, to a pacific demonstration of harmless people.

    They killed more people than the bullets they wasted.

    See this outstanding lie:

    Argentina's 97% white, according to the census. Wonder what happened to the Indian tribes who once flourished on the Pampas? Well, what do you know; they were deliberately exterminated in a series of genocidal military operations in the 19th century.

    Flourished? This guy knows nothing about demography. Obnoxious article. The Pampas were almost unpopulated.

    Series? There were only two, after many attempts made by the government to have an agreement with them.

    To be frank, I never thought that an Englishman could be so uninformed and unaccurate, writing an article.

    I always consider the British as a very cultured people. He seems a clear exception,.

    We can argue about the validity of his "facts" (which you have not successfully countered yet) and certainly we can raise an eyebrow at the motive of this article. He seems to have a genuine dislike of Argentina and claims to love the country, which reads as a laughable attempt to cover the rest of his article. We could also argue that his article is nothing more than a rant.

    However, I think you (Carlos) have missed the point, however inaccurately or wrongly it was made. He is not forgetting the terrible things the English or other countries did. Instead he saying Argentina has done these things too and the fight over Falklands (specifically during CFK-era Argentine politics) was based on taking a moral high ground that simply does not exist. Three times you have said "but the English" and three times you prove his point.

    I could be wrong because I am not basing the following on any data, but I have not experienced a similar view in the UK. I don't see people say Argentina was morally wrong to invade the Falklands. Stupid and naive, cheeky and disrespectful ("How dare they") for sure, but not criticism of morals. Again I could be wrong, but I guess most Brits would understand the history of their own country's antics around the world.

    That's the point here, Argentina is showing hypocrisy by trying to take a moral high ground. I often think it would be better if Argentina just admitted it wants the islands simply because it wants them instead of pretending to be a defending base against colonialism.

    Lastly, I think the article is trash.

    In a former post, that you cannot see now, because it was written in the old forum, I said that neither the British nor the Argentines have sound reasons to say that Falkland/Malvinas belongs to them.

    My post was made with of the most benevolent balance: Half of the library will say that UK is the owner, and the other half will say that Argentina is the owner.

    My point is that when the UK seized the islands in 1833, there was a small population there ruled by an Argentinean governor, and the UK seized it when in 1824 , the UK and the government of "United Provinces of teh Rio de la Plata", the former name of this country, have signed a peace and friensdhip diplomatic treaty to allow many important things for the commercial and civil inmigration of Englismen who began to develop a huge commercial deal with this country. In the treaty, the UK did not made any reserve of the Islands.

    But the islands were, in fact, already populated, there was people there which were expelled (fortunately not killed by the winning British garrison, and sent to Montevideo). This fact is actually ignored in the school texts of the Falklanders. They say that the islands were a desert, and this gave them reasons to get the islands.

    I do not think that the question is moral. I think that simply the UK bullied a young nation that begin to develop, and I must recognize, as many readers of this forum could witness, that the UK influence in Argentina was a good one. It lasted until 1965 or more, but the erred policies of the Military in 1982 destroyed any possibility of a fair covenant.

    As about a fair agreement, I took the example of the Sud Tyrol/Alto Adige question in northern Italy. The boundaries between Austria and Italy, after WWII, were established with the "divortium acquarum" criteria. The waters who went to the Adriatic marked the Italian territory, and the waters which went to the Danube, were Austrian. But there was a problem: in the Alto Adige (Ober Etsch) there is a German speaking population. Of ourse they disliked the actual partition, because they were in Italy following the above mentioned criteria. But good sense prevailed, and Italy and Austria did a fair thing: they created an autonomous region where German and Italians could use officially their languages, and also they administered the public income instead to give it to Rome.

    This region nowadays is one of the most wealthy in Italy. (And also with beautiful landscapes()

    I suggested, perhaps in a naive and idealistic insight, that perhaps, with time, we can do that if we left aside the hatred and fanaticism of the nationalistic groups.

    The British argentines had never been rejected by the argentine society. I can say that perhaps we needed more anglosaxons in this country, that carry some virtues that the mainly mediterranean stock (Spanish and Italians) lacks.

    Anyway, for me and others of my countrymen, the property of the islands is not a crucial issue. We need to do a lot of things to rebuild the country after the CFK era (2003-2015)

    Of course, I regret the haughty, authoritarian, rude words of CFK who shows the Argentina that I dislike. But her influence is decaying, for our fortune.

    Not saying I agree or disagree with this and never mentioned whether the island should be British or Argentinan (the world would still go around either way). In fact I purposely avoided trying to claim either side is right because neither is. The history lesson was not needed in this case. However, once again there is a slight hypocrisy here regarding what is taught in schools in the Falklands. My son attends a decent private school in Buenos Aires and when he studied the war they taught him that Argentina won the war. He was genuinely shocked when I told him that was actually not the case, so fudging of facts is something that happens in many educational systems.


    I do disagree with the assertion that this is not a crucial issue for people in this country. It depends where you go I would say, judging by the idiocy (from all sides to be fair) when a stupid motoring show succeeded on a wind up mission. For every person I meet who is ok with the Falklands situation (luckily my family here) I know one is who is completely blinded beyond reason.

    I think that the case you mentioned is exceptional. All the people knows that we lost the war.

    Even the loss of the war precipitated the loss of presrige of our military forces,

    Regarding the Malvinas/Falklands --

    In the 'national identity' department, during the K regime, the official stance seemed to be that there was no such animal as a Falkland Islander, but that the islanders were merely an implanted population of English people.

    Enter Benjamin Sommerville.

    http://buendianoticia.com/nota/9240/inve…s-kirchneristas

    We can look for his dissertation progress and findings in the Penguin News. While enjoying a pingüino of Malbec.