Thinking back I'm not sure I ever gave the Pebble Mill At One presenter Bob Langley full credit for his role in the birth of my political consciousness.
But it's true. My whole teenage attitude towards the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher, right-wing conservatism and the politics of the rest of that decade (and pretty much everything since) I can trace back to an episode of Pebble Mill broadcast somewhere around the end of 1981.
Langley was doing a tour of South America for Pebble Mill for the long-defunct afternoon magazine programme and at one point he washed up on the Falklands. At the time I'd never even heard of the Falklands, but here was Bob telling us that if we weren't careful there could be serious trouble with Argentina over this far-flung pile of rocks. In the months that followed, as the Falklands moved up the news agenda, that report stayed with me. If Bob Langley could tell Argentina's obsession with the Malvinas could be a problem why not the Foreign Office?
Perhaps I was hyper-aware at the time because I was of conscriptionable age, but the prospect of a war so far away over an island I'd never heard of until a few short months before seemed ludicrous. The conflict that followed cost the lives of 258 British servicemen and 649 from Argentina. It led to a cementing of Margaret Thatcher's grip on political power in the UK (which in turn cemented my distaste for the woman and her politics).
For years afterwards I always saw the Falklands as one of the most ridiculous of conflicts, some kind of post-imperial burp that reflected well on nobody. That line by the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, "a fight between two bald men over a comb", seemed all too apposite. It still does. Sour memories of Mrs Thatcher's "Rejoice, rejoice" speech after the recapturing of South Georgia remain near the surface. But the 30th anniversary echoes of the 1982 conflict have, I suppose, made me reassess the conflict at least a little bit.
The reason is to be found in Argentina. Any cursory reading about the Argentinian President Cristina Kirchner throws up similarities to a British female prime minister of 30 years ago. She is loud, at times shrill, confrontational. And given that her Peronist party has been in power for 20 of the last 29 years she belongs to a political force that has managed to hold onto power in a way that Mrs Thatcher would have admired.
What she is not, of course, is General Galtieri. We can look back at the injustices and hypocracies of the Thatcher era and see the costs we are still paying even now. But even at her worst her Conservative government was not comparable to the military leadership which had ruled in Argentina since the overthrow of Isabel Peron in 1976. What followed was a dirty war which saw tens of thousands of Argentinians spirited away from their homes to be tortured and killed. As an army commander in chief Galtieri was instrumental in the fate of many of the "disappeared".
The invasion of the Malvinas was predicated on the mistaken idea that the Reagan government would back him. When it didn't he was doomed. The British forces may have been stretched but the Argentinian army was made up of scared teenage conscripts led by incompetent commanders. When Galtieri died in 2003 he was facing prosecution for his role in the country's true dirty war. Not the Falklands war but the war against his own people.
In a way then the present-day Argentina is Mrs Thatcher's legacy. She helped end a horrific dictatorship. I didn't see that 30 years ago. Then again, I'm not sure she ever has. At the end of the 1990s she was speaking out in defence of Chile's General Pinochet, another South American mass murderer. In the end it's not enough to define ourselves by our enemies. We are also defined by our friends. Hopefully in the days to come both Britain and Argentina will remember that.
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