dreams of post-punk empire
I was watching some of Sky News’ coverage of the Anniversary of the Falklands conflict, and was quite startled to see one of the talking heads remark that it was “the woman inside Margaret Thatcher that won the war”.
Odd, I thought it was the man inside each Para, Marine, Gurkha, and Guardsman, each soldier and sailor.
Now I’m not much for jingoism (wouldn’t it be great if we could all just get along?) but like Samuel Johnston said “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.”
Although I’ve pretty much grown out of that since I stopped reading the Eagle and started watching the news.
I did start thinking though that the Falklands was the perfect war for Thatcher’s Britain. With the strikes, unemployment and general gloom of post-punk Albion, and a crisis of British identity, a good old-fashioned colonial beano was just what we needed.
The Falklands conflict had all the right echoes of empire. It was far away enough away that we could cheer the boys on over breakfast without having to scurry into the bomb shelters after dinner, or worry about nukes getting lobbed about. But despite the distance involved, the people we were liberating were just like us, and of course, we was provoked.
In military terms the whole affair was informed by all the classic imperial myth of British military might: a tinpot local ethnic chiefy (or in this case, three chiefys, the Junta) gets a bit above himself and plants his flag on British soil. There’s more Johnny Foreigners than there are Tommies but of course that never mattered: the fuzzy-wuzzys and dagoes no match for the superior kit, training and honest-to-goodness British pluck of the British soldier (except when they were.)
The contrast with Iraq couldn’t be more marked. If the Falklands made Thatcher unassailably popular, Tony Blair may have wanted the same from Iraq.
If this kind of national fillip was what Tony wanted he couldn’t have been more off the mark. Perhaps he’s ruing the lucky break that the Junta chose to set about the Falklands on Thatcher’s watch as much as her opponents have ever since.
Unlike this second Iraq expedition, and Afghanistan, the assault on the Falklands had a clear goal: send Johnny Foreigner packing. So it was short. Casualties didn’t mount by the day. The soldiers soldiered. They fought proper battles, marched to the next battle, won that one and went home. They didn’t hang around trying to be friends with unfriendly locals and worrying they could get blown up every time they got out of bed.
The go-to attitude that got the Task Force out there and back with three points on the league table affirmed our place in the international First Division, but didn’t wind up half the world’s fans and start them chucking fireworks round on our terraces.
After the Falklands, we got to feel triumphant; not shifty, unsettled, unsure why we’re still there. Sometimes when I’m watching the news I wish I’d never stopped reading the Eagle.
April 8th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Ha, that’s a great description of the Falklands War– little more than a colonial-ish distraction from Margaret Thatcher’s abject failures on the ground as a leader in Britain itself. Britain even during its prime had a rather lousy military record. The British were slaughtered twice in the First Anglo-Afghan War in the 1840’s and its successor in the 1880’s– the Afghan Warriors defeated the British so badly, they were permanently kicked out of Central Asia. This was the supposedly powerful Victorian army at work, getting its tail kicked by a bunch of Afghans. Those British forces were also beaten in Egypt by an Albanian-Egyptian force in 1807, and around the same time, they were defeated twice and kicked out of South America entirely. Spanish soldiers, with a French officer at the helm, and joined by creole-led militias throughout South America, defeated the British invasions in 1806-7. The British never actually beat the Chinese even with the Opium Wars– every time they tried to send forces to actually get control over the Peacock Throne, they were thwarted by the Chinese coastal forces, even as corrupt as the Manchu government was at the time. (The British learned the hard way how dangerous the Chinese soldiers could be during the Korean War a century later.) The British were also humiliated by the Irish after WWI in the Anglo-Irish War, by the Cypriot fighters and the Yemenis after WWII– that’s just the start of it.
So Britain’s never really had a record of martial prowess to begin with, and it’s never been very distinguished– it’s actually pretty mediocre.
Even Margaret Thatcher herself failed meekly when faced with tougher opponents than some tinpot loons in Argentina. She was never able to defeat the Irish Republican Army, which enjoyed its most deadly and effective period during Thatcher’s administration. They even bombed a building she was staying in while escaping unscathed, contributing further to the mayhem and economic decline that undermined the Thatcher government.
Thatcher capitulated like a welterweight on the Hong Kong issue against China (which, in the 1980’s, really was a nasty authoritarian power, compared to the hybrid whatver-it-is today). Hong Kong, in economic, military and political terms, was vastly more important to the United Kingdom– and far more central to the UK’s strategic interests– than some far-flung, little-visited South Atlantic islands. Yet Thatcher was intimidated to abject surrender by Deng Xiaoping when the Chinese started playing hardball. Even on Thatcher’s most cherished foreign policy issue– minimizing the EU’s grip on Britain– she failed. Her own Tory MP’s refused to back her, and Thatcher was forced to watch Britain become further enmeshed under the authority of the institution that she despised so much.
When it became clear how much of a failure the Thatcher Administration had been– in a political, military and especially economic sense– and she refused to take the hint, her own party tossed her out in humiliation. Not even Tony Blair after the horrors of the Iraq failure has faced such an insurrection.
So this notion of a “proud and powerful” Britain has always been more spin than reality– even at its imperial height in the 1800’s Britain was constantly losing wars against colonial opponents. The UK never had the sort of mystique that e.g., Rome did or the ancient Chinese did, or even the Spaniards and the Portuguese when they became the first truly global empires from the late 1500’s. That the British sailors refused to fight futilely and die for a foolish myth, is to their credit.