On June 14th 1982, 40 years ago next week, the Falklands War came to an end when Argentine forces under the command of General Mario Menendez surrendered to Major General Jeremy Moore. The Falklands War lasted for 74 days and resulted in the deaths of 255 British and 649 Argentine service personnel. Originally written off as an impractical military operation which would be doomed to failure due to the logistical difficulty of supplying an amphibious task force operating 8,000 miles away from Britain, the Falklands War was a resounding success. It remains one of the largest conflicts Britain has fought since the Second World War and it is still something we can learn from, perhaps now more than ever as we slowly emerge from the response to COVID-19. We find ourselves facing ongoing military threats from Russia and China, an assault on our own heritage and the emergence of decidedly unsavoury political initiatives which loom over independent nation states, notably the WHO’s Pandemic Preparedness Treaty. The Falklands War is a reminder to us that Britain need not follow the herd or submit to the flawed Left-wing groupthink and dogma so often subscribed to by leaders elsewhere. It can, and should, instead act independently and uphold the values and rights which are ingrained in its own history, and which are so rarely practised elsewhere.
Much media discussion and coverage of the Falklands War has focused on issues like the supposed injustice of sinking the Belgrano or has treated the conflict as some sort of pathetic attempt by Britain to retain some grasp on its colonial past. Other narratives have been shaped by a hatred of Margaret Thatcher and a general dislike of Britain’s past, with the Argentine occupation of the islands being portrayed as benign and perhaps even justified and beneficial. Such portrayals may have some evidential basis and are certainly attractive to various ideologues, but they are also misleading and overlook the decidedly unpleasant nature of the Argentine Government at the time. Critics might like to portray the Falklands War as being driven by outdated foreign policy and cynical political opportunism by Thatcher’s Government to distract voters from Britain’s economic problems. But the reality is that, irrespective of official motives, British military intervention in the Falklands ensured the survival of the political and cultural liberties which were, and still are, valued by Falklanders and which are an inherent part of Britain’s identity. The purpose here is not to analyse the political and military strategy, though some discussion of historical context is initially necessary, but to draw attention to the nature of the Argentine occupation of the Falklands. This article will therefore briefly outline the historical origins of the Falklands War, suggesting Britain’s claim over the Falklands had greater merit, before proceeding to examine the Argentine occupation of the islands. In essence, the aim is to firmly demonstrate British intervention was undoubtedly justified from a cultural perspective.
Going by the known historical record, it appears the first people to live on the Falklands were some Spanish sailors who temporarily sought refuge there in 1540. The first known English contact with the Falklands was in 1690, though there is some speculation that English sailors had visited them a century earlier. Britain did not actually claim sovereignty of the islands until 1765, with settlers arriving in 1766 in Port Egmont. By that time, Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville, had already established a French colony in Port Louis of about 150 people, some of whom had been deported from Canada following Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). However, the French colony was removed in 1767 following a dispute with Spain, which claimed the islands were a dependency of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, a Spanish colony in what is now Argentina. The Spanish did not discover the British presence at Port Egmont until 1769, with Spanish troops evicting the British settlers in 1770. The following year, with Britain threatening military action, an arrangement was made in which Spain agreed to the British restoration of Port Egmont on the understanding that the islands still came under Spanish rule. This arrangement led to a coexistence between the British and Spanish until 1774, whereupon economic pressures and emerging struggles elsewhere in its empire, notably the Thirteen Colonies in North America, led to a British withdrawal from the Falklands. This did not signify a withdrawal of Britain’s sovereignty, however, as the British left a plaque which asserted their claim to the islands in their entirety.
The Argentine War of Independence (1810-1818) led to Spain’s withdrawal from the Falklands in 1811, the demise of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata and the emergence of Argentina as an independent country, with the Congress of Tucumán formalising the Declaration of Independence on July 9th 1816. Part of Argentina’s claim to have sovereignty over the Falklands is based on the account of David Jewett, a privateer licensed by Buenos Aires to attack Spanish ships, who stated he had taken possession of the Falklands for Argentina in November 1820. The problem, though, is that Jewett does not appear to have been operating with any official orders or instructions and was thus acting without any authority. The Government in Buenos Aires was not even aware of Jewett’s actions until a year later, when the story broke in the British press.
Furthermore, Argentina did not attempt to establish a permanent settlement until 1826. By that point Louis Vernet, a German-born merchant, had emerged as a key figure in the development of the islands and was in correspondence with Argentine and British officials. Vernet set about developing the ruins of Port Louis on East Falkland and was appointed the governor of the Falklands by Buenos Aires in 1829, with Matthew Brisbane as his deputy. Vernet attempted to regulate fishing and sealing rights, resulting in a dispute with the USA after Brisbane seized three U.S. ships. Subsequent intervention by the USS Lexington in 1831 concluded with the removal of Vernet’s Government but the U.S. lodged no claim over the Falklands. Argentina briefly formed a new administration on the Falklands in 1832 but an ensuing mutiny and Britain’s intervention in 1833 meant the islands were left under British sovereignty and were militarily undisputed until 1982. This therefore means that, whilst the Spanish were the first to live on the Falklands, the British were the first to establish a permanent presence and stable government there.
By 1982, Argentina believed it had a strong case. Seizing upon the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960), which basically supported decolonisation and the principle of self-determination, Argentina believed it had a right to claim sovereignty over the Falklands. The flaws and irony of their own logic passed them by. Besides having a democratically elected Government, the Falklanders desired to maintain strong links with Britain. Any Argentine attempt at asserting sovereignty over the Falklands would not only clash with the islanders’ wishes but also merely replace one colonial power with another and thereby run counter to the principles of the UN’s resolution.
Nevertheless, the actions of the British Government during the 1970s and into 1981 suggested to the Argentine government that they had an opportunity to seize the islands without much resistance. The 1981 Defence Review, with its proposal to decommission HMS Endurance, would have essentially removed the Royal Navy’s presence in the South Atlantic. Britain also only ever maintained a tiny garrison of Royal Marines on the Falklands and appeared to be scaling down its scientific base on South Georgia, a dependency of the Falklands. Furthermore, except in individual cases where connections to the U.K. could be demonstrated, the 1981 British Nationality Act had not granted British citizenship to Falklanders. These developments were interpreted by the Argentine Government, which itself was confronted by significant economic problems, as evidence that Britain had little interest in retaining control of the Falklands. The Argentines thus ignored the principle of self-determination and invaded the Falklands on April 2nd 1982.
The root cause of the Falklands War therefore centred on the question of sovereignty, with Britain and Argentina claiming the islands. In Argentina’s case, the claim was (and still is) essentially predicated on geographical proximity and the assumption that it had an historical inheritance derived from the legacy of the Spanish Empire. Argentina’s claim therefore amounted to a desire to right a perceived historical wrong (something which no doubt chimes with today’s social justice warriors and the Labour Party’s 2019 manifesto). Britain’s claim, however, was based on the fact that a British presence has been maintained consistently since 1833 and that any attempt by Argentina to force change on the governance of the islands would trample on the rights and wishes of the Falklanders. Essentially, the argument came down to whether the rights of the Falklanders to determine their own government should be respected or whether some tenuous historical claim to ownership should be prioritised. (Going by the 2013 referendum in the Falklands, the British case remains relevant with an overwhelming majority of Falklanders (99.8% out of a turnout of 92%) wishing the islands to remain a British Overseas Territory (not that the then Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kircher respected the outcome).) Had Argentina’s claim ever been successful, one wonders what the implications would be for national boundaries, territories and identities elsewhere. Judging by the state of Argentina in 1982 and the nature of the Argentine occupation, it is clear Falklanders’ rights were better protected by Britain.
The Argentine occupation of the Falklands may well have been relatively brief but it nonetheless was characterised by some sinister developments which indicate what might have emerged had the British not responded. By 1982, Argentina was governed by a military dictatorship, or Junta, which had been established in 1976 following a coup led by General Jorge Videla against President Isabel Peron. Once they had seized power, the leading figures of the Junta launched a campaign against Left-wing opponents which became known as the ‘Dirty War’. It is unknown as to how many people were ‘disappeared’ during the Dirty War but some estimates suggest that perhaps 30,000 people were either killed or imprisoned between 1976 and 1983.
There is certainly evidence which indicates the Argentines who briefly occupied the Falklands attempted to build bridges with the islanders. In an effort to ease pressure on civilians and prevent supplies from running out, General Mario Benjamin Menendez restricted troops’ access to shops. Air Vice Commodore Carlos Bloomer-Reeve appears to have done what he could to make the occupation as tolerable for the islanders as was possible given the circumstances, and it is evident that some mutually beneficial trading was done between some of his troops and various islanders. There were also instances of individual Argentine soldiers attempting to establish friendly relationships with civilians, though such efforts were unsurprisingly met with cool responses from the local populace. It might seem bizarre from a British perspective, but it appears some of the Argentine troops genuinely thought they were there to liberate the islanders and were confused as to why their efforts at greeting local people went unacknowledged. Bloomer-Reeve recalled how he and his men believed they could improve the quality of life on the islands, with medical professionals and engineers being brought in during the occupation to develop services and infrastructure.
However, there remained a sinister threat lurking just below the surface as signs of the Junta’s ‘Dirty War’ emerged from the pool of goodwill on display. The worst of this appears to have come from Major Patricio Dowling, a distinctly unpleasant individual who had built a career around terrorising civilians in Argentina, was tasked with heading a military police unit on the Falklands. Dowling seems to have repeatedly overstepped his authority and applied some of his brutal methods during his time on the islands. In one incident, Dowling burst into the house of one family and threatened them at gunpoint, putting them in fear of their 11-year-old daughter’s life. In another, Dowling intimidated the Luxton family by having them detained and interrogated, putting them in great fear, before having them deported. Dowling’s actions towards the Luxtons ironically undermined the Argentine objectives as the family arrived in Britain and disclosed useful information to the British armed forces. Dowling posed a clear threat to civilians and according to Allison King, who helped run the Upland Goose Hotel where Dowling dined, he imitated Nazi ideology by allegedly talking of a ‘final solution’ to the ‘problem’ of the Falklands.
Physical intimidation and the threat of violence seem to have extended beyond Dowling’s own presence, with other Argentines either supporting or using methods directly drawn from Argentina’s Dirty War. Nicolas Kasanzew, an Argentine journalist, stated:
The Kelpers were our arch-enemies. From the first moment, I felt they were going to be fifth columnists. I was not mistaken. They are basically shepherds; primitive in their way of life. In their character and their appearance, they are hybrids. Their attitude towards Argentina was absolutely negative. Kelpers, like the English, respect nothing except force.
It was a sentiment which was certainly put into practice by officers beside Dowling. A lieutenant, Juan Gomez Centurion, appears to have had a menacing presence, boasting of his involvement in the Dirty War. One islander, John Pole Evans, described how there was a constant fear that they would be killed and he witnessed how another islander, who had been caught listening to a radio, was arrested, beaten and tortured. Evans’ fear was shared by other Falklanders as one recalled how the confusion and lack of communication within the occupying force meant one of the Argentine soldiers “could easily come along and shoot you”. Even the seemingly reasonable Bloomer-Reeve admitted he was prepared to use violence against civilians if ordered to by his Government. The potential risk posed by the occupying force to the islanders’ lives grew over time, especially once British forces had retaken South Georgia on April 25th. From that point, a unit of Argentine special forces arrived and began arresting and interrogating men in Port Stanley, and plans were developed to deport detainees. Robin Pitaluga, a sheep farmer, was made to believe he was going to be executed after making contact with HMS Hermes on May 1st. Physical intimidation and coercion were thus key characteristics of the Argentine occupation.
Other troubling matters which threatened the Falklanders’ way of life developed during the occupation. Argentine intelligence services began an initiative to introduce identity cards and restrictions on islanders’ movements were imposed via a curfew which was enforced by military patrols. Breaking the curfew could, as some discovered, potentially result in being shot at. Civilians’ vehicles were requisitioned and some islanders’ homes were broken into and looted by Argentine soldiers. Later stages of the occupation revealed how some Argentine soldiers had deliberately vandalised property by defecating over walls and floors, leaving a disgusting mess for the islands’ inhabitants to clear up.
The occupying force also tried to restrict the Falklanders’ contact with the outside world whilst launching their own campaign of misinformation. A television transmitter was installed and television sets were imported from Argentina, and a news bulletin began being broadcasted at 8pm. Falklander Tony Smith described how the Argentines began “broadcasting propaganda and horrible stuff”. The Argentines spread false reports of how key Royal Navy ships, such as the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, had been sunk by the Argentine navy and that the morale of the British was low. Misinformation was accompanied by actions which today might be considered a form of cancel culture. Port Stanley was renamed Puerto Argentina, though there was also an aborted plan to rename it Puerto Rivero (after Antonio Rivero, who led an uprising against the leaders of Port Louis in 1833). On April 14th, a group of Anglo-Argentines was brought in to try convincing the population they would be better off under Argentine rule but this appears to have backfired and been met with a less than favourable response from the locals. Clearly, the attempt to introduce cultural change and propagate state-approved misinformation was a failure.
Overall, there are some very important lessons we can learn from the Falklands War. In one respect, the question of sovereignty over the islands illustrates how the modern fashion for selectively imposing perceived historical injustices, which themselves are typically based on misinformation and fallacies, on the people of the present makes no logical sense. In another respect, the conflict represents what Britain stands for and what it can achieve. All too often in the decades since the Falklands War, a certain malaise has infected British Governments and British media. The symptoms have included a loss of confidence, disdain for British history, dishonest leadership, the growth of socialist-inspired policies and a general talking down of what Britain and its people can accomplish.
During the EU referendum, innumerable comments and reports were made of how Britain had to be part of the EU as it was too small to survive in a world dominated by powerhouses like China and the USA. The arguments surrounding geographical size were as irrelevant as Argentina’s assertion that physical proximity gave it sovereignty over the Falklands, but the theme was clear: Britain was supposedly not capable. The lack of confidence grew with the response to Covid as Britain’s existing contingencies were instantly cast aside in favour of the inhumane, illogical and unscientific approaches from China. Government and media hysteria heightened people’s fear of death and in efforts to avoid dying, most people became terrified of living. Assaults on liberty were readily accepted by most of the population and the alien concept of being interrogated by police whilst you tried going about your own business suddenly became part of the new normal. This resembled systems and cultures which exist in totalitarian regimes and was not dissimilar to that which began to emerge during the brief occupation of the Falklands. For all the incompetence in the way the British Government handled the Falklands prior to 1982 – incompetence which encouraged the Argentine invasion – British military intervention in the Falklands stopped the sinister methods of Argentina’s Government from being permanently established on the islands.
As we emerge from the response to Covid, we can look back on the Falklands War and see a Britain which was seemingly in decline but which reasserted itself and overcame the seemingly insurmountable. Much like in 1982, Britain in 2022 has the potential to take charge of its own direction and fate. In her speech to the 1922 Committee on July 19th 1984, Thatcher commented on the miners’ strike and observed:
We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.
In 2022, Britain has a new enemy within. But it need not follow the narrative laid down by the collection of cancel culture activists, doomsters and technocratic sycophants. It can instead look back on achievements like the Falklands and once again find itself, re-engage with its classical liberal values and emerge from the aberration of its response to Covid with renewed confidence.
Dr. Paul Jones is Head of History and Politics at an independent school.
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Pre Crimes the Next Tyranny
8 days late? Perhaps the G has production problems; it would have made sense on 1/4, after all.
They should change the name once more to:
Sharing Archives To Improve Risk Evaluation.
The revised name comes with its own handy mnemonic.
The most scary bit here is acutally that our officials are stupid enough to believe this is possible. Especially, this includes being ignorant enough about pretty basic math to believe that the relative frequency of a non-random past even equals the probability of it repeating in future.
Despite being taught in GCSE Maths in the UK, the False Positive Paradox (aka Base Rate Paradox) still does not gel with most people, including ignorant officials. A highly relevant example of the paradox can be found by googling for “Base rate fallacy Example Terrorist identification”. (Ironically, Google’s AI introduction summarises this!)
The idea behind this is much more f***ed up. A probability is the relative frequency a specific outcome of a random selection will approach if the random selection is repeated often enough. The usual simple example is rolling a dice. Each individual outcome as a probabilty of ⅙ and this means there’ll be approximately n/6 occurences of each number when a dice has been rolled n times. The actual number of occurences will converge towards n/6 as n increases.
Relative frequencies can obviously be calculated whenever there’s a group whose members have a property X and a subgroup whose members also have an unrelated property y but the y/x is not the probability that the next person with property X will also have property Y as there’s nothing randomly selected here.
We don’t know what the outcome will be is a necessary condition for a random selection process but it’s not a sufficient condition: Just that we don’t know why something occurred doesn’t mean something occurred randomly.
Mathematical de-nonsenifying: Let nx be the number of people with property X and ny the number of these people with property y. ny/nx is know the relative frequency of number of people in the property X group which also have property Y but not the probability that the next person where property X is observed will also have property Y.
Good example – I like the example around tossing a coin – many people believe after a series of one result, you are more likely to get the opposite, when in reality it’s basically still 50/50 because each event is separate
This is actually not true because the probability of an event occuring is the number of times “event occurs” in the total set of events divided by the total number of events. When tossing a coin once, the total number of possible outcomes is 2 (front or back) and both front and back thus have a probability of 0.5 of occuring. But when tossing a coin twice, the total set of possible outcomes is
This means the individual probability of each outcome is now only 0.25. The number of possible outcomes doubles with each toss of the coin. But a sequence of all front or all back always remains only one of the possible outcomes. This means the probability of it decreases exponentially with the number of coin tosses.
Here we go again! Matt Hancock allegedly based his strategy to
control everyonecontain a ‘deadly, killer virus’ after watching the film ’Contagion’.Who has now been watching Tom Cruise in Minority Report?
Perhaps anyone that has should be subject to a double eyeball transplant without being told that it only works in the pretend world of Hollywood.
They’d need a brain transplant first
*For those who haven’t seen the film, Cruise plays a cop who, after being assessed by an AI pre-crime programme, is falsely accused of a pre-crime. He has to fight the system to clear his name.
Dear Mr Smith,
Our algorithms detect that you are more likely than average to commit murder, and so we need to talk to you about your thinking, and enrol you in our Homicide Awareness Course. You should report to Blogtown Community Centre next Monday at 6.30pm, bringing this letter and a utility bill with you as evidence of eligibility.
Failure to complete this course may make you liable to summary arrest in front of your children, 48 hours in our cells, and then release on Police Bail followed by a “no further action” notification, as is usual in non-crime situations.
If you belong to any of the following Protected Categories, you may ignore this letter…
I’m surprised that there is no mention of ‘number of years residing in the UK’ as one of the predictive variables.
So the algorithm might not work very well if they don’t include all the variables that correlate strongly with crime.
They can’t help themselves can they.
They’ve never seen a dystopian film or book without thinking “ooh that’s a good idea, we’ll try that”.
Truly we are governed by moral and intellectual pygmies.
“Explore alternative and innovative data science techniques…“
…Meaning find new ways of making stuff up. Outcome life sentence for the heinous pre-crime of predicted premeditated homicide.
Elementary, my dear Two-Tier.
Just another excuse to pry into private citizens and then control them. But it is all protect the individual. “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Benjamin Franklin I believe.
Its been said before, but 1984 was not intended as an instruction manual.
“Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.” Like they denied the introduction of vaccine passports and look at what happened…..
This appears to be largely a re-run of the Home Office Initiative around 2001 (under various “Blair Babe” focus groups, presumably led by Jack Straw). This reached the level where the Home Office tried to get national and international definitions of mental illness changed to introduce a new one: “Severe and Dangerous Personality Disorder” (SDPD). This was defeated, not so much by human rights activists and lawyers, but by psychiatrists, doctors, medical professionals, researchers and, above all, mental health practitioners. On the whole these did not want the responsibility for “diagnosing” the politically-motivated new disorder of SDPD, especially as such a diagnosis would, under the Home Office proposals, render the person immediately liable to indefinite detention without charge, simply on the basis of a couple of opinions of psychiatrists. Also it tended to work the opposite way to that recommended by psychiatrists dealing with this type of case: namely, instead of encouraging the patient to take responsibility for their own actions, it would have specifically removed that responsibility from the patient and transferred it to the doctor, or the medical facility. As well as being psychiatric bad practice, it would have placed doctors and anybody else in a position of responsibility in a situation where they would be fearful of the consequences of NOT making such a diagnosis if the patient then went on to commit murder; such fear would tend to make the person adopt the contentious “precautionary principle” and make a SDPD diagnosis, knowing that they would not be held responsible for any violation of the patient’s human rights.
Twenty-five years later, what has changed? First, the government of the day still seeks votes by appearing to be able make the electorate “feel” safe from the extremely small number of people who pose a risk to the general public, while playing down the much larger risk of the much larger number of essentially basically harmless people, who happen to tick all the “right” boxes in the opinion of psychiatrists, being detained indefinitely. (It’s the old False Positive Paradox again, which came to fore during Covid testing.) Secondly, AI has come along, or whatever small development in software and hardware has been thus dubbed. This will encourage even more dependence on “computer says” diagnoses, based on even more obscure algorithms and models of human behaviour. The potential for unscrupulous, incompetent or merely mistaken people (whether entrepreneurial, medical, political, legal or social) to cash in on this, and the resulting human rights violations, will be enormous.
However, there will be opposition. One obvious tactic will be to point out that “psycho-eugenics” would be tainted by bad history, because it comes out of the same stable as eugenics, the difference being that eugenics was about extirpating carriers of “defective” genes, whereas psycho-eugenics is about extirpating carriers of “defective” memes. Another defence is the lessons from the psy-ops applied during Lockdown detecting people who might be labelled as potential “granny killers” just because they up-ticked a comment sceptical of the value of Lockdown and vaccination.
I hope this research does not result in the roll-out of an “early intervention” programme to stop crime before it occurs: the lessons of the 2001 Blair/Straw research must surely be available.
Scary!
“‘Murder Prediction’ Tool to Identify People Most Likely to Kill” Lite woke version no doubt.
The pre-crime tool will of course work only in identifying white people, any other person ethnic or sexual protected status will be filtered out.
I wonder if it could have predicted the Nottingham and Southport murders? It’s funny how all the layers of ‘experts’ couldn’t, yet the man on Clapham Omnibus would have done this in 5 secs.
This is just another boondoggle for the useless Home Office and MoJ.
At which university is this “research” taking place?
The Odeon or Cineworld.
Ha-ha! Brilliant!
Algorithm is:
white?
male?
not in trade union?
heterosexual?
not disabled?
score 2 or more positive answers to get arrested.
The biggest problem with this approach is not that it might identify those most likely to kill people but that following that identification nothing will be done.
Potential murderers will no doubt claim a right to enjoy a family life under the EHCR which trumps the ‘identification by algorithm’.
You don’t seriously want people to be punished for some AI claiming they might commit a crime in future with a certain probability, do you? If you do, why not just send people to prison street-wise? Some of them would certainly have committed some crimes otherwise! Or why not just gather people at random and shoot them?
Nice one. That’s a quote to remember:
“Why not just gather people at random and shoot them?”
Is this the real reason Stalin Starmer is so keen to force schoolchildren to watch that Marxist Indoctrination programme called “Adolescence”???
Softening up the public with propaganda, so they will accept White Working Class Boys as the primary targets of the “Pre-Crime Murder Prediction Tool”???
TPTB: We think you’re likely to commit murder so we have you under round-the-clock observation.
Subject: !! I’ll ****ing kill you. Make sure they get it on camera.
I presume this will only be deployed against white British people ….. since they know who the most likely to murder are and they all have various shades of darker skins and have come here from places where violence, particularly against women, is the norm and often sanctioned by their faith and their governments.
it was known at least thirty years ago that there are typically 39 to 39 antecedent criminal events prior to the major ‘index event’ such as murder, rape, etc and that the obvious job of the ‘relevant authorities’ was to work on the perpetrator during the first batch of criminal acts to prevent the probability of the major incident – but, as ever, the bureaucrats and politico’s ignored the research … no wonder we’re ‘at’ where we’re at