Yesterday, profiting from their victory over England, the Argentine footballers waved a revanchist banner on live television, asserting Argentina’s claim to the ‘Malvinas’.
 
This is a tiny archipelago which is actually called the Falkland Islands; it was first settled by the British and today has only British inhabitants.
Moreover, as many will recall, when the Argentine military junta (one of the bloodiest of the 20th century) attempted to boost its popularity by invading those little islands, Margaret Thatcher inflicted such a catastrophic military defeat upon it that it hastened its downfall, effectively restoring freedom to the Argentines.

In light of these facts, a reasonable person might ask: “What sense does it make, for so many Argentines, to still lay claim to those islands today?
They have never been Argentine nor inhabited by Argentines. Their reconquest is associated with a dictatorship that murdered 30,000 Argentines in seven years. What is just or lawful about continuing to lay claim to them?”

The answer, of course ,is ‘Nothing’.
But that is irrelevant to them.

Because, according to those people, the Falklands must not belong to Argentina on grounds of self-determination, nor on grounds of international law, nor to protect their inhabitants from any abuse by the authorities.
They must belong to Argentina because it is a likeable country, whereas Britain is an unlikable one.

As Loris Zanatta has masterfully demonstrated in his analysis of Peronism, the Englishman has for centuries represented the ideal enemy for the demagogues who have come and gone in power in Buenos Aires.
In the 19th century, he embodied the Protestant Freemason whose individualistic ideas threatened the harmony of Catholic society. In the 20th century, he embodied the political economist, the investment banker, the champion of free trade, and the builder and operator of infrastructure in distant lands. Today, he still reeks of the Atlantic Pact, the ‘special relationship’ with the US and bombs on Iraq.

Such an individual cannot continue to own islands, even if he was their first and rightful owner.
There is no need, therefore, for him to have committed any particular mistake: he must leave simply because he is English.
He must leave because of what he represents, regardless of what he does.

From this perspective, the banner in the Atlanta stadium is a brilliant litmus test for understanding how ‘anti-colonial’ or ‘post-colonial’ ideology really works .

It is an ideology that completely disregards questions of right and wrong.

In its eyes, there are no individuals, with their free choices that may at times be right or wrong, but there are peoples, who by their very nature are either good or bad: the former are colonised victims by definition, whilst the latter are oppressors and colonisers a priori.

Thus, even when it is Argentina that attempts to occupy a territory that has always been inhabited by the British – that is, behaving in a manner that, on paper, is ‘colonial’ – it continues to be a colonised victim, whilst Great Britain, even when defending itself as is its full right, remains a colonising oppressor.

The facts are irrelevant: what matters is waging an all-out offensive against a social model that Europeans are accused of having created and of continuing to embody.
If this offensive can be waged whilst having the law and reason on one’s side, so much the better. Otherwise, one can happily do without it.

For the battle is not perceived as legal or political, but as spiritual. Just as the European empires, at the end of the 19th century, used to say: ‘Since we are a more advanced civilisation, we must win’, so today the post-colonialists say: ‘Since you are a supposedly more advanced civilisation, you must lose’.

The label of ‘more advanced civilisation’, whether true or supposed (in pre-Peronist Argentina, life was much better than in Wales or Scotland), is more than enough to determine who is the oppressor and, by contrast, who is the hero.

The Falklands are an extreme example of this idiocy, but this fanatical way of thinking can cause far more serious damage.
When one hears, for example, that Israel is ‘an illegitimate state’ or ‘a Zionist entity’ that ‘stole the land from the Palestinians’, there is no point in poring over documents dating back to 1949 to refute these claims. Even if the Jews had not done everything they are accused of doing, in postcolonial mythology it is their very Jewishness that condemns them to being unable to have their own state in the Middle East.

In that mythology, the Jewish people who dare to settle along the Jordan River – just like ‘the people of Freemasons and bankers’ who dare to settle in the Falklands – are accused of being the original pathogen of a diseased social model.
And so they must be fought: not so much for what they have specifically and demonstrably done along the Jordan or in the Falklands, but for what they are accused of having done throughout the world by creating that social model.

The sooner we realise that this ‘postcolonial’ game works like this, the sooner we’ll be able to take the right countermeasures. Assuming it isn’t already too late.