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Pro Patria Mori?

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Rory Winter
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How right he was.

For weeks now, Brits have been force-fed glorified memories of an event which took place 25 years ago proving to the world that the British ruling classes cling on desperately to their imperial pretensions regardless of the price in blood that is invariably paid for it by their subjects.

Subjects, for in Britain there are no citizens, only the lowly subjects of Her Satanic Majesty, that notorious blood-sucker whose hidden and most influential hand still manipulates the death-machine of international monopoly capitalism and usury.

Governments, as the astute Tony Benn has observed quoted in an article below, use the Media to project the distorted version of reality which suits them. In Britain, it also uses the monarchy to promote a bluster of hollow patriotism in the manner described by an earlier commentator, Walter Bagehot, as a necessary tool of pomp and circumstance, bread and circuses, by which the masses are governed and kept in their place.

By promoting the disgraceful, modern-day colonialist adventure of the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas war the mainstream media (MSM) is playing to classic form, glorifying a sickening episode in which hundreds of young Brits and Argentinos died over a crop of rocks in the bleak South Atlantic. For weeks now we have heard nothing but blaring chauvinism, led as always by the BBC, on what a great job "our boys" did in liberating the hardy, Best-of-British Falklanders from the dastardly grip of that dago, Leopoldo Galtieri.

Of course, no mention is made of that other dictator, Margaret Thatcher (or 'Señora Torture' as she was aptly described by an Argentino mispronouncing her name), or the reasons behind her galloping patriotism and willingness to spill the blood of Britain's youth in a war which was a calculated attempt, on her part, to bully a weaker country into submission, claim victory and thereby bolster her badly-flagging electoral popularity.

Nor the fact that the disputed sovereignty of the Falkands/Malvinas dates back to 1833 when the British opportunistically seized the islands with its military might. These things are better left undiscussed. As is the uncomfortable contrast some have made since of the obviously racist interest the British Government had in coming to the rescue of a handful of white colonists 8000 miles away from the Motherland while, in the Indian Ocean, having expelled through threat and deceit another small group of dark-skinned people from the Chagos Islands.

There is no comparison, the British Government would maintain. After all, the Chagos Islanders were descendants of indentured labour (legal colonial slavery) whereas the Falklanders were authentic colonists (colonizers). And besides which, the Big White Father in Washington had made it known that he wished to acquire the Chagos Islands, lock stock and barrel, in order to build a nuclear strategic base on Diego Garcia (called Fantasy Island by its Yankee usurpers) to fight the good fight for Democracy-'n'-Freedom and occasional bomb the sh*t out of uppity rag-heads in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

Reality doesn't bear looking at too closely. It never has. Especially the vicious, murdering lies behind what is called patriotism, that perpetuator of paternalism and an inherited, psychopathic Jewish thunder-god. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, it is sweet and seemly to die for one's country. Evidently, the BBC, the British MSM, the Government and the Royal spokesperson, Prince Andrew, on TV for those miserable parasites called the monarchy, still insist it to be so.

But let me tell you of an alternative, personal version to the official glorification of that episode of tribal blood-letting.

Back in 1982, I was living in south Oxfordshire, the heart of Tory-land, out-of-work together with the rest of Thatcher's marginalized millions, scraping a living out of a mixture of substitute teaching and government welfare, fathering a child and two step-children and campaigning daily against the Reagan/Thatcher Arms Race and the Cruise missiles at Greenham Common.

Then suddenly came the Falklands/Malvinas crisis. Instead of dealing with it peacefully through the United Nations, as she could have done, Thatcher decided to live out her pretensions of being a latter-day Boadicea, offering the blood-sacrifice of British youth in yet another opportunist war ('yet another' because it was a repeat of how the Falklands were originally seized).

Hurriedly, I photocopied a batch of hand-bills which had written across them, Ceasefire Now!, drove across town and plastered them wherever I could. On inspection twenty-four hours later, I discovered them all to have been torn down. Such was the fever of jingoism that had infected every little market-town through Her Satanic Majesty's land. So, determined not to be outdone, I printed double the number of hand-bills and, this time, stuck them with a much stronger glue. The next day, with satisfaction, I noted that many of the posters were still up. But such was the frenzied anger of our local patriots, you could see where they had attempted to scratch down the offending posters, leaving behind a trail of claw-marks.

To make it worse, I developed the measles and had to be put in quarantine in the living room next to the TV. So I had very little else to do but to watch the entire playing out of the Falklands war-movie from start to finish. Every time a British battle-ship was sunk by the Argentinos, I cheered traitorously, "teach the British colonialists a lesson!" Later on, I discovered that I was not alone. Many other Brits opposing Thatcher's war had done the same.

One interesting aspect of the media show which accompanied the adventure in the South Atlantic was the manner in which the War Office (aka Ministry of Defence) censored all TV reports by running a thick cable from the TV cameras to caravans installed outside Downing Street where all reports would be monitored and adjusted to Government requirements. Now called 'embedding' that process of censorship and government-sanctioned propaganda has been developed to a fine art both in Britain and the USA.

Sadly, Thatcher won and by doing so condemned her subjects to 15 more years of penal servitude. A great victory march was organized in Portsmouth and the patriots gave themselves to an orgy of chauvinism, booze and self-degradation. One of the memories of that celebration of pomp and circumstance were the numbers of one-legged war-wounded. How sad, these sheep who, over and over ad nauseam so easily go to their slaughter!

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Coauthored THE ULTIMATE TRAGEDY with Abid Ullah Jan

Blog: CHIMES OF FREEDOM

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