En relación a [PEN-L:1606] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australi,
el 11 Sep 00, a las 1:16, Rob Schaap dijo:
> Hi again, Nestor,
>
> >This is EXACTLY what Peronism attempted to do here, and failed.
> >
> >Funny to see again how different are things in an imperialist country
> > and in a colony. In more senses than one, Peronism, which is widely
> >known outside Argentina (and particularly in the United States) as a
> >Fascist South American overgrowth that remained alive for a decade
> >after Nazism was swept away from Europe was in fact a domestic
> >version of a Labour government in Australia. In fact, one of the
> >parties on which Perón built his initial electoral victory in 1946
> >was the Argentinian Labour party, a party based on the workers of the
> > La Plata city foreign owned meat packing and slaughterhouse
> >industries.
>
> I'm not disagreeing with anything you say, comrade,
Oh, how boring... ;-)
> but am left
> wondering if a significant difference between Australia and Argentina
> might not be precisely that we did follow our masters to war.
Ah, this is where diplomacy and economics blend. I have a long story
to tell you here, so that please be patient.
1. The idea that Rob is raising on his post is, in fact, one of the
favorite tenets of gorillas here. But from the general thrust of his
argument below, it is clear that his is a completely different
argument. The gorillas (right or left, because there is a great host
of "left wing" gorillas here) suppose that if Argentina had gone to
war, it would have been awarded some kind of a prize, such as a badge
of loyalty. [They are absolutely ignorants of the realities of
interimperialist war, as I will show immediately, because in a very
important sense Argentina actually _did_ go to war between 1939 and
1945, and on the British side.]
The argument that the local gorillas generally resort to is that
Brazil owes its great leap forward towards industrialization in the
second half of the 20th. Century to the miserable batallion of
natives that were sent to massacre at Monte Cassino to spare Anglo
lives. This is bullshit, of course, but that's the way these idiots,
mixing in the same cauldron hatred to our brother Brazilians and love
to our colonizer Americans, understand life. Now, on to more serious
things:
3. As I commented above, Argentina did in fact "go to war", _by
remaining neutral during WWII_. Why so? Because this neutrality was
in the best interest of Great Britain, since the British considered
our meat supplies a strategic material. Long convoys for weaponry
supply across the North Atlantic had been a problem themselves. Can
you imagine such convoys travelling 6,500 miles from England to
Buenos Aires, and back? And for packed or chilled meat? Sheer
madness.
So that Argentinian neutrality was a guarantee of food supply. Things
were so revolted (because the nascent industrialization in Argentina
was beginning to generate a weak but militant anti-British
nationalism) that Nazi Germany even came to harbor a hope that
Argentinians would turn to their side, and they thus attempted to
obtain this by funding some newspapers and institutions in Buenos
Aires. Whoever knew the history of Argentina (and the Foreign Office
had a long track which everybody else, ourselves included, lacked),
this was to prove senseless, and in the end also worked to the
greater benefit of Britain: wooing Argentinians and blasting vessels
carrying Argentinian meat was not reasonable, Berlin cleverly
assumed. Most probably, the Admiralty and the Foreign Office would
smile slyly at the way events were developing down there.
4. But the United States were absolutely mad on this issue. The
American State and the American corporations were fed up with these
Argentinians. And the history of these bad relations was a long one,
with a strong economic origin: Argentinian and American economies
were not complementary, they were competitive.
The whole mess began in the last decade of the 19th. Century, and is
worth exposing because it is very important in our history. In 1889,
as a clear indication of what was to follow in 1898 with the Spanish-
American war, the State Department convened the first Pan American
Congress. They were decided to impose themselves as the ruler of the
Western Hemisphere on all those South American Latin moronic bums.
The way things actually happened, they had to endure, at the very
heart of Washington, D.C., an exasperating and disgustingly
vaudevillesque defeat when the Argentinian diplomats, nurtured in the
best of the French and British intellectual traditions (moreover, the
heads of the delegation were also domestic politicians and as such
extraordinary public speakers in an age of public speakers), brightly
and gallantly turned the congress into an useless amass of high
sounding, nothing meaning debate on great principles, and stated our
position as "America for Humankind" against "America for Americans"
proposed by Uncle Sam.
In grim reality, this meant "Argentina for Britain" against "America
for the USA", but around our delegation most of the Latin governments
found a rallying point that put a temporary brake on the encroachment
of Yankee domination of the South; those were the times when José
Martí, the predecessor of Fidel Castro and martyr-hero of the Cuban
revolution, found friendly doors in the large oligarchic newspaper of
Buenos Aires, such as _La Nación_. This tradition of Argentinian
independence towards the United States was further enhanced when,
since 1916, a more popular government came to power in Buenos Aires
with Hipólito Yrigoyen. Yrigoyen was not interested in debating the
by those times very comfortable dependency towards England, but he
was a stron Latin Americanist, and thus added activity to the passive
resistence that Argentina had displayed between 1890 and 1915.
During the USA invasion to Santo Domingo, an Argentinian man-of-war
was on a visit to the island. Asked by the captain of the vessel on
what to do when arriving there, Yrigoyen ordered that only the
Dominican flag had to be saluted. A group of local patriots waved
such a flag, and it was hailed with a full salvo of cannon blast,
thus taking American diplomacy to another frenzy of rage.
With these antecedents, and others (such as Argentian subdued but
unmistakable support to Paraguay (that is the British Dutch Shell) in
the oil war of the Chaco against the Bolivians (who were linked to
the Standard Oil Co.), it is hardly surprising that diplomatic
decission makers at Washington nurtured a cool rage against this
Argentina that would never bow to their might --the secret of such
stern patriotism vis a vis Uncle Sam being mild admiration towards
our patron Britain.
Since WW II was _also_ a commercial war between waning England and
rising USA, and the lower River Plate basin was the last bulwark of
British predominance in South America, Washington was bent on
cracking the back of our traditional anti-American standing. No
surprise, then, that when WW II was already almost finished, and
against every sound advice, the State Department sent as ambassador
the insane, stupid and ignorant Spruille Braden, in order to bring us
to reason. The final result of such intelligent a move was to open up
the gate to Peronism on the formula "Braden or Perón":
In the meanwhile, the military regime that had set in on June 4th,
1943, evolved slowly towards what would finally become Peronism, and
in the process Argentina declared war on the defeated Axis powers. So
that in the end what happened was that the roughshod and crude
authoritarian Argentinian military, with a little stroke of good luck
and a good deal of mischievous wit, managed to emerge from a war
where the country had been neutral as the heads of a creditor country
(England had not paid a cent for our exports during the war), without
having spilt a single drop of Argentinian blood in the battlefield,
and standing proudly on the "good" side of the divide. Not bad for
newcomers to international politics. Declaration of war on the Axis
also allowed the government to seize important German assets in
Argentina, on which the state owned sector of the economy, and
particularly a most modern trading fleet, was constructed later. But
it also implied a horizon of straining pressure from the American
establishment. This pressure was a constant until the Menem
administration put Argentina in the most repugnant obsequency towards
the most stupid whims of the resident of the White House, Washington,
D.C. And even once this was obtained, the USA left Argentina without
Ambassador for long years, as a way to show how much they scorned us.
5. Now, let us comment your most interesting story on the effects of
the war effort on Australian economy:
>
> It certainly occasioned a massive and belated shift from the almost
> entirely agricultural economy we'd been. This at once reduced an
> aspect of dependence, diversified our stock market, and made us less
> reliant on a low-value staple (we were more the price taker than the
> price maker in our agricultural exports).
The effects on Argentina were different. When the war broke, as I was
commenting above, Britain had Argentina under the yoke of a legal
structure that had turned us into a colony. But at the same time,
since depression first and war later put England in such a position
as to not be able to supply our domestic market, war gave us an
opportunity to develop our own industries. It only enhanced a
tendency that had appeared immediately after 1930, and thus laid the
bases for our conscious effort at industrialization. The
industrialization of the 1930-1945 period was different from that of
the 1945-1955 period, mainly, in that the former was an unwanted
result of a crisis in the semicolonial structure, while the latter
was the very wanted result of a conscious policy of the State.
> The Pacific War (beginning
> with the pathetic Singapore disaster in '42) significantly contributed
> to a resentful suspicion of the UK (already in place, given the
> equally pathetic Gallipolli disaster and the continued and expensive
> mediocrity of British general staff on the Western Front), itself
> occasioning a popular desire for less dependence on 'em - indeed a
> distance from them (funnily enough, many on the left were persuading
> everybody we should make for Unca Sam's open arms with expedition).
This story is different here too. The asphyxiating cultural
atmosphere of the semicolonial Argentina of the 30s was drenched of
great nation chauvinism, but it was a chauvinism of the imperialist
great nations. What I mean is that since under the conditions of the
1932 agreements domestic politicians could do little but accept graft
and manage our miserable fate (a story that is copied by Argentina
today almost to the letter, scandals in the Congress included), then
the Argentinians were eager to break each other's skulls over issues
of foreign politics. This was not precisely the best ground to
nurture an ideology of nationalisation of the economy, and it was in
fact the factor on which Braden counted during his days of folly
here.
>
> And it made Australia's Labor Party, and a large slab of the public,
> look away from the old Commonwealth in its strategic (we immediately
> signed some treaties with NZ) and trade policies (even Asia copped
> some overtures, but that stopped when the Tories got in). So both the
> sectoral structure (higher value production and the creation of a new
> and integrated national bourgeoisie) and the political culture
> (self-reliance and nation-building) of the country were very much
> positively affected in the context of the times. Not lastingly and
> not completely, but perhaps decisively at and for the time.
Yes, certainly. Argentina underwent a similar process, but without
the slightest idea of what was happening, and in a very subdued way.
>
> Perhaps the ALP did not face the problems Peron faced because of the
> war, then?
It has been commented above, I guess.
>
> What say you?
A lot, as you have seen.
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
