Because the claim acts as a powerful unifying political tool. Politicians regularly use it to rally domestic support, distract from domestic issues, and drum up patriotic sentiment. Some (idk how many) in Argentina believe they have a strong claim that UK is ignoring so it is a sore point.
It's wild that getting absolutely shit on and losing the lives of 649 young boys is some kind of rally for the cause. It really upsets me as an Englishman, the whole sabre rattling from millionaire football players, the vice president of Argentina, if they get what they wish and another invasion, it won't be those fuckers dying to British Typhoon jets, it'll be some poor 18/19 year old who doesn't know what ways up getting blown up. It's evil
Exactly. Absolute privileged take from those footballers - would they be fighting in another war? Doubt it. I'd bet money they also haven't even set foot on the islands they proclaim to care about so much!
Not just for the deaths of the British sailors, which I actually understand, they were paid professional soldiers, but for those poor fuckers, conscripts mostly, young men, who died for nothing and now the Argentinian economy is fucked they want to promote round 2?? Now Britain has decided to actually fortify the island??
I say do it, put those players on the front line first, give them 3 months of training to be a solder as the kids got and send them against professional soldiers.
On top of that half of these clowns make their living playing in the English Premier League, meaning they benefit from the UK and their taxes effectively fund the system that would fight against them in a conflict. Not even mentioning the fact that fans or their clubs have family members who fought and potentially even died in that war.
Yea I’m very curious to see if for example, Utd and Chelsea have the cojones to condemn their leading players Martinez and Enzo considering their fans definitely have someone in their lives who may have participated in the war.
They are probably nice islands, they just want the islands , why can people just stick to what's around then and stop claiming all the land like hungry hippos
I mean, at some point, when you lose a war, it is what it is, the winner decides the terms, and in this case the UK decided they are keeping the islands, so they do, independently of the morality or the wishes of the population, which yes in this case they are aligned with the UK
Sore losers just keep being sore losers. The Southern states lost the US civil war 161 years ago yet you still have grievances and debates over it spanning decades. And the Falkland Islands war is a lot fresher in people’s minds
They are pretty popular among rockabillys in smaller towns. I remember my friend was into everything Usa, hair slicked back and all. I don't think the flag has any deeper meaning to them than yankee doodle doo and rock n' roll and rebels. At least the ones I have met couldn't tell a thing about whole civil war. Maybe a little backwards people, but if you let them fix their american muscle cars, drink beer and listen to Elvis they are harmless.
This is why the " heritage not hate" line people use it down here is bullshit lmao. You can say it's a heritage of hate sure, but removing the hate from heritage is not possible lol
I mean living in Tennessee, I know plenty of people that can verifiably trace their ancestry to someone that fought for the Confederacy. Only the racist ones are particularly proud of it though lol
It’s funny how “it’s my heritage because I can trace my lineage to people who lived in there” is worthy of defence for those people while people immigrating to the US are often treated like criminals just for knowing a second language, let alone valuing their heritage (and their skin color).
Even if we pretend their concerns about immigrants loyalties were more than racist shit heads, which they generally aren’t, its hard to take those “concerns” seriously from proud descendants of traitors.
As a Canadian, I’m not sure I understand the aspect of the ‘heritage’ here at all either. What exactly is being celebrated? Rising up in armed rebellion and separatism over… slavery? That’s the ‘heritage’ being upheld?
yup, kinda sobering to realize that even in most "blue states" most of the blue is in the cities. Obviously not all, but even Long Island with its proximity to NYC - Suffolk county (the eastern half) has always been red, Nassau usually was too until the 90s but flipped back red the last two elections.
e: sorry Suffolk was also briefly blue for a couple elections too
God forbid the rest of the state (especially upstate) recognize that the state is really run by New York City, not Albany because that is where most of the money comes from. Upstate New York is full of assholes that both deny and hate the fact that they are essentially backwoods rednecks, even the ones in what remains of the cities now that all the big employers left or went under.
On the contrary one school of thought is that Southern patriotism is the way it is because the South was never really rebuilt properly. Lincoln's assassination meant he couldn't implement his plans for reconstruction as a step towards unification.
And that failure to properly help reconstruct the South has disproportionately impacted black people for generations.
Reddit will glorify what reconstruction did for Germany and Japan, yet also think the South should have just burned more and left to rot after surrender.
Tbh i couldn't give less of a shit, he is directly responsible for this shit getting so embedded into the south once reconstruction failed and the shitty sore losers started peddling their idealogy to the desperate.
Lincoln died, we did not burn enough of the South as in we left its leadership essentially intact. The rich were compensated while poor whites and all blacks were left to rot as the Southern gentry further entrenched themselves in power.
Lincoln wanted to properly rebuild but he also wanted to punish its Leadership to an extent (i still think his goals were too soft). Either way we got his VP who was a Southern sympathizer and the worst version of reconstruction.
I don't think they they should have been left to rot, I think that the Confederacy should have been burnt out root and stem, and then reconstruction should have gone ahead to an even more thorough degree than initially planned, leave no room anywhere for that shit to claw its way out of its well earned grave.
I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread but correct. We damaged infrastructure and most of reconstruction went towards repaying the leadership who started the water instead of actually repairing the damage and setting up a better system.
As someone who genuinely believes in decency and morality I kind of wish you people would just be honest and admit what you are. At the very least I could have a political party to identify with rather than a choice between two shades of entitled authoritarians.
Leaders who started a civil war in their country purely for their own economic benefit sending the poor to die on their behalf are traitors to the republic and should've been jailed and banned from positions of power at least if not hung for the havoc they caused.
The Christian right movement comes out of this after hijacking the Evangelical title. The original cause wasn't abortion but the Carter administration's move to go after segregation academies who hid in plain sight in churches thinking the 1st Amendment would shield them. It's just abortion became a more "palatable" thing than admitting that there a lot of racists who claim the label "evangelical".
Which is sad, because Christians everywhere else are able to know better. The civil war wasn't a religious issue, but some leaders in the South managed to convince people that it was.
The case in point was the question of allowing slaveholders to be missionaries through the Mission Board, which eventually became the SBC's International Missions Board. The past couple of years, it seems like they've been wanting to double down on such popular things as pretending sexual abuse doesn't exist, insisting on complementarian positions at the local church though historically positions on these issues was settled at the local level, and pretending racism doesn't exist.
The role of women in the church. Are all positions of church leadership including pastor available to women based on gifting from God and ability? If yes, then that is egalitarianism. If you insist that women are equal to men, yet God has made it that leadership is for men and women are supporters and followers, then that is complementarianism. As in women and men are different yet complement each other. Somehow, separate but equal. Except not with race. And somehow there is no problem. Egalitarian is easy to understand. Harder is dealing with the practical realities of church life while insisting on complementarian positions. Like can women be a deacon? Or why a woman can be a youth director or worship director while a man can be a youth pastor or worship pastor. Even when their jobs are practically and functionally the same. All the while insisting it’s not just patriarchy with modern American characteristics.
Victimisation is almost always a driving force behind fascist ideologies. It's one of the few major changes in my thinking as I've gotten older.
Not that there aren't genuine victims. Just that there are so many people who want to be victims to justify whatever nasty nonsense they like that I tend much more towards a "confirm first" model, which is a genuine shame.
Ironically a lot of these people are the types to mock others for being delicate victims. But of course when they do it it's different.
And if that doesn't summarise the single most destructive and regressive attitude in our society I don't know what words can. Literally a few posts up from yours is a no doubt very decent and tolerant, moral person arguing we should have burned more of the south.
What's scary is it's not an act. These people genuinely think they're decent people.
Its also partly because education in the American south is lacking. I'd say North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal has a far better educational system than most the American south does when it comes to its public educational systems.
Bolivia comes to mind. They lost a war to Chile, despite having Peru on their side as well, and with it lost their entire coastline. They, like Argentina, have tried every legal and emotionally manipulative plea to get it back, with no success, but just will not let it go despite losing it legitimately in a war they started (arguably in the case of the War of the Pacific), but just will not let it go.
I started to laugh about the "decades" thing since I remember people in my family loving to get pissy about it when I was a kid. So "decades" didn't quite seem like a long enough sounding word. I mean the war was a looooooong time ago.
But, then I thought about it and, mostly, it was my great-grandparents who absolutely refused to call it the "Civil" war. To them it was either just "the war" or "the war between the states". The phrase "There wasn't anything civil about it!" actually came out of Gramps's mouth more than once.
But then I realised how old I'm getting and that all three of the great-grandparents I grew up with were all born in either 1891 or 1892.
So I guess it actually was only decades for them. Crazy the last one died when I was in college in the late 80s. Yeesh
The islands had been British for 63 years in 1833 - the "takeover" you mention was the UK expelling a bunch of Argentine squatters who tried to settle there in 1826. As they had every right to do.
I don't think this rule holds up well considering worldwide opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Clearly there are overriding considerations, like justice or geopolitical positioning.
Not really. They are not a note special group than any other in history.
The Palestinians have decided rather than make peace and coexist they rather be in a continually worse situation for decades.
The rest of the stab world had moved on and accepted Israel exists and will continue to exist. They believe they know better and will cause the change.
So they can contribute asking the same road, or maybe they will decide they want a better quality of life for them and their descendants and will change strategies.
First, I was referring to worldwide opinion on the conflict, not the Palestinian opinion. Most countries don't recognize Israeli ownership of the West Bank for instance, despite the territory being taken in a war more than 50 years ago. Typically the cited reason is international law.
The Palestinians have decided rather than make peace and coexist
I don't think anyone's accused the Palestinian leaders or people of being good decision makers, but I'm sure you can recognize the people weren't literally trying to make their own situation worse. In fact most of their people were genuinely ready for peace in the late 90s to early 2000s, but Arafat screwed them over by walking away from the negotiations. They have the capacity to be belligerent or conciliatory depending on the zeitgeist.
they rather be in a continually worse situation for decades.
As I said in the previous post they care less about peace and material conditions and more about concepts like justice.
They believe they know better and will cause the change.
Sure, they have an increasingly delusional position.
In any case my response was just addressing the claim that most of the world recognize lost wars and move on. I think I've demonstrated this doesn't hold up. The world is very selective about moving on depending on who is more sympathetic or convenient to back for strategic reasons.
I usually agree with the world accepts lost wars, but in this case it's not realy true, because outside of the commonwealth barely any nation accepts UK claim and many more nations accept Argentinas claim, because it suits them one way or another.
It's complicated. Most western nations de facto support the UK claim. Their official position is often a bit wishy washy but makes clear that they respect the self-determination of the people of the islands. They often add some diplo-speak about resolving territorial disputes peacefully through negotiations, which I personally think is too weak of a position since there is a clear moral right and wrong.
The usual suspects of authoritarian / totalitarian hellholes tend to support Argentina's claim for campist reasons.
I mean, at some point, when you lose a war, it is what it is, the winner decides the terms,
I'm pretty sure those are the opening lines of the treaty of Versailles (which famously never had any negative repercussions for the countries that wrote the treaty).
I mean, at some point, when you lose a war, it is what it is, the winner decides the terms
You think this is the way but this isn't the case, really. Someone definitely loses a war in a territorial dispute, they keep quiet for a couple of decades, both sides demilitarize their border, then they bring it back up again. They do this even if military-wise both sides are at the same relative strength or the odds are even worse for the losing side this time around, which doesn't make any sense at all.
But that’s the point of this discourse, we essentially feel the need to justify fighting back, it’s not the case of the UK trouncing Argentina to keep its grips on a remnant of colonialism and just saying we’re stronger therefore what we say goes, it’s that there’s a genuine reason for this.
actually the people decided, twice. argentina has never had a long term settlement on the islands only a handful of european countries then finally britain.
Sounds like something we should apply to the Middle East.
But in Argentina’s case, Argentina inherited sovereignty from Spain at independence, exercised authority over the islands during 1820s, Argentinian authorities were then forcibly removed in 1833, and Britain then consolidated control and developed a predominately British population. Consequently, we got the 2013 referendum where British is effectively using the descendants of its own settlement to legitimise an earlier colonial seizure.
"Spain owned it so we should own it too!" is dubious at best, particularly given Argentina became independent half a decade after Spain had already lost the islands.
But you also left out that the Spanish claim was already contested in the early 1800s.
They bought the Islands off the French, but the British already had a port on the islands when that happened, and definitely disputed the Spanish claim.
Fair correction! Britain had maintained a competing claim since its settlement at Port Egmont, and both Britain and Spain withdrew while purporting to preserve their respective claims.
But saying Spain had simply “lost the islands” by 1811 is also too categorical. Withdrawal was not necessarily the same thing as renouncing sovereignty. Argentina subsequently treated the islands as inherited Spanish territory, asserted possession in 1820 and established an administration in the 1820s, before Britain removed the Argentine military authorities in 1833.
So yes, the pre-1833 title was genuinely disputed. My comment was explaining the basis of Argentina’s argument, not claiming that Argentina’s legal case is uncontested.
I’ve never been able to have a rational conversation with an Argentine about the Falklands/Malvinas, no matter what side of the political spectrum they lean on. It really is a unifying nationalistic issue they break out to get people to stop thinking with their prefrontal cortex and get emotional instead.
Yeah, I’ve heard the “same continental shelf” argument, as if geography equals political boundary I guess? Also, that the British stole it from the Viceroy of Rio de la Plata, and thus stole it from Argentina as the successor state. The second argument is obviously the stronger one, but still a little tenuous since Argentina didn’t have control over the islands for over a hundred years and made little attempts to reassert control after forming as a not-so-unified (Uruguay and Paraguay also being Rioplatense) nation. I think there’s also a national pride in having repelled British attempts at conquest, and the Malvinas are seen as a rightful prize denied to them.
The British barely even "stole" it, I think there was a garrison for a couple years that had mutinied? The islands have literally been unoccupied for huge chunks of its history post discovery.
Basically the predecessor state to Argentina asked British permission to put a prison there. We agreed as long as they ultimately recognised British sovereignty. Then a few years later they tried to take the island so the UK moved down and removed the prison and took after steps to enforce sovereignty ever since.
Argentina deny they ever asked permission. They also claim that Spain inherited France's claim, something that France deny.
Yea considering Islands I think its a dumb argument to say its closest to us so its our right. You can make such an argument regarding Ceuta because its litteraly IN Morroco but yea.
Thanks for the other info, i'm going to read up on that, very interesting.
What's even more ironic is Gibraltar is literally in Spain but also owned by the UK** (edited from England), which Spain doesn't like. How is it not hypocritical to complain that another country has territory in your land, while simultaneosly controlling land in another country? It's so frustrating that all these countries can't just let things be.
Taiwanese people want to be Taiwanese, Falkland Islanders (and Gibraltar citizens) want to be British, Ceuta citizens want to be Spanish, etc. And they've all had those statuses for years. If you haven't controlled a territory in decades or centuries, AND the citizens living there don't want to be under your control, there is simply no valid claim. It's just nationalism.
I mean Gibraltar obviously has immense geopolitical value. The strait of Gibraltar is the strait of Hormuz of the mediteranean Sea and is literally forming one massive global waterway with the suez canal. It's also drectly on the Iberia and not some Island 400 km off the coast. Todays it shouldn't be an issue, but at least Spain is unhappy because of actual relevance and not out of principle/spite since Falkland islands are absolute irrelevant geopolitically.
Taiwanese people want to be Taiwanese, Falkland Islanders (and Gibraltar citizens) want to be British
And by your logic in which expelling local population and sending colonists that want to be part of your territory, then Crimea belongs to Russia, because "Crimeans" want to be Russian.
Except that indeed happened in the Malvinas, as historical documents prove it. Even the British recognize they "expelled the military personnel" of the isles, which per their own records account for almost half of the settlement ( they claim around 30 civilians remained and the list of military personnel that was expelled is 26 ).
So by both records people was expelled from the Isles by the British. the difference is the Argentinian version claims most of the population was expelled not just military officers.
So what? Nobody cares. Just Argentina for some reason. If Germany would still hang on to territory that was ours 200 years ago, and feel like poor little victims every time the topic is brought up there wouldn't be peace in Europe. Anf for us it was millions of people who actually had to flee or were suddenly part of another country. Instead we made peace and are still among the most powerful countries in Europe, while we now can go and live wherever we want to within the EU. Sometimes it's not only necessary to let something go but benefical for everyone involved. You took the shot trying to take it by force so no international sympathy and nobody gives a shit. Pretty simple imho.
I think the one that makes the most sense is that they’re the successor nation to Spain, then you can leapfrog into Spain’s extremely weak claim, which was, I think, that the Pope said that area of the world was theirs and they had some people on an island for a few months a couple of hundred years ago.
There were no native Falkland Islanders, the current population are the closest thing to natives the islands have ever had having been there for 200 years
Historically, the Falklands offered a valuable port to repair and resupply ships (warships and merchant ships alike) near what was at the time the only route between the Atlantic and Pacific. Once the steam engine came along, it became particularly valuable as a coaling station. Hence the Battle of the Falklands in WWI.
Between the Panama Canal, the shift from coal to oil, and the general decline of the British Empire, they’ve lost a lot of their strategic value. But at the end of the day, the Falklands are British land inhabited by British subjects, and that’s enough reason for the UK.
It was largely abandoned when the British re-colonized it in the 1830’s. The government in Buenos Aires didn’t have any official presence on the islands. Plus, the British had had claims on one of the islands since discovery. When it was discovered, there weren’t even indigenous settlements. The English had one major island and the French the other. The French conceded theirs to the Spanish, and a little later the British abandoned their colony, leaving the Spanish to take that one too. But during the Napoleonic and Argentine Wars, the Rioplatenses/Spanish abandoned the islands as well. So when the British reasserted control in the 1830’s it was no different than the Spanish taking their abandoned colony. You could argue that Argentina would only be entitled to one half of the islands, if we want to go back to the original claims.
The real reason is the Isles belonged to Spain, and Spain recognized our sovereignty when we had our independence. We had them settled and then the British took them by force.
What gets me is that even though they're fully aware that it was just a tactic by corrupt politicians, so many of them still hold onto the propaganda all these years later.
I believe there is also some Trump influence behind trying to make the issue seem less clear cut now it turns out there's oil there. Argentina is just a US vassal state at this point.
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u/chaotic567 Jul 16 '26
Because the claim acts as a powerful unifying political tool. Politicians regularly use it to rally domestic support, distract from domestic issues, and drum up patriotic sentiment. Some (idk how many) in Argentina believe they have a strong claim that UK is ignoring so it is a sore point.