Games without frontiers

Trails full of tears

We’ve been making sense of ourselves through stories since we sat around fires. Bards spoke of legendary hunts and stag-headed gods. We defined ourselves through these stories, and measured ourselves by how well we performed against them. No doubt in the age of Homer, many an Athenian boy dreamt of being Achilles or Odysseus, and girl Helen or Penelope.

Growing up in England in the 1970s, we drunk deep on the myth that ‘Britain won the war’. Little was said about the USA in our history lessons, and next to nothing about the USSR. This was also the post-imperial England of seemingly inexorable economic decline, which our rulers appeared to regard as inevitable until Margaret Thatcher came along and ‘won’ the Falklands War, of which more later.

In fact, ‘England’ was special, only not exactly as we had been taught. It owed much of its luck to geography, a highly defensible island from which it had launched a rapacious pirate campaign, then empire. Myth-building followed when it needed to square its vast holdings with its sense of being a ‘righteous’ people (as all people consider themselves righteous). Thus, ‘Victorian values’ and martial Christianity came to explain Britain’s ‘manifest destiny’.

We told stories of virtue to justify our vice, tales of heroism to deflect our decline.

But Britain is not alone in her myth-making – look at France (I mean, just look at France) and, to this day, the Americans tell themselves they fought for ‘no taxation without representation’ when this really only applied to a wealthy elite stoking up resentment against a distant government to consolidate power (sound familiar?). I would even argue Germany bought into a sort of ‘reverse’ foundation myth, its modern crimes (never mind the Hereros) so egregious the nation was ‘reborn’ following the Second World War, and its ‘economic miracle’ a kind of baptism, when in reality, the rest of the world knows Germans just haven’t changed that much.

Which brings us to the Argentinian victory in the World Cup. This was clearly a grudge match, to put it mildly, and as the Italian commentator said at half time – a ‘vergogna’ which literally means shame, but also implies disgrace (there were loud shouts of ‘vergogna’ in the crowd for example, when Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were released) given their many potentially leg-breaking fouls on the English. Still, the ‘Argies’ won fair and square in the second half, so that’s that. Except, clearly, to the Argentinians, it was not – players unfurled a banner at the close stating the ‘Malvinas’ were theirs.

And here we come to that fire again. Argentinians generally appear to have absorbed the notion they are somehow indigenous to Argentina, which was ‘terra nullius’, empty land (as in the notorious claim of the British about Australia) before their Spanish ancestors colonised the territory, ignoring the presence of the native Mapuche and Tehuelche, wiped out in the ’Conquest of the Desert’ (1880), and the Selk’nam and Yaghan, similarly eliminated in Tierra del Fuego (1890), events which echo the Australian genocide of the Tasmanian Palawa people (1830).

Ever wondered why there are few black people in Argentina? In the 1840s, around forty per cent of the nation had African heritage due to its enthusiastic role in the slave trade. Following independence, the rulers of Argentina did everything they could to ‘whiten’ Argentina, from promoting European immigration to encouraging miscegenation (esp. between black women and white men). It was plain that the lighter-skinned faced less discrimination, and by the turn of the 20th Century, the ‘black’ population had dropped to around one per cent.

Long before the Spanish settled the land of silver – hence Argentina – en masse, a British sailor literally (as there were no indigenous inhabitants, except for penguins, seals and the odd beached whale) discovered the Falklands. The first recorded landing was made by Briton John Strong in 1690. The islands were then settled by the British and French in the mid-1700s. Spain tried to grab them later that century but was stopped by the British, who were later obliged to withdraw protection due to the US War of Independence (see above) and the Spanish promptly returned to kick the settlers out. There was much argy-bargy over the successive fifty years, after which the British finally regained control (and sovereignty, which they had never surrendered).

Of course, the British have no right to actually be there, but apart from a few ruffled (penguin) feathers, this particular imperial act did little harm to the native population, and what right did the Spanish have to settle the mainland? Certainly no more, which is not to say that the Argentinian claim to the ‘Malvinas’ is especially remarkable in world history, but it does seem akin to Australians claiming New Zealand as their own. It really is as absurd as a pair of transplanted cultures arguing over ownership of an outcrop of land thousands of miles from ‘home’.

Yet, just as seventies Britain, rotting from the inside out, clung to the myth of vanquishing evil alone, modern Argentina unites to embrace an historic injustice that is really no injustice at all.

Myth proves more enduring than reality. Chief Athenian propagandist Homer placed a glossy veneer on a nasty episode of kidnap, murder and rape in his Iliad that helped define a people. Christopher Nolan’s version of its sequel, The Odyssey, is as loudly praised by critics as it is loathed by ‘influencers’. Either way, it demonstrates how little has changed since we gathered to watch buffalo flicker to life in the firelight of caves.