Easter islands

This long Easter weekend including a Maundy Thursday overlapping with Veterans Day supplies the topics for today’s column since all other issues are likely to continue beyond.

Ahead of whatever he might have to say at tomorrow’s Urbis et Orbi, Pope Leo’s Easter message thus far speaks of an “unarmed and disarming peace” but there is not much peace in today’s world – neither at home (with the horrific school shooting in Santa Fe Province) nor abroad (the Middle East) while for many people the dominant image of Easter itself is the violent cruelty of the crucifixion rather than the transcendental importance of the resurrection. Meanwhile Maundy Thursday’s Veterans Day marks yet another anniversary of the outbreak of the tragic 1982 South Atlantic conflict.

That war remains for most people an uncomfortable trauma which they would rather not contemplate but when they do, they question almost everything except the national cause itself – the folly of sending raw conscripts often from virtually subtropical northern provinces into battle against a highly professional army in a war stretching almost into a frozen winter, frequently mistreated by the officers of a brutal military dictatorship. Many find it hard to question the legitimacy of the war itself and far less the underlying claim to islands indisputably forming part of the Argentine continental shelf.

Nevertheless, a true nationalism should deplore rather than honour the outbreak of that war because otherwise it would be almost inconceivable that the disputed islands are now closing in on a bicentenary of British possession. Britain’s 1974-1979 Labour government just beforehand was actively exploring leaseback options via its Foreign Secretary Lord Chalfont (who only died six years ago, incredibly enough). All nipped in the bud by the war. Without it, a British Conservative government capable of negotiating the return of Hong Kong to China (even if the actual transfer was made in the first weeks of Tony Blair in 1997) would doubtless have had few misgivings about relinquishing the Malvinas but after 1982 they could hardly have negated Margaret Thatcher’s triumph (over geography as much as Argentina) while on the other side interest in leaseback was superseded by fears of “Labour sellout” newspaper headlines.

All these might-have-beens of history now find us marking 44 years of deadlock. This dispute basically boils down to territorial versus popular sovereignty (to which Whitewall might add: “Possession is nine-tenths of the law”) – Argentina’s geographic claims so much more clearcut than a complex history versus the self-determination of the islanders. But this deadlock could at long last be changing. President Javier Milei has many other greater priorities but in his few comments on this issue, he has hinted at a strategy combining territorial and popular sovereignty which might just find him visiting London later this year – both earlier this year and this time last year Milei expressed respect for self-determination while adding the hope that the islanders would voluntarily opt to be part of Argentina once transformed, an approach accompanied by reaffirming Argentina’s “legitimate and irrevocable” sovereignty claims over the Malvinas at every United Nations General Assembly appearance.

Meanwhile Argentina is celebrating Easter with a president more interested in Passover but the bigger challenges to the traditional Church are coming from secularisation and Protestantism. While around the time of the South Atlantic war Argentina’s percentage of Catholics was on either side of 90 percent, that proportion has fallen to about five out of every eight today despite 12 years of Pope Francis. Yet even if only one in every six of these attend mass weekly, this still adds up to around five million people every Sunday, thus vastly outnumbering the stadium crowds in this football-crazy country.

One in six would also quantify Protestant Argentina approximately with almost a quarter shunning religion altogether. This percentage lags behind various Latin American countries such as Brazil, Guatemala and Peru – in our giant neighbour the evangelicals have become a potent electoral force at almost 30 percent of the population (thus Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018 was attributed to 3 “B”s – Bible, beef and bullets in reference to evangelical and farming sectors and law and order issues).

This columnist’s historical studies provide one possible explanation why Argentine Protestantism is not growing as fast as in other Latin American countries. The French King Henri IV is perhaps as famous as anything for saying: “Paris is worth a mass” when converting in 1593 – by then he had conquered most of France but Paris was so intensely committed to the Catholic League in the religious wars that there was no way the Huguenot prince of Navarre could enter the French capital without submitting to Rome. It might seem strange to the modern eye that “gay Paree” should be so deeply Catholic but being “gay Paree” was precisely the reason – Parisians loved their festivals and had no intention of losing them to party-pooping Calvinism (it might be recalled that only a couple of generations later Oliver Cromwell outlawed both Christmas and the theatre in England). By the same token it might be less of a surprise to find fun-loving Argentines leaning more to the Catholic side of the aisle. Now just wait and see if Dante Gebel is elected president next year to prove me wrong.

Enough on religion. Coming back to the anniversary of the 1982 South Atlantic conflict, repudiation of that war should not stand in the way of its veterans being honoured as even the youngest of them are starting to enter retirement age. Repentance is in order for supporting the counterproductive aggression of a military dictatorship but not oblivion – we need to learn from the mistakes of the past and, above all, to give peace a chance. This Easter finds war clouds over much of the world but perhaps down here the ghosts of the 1982 South Atlantic conflict could finally be banished if more people can hold the thought that territorial and popular sovereignty may be made compatible.