The Falklands and the Cunning of the Total News Story

A flag carrying the words “The Falkland Islands are Argentine” traveled from the corridors of Fuerte Apache to a stadium in Atlanta, then into the country's political conversation. Perhaps the story is a myth. But myths define history, and this one now forms part of the government's effort to make the Falkland Islands Argentina's shared national subject once again.

The story begins, according to the account, in Fuerte Apache, the neighborhood associated with footballer Carlos Tevez and with lives shaped by both violence and the struggle for dignity. Friends of Argentina international Thiago Almada are said to have carried out the idea for the flag. After Argentina's extraordinary victory over England, the players displayed it before the largest audience possible, with the world watching.

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The Falkland Islands are Argentine.

From there, the story moved toward Javier Milei, who announced sanctions against companies seeking to extract oil without Argentine authorization and the construction of a base in Ushuaia. The article presents this sequence as an example of “total news,” a story that eclipses other news and makes it appear less important. Everyone talks about the same subject. Every outlet carries the same subject.

The author argues that this uniformity does not destroy the wider news universe. It makes that universe tangential for a while. Economic difficulties, drug trafficking in the north, the precarious financial situation of members of the armed forces and the private lives of ordinary people continue outside the dominant agenda.

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Argentina should not confuse a lever with a doctrine.

The article also cautions Argentina against confusing a political lever with a doctrine. On Aug. 31, when asked in the Oval Office about Washington's historic neutrality in the dispute, Donald Trump said he was reviewing all positions and that neutrality was only one of many. The article says that remark did not arise from a South American conviction, but from Trump's disputes with London over NATO defense spending and his tense relationship with Labour premier Andy Burnham. “What is granted to pressure a third party can be withdrawn as lightly as it was granted.”

The history of the islands, the article concludes in the supplied text, is a catalog of successive flags. Frenchman Louis Antoine de Bougainville founded Port Louis in 1764, and the British later claimed and took the islands.

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What is granted to pressure a third party can be withdrawn as lightly as it was granted.