April 2nd 2012 was the 30th anniversary since the army of Argentina made an amphibious landing around the settlement of Port Stanley, the largest town on a miserable, lonely speck of land stranded in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that goes by the name of Islas Malvinas, or, as the British overseers call it, the Falklands Islands. Over the next two and a half months nearly 1000 people would die, war crimes would be paraded as military victories, and the aftermath was set for one government to come crashing down and another to rise to further and unprecedented heights of international bloodshed and terrorism. The ‘Falklands War’ of 1982 is a dirty stain on my country’s recent history, a disgusting wallow in extreme jingoism and xenophobia, macho posturing not seen since the world wars, the manufacturing of a latter day folk mythology through gallons of blood and a decisive, perhaps irreversible, shift in politics and society to the far right.

A bloated, repulsively enduring colossus, Margeret Thatcher remains an icon of Kim Jong-Il proportions amongst the mainstream press and culture, venerated and praised endlessly despite her legacy being one of appalling destruction and hardship swung into the livelihoods of the poorest and most discriminated against sections of society. She was the first female Prime Minister who harmed women’s rights more than any man in her post had ever done. Yet the key to her success is money, and lots of people made themselves stupendously rich during her 11 year dictatorship. In 1982, however, she was just getting started, and her blowjob to big business was being increasingly interrupted by the fact that more people were out of work than since the Second World War, trade unions rights had been attacked with intense viciousness and a new campaign of institutional racism had been launched to control the masses that wasn’t proving to be very popular. In the House of Commons, Michael Foot’s Labour Party had managed to write a political manifesto that contained some of the most progressive policies ever seen by a political party, and the general election of spring 1983 was seen to be a surefire dislodging of Thatcher’s regime in the face of immense social chaos and incompetence.

7000 miles away in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian government was under similar strain, having spent six years murdering its own population and wilting fast under hyperinflation. This was exactly the right time to distract its people with a vivid circus, but exactly the wrong target. Throughout the late 70s China had been making loud noises over returning Hong Kong to Chinese rule, and, eager to avoid an influx of non-white people, Thatcher stripped everyone in the British Overseas Territories of their British Citizenship, which applied to the 2,000 people living in the Malvinas. General Leopoldo Galtieri saw this is as a perfect opportunity for that circus, as well as taking back land that belonged to Argentina in the first place. To cut a long story short, it failed, Galtieri’s junta collapsed months later and Thatcher was re-elected by a landslide by a population drunk on their success of saving thousands of Falklands sheep from ending up in Argentinian stomachs.

30 years seems like a long time, but you wouldn’t think so these days. We have yet another Tory dictator violently ripping apart any semblance of a welfare state and privitising seemingly everything it can from roads to sunlight and oxygen. Though the next election is still more than three years away, the social unrest and widespread condemnation against this government by thousands of academics, professors and experts in every area being sold off is at a level that cannot be sustained without something serious occurring. Unfortunately, Dear Leader David Cameron can’t write his own little ‘heroic’ war story against some charmingly offbeat minnow nation, because class bully Obama has already made him pinkie swear to massacring Syrians instead, so the best he can do is make speeches that even Third World dictators would view as excessive in their militancy and warmongering. Apparently the ‘right to self-determination’ of those 3,000 people living in total isolation in the middle of the ocean are more important than the rights of the nation in whose territorial waters the Malvinas stands, or the thousands of stateless inhabitants of the Chagos Islands who were forcibly evicted from their native homeland to make way for a US military base, or the sovereign nation of Cyprus’s calls for the British to abandon their military colonies at Akrotiri and Dhekelia, or the Spanish nation’s calls to return the steadily increasing colony of Gibraltar, or the pleas of 10,000 Caymanians for the British government to let them run their own country and expell the thousands of corporations who use it as a tax haven at the cost of its native population, or the people of imperialist pinata Ireland who want 6 counties of their own country back from a small gang of violent racists, or the people of Scotland who have every right for themselves to decide whether they want to stay in the UK or not but the Westminster Parliament thinks that the business of someone in Glasgow matters to someone in Portsmouth and so the whole of country needs to be bullied into accepting the corporate line of thinking. Cameron seems to forget about all these issues, and many more, where there are many millions of people who won’t say what he wants to hear about them, but nevertheless, for various reasons, don’t deserve the same respect as those 3,000 nobodies in the Malvinas.

But what of the Argies? Won’t they send 10,000 troops there to force the islanders to speak Spanish and sing a pledge of allegiance to the President? Actually, no, because Argentina isn’t bothered about the people at all, who would retain their British citizenship as well as be given the choice of sole or dual Argentnian citizenship should rightful sovereignty be established. Argentina only cares about the fact that British-affiliated companies will be guzzling up the £100billion worth of mineral resources scattered in the waters around the islands, which would otherwise belong to Argentina. When you consider that Britain likes to think of itself as a world leader in technology and business innovation, to cling childishly to fossil fuels kind of pisses over that smug image doesn’t it?

Oh, and Cristina Fernandez is no General Galtieri, because unlike her predecessor she has a progressive attitude on human rights, a real committment to the advancement of the working class of her country, a sharp intelligence when it comes to the economy and cutting ties with international loan sharks, and holds the unique distinction of being the first woman in the world to be democratically re-elected as leader of her country, something Eternal President Thatcher never achieved since not a single person ever voted her as Prime Minister. Neither did we vote for Cameron either, but the failures and falsehoods of British ‘democracy’ would take too long to expose here.

For now, let’s remember what year we live in, what has happened over the last three decades, and where certain people in certain governments come from. Argentina is a full democracy, progressive, bright, dynamic, bursting with beauty and culture and with a strong and inspirational head of state, and a growing number of international supporters joining the chorus of criticism against British imperialism; Britain is none of those things, a sick and globulous phantasm, a cancerous blot on world affairs that has nowhere to go beyond imprisoning, torturing, maiming and killing as many people as it can. The anniversary of the ‘Falklands’ war is just one of many revolting disgraces our government and our corporate media desperately champion as symbols of the power of capitalism and its effectiveness of controlling the British people in its own state-sized version of Celebration, Florida, with Rupert Murdoch, a pint of Carling and a pack of 20 JP Specials as its seal.