[lit-ideas] "Our finest ...?" "Hour!" (Was Clichés
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 08:14:48 EST
The War of the Triple Alliance
>You seem to disparage an interest in a war Paxton implies was in some way
>formative - and perhaps inuring against Fascism . . . although I don't think
>I understand Paxton on this point.
From Wikipedia
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Triple_Alliance_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Triple_Alliance) I read of
>British economic interests in the region,
>The war would lead to the modernization of Argentina. After the war, that
country quickly >became South America's wealthiest nation,
--- and the Speranzas would never have emigrated to South America if
Argentina had _lost_ the Paraguayan War -- So there. I woud be splashing at the
Swimming Pool in Villa Speranza, Bordighera. :)
After the war,
>Argentina annexed part of Paraguayan territory and became the strongest of
the River Plate >countries.
But personally I could care less. For me regions are what matters. I'm a
River Plate basin person, and cannot really identify with another part of the
country as the Paraguayan border. They do speak like Shakespeare up there.
As I say, I cannot think of it as very formative, as it involved three
separate nations. We never had much affinity with Brazil, and Uruguay we feel
as
traitors for becoming an independent state. So it's not a war with a
commonground base, it seems -- and unfair in that three different nations are
aimed at
destroying just _one_.
But you are right that Peron reinstated fascism -- which I read, is from the
root that gives us 'fascinating', a rather 'gay' word -- in the sense of
'gay' meaning 'exuberant' or something.
While Peron was of Buenos Aires (and ultimately Spanish) stock -- he was
born in the middle of the Province of Buenos Aires -- once he got into the Army
School, he was 'trained' in Germanic 'art of war' manuals -- as was the wont
then. He belonged to the GOP, and later he found the affinity with what
Mussolini was doing in Italy.
In Argentina, however, the thing cannot be explained _ethnically_ -- as with
Mussolini and Hitler aiming at the purity of the Aryan race. Peron
derogatorily referred to the people from outside Buenos Aires province (town
and
country) as 'cabecitas negras' -- black heads --. The meaning of which is still
unclear to me. There is a little bird called 'cabecita negra', which is like a
finch, yellow in body and black in head. Peron would use the phrase from the
balcony, from where what he could see of the 'banal masses' (scare intended,
hence quotes) were their heads of hair.
The _fasces_ I'm never sure what they were, but the Romans used them, I
believe, as every graduate with Honours from the Great at Lit. Hum. should
know!
I wouldn't compare the Triple Alliance War (a rather artificial grouping
possibly motivated by UK -- The Baring Brothers subsidized Brazil, I read) with
the American Civil War. We did have Civil Wars of our own.
Our Civil War is something that as residents of Buenos Aires (town and
country) we experience every day (its results). It was the war that eventually
will turn Buenos Aires the capital of the whole NATION rather than just
ARGENTINA.
This brought many changes, like the establishment in Buenos Aires of
buildings and bureaucrats to represent EACH of the Argentine states that had
nothing
to do with the River Plate basin. I have met some of these representatives
and it's SAD to see someone from the middle of the _other_ side of the country
(say your Oregon) having _moved_ permanently to, say, Washington, living the
life of a big bureaucrat, and thinking he is doing something for Oregon.
One good thing of that Civil war between UNIONISTS (or "unitarians") and
FEDERALS was that the Province of Buenos Aires became the bastion and relic of
a
pastoral past -- the gaucho land, the uninhibited plains, the cult of the
horse -- and all that makes Buenos Aires great. (Whereas the town itself is
smoky, overpopulated, and as Pericles said of Athens -- "full of foreigners"
(xenoi), by which he did not mean 'barbarians' (a share of which we do have)
but
plain outsiders (For Pericles, someone from Macedonia, Beocia, Peloponnese,
etc). I suppose the same feeling in London -- although not a consequence of
their rather silly Civil war with roundheads and cavaliers --, where everyone
can claim she is a "Londoner", while you have to prove ancestral something to
say you are, say, "a Yorkshireman".
Cheers,
JL
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