An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain by John O'Farrell

Author:John O'Farrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld

Gotcha!

The British government had declared a 200-mile exclusion zone around the Falkland Islands, a concept the newspapers managed to convey by printing a map of the Falklands with a great big circle drawn around them. However, the Argentine navy might have been forgiven for feeling confused about this notion when, in the first significant military action of the war, a warship outside the exclusion zone and heading away from the islands was attacked and sunk by a British nuclear submarine. The General Belgrano, a former American battleship that had survived Pearl Harbor, went down with the loss of nearly four hundred lives. War was now inevitable.

However, at no point was there any formal declaration of war, and throughout 1982 the television news tactfully referred to the entire episode as ‘the Falklands Conflict’. (It is a strange twist of modern linguistics that governments only use the word ‘war’ when they are not actually at war. So we have the ‘War on Drugs’ or the ‘War on Poverty’, but when we send our army or air force into places to blow them up, it is referred to as ‘the Serbian Crisis’ or ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.)

The sinking of the General Belgrano would develop into something of a political scandal, not least because of the number of lies put out by the government about the course of events that led up to its sinking, and the mysterious disappearance of the logbook of the submarine in question and the attempted cover-up. The episode climaxed in the failed prosecution of a civil servant who had felt moved to leak information to a Labour MP. Tam Dalyell MP doggedly asserted that the ship had been sunk for political reasons rather than military ones – he asserted that Mrs Thatcher gave the order to sink the ship to scupper a new peace plan that had just been hammered out by the President of Peru.

The infamous headline on the first edition of the Sun was Gotcha!, which some considered perhaps a rather insensitive way to report the death of hundreds of Argentine conscripts. ‘The paper that supports our boys’, as it described itself, plumbed new depths during the war with jaw-dropping jingoism and racist jibes against ‘the Argies’. It helped create an atmosphere in which to criticize the pursuit of war was tantamount to treachery – indeed, it even suggested that there was a legal case for Tony Benn to be charged with treason.

Two days after the Belgrano was sunk, the British destroyer HMS Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile, killing twenty British servicemen and eventually causing the ship to sink. The mood in Britain noticeably darkened and the BBC was criticized for showing the extent of British injuries; obviously the government would have preferred them to report that these AM-39 air-launch missiles really, really tickled. 100 By the end of the war, nine hundred British and Argentine lives would be lost – one for every two islanders being liberated. The vast majority of the British casualties came

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.