u/DecisionTight9151

When you think of real-life analogues to the Ghorman arc, a few obvious examples may jump to mind. There are those who mock comparing fiction to reality, in the sense that validating one's view of the world through analogy to fiction is naive — whatever piece of media one consumes is written with a political agenda: it has its skew. Regardless, art is ever in dialogue with history and it's meant to warn of its rhyme. Of systems that still work, though disguised as something else. Of what might happen, even if there's no guarantee that it will.

The World Cup is over, and my home country of Argentina was knocked out just short of the grand prize. Argentina has come under intense scrutiny this past month, a great deal of it negative. I will not bore you with attempts to whitewash, recontextualise, or justify any of the ugly things you may have read or seen in association with my country, or the behaviour of the Argentine team. Suffice it to say that a bad look is a bad look, and racist, toxic, violent, and arrogant behaviour is despicable.

My compatriots are mostly disappointed by the loss, but for weeks now it's been a cascade of criticism and hate from foreign users whose view of the country, and especially its history, is condemnatory... And Argentines are wondering. Conspiratorial thinking can be the coping method of a sore loser. I, for one, don't much mind the team having lost. But I am wondering where all of this is coming from. Other than justified blowback, that is.

Many tiktoks spread historical narratives about the country following uncannily similar scripts. Many reddit comments are superlative in their condemnation of the country, as if it had been lowkey the most evil and genocidal country on Earth until this past month when the truth came to light. Just one example is the accusation of having purposely eliminated between 30 and 50 percent of our population (the purported Black segment) in the 19th century. Can you tell a bot from a real user? I don't usually try.

People have this weird notion of Argentina as a White ethnostate. At most, it's a country with a significant minority of people who are White, and a vast majority of people of diverse origins — the result of generations of (sometimes nonconsensual) interbreeding between people of Southern European, Indigenous, and African extraction.

But that's neither here nor there. We are a settler state. Genocide is in our history, whatever practices it entailed, or consequences it had, may have been. We have to confront our past ourselves, with honesty. But consider the effects of this sentiment. Consider the political angle.

Peter Thiel is in my country. He's settled down here, to what end, no one's sure. My president is the self-proclaimed most Zionist and US-aligned leader outside of the US and Israel. There is conspiratorial talk of Israeli companies buying land in our backyard. The government is pushing a bill to legalise land purchases in Patagonia by foreigners immediately after forest fires have ravaged the property (the current law bars foreign purchase for a decade after any fire). Off-duty Israelis are regularly accused of causing trouble in that area. Fires happen sometimes. The origin is near untraceable.

I am speaking in conspiratorial language with regards to Zionism because, even though other foreign interests may plot at our expense, the dehumanisation and demonisation tactics displayed in Andor by the Empire towards the Ghor are best viewed, in contemporary terms, as a mirror to the decades-long dehumanisation campaign against the Arabs and the people of Palestine.

But the reason why the Palestinian comparison never seemed to fit all that well to me is that Ghorman, unlike any of the post-Ottoman polities, was a well-respected, longstanding member of the community of nations (the Senate) for whom a special effort to demonise had to be crafted.

I'll make no such claim for Argentina. But this country is my normal. I have lived in peace all my life. We have not had a continental war in more than a century. We have violent crime and clashes in the streets, but no mass shootings or bombings have occurred here in nearly thirty years. I am proud of the generational struggle to have made something of this society. Freedom, equity, and solidarity mean something to us. To see the world accuse us of being "the Israel of South America" whilst in the same breath singling us out for having had a government that allowed Nazis to go into hiding is baffling.

If the anti-zionists hate you for being a zionist, and the anti-fascists hate you for being a nazi sympathiser, who will protest when they come for you? Will people remember us only as the racist, arrogant, fascist collaborator who had it coming anyway?

I thank you for reading so far, and understand if you think I'm overreacting. The facts are inconclusive. Time may tell. But I'm convinced that Argentina's being smeared, even with the truth or distortions of it. A man named Goebbels said that the best lies are built on truths. Beware not to be misled, like Edie Karn, by what the screen is telling you.