r/GenZhukov2024

A lot of people must have seen the "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" banner displayed by the Argentinian football team after their victory against England at the World Cup. BE has talked quite a few times about the Falklands, notably on his main channel video about self-determination and in a few other videos on his second channel (one, two).

Since the issue is on the news again, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the Argentinian claim to the Falklands, and why I think it should belong to them. To do so, we'll look at the two arguments commonly used by the British used to justify them owning islands 13,000 km away from Britain. As you will see, what the British really believe deep down is that the British empire should get to take and keep the territories it wants, and they work backwards from that. They may talk about self-determination, international law, etc. but it's just pretense.

1. The islands were empty/The British were there first

This is simply not true.

Before Europeans arrived, Yahgan and other Fuegian peoples likely reached the Falklands on seasonal seal-hunting migrations, a claim supported by 14th-century canoe remains, arrowheads, and the now-extinct warrah, a now-extinct wolf species that may have been introduced to the islands by humans. Europeans nonetheless claimed the islands under terra nullius, a doctrine that ignored nomadic and non-agricultural peoples' ties to land. France built the first European settlement in 1764 (and name the island after the French port of Saint-Malo, source of the name "Malvinas"), Britain founded a rival colony at Port Egmont in 1765. Spain bought out the French in 1767, and expelled the British by 1770, though an uneasy 1771 treaty let Britain return. Britain withdrew in 1774 for economic reasons, leaving a plaque asserting its claim, while Spain held the islands until 1811.

Newly independent Argentina claimed succession to Spain's territory in 1820 and installed Luis Vernet as governor by 1829; his colony of some 120 settlers collapsed after a US Navy raid in 1831 punished his seizure of poaching ships. Finding the islands defenseless, Britain expelled the small Argentine garrison in January 1833 and formally made the Falklands a Crown Colony in 1841.

Since the first settlement was built by the French, later handed to the Spanish, and that claim passed to Argentina under the principle of uti possidetis juris, combined with the fact that Argentina was actively settling the islands in 1833, the claim that "the British were there first" doesn't hold up.

Britain doesn't seem to recognize the "we were there first" concept for others either. China has also taken over empty islands in the South China Sea and planted military bases there to strengthen their claim to the nine-dash line. These claims are of course not recognized by the British.

The real British claim here is "might makes right". The British had a stronger navy than Argentina in the 1830s, and still do today, which why they haven't handed over the Falklands. The British wasted no time handing over Hong Kong to China in the 1990s after Deng Xiaoping reminded Thatcher that China could take it over in a day if they wanted.

2. The settlers deserve self-determination

BE has already made some strong points about self-determination in his main channel video. The Falklanders are a settler population that was implanted after 1833, to reinforce Britain's claims to the islands. Quoting historian Barry M. Gough in The British Reoccupation and Colonization of the Falkland Islands, or Malvinas, 1832-1843, p. 285 :

> In retrospect, the British were led to reassert their authority in the Falkland Islands by reoccupation in 1832 for two reasons: the pressure of rival powers, Argentina and the United States, and the threat that the control of the Falklands might have in foreign hands to British seaborne and political interests in South America and the southern oceans. Successive first lords of the Admiralty beginning with Anson had urged the islands' occupation and development in order to enhance British maritime paramountcy and to check rival threats.

In the 2013 referendum, 99% voted to remain a British overseas territory, an outcome that was never really in doubt, given the population is almost entirely British settlers or their descendants. That's the whole reason why Britain sent them there in the first place. And this creates a real tension with modern international law: Article 49 of the Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into occupied territory. International law doesn't apply retroactively, so Britain can't be held to a rule that didn't exist yet, but the underlying pattern is hard to ignore: Britain was an occupying power that populated occupied territory with its own settlers, and that population's "self-determination" is now cited as the justification for keeping it.

The British government is also very selective on self-determination :

The British government has numerous times rejected a second Scottish independence referendum.
The UK has been a staunch ally of Israel since its creation, despite the fact that Israel's very existence undermines Palestinain self-determination. I believe Israel should not exist, but even if we stick to liberal international law, the UK is explicitly denying Palestine's right to self-determination when it considered in 2022 moving its Israel embassy to Jerusalem, the internationally recognized capital of Palestine.
The Chagos islands have been under British control since 1814 and were administered from Mauritius when it was still a British colony. Mauritius gained independence in 1965, but was illegally forced by the British to give the islands away as part of the deal to gain independence. In the late 1960s, Britain invited the US to build a military base on Diego Garcia, and expelled all the indigenous people from the island. The UK has still not handed over the Chagos islands back to Mauritius and has denied the Chagossians self-determination for the last 200 years.
The British don't recognize Russia annexation of Crimea, despite it being the choice most of the population : "According to a poll of the Crimeans by the Ukrainian branch of Germany's biggest market research organization, GfK, on January 16–22, 2015: "Eighty-two percent of those polled said they fully supported Crimea's inclusion in Russia, and another 11 percent expressed partial support. Only 4 percent spoke out against it."

The moral argument

As we saw, it's pretty clear that the reason why the British are in the Falklands in the first place is because they managed to take them in 1833, they just annexed parts of a newly independent country because they could. The reason why they still hold on to them are the exclusive maritime zone of 466,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Sweden) off the coast of Argentina that they get from owning them. The Falklands produce about 280,000 tons of seafood each year. Pretty much all of it is exported to the EU : in 2017, 94% of the Falklands' fisheries exports went to the EU.

British oil company Rockhopper Exploration and Israeli company Navitas Petroleum are also prospecting for oil around the Falklands. According to this article, there is a whopping 3.1 billion barrels in the oil fields around the Falklands.

On top of that, thanks to the RAF Mount Pleasant base, the islands also serve as an aircraft carrier for the British in the Southern Pacific, to project power in the region.

The 3,500 settlers are simply a tool to take resources for the metropole's benefit, at the expense of tens of millions of South Americans.

We all know full well that the Brits would never talk about "who was there first" or "self-determination" if a far away country claimed an uninhabited island off the coast of Britain, planted a few hundreds of settlers there and used them as a pretext to ship enormous amounts of resources back to their homeland.

America signed its Suez at a dinner table in Versailles, then threw itself a birthday party where the ice cream melted, the arch was cloth, the crowd fit in a guitarist's sunglasses, and the Brooklyn Bridge caught fire.

The internet named the era before I could: "Hello, I am refugee from american century of humiliation." So let's take the meme seriously. The US fought a ten-week war it couldn't convert into anything, handed Iran the keys to Hormuz in a page-and-a-half confession, tore the paper up three weeks later, and answered all of it with tall ships and a $150 million party that House Democrats allege skimmed its own donors. Britain ran this exact play in 1956. Ask them how it went.

Here's what I'm actually saying, from my seat on the other side of the longest undefended border in the world: the empire was never the country. The careers that died at Versailles belong to the foreign-policy blob; you just paid the bill. And underneath the flag there was a different America the whole time. The Black Loyalists whose freedom ran through the British side. The Redneck Army at Blair Mountain. Every person who read "all men are created equal" and set out to make the country mean it.

Empires drop everything they're carrying when they fall. Somebody gets to pick it up. It should be you.

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