Reagan tried to stop Falklands war

This is a video of British musician Robert Wyatt, singing Shipbuilding, against the Falklands war, on the Old Grey Whistle Test, on BBC TV.

By Tony Patey in Britain:

Reagan bid to halt Falklands revealed

Friday 28 December 2012

New light was shed yesterday on the so-called special relationship between B-movie actor turned world leader Ronald Reagan and chemist turned warlord Maggie Thatcher during the 1982 Falklands war.

Public records released under the 30-year rule reveal that Reagan showed a rare ray of insight by making a last-ditch appeal to Thatcher, who had sent a full-scale task force right round the globe to retake the islands following the Argentinian invasion.

In an 11.30pm telephone call to 10 Downing Street on Monday May 31 1982 the then US president urged Thatcher to abandon her campaign and to hand over the islands to international peacekeepers.

Official files released by the National Archives at Kew show that as British troops closed in on final victory Reagan begged Thatcher not to completely humiliate the Argentinians.

Reagan, whose country officially remained neutral, told the Tory leader: “The best chance for peace was before complete Argentine humiliation. As the UK now had the upper hand militarily, it should strike a deal now.”

Thatcher rejected his approach and ordered soldiers to fight until the occupying forces had been totally defeated.

Over the next two weeks more than 100 British troops died and around 150 mainly conscript Argentinian soldiers were killed.

Reagan, who had questioned whether the Falklands was really worth a war, faced a strategic dilemma during the conflict.

The US had a longstanding alliance with Britain, but by 1982 the far-right military junta in Argentina had become a cold war ally in Latin America as Washington sought to snuff out left-wing social movements.

The newly released files also revealed criticism of then dean of St Paul’s Rev Alan Webster for introducing notes of concern for Argentinian, as well as British, casualties in a thanksgiving service on July 26 1982 following the war’s end.

Argentinian deaths during the 74-day conflict reached 649, while 255 were killed among the British forces.

Three Falkland Islanders also died in the fighting.

The biggest single death toll came on May 2 1982 when a British nuclear-powered submarine sunk the light cruiser General Belgrano over 200 miles from the islands with the loss of 323 of its 1,090-strong crew.

Talking about Margaret Thatcher:

Red-faced Thatcher paid for son’s rescue

Friday 28 December 2012

An embarrassed Margaret Thatcher hurriedly repaid thousands of pounds of public cash used to save her playboy son from the Sahara desert, declassified files have revealed.

The penny-pinching former prime minister was busy wrecking the economy in January 1982 when her only son Mark disappeared while taking part in the Paris to Dakar rally.

Mr Thatcher and his French co-driver were found by the Algerian military after a six-day search.

The Algerian government footed the majority of the bill, but Britain was originally set to stump up £1,190.95 with Ms Thatcher contributing just £583.14.

But the “Iron Lady” scribbled a cheque to cover for her son’s racy lifestyle to head off a feared taxpayer rebellion.

Months later Ms Thatcher had to cough up for one final bill of £15.16 – for landing charges incurred by aircraft carrying her husband and son.

Wide divisions within the Conservative party over how the government should respond to Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands were revealed today as Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 private papers were made public: here.

Related articles

• Files reveal Thatcher vetoed late Reagan bid to halt Falklands War (scotsman.com)
• Reagan’s Falklands plea to Thatcher (standard.co.uk)
• Thatcher was ready for Falkland Islands deal, National Archives papers show (guardian.co.uk)
• US urged UK to stop Falklands campaign (bigpondnews.com)
• Reagan’s Last-Ditch Falklands Plea Revealed (news.sky.com)
• Secret papers reveal Thatcher’s worst moment (thehimalayantimes.com)
• Secret files lift lid on Thatcher-Reagan Falklands contacts – Reuters UK (uk.reuters.com)
• Margaret Thatcher was furious over Irish support for Argentina on the Falklands War (irishcentral.com)
• Declassified documents: 1982 Argentinian invasion of the Falklands took Margaret Thatcher by surprise (rawstory.com)

Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and police states

This video from the USA is about a lecture by Christian Parenti.

From British daily The Morning Star:

Warning: police state ahead

(Sunday 28 September 2008)

PICK: Lockdown America by Christian Parenti
(Verso, £12.99)

TOM MELLEN reads Christian Parenti’s unflinching analysis of the US justice system.

Over 1.7 million US citizens now live in prison, a 300 per cent increase since 1980.

In some US cities, one-third of all black men are in jail, while spending on prisons has overtaken allocations for higher education in California.

Christian Parenti’s new book Lockdown America establishes the connection between these stark facts and the right-wing social and economic counter-offensive that began in the early 1980s.

Parenti marshals a vast array of evidence to underline the connection between the damage wrought by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to the substructure of US and British society in the early 1980s and the effects that have consequently devastated working-class communities on both sides of the pond.

He shows that Reagan’s reactionary social engineering, in the form of “monetarist austerity” and a “deregulatory war on labour,” led to interest rates shooting up from 7.9 per cent in 1979 to 16.4 in 1981, plunging the US economy into the worst recession since 1929.

Parenti observes that then chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volker’s “cold-bath recession” resulted in unemployment shooting up to 10 million by 1982, putting immense downward pressure on wages, as it was designed to.

He quotes Thatcher‘s chief economic adviser Alan Budd, who submerged Britain in his very own “cold-bath recession.”

In retrospect, Budd wrote candidly that “rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.

“What was engineered – in Marxist terms – was a crisis in capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”

In the US, the real average weekly wage fell more than 8 per cent between 1979 and 1982.

“Overall,” Parenti writes, “‘Reaganomics increased class and racial polarisation destroyed inner cities, sacked public education and public health services, created epidemic homelessness, increased exploitation of workers and caused the intensified spatial concentration of a permanently unemployed class.”

The same is true of Thatcherism and its new Labour legacy here and it is the “social wreckage” and “social dynamite” left in the wake of the ruling-class offensive that the modern criminal justice crackdown seeks to regulate and contain.

Petty gangsterism, drug peddling and the associated violence that corrodes formerly industrial working-class communities in Britain and the US today are, in Parenti’s eyes, the “natural” result of economic decline and the ongoing metamorphosis of the welfare-into-police-state.

Parenti traces the origins of today’s macho, militarised Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) teams to the armed units of spooks and police that killed off the Black Panther leadership in the late 1960s.

Once established, these expensive attack teams became self-perpetuating. “Big budget outlays compel police departments to show ‘good use’ – that is, to deploy their SWAT teams wherever possible,” he explains.

Today, paramilitary police units are increasingly “called out to execute petty warrants, conduct traffic stops and round up non-violent suspects or, more commonly, conduct raids in place of detectives doing investigations.”

In Greensboro, North Carolina, the public library’s bus-sized “bookmobile” was retired, along with its card catalogue, 2,000 volumes and two librarians, due to lack of funds.

Shortly thereafter, the bookmobile was converted into a mobile command-and-control centre for the Greensboro police department’s elite 23-man SWAT team.

While the business counteroffensive of the 1980s and ’90s helped to restore profits, it also “invigorated the perennial problem of how to manage the surplus, excluded and cast-off classes.

“This then is the mission of the emerging anti-crime police state,” he argues.

New Labour vowed to get tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime in 1997, the same year that Gordon Brown supposedly set the Bank of England free.

Back then, Britain’s incarceration rate stood at 120 per 100,000.

Today, it is 148 per 100,000, putting Britain above China, Turkey and India in the imprisonment league table.

It is a source of pride to Britain’s working-class movement that the Prison Officers Association and the National Association of Probation Officers are in the forefront of the campaign to oppose new Labour’s plan to build three US-style super-Titan prisons.

What follows from Parenti’s unflinching analysis is that the only durable alternative to new Labour’s emerging anti-crime police state is a socialist state which prioritises a crackdown on social injustice.