Todays dispatch has an ironic tinge, cos out there there is another front and if you take a longer bow its out in the ‘Eastern front’. You know how the story goes, the Western front is all spiffing with bravery and over the top and ‘all quiet’, whereas the Eastern front is scary, limitless, dangerous and foreboding.  No Waterloo on the Eastern front, just an endless retreat from Moscow. It’s a sort of  self-perpetuating Afghanistan. Anyway, we at pcbycp have never got used to re-named place names.  On our wall map the globe is still one third pinkish with places like Bombay, Calcutta, Ceylon and Rhodesia pulsing with anointed light.

And the other great blob represents the Empire of Russia, with a double-headed eagle and extends all the way form Siberia to the bits that bordered on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On our wall-map those bits defined by the Russian Empire are coloured a sickly green. The colour of gangrene you may ask?

 

No pink-ish imperial possessions in Russia, which is a pity, for as the great pan-strategic poet laureate Rudyard Kipling, intoned, ” if the rest of the world played cricket what a jolly old world it’d be”.

 

So heres a dispatch from the Ukraine via Argentina, where Frank has a sideways glance at bias in reportage and suggests the ‘Argies’ aint all bad, though they don’t have much of a cricket team.

 

 

 

Hola Amigos

Most of you will know that I grew up as a Dutch kid in Argentina.
I learned to read and write and do sums in Argentina. I also learned that “Las Malvinas son Argentinas’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqBC3l7i7dk

The Buenos Aires of my childhood was a cosmopolitan city whose world-class Opera House (El Teatro Colon) opened 65 years before Sydney’s famous Opera House. I won’t bore you with more comparisons.
General Galtieri was one of Argentina’s Presidents during the so called ‘Dirty War’ which ‘disappeared’ as many as 30,000 people and featured such charming events as the harvesting of new-borns and the subsequent murder of their mothers and the throwing of live prisoners out of aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean. When Galtieri was losing grip on power, he started the Falkland Islands War.

Meanwhile in Great Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was also losing her grip on power, so she jumped at the chance of responding to the Argentine challenge. Britain winning that two-month long war which claimed almost one thousand lives ensured the Iron Lady’s political survival.

When following the Malvinas war in the Australian press I was rather miffed by the one-sided reporting. I had to swallow what was left of my Argentine pride, as I was told of that miserable, evil, tinpot banana republic that was entirely at fault for this senseless war.

In 1981 General Leopoldo Galtieri was warmly received by the Reagan Administration. Galtieri’s proactive support of the Contras in Nicaragua was especially appreciated.

A decade later the Soviet Union dis-united. A major consequence of this disintegration was that all state assets were privatised and fell into the hands of the oligarchs. There’s that saying that shit rises to the top, well Vladimir Putin has.
In Britain they don’t call them oligarchs, but Margaret Thatcher went on to privatise everything she could. Her son famously was involved in the biggest British arms sale ever, to that peace loving nation Saudi Arabia, not to mention the failed coup d’état in Central Equatorial Africa which he bankrolled with his mates with the aim of getting favourable treatment in relation to oil leases.

But no, the attack on Ukraine is all down to one man, that evil Vladimir Putin. And all those Russian school children who are learning to read and write and do sums, are also learning that “Украина русская”.

Sorry folks, I’m just not buying the one-sided portrayal that the Australian Press are presenting of a complex situation.

You only need to see the portrayal of Remote Aboriginal communities in some of the media to realise that often not all is as it seems or we’re being told.

“Oi, get your filthy hands off my desert!”
“What ‘e say?”

Brezhnev took Afghanistan.
Begin took Beirut.
Galtieri took the Union Jack.
And Maggie, over lunch one day,
Took a cruiser with all hands.
Apparently, to make him give it back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKqCknCOllg Pink Floyd

My favourite Louis Armstrong recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO3k-S_pqK4 (Wild Man Blues- 1927)

And the most relevant to these troubled times-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PYjx7Ehvu0 (Give Peace a Chance- 1970)

(turn up the bass notes and listen to the killer bass player)

Chau,

Frank