Swensens

[phutoie2]

its England competing in the world cup not Great Britain, in the olympics the union jack is used as it is a Great Britain team. not doubt Swensens is an american country and would not understand. i for one would not set foot in the place to so such ignorane. why dont they show even more ignorance and put all the teams from the EU under the EU flag. there reply is an insult to the people of Thailand who are showing the England flag right now not the Union Jack.

Numbnuts - have you been reading this topic?. The national flag of GB & NI is not called the <deleted> union jack!

[CarlBkk]

Gaccha, you are saying the British were "nationally blind" to defend the Falklands. Regardless of the proximity of an island to other nations, you don't just give in to aggression from the close neighbour. It's a little bit more complicated than that.

I'm quite happy for the Union Jack to be used to represent England or Britain, it's just some Scots, Welsh and N.Irish who seem to resent it so much even when all are so closely linked in ways of life, genes and geography.

Yes, it is much more complicated than an issue of geographical proximity.

By saying "British" is to let oneself be governed by a prevailing geopolitical mode of representation and to engage in the continuation of a complex practice. The dominant statist discourse is a mode of reality-making.

The object and general grammar (i.e. "Britain", "invasion") allows a licence to forget the history of struggles in which entities ("Britain", "Argentinia") have come to be domesticated within modern international space. This forgetting is scripted or institutionalised.

The mentality of nationalism is a mentality of accepting the rusting discourse that is the privileging of nation-states.

So, you say "you don't just give in to aggression from the close neighbour. It's a little bit more complicated than that." Note how you use the domesticated grammar of everyday life-- the "close neighbour". it takes away the extraorindary violence, it ignores and places on the backwater the real issues-- these had nothing to do with "aggression". it is a cryptic mode of legitimation. You must question the rhetorics and narrative structures used to describe what happened.

When "Argentinia" moved into the smal islands close to the Falklands "Britain" did nothing. When they moved into the Falklands, Thatcher still intended to allow it to be given over to "argentinia" it was only when she was pushed into war by a long series of parliamentary speeches they used the same rhetoric of naked aggression that you enjoy that it led to the violence of 1982.

The reason that Britain did not hand Flaklands to Argentinia was because of wealthy absentee landlords didn't want it to.

Don't become a consumer of representational practices. Once you realise what you fed on is not authoritative description but just a rhetorical practice then you can better understand my position. Stop thinking of the World in terms of nation-states, and start to ask about the necessity of violence over such petty imagined communities.

I certainly didn't know that Thatcher was going to "allow" Argentina to take over the Falklands. As far as was visible to the people watching, the Falkland Islanders were dead set against that and wanted to remain British. A bit like the Maltese. I thought that after Argentina had basically said "ok, I know you found the islands and inhabited them....but actually they're closer to us...so hand 'em over" there were some military post tit for tat until Argentina put a few too many soldiers on the island for our liking. And the rest is history. So when does a country give up nations and islands that it founded? And will they be bullied into it or embarrassed into it? There are plenty of lands in the world far away from the founding "mother" country which are still territories as history, explorers and even trade deals dictated.

Just out of curiosity, do you also think that it would be a good idea if England "gives back" Wales, N.Ireland, Scotland...and maybe even Cornwall because they were coerced into signing control away in the 1600s?

[ukrules]

Just out of curiosity, do you also think that it would be a good idea if England "gives back" Wales, N.Ireland, Scotland...and maybe even Cornwall because they were coerced into signing control away in the 1600s?

I think it would be a great idea to get rid of Wales, N.Ireland and Scotland and see them stand on their own two feet without a penny of English money to prop them up.