THE FALKLANDS WAR Also by David Monaghan
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THE FALKLANDS WAR Also by David Monaghan JANE AUSTEN: Structure and Social Vision JANE AUSTEN IN A SOCIAL CONTEXT THE NOVELS OF JOHN LE CARRE SMILEY'S CIRCUS: A Guide to the Secret World of John Le Carre 'EMMA': Contemporary Critical Essays The Falklands War Myth and Countermyth David Monaghan First published in Great Britain 1998 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-39720-4 ISBN 978-0-230-37370-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230373709 First published in the United States of America 1998 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-21331-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Monaghan, David. The Falklands War: myth and countcrmyth I David Monaghan. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-21331-2 (cloth) I. Falkland Islands War, 1982-Public opinion-History. 2. Thatcher, Margaret-Public opinion-History. 3. Falkland Islands War, 1982-Art and the war. 4. Falkland Islands War, 1982- -Literature and the war. 5. Falkland Islands War, 1982-Motion pictures and the war. 6. War in the press-Great Britain-History. 7. Myth. 8. Dissenters-Great Britain-Attitudes. 9. Public opinion-Great Britain-History. I. Title. F3031.5.M643 1998 997' .I 10241-dc21 98-12681 CIP © David Monaghan 1998 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1998 978-0-333-65581-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10987654 3 2 I 07 06 05 04 03 02 0 I 00 99 98 In memory of my mother Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction ix 1. Margaret Thatcher and the Making of the Falklands Myth 1 2. Confronting the Icon: Portrayals of Margaret Thatcher in The Falklands Factor, Sink the Belgrano! and If . .. 39 3. Opportunists and Hooligans: Thatcherism in The Ploughman's Lunch and Arrivederci Millwall! 84 4. Writing the Imaginary Britain: The Kingdom by the Sea and Coasting 117 5. Em-Bodying the Disembodied: Tumbledown, Resurrected and the Language of Chivalry 150 6. Ten Years After: An Ungentlemanly Act 174 Works Cited 195 Index 200 vii Acknowledgements Many people and institutions have helped in the preparation of this book. I am particularly indebted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and to Mount Saint Vincent University for research grants. I also owe a debt of grati tude for the help that I have received from the staff of the British Film Institute, the British Library, the British Library Newspaper Division and the Imperial War Museum. Further thanks are due to Valerie Adams for good advice at an early stage in the prepa ration of this book, to Jim Aulich for sharing with me his collec tion of Falklands War material and for providing me with a proof copy of his book, Framing the Falklands, and to Greg Philo who was extremely helpful both during and after my visit to the Glasgow University Media Group. Earlier versions of chapters 4 and 5 were published in Norman Page and Peter Preston, ed. The Literature of Place (London: Macmillan, 1993) and Works and Days 11 (1993): 79-100. I am grateful to Macmillan and to the editors of Works and Days for permission to reprint this material. viii Introduction For the most part, we know about war only as it is represented in words and images. Compared to other major life events such as birth, sex and death, relatively few people are ever directly involved in war, especially in the narrow sense of combat. Even a vicarious experience of any but the most sanitized versions of what an individual goes through in combat is most often denied to the civilian, because those who serve on the front line are usually either unable or unwilling to communicate a personal understanding of battlefield horrors that so drastically contradict the comfortable space accorded to war within peacetime constructions of reality. Samuel Johnson, writing in 1771, offers some particularly acute observations about the attitudes instilled in civilians by their merely mediated understanding of war. He remarks, for example, on the 'coolness and indifference' with which people who will not be called upon to fight respond to the outbreak of war and goes on to note how 'those that hear of [war] at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it little more than a splendid game; a proclamation, an army, a battle, and a triumph' (p. 370). Siegfried Sassoon's famous denunciation of the First World War, 'A Soldier's Declaration' (1917), includes similar comments on the inability of noncom batants to understand what happens on the battlefield. He writes scornfully, for example, about the 'callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they do not have sufficient imagination to realize' (quoted in Barker, p. 3). We can also turn to Samuel Johnson for an insightful assess ment of the perceptual and linguistic problems encountered by the soldier as he tries to bridge the gap between what 'heroic fiction' (p. 370) has taught him about war and the 'hopeless misery' (p. 371) that is its reality. A further example of the inadequacy of language learnt during peacetime in communicating the sol dier's experience of combat is provided by a scene from Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991) in which the psychologist W. H. R. Rivers comes across a traumatized veteran whose psychosomatic ix X Introduction muteness so completely expresses the horror of 'Mons ... , Ypres ... , the Somme ... , Arras' (p. 224) and other First World War battles that he is paradoxically 'silenced' (p. 238) when an electric shock treatment restores his voice. Ken Lukowiak similarly com ments on the way in which the linguistic resources at his disposal failed him when he tried to write to his wife about his part in the battle for Goose Green: 'I could not write. I was searching for the words to describe the events of the past few days but I could not find them. They had been stolen from me, along with a part of my soul, on the battlefield of Goose Green' (p. 97). Those who take on the task of giving meaning to particular wars and to war in general thus have tremendous freedom but also, whether or not they acknowledge it, a huge burden of respon sibility. At one end of the spectrum are propagandists and sensationalizers and at the other those with ambitions to uncover what war has to tell us about the human condition. From an ideological perspective, however, it is the sum total of all inter pretative acts that is finally crucial because of the important part played by the meanings that cluster around a country's wars in reinforcing, supplementing or subverting official formulations of national identity. Although they occupy a privileged position amongst interpreters of war, power elites have not been very successful in making the major wars of this century carry meanings that serve their ideological ends. For example, establishment ideas about war as a glorious and honourable crusade destined to end in national purification and revitalization that were dominant at the begin ning of the First World War had been largely discredited by the time a peace settlement was achieved in 1918. As Hynes argues in A War Imagined, such ideas became increasingly untenable as an apparently endless conflict developed involving battles of unprecedented bloodiness fought not by knights on noble steeds but by the millions of common soldiers who lived and all too frequently died in the 'troglodyte world' (Fussell, p. 36) of the trenches. Therefore, they were gradually forced to yield the inter pretive field to an understanding of war shaped by the antiheroic writings of the unusually large number of 'articulate men' (Hynes, p. 114) who served on the front line. As a result of the efforts of Owen, Sassoon, Graves and others, the First World War finally yielded up a myth structured around embitterment and mistrust that, in Hynes' view, 'altered the ways in which people thought Introduction xi not only about war, but about the world' (p. xi). The experience of the United States during the Vietnam War was similar. Stubborn resistance on the part of a supposedly inferior enemy combined with antiwar protest at home and unre lenting media coverage of the ever-increasing number of Ameri can casualties eventually resulted in a widespread loss of faith in what Englehardt calls 'victory culture'. Originally scripted as a glorious expression of the American Dream in which capitalist efficiency and technological know-how triumphs over the dark forces of communism, the military incursion into South East Asia ended up as the 'nightmare' (Englehardt, p.