In face of President Kirchner's latest stunt, supposedly directed against the colonialism of this country in the Falkland Islands, I can't think of anything to say. Or, rather, I can't think of anything more to say - more than I have already said on the subject.
Well, perhaps one thing. It's funny - funny in the sense of logically odd - how, where colonialism is concerned, those who, like Kirchner, allege it aggressively as needing to be 'ended', always manage to swallow the camel of the greater effects of colonialism while choking on the gnat of some much smaller one. Thus, the Americas, both North and South, are not to be returned to the governance of the indigenous peoples, such as they now are, of those two continents. Nope, in this regard what's done is done. With Australia, New Zealand, likewise. But THE FALKLANDS. And, for many of the boycycrowd, ISRAEL - utterly intolerable and to be reversed.
Explain this who can. I mean explain it in terms going beyond 'Just so, folks'. It might be suggested that the camel/gnat difference here is simply a matter of practicalities: the effects of the greater colonialisms, so to put it, aren't any longer reversible whereas the effects of the smaller ones are reversible. (In treating Israel here as a case of a smaller colonialism, I set aside, just for the sake of the argument, the consideration that Jews have an unbroken connection with that part of the world for more than two millennia.) However, even this suggestion won't work to explain the difference. One of the reasons that reversing the effects of the greater colonialisms is impractical is that it would involve overriding the rights to self-government and national self-determination of far too many people, millions upon millions of them. And that consideration is just as relevant in the small as in the large cases: the Falkland Islanders and Israel's Jews, though their numbers are far smaller than the number of all Americans of European descent, enjoy the same human rights in this regard as everyone does.