Argies

 

Isabella was born to Emilio and Rima, her parents being from Spain and Syria respectively. Rima had moved to Spain as a young woman, had fallen in love with and married Emilio.

To cut out unnecessary details, Emilio and Rima subsequently divorced. Rima and Isabella moved to Britain, and Isabella grew up spending time with each parent in each country.

Apart from the divorce, one other factor was difficult for Isabella. Despite having learned English very rapidly - children do when it becomes important for them to socialize with their peers - despite this, she had problems with the children at the provincial English school she attended. Children are highly conscious of differences and are suspicious of and often not well intentioned towards those they see as being different in any way - unfamiliar - not "family". We adults, most of us anyway, learn that such reactions are unhelpful and, well, not very nice.

Isabella, at school in England, would visit her father in Spain. When she came back to her mum, she was always lamenting about how much better everything was, down in Spain. Why, even the instant coffee tasted better. (The real coffee in Spain is at least equal that in Italy, and both put British coffee to utter shame, but that's another matter.) Life was so much better in Spain, the land of her native tongue.

It was at the time of the Falklands war, when Margaret Thatcher, then the most unpopular prime minister in history, seized upon the chance to rouse the British into belligerent patriotic fervour and rescue her sinking political career by sending a war group to the Falkland Islands, inhabited by Brits, but just having been seized by nearby Argentina. The leader of the opposition accused her of wasting young men's lives in pursuit of her aim to recover a degree of popularity, but it worked.

Isabella arrived back in Britain and said to her mother, "Look what those bastard Argies have done! They have sunk one of our ships!" It was the HMS Sheffield with the loss of 20 men. "Argy" was a label that the British tabloid press had come up with as a derogatory term to apply to Argentinians. "Argey bargey" was already slang for a serious argument or rumble.

"OUR ship, Isabella?", her mum replied. "OUR ship? Since when was a British ship one of 'yours'. I thought it was sunk by those wonderful Spanish-speaking Argies!

I'm relating this story as an example of how influential our identities are to us and how very easy it is to create and inflame a "them and us" situation. It is par for the course for populist leaders and other rabble-rousers.