Cinebook Recounts: The Falklands War
Cinebook Recounts: The Falklands War, by Bernard Asso, Joel Rideau, Daniel Chauvin & Marcel Uderzo, Cinebook
WHEN THIS book first came out, my daughter asked me about the Falklands War. It transpires there was some revisionist history going on at schools and in young history books regarding it, and I can but such falsehoods have been brought to light and rectified.
It was another time and place when it happened, the early 80s, I explained. ‘Pretty much the first of the oil wars (or places to look for it offshore), as I recall. British folk lived there, paid sovereignty to the Queen, but Argentina living so close saw it as their property, and when their latest leadership took over they decided to invade while Margaret Thatcher was cutting back on Britain’s defence budget... Is that too simplistic a view?
I viewed myself as a pacifist back in those days, do so now for the most part: I refuse to kill for any politician, but if my loved ones were in danger, well, that’s something I trust we’ll never have to find out... I watched the limited TV channels we had back then reporting daily on the war, and heard men and women younger than I am now air their views everywhere I went... To be frank it all seemed a million miles and far too unreal: the IRA bombings in the centre of Birmingham of only a few years previous were in every real sense far closer to home.
But for others it wasn’t.
Decades later I would reunite with an old school friend who had served in the navy, and ended up in the Falklands just after the conflict came to an end. He would also tell me about another school friend, one who had been among the first to land: things happened, and I am told that old friend (who I knew from such an early age that I still picture him wearing short trousers in my head) will never talk about them. Post-traumatic stress disorder for those who have served in wars is something that’s still barely discussed. Still, I have heard stories and read facts with differing points of view about the Falklands War since, and adjusted my own values. Fortunately, by comparison to the conflicts British soldiers have found themselves in under the last couple of governments’ regimes the Falklands War was over relatively quick: Both sides numbered their dead, and buried them; and peace has ensued, though Argentina still claims the land mass whenever they can.
Cinebook Recounts: The Falklands War is a curious beast of a book. A spurious reading of it will make it come across as some gung-ho retro edition of Commando meets an 80s Roy of the Rovers strip (there are a couple of newspaper reporters with bits parts who fit in there), but on more studied reading there’s a brave attempt at a fair balanced point of view to both sides’ points of views, though favouring Britain’s (curiously so since the book was created by Europeans, as we tend to view them as eternally putting our nation down).
The important thing is that recorded facts are presented and by being in a large comic book may more easily be digested by the young than a text book, especially if revisionist history is under way. On a personal level I did not read Cinebook Recounts: The Falklands War with any great sense of enjoyment, if one should at all, but as a relevant document, and generally unbiased reminder, of an event that happened.
If there’s a fault in its actual presentation, it’s that when you look at the soldiers, on both sides, they look far too much like seasoned men of action, and the reality with hindsight – and as we now see in the pictures of those who have died in the recent political conflicts our soldiers have been involved in – there were far too many of them who were only boys in uniform.
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