READERS WRITE

LEST WE FORGET

In its ‘Community’ section, the Times tells how Remembrance Day was observed on Friday, 11 November, at the British Cemetery and at St John’s Anglican Church the following Sunday.

As befitted the occasion, bagpipes were played and poems were read. World War II Fleet Air Arm Veteran Ronnie Scott remembered Poppy Day by reading Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Attack,’ describing soldiers fighting in the trenches as human beings overcome with fear desperately whispering “Oh, Jesus, make it stop!” to themselves. It seems to me that the poem shows soldiers made of our same flesh and blood, that history changed into heroes, but who were in fact any Tom, Dick and Harry aspiring to serve their country and then return home to embrace their loved ones. This fact reminds me of ‘Exposure,’ another war poem by Wilfrid Owen, in which the cruelty suffered by soldiers on the battlefield is vividly described: “The merciless iced east winds that knive us” shows the relentlessness of the extreme weather conditions and the “twitching agonies of men among its brambles” attests to the horror of trench warfare.

To honour Poppy Day, I think it necessary to remember the war poets, who dispelled the myth that Dulce et Decorum est (“It is right to die for your country”), a statement used by Wilfred Owen as the title of his celebrated poem revealing the inhumanity of fighting on the battlefield and teaching us the moral lesson that man was made to live life fully instead of ending up as a corpse flung onto a wagon unheroically.

Last but not least, Remembrance Day should give us pause to reflect on the war poets who were soldiers but who became staunch pacifists after witnessing the atrocities they saw in the trenches.

Adrian Insaubralde, Santa Fe

ANOTHER WORTHWHILE FILM

Beyond all the criticisms made because of details omitted from its script, Argentina, 1985, has proved tremendously valuable for our society. It has reminded the elderly and illustrated the young of an extremely important happening in our history, the Trial of the Military Juntas, something of which Argentines can be very proud of because it was a monumental victory for justice and democracy.

Yet now that we have remembered, half a century later, the return of Juan Perón from exile on November 17, 1972, it strikes me that the production of another film, ‘Argentina 1943/1955,’ is long overdue, because nowadays all that is mentioned about this man refers to his actions after his return and hardly a reference is made to his first stage as Argentina’s leading political figure. Consequently there exists an idealisation which does not correspond to reality.

To an enormous extent, those not yet alive in those days do not have a real knowledge of what an awful dictatorship we lived through in those times: a persecuted opposition, many jailed and very often tortured, often forced to flee abroad, including its members of Congress, a press where opposition newspapers were hounded and denied newsprint, where no non-peronista radio stations were allowed, not to speak about the official television station, with educators forced to endorse peronista candidates on the risk of losing their jobs, nonperonista trade unionists being denied all rights, the burning of churches and opposition headquarters, and so on and so on. Those were times when there were spies everywhere and in public places one would speak in a low voice, with eyes open, looking in every direction. And then again you have the other chapter, the populist destruction of our economy, but that’s another story apart.

You tell all this to youngsters nowadays and they look at you as if you had come from another planet. This is why a film objectively recounting those days would be immensely valuable to put the historical record straight, and in the process back up the value of freedom and democracy, because: “It’s the Republic, dammit”!

Harry Ingham,

City

WITHOUT MUSIC, LIFE WOULD BE A MISTAKE

Gal Costa, one of Brazil’s greatest singers and a model for generations of Brazilian performers, died at 77 on November 9, at her home in São Paulo. Pablo Milanés, the legendary Cuban singer-songwriter, died aged 79 on November 22. The same day Erasmo Carlos, a popular Brazilian singer-songwriter, died in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 81.

Three in a row. A Black November. What a pity! Such awesome artists, so creative, so generous, so universal. Fortunately, they leave behind so much poetry, so much beauty, lyrics we all know by heart.

Contrasting with all those pitiful losses, many of us have been lucky enough this month to enjoy Juan Manuel Serrat’s “farewell” concert at the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires. For two-and-a-half hours he literally mesmerised thousands of fans. At 78 he hasn’t aged at all as an artist, nor has his voice or his songs. ‘El Nano’ has kept a love affair with his Argentine audience since the late 1960s, and has never disappointed it.

I guess we all have mixed feelings: sorrow and joy at the same time. Is this really his last tour? I don’t think so. Nor does he, I suppose. Anyway, we are all so thankful! He’s made our lives happier and richer. As German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

Irene Bianchi, Ringuelet, La Plata

BATTLE OF THE BULGE: PART 222

Dear sirs,

The most recent copy of The Economist

(edition November 19-25 2022) has a fascinating article on a couple of giant economists of the past century: Lord John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. They had radically different outlooks on the dismal science – the former believed that the State should boost demand when private investment flagged, the latter thought that Keynesian ideas represented an extremely dangerous popular delusion and argued that his counterpart’s solutions would not only fail to solve economic problems, but would make them worse. Governments, he believed, would not know better than millions of individuals when it came to distributing resources. Published in 1944, his Road to Serfdom argued that State intervention often produced the need for further State intervention and, with it, increased the chances of fascism. Taking into account what happened in Argentina in 1946 and the long decline thereafter, with a covey of government mis-run enterprises losing in aggregate some US$20 million per day, I rest my case. David Parsons,

via email