"Teach some #@$%ing History!"

 

With all due respect to my fellow OP and historian Dan here, there's more to teaching history than providing everyone with a handbook of clichés to avoid.

 

 

History is not scripture (a collection of allegories that are really about the here and now!)

 

We always need to be ready to interpret how phenomena from the past might be about to interact with phenomena from the present.

 

Anyway, this has (of course) not stopped Nicolás Maduro from immediately characterising Javier Milei as a "Neo Nazi". 

 

Superficially the rise of Milei can be aligned with the familiar trope which Snow outlines and, though unmentioned, with names like Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson. 

 

It's too early to make any definitive judgment, but I can already see some significant differences, and this is precisely where it is important not to overlay and thus obscure present realities with layers of historically-derived understandings. 

 

Trump is repellent and to a large extent inauthentic on almost every human level. He's also a sociopath, and a crook. Bolsonaro and Boris also have corrupt leanings.

V and I have done quite a deep dive into Milei: speeches, prior interviews and so on and have encountered a man who clearly has some empathy, and yet projects an oddly appealing alien-like persona, with an awkwardness that seems authentic. It's not hard to see how he has managed to appeal to younger voters in Argentina.

 

Milei is no fool. He's sharp, educated and cultured. His love of Donizetti and the Stones is part of a package of generally rather endearing Argie traits, which include that peculiar combination of naïveté and high-handedness. 

 

He's by no means a chancer or bluffer like Boris and barefaced lying would not appear to be such a fundamental part of his programme as it has been with notable populist leaders lately. 

 

In one interview we watched, he admitted that he had been wrong to denigrate a journalist in 2018. When did the others do anything other than double-down? 

 

As someone determined to live my life my own way, libertarian values have always had an underlying appeal for me, but the turn off turns up when these are rigidly formulated into an ideology, as they are with our own Gloria Álvarez. Freedom attached to a set of precepts fit for all circumstances is somehow oxymoronic. She is too deeply obsessed with her family trauma with Caribbean socialism to be the kind of practical, instinctive libertarian that Milei so far appears to be. 

 

Where the underlying reformist ideas are a little kooky, as they were with Lettuce Liz in the UK, one senses that Milei will be just a little more circumspect in how he implements them (and how fast). 

 

And when it comes to the Falklands, it has been the Peronists who have always adopted the populist line, rather like our own clown Jimmy on Belize. Milei seems to understand that the issue is an analogue of Hong Kong and China, where the aspirations of the people inhabiting the 'colony' should be paramount. 

 

So, I will stick my neck out here and state that there's more to Milei than "Trump with a chainsaw", as there is a lot more to the chaotic situation in Argentina to which he represents an overdue reaction, or indeed a reboot.

 

One could even, perhaps fancifully, characterise Milei as “Arévalo with a chainsaw” and there have indeed been times recently when I have wished Guatemala’s Prez-elect would drop his diplomatic demeanour and go a bit more lunatic lumberjack with the soft coup plotters.

On a vaguely related topic, this could be a place to mention Gareth Edwards's new film The Creator, which very consciously 'quotes', in terms of both concept and visualisation, from a gaggle of different movies (not all of them futuristic sci-fi) which themselves might be said to have stood on the shoulders of earlier giants. And in doing so it never sacrifices its right to be described as original*.  

 

There are plenty of other films of which the same can be said. So, just because you have obvious  antecedents with which you can be usefully compared, does not mean that your own narrative is set to be dismissed rather pompously by academics ready to bamboozle you with historical factlets and facile comparisons. 

 

And, with all due respect to Noam Chomsky as well, AI is already ‘aware’ of this, if nothing else.