The Falkland Islands have changed a lot in the past thirty years, Larissa MacFarquhar writes in The New Yorker, thanks in part to fishing rights:

Until recently, the Falkland Islands were a quasi-feudal colony, in which an arcadian Britain of the past was preserved in microcosm—a population of eighteen hundred, territory a little larger than Jamaica. The islanders, almost all of whom claimed British ancestry, ate British food and planted British gardens, with crowded flower beds and gnomes. They flew Union Jacks from their cars and greenhouses. They were given to displays of patriotism that were rare in the mother country: they celebrated the Queen’s birthday, and sang the national anthem every Sunday in the cathedral. When older islanders talked about Britain—even if they had never been there, and their families had been in the Falklands for five generations—they called it ‘home.’

John Fowler arrived on the mail boat in 1971. After several awful days at sea, he woke up at four or five in the morning to find that the ship was still. He went up on deck in his pajamas and saw that they were moored on the jetty at Stanley—the town just a few streets on the steep slope above the harbor, little white houses with colored roofs, the air smelling of peat smoke—and saw what looked like three-quarters of the population assembled onshore to greet the ship. To him, just woken up, and disoriented by appearing in public in his pajamas, it was a dreamlike sight, in 1971—like England twenty-five years before, the men in ties and mackintoshes, the ladies in the sort of dresses he remembered his mother wearing when he was a boy.

At the time, the Falklands were poor and embattled, losing so many people to emigration that it seemed the society was in danger of becoming extinct, the islands abandoned. Nobody knew that it was in fact on the verge of an astonishing change: that, a generation later, it would be unrecognizable, its politics transformed, its population doubled and commingled, its identity mutating. It is the fruit fly of societies—a tiny social organism that has metamorphosed through centuries of history in twenty years.

Everything changed for the Falklands because of a chain of events set in motion by the decision of General Leopoldo Galtieri, then President of Argentina, to invade, in April, 1982. Argentina had long claimed the islands, which lie three hundred miles off its coast, and although it was defeated in the war, it claims them still. It maintains that the Falklands are an illegal colony, populated by implants sent by London, and that the British forces on the islands are there to prevent islanders from escaping to Argentina.

In a referendum in 2013, all but three voters elected to remain a self-governing British territory, but the Falklands are no longer now as British as they were. They have become a place where people fetch up from all over the world, for all sorts of reasons—rootless wanderers, transient workers, people fleeing politics at home. In February, a small delegation arrived representing a group of Hong Kong Chinese who were nervous about Beijing. Several white South Africans have turned up; in early March, a divorced contractor from Cape Town who had recently emerged from ten years in prison, in Kuwait, visited offices in Stanley with a stack of business cards. But the constant pressure of the Argentine claim compels the islanders to make the case to the world that they are something more than a haphazard group of settlers, sharing nothing but the ground they live on.

In other news: Samuel Gregg reviews a new book defending the American Founding: “After World War II, most American conservatives placed the Founding at the center of their thought, not least because it delegitimized efforts by their opponents to detach liberty from the guidance of right reason and, many would add, from revelation. Over the past ten years, however, some conservatives have contended that modern liberalism’s gospel of autonomy and diversity over and against reason and truth represents the logical working out of that same Founding. They consequently do not believe that recourse to the Founding can save America from the nihilist implications of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “mystery of life” passage in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. On the contrary, these statements are presented as the Founding’s fulfilment . . . In America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, Robert R. Reilly has penned what is thus far the most systematic attempt to refute this Founding-skeptic narrative. Reilly does not deny that liberty has collapsed in many Americans’ minds into license. He nevertheless holds that this situation owes little to the Founding. For him, the Founding represents a powerful re-expression of a Western tradition far older than modern liberalism. Its lineage, Reilly says, stretches as far back as the Hebrew Bible and consequently articulates a very different understanding of human freedom.”

“The Goths wanted to be Roman, or at least to live on Roman soil. The Romans, most especially the upper-class conservative policymakers from whom we hear the most, feared that romanitas, the essential core of what it meant to be Roman, was threatened with dilution by the influx of Germanic migrants, yet acknowledged that without their support the empire was incapable of defending itself. It is this tension that lies at the heart of Boin’s book and explains the fatal intertwining of Alaric’s career and the fall of Rome.” Philip Parker reviews Douglas Boin’s Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome.

 The publication of Mary Trump’s book about her family has been temporarily blocked by the New York Supreme Court: “Robert Trump took his niece Mary Trump to court over her plans to release a memoir titled Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which is scheduled to come out in late July. Robert Trump alleges that publication of the book is a violation of a nondisclosure agreement the family signed when settling the estate of Robert and Donald Trump’s father.”

Georg Ratzinger, the older brother of Pope Benedict, has died. He was 96: “Ordained on the same day as his brother, Ratzinger proved to be a talented musician and went on oversee the recording of numerous masterpieces and concert tours around the world by the Regensburger Domspatzen, a storied choir that traces its history back to the 10th century.”

Jean Raspail has also died. He was 94: “Jean Raspail was born on July 5 1925 in Chemillé-sur-Dême, in the Indre-et-Loire department of west-central France, the son of a factory manager, and educated at private Catholic schools. As a young man he was a tireless traveller, leading an overland expedition from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska in the early 1950s and a research expedition to the land of the Incas in 1954. In 1956 he spent a year in Japan. He published several works of travel and adventure, for which he was awarded the Jean Walter Prize of the Académie française in 1970. Le Camp des Saints was initially panned by the French press. Even France’s biggest right-wing newspaper, Le Figaro, to which Raspail was a contributor, tore into his tale of Europe being overrun by dark-skinned, faeces-eating, sexually predatory invaders bent on overpowering the white population. The book sold only 15,000 copies in its first year. Its fortunes were transformed from 1985 when an English language edition was published in the United States.”

In The Nation, Barry Schwabsky asks how galleries will—and should—change because of the coronavirus: ““There’s no reason why the art gallery as we know it, a 19th century invention, should last forever. But there’s also no sign of an alternative on the horizon.”

Photos: Locust swarms

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