This column aims to look beyond the ongoing debate over whether Argentina is a racist country to argue that racism is self-defeating by nature – not least because that debate is largely an exercise in futility with racism not the real issue.
No country is racist and no country is free of racism – this is not a black-and-white issue (perhaps not the best way of putting it) but numerous shades of grey. And the main fuel for the massive offensive against Argentina – actually around 0.8 percent of the millions of social network posts on the final weekend of the World Cup so not quite so massive but ruffling local sensitivities – came from this year’s central news, the Middle East conflict. The militant sympathisers of the Palestinian victims of that conflict worldwide had it in for a country whose current “most Zionist president in the world” (Javier Milei dixit) automatically aligns it with Israel and the United States – little to do with Argentine football or demography.
The detractors found their ammunition replenished by such gaffes as Mendoza Lieutenant-Governor Hebe Casado echoing Spain’s Mariano Rajoy by describing the French World Cup team captained by Kylian Mbappé as “a bad-mannered African team.” Her self-defence was adroit in arguing that those taking that as an insult are the real racists because they are assuming “African” to be synonymous with “inferior” but that explanation is too clever by half – the damage was done in providing a smoking gun of Argentine racism.
Rather stronger grounds for these accusations than their original flimsy basis that coloured players are excluded from the Argentine team. Such critics should be asked to name the excluded black footballers. Furthermore, racism presumably extends beyond African origins to other pigments such as the indigenous with more than one face reflecting that in Lionel Scaloni’s squad. The Czech World Cup team was entirely composed of white Slavs and yet no charges of racism were levelled in that direction and nor should they have been – Prague is a beautiful city for the tourist but it would seem that far less people are interested in emigrating to the Czech Republic. It should be clear that neither Argentina nor the Czech Republic contain much football Afro-talent in their populations – otherwise they would surely have been chosen. And even where World Cup squads are more polychromatic, does this absolve any country from racism – France has the football team it has but does this cancel out 41 percent of its electorate voting for Marine Le Pen in the last ballottage? It is precisely Europe’s imperial past which has given its teams their ethnic depth so should they be pointing fingers?
Perhaps the most balanced verdict in this battle of stereotypes came from the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte who, while joining the criticism of the unsportsmanlike conduct of bad losers after a substandard final, added that this “does not represent Argentina, which is better than that – it represented only the most violent and irrational part of a certain detestable Argentine society.” Yet this column does not propose to add to the multiple reactions to Rosalía and Samuel L. Jackson over the last fortnight nor enter into any history of Argentina’s shrinking black population (if boats transported 72,000 slaves to the colonial viceroyalty and seven million European immigrants to the Argentina between 1880 and 1930, this should be sufficient explanation of Argentine demography without wars or epidemics) but instead explore racism from another angle.
In order to argue that racism is its own worst enemy, what better place to start than its most extreme example in history – Nazi Germany?
Prior to Adolf Hitler, the German imprint in Eastern Europe stretched all the way to the Volga (thus the late Argentine crooner Sergio Denis, real name: Héctor Omar Hoffmann, was of Volga German origin). This was but one of many such niches within and beyond the vast blanket of the Austrian empire with several layers accumulating in the centuries since the Drang nach Osten drive to the East was born under Henry the Lion in the 12th century – the Transylvanian Saxons, the Teutonic Knights, the Baltic barons to name but a few.
Yet perhaps an even stronger injection of German language and culture than from the Volksdeutsche of the Ostsiedlung came from Eastern European Jewry speaking the basically similar Yiddish when not German itself – extremely successful and prominent in commercial, professional and academic life, they were highly effective Kulturträger. In many countries like Poland they were granted protection by the local nobility in exchange for doing their dirty work as rent collectors, forward commodity brokers, etc., which explains some of the roots of Eastern European anti-Semitism, but in more recent centuries they were at least as much as an asset for German language and culture as the Volksdeutsche.
Yet Hitler threw out the baby with the bathwater when he not only annihilated the Jews but that German imprint – centuries of a steadily growing Germanisation of Eastern Europe wiped out in a dozen years of the Thousand-Year Reich. In victory he wiped out the Jews and after his defeat the Volksdeutsche were no longer welcome – both the main Kulturträger gone from the scene. Jews obviously abhor Hitler but German ultra-nationalists should also be extremely angry with him if they stopped to think.
Turning to the present, where current feelings against immigrants are based on racism, this is also counterproductive, based on this columnist’s personal experience. When coming into London from Heathrow Airport on family visits to Britain, we would invariably have tea at the railway station before heading onward and in the past century the stand was invariably served by somebody of Caribbean or South Asian origin. But after 2004 we were suddenly served tea by a blond youth of whom Hitler would have been proud (probably Polish). Anybody voting for Brexit in 2016 on racist grounds was thus cutting off an increasingly white wave of immigration. This is not to say that such immigration is more desirable. Why should a Jamaican speaking only English whose island’s counties have names like Cornwall, Middlesex and Surrey be considered less British than, say, a Pole from a town without vowels or anybody from a country never in contact with the British Commonwealth or Empire, merely on the basis of pigment? This is just to say that a racist Brexit vote should be considered an oxymoron (or just moron).
Another supreme contradiction of racism was the Southern Confederacy in the American Civil War granting freedom to slaves in return for entering a war to perpetuate slavery. By March, 1865 (just four weeks before the surrender at Appomattox Court House), the Confederate Army was so desperately short of manpower with quarter of a million of its soldiers dead that the Richmond Congress passed a law granting slaves their freedom after the war if they enlisted (a few hundred did). Yet it could also be said that racism was the main reason why the Civil War lasted four years – white trash would otherwise not have fought so hard for wealthy planters with little economic stake of their own while the slave-based agrarian economy doomed the Confederacy to defeat, lacking industry or liquid cash with the wealth tied up in land.
Space short for further examples but it has been hopefully demonstrated that, moral outrage or woke aside, racism is its own worst enemy – as Talleyrand would say: “Worse than a crime, it is a mistake.”