Página 1 de 3 123 ÚltimoÚltimo
Resultados 1 al 10 de 22

Tema: How viveza brought down a nation.

  1. #1

    How viveza brought down a nation.

    Es del 2002.
    Argentina's plight should be a warning to us all, argues John Carlin: a get-rich-quick mentality leads to disaster

    One of life's great puzzles for the man on the Buenos Aires omnibus is why Argentina, which has everything going for it, is such a basket case, while Japan, seemingly having so little, has been such a success.

    Japan is a densely populated archipelago scarce in natural resources whose society is hierarchically structured and whose politics - until not all that long ago - was quaintly feudal. Argentina is a vast, empty, fertile land unfairly blessed not only with oil and gas, but with a people whose standard of education is the highest in Latin America, and whose habits of thought and tastes in clothes, food, fashion and the arts are entirely European.

    Yet Japan is the supermodern, democratically stable, capitalist colossus; Argentina has spent the past 50 years manically see- sawing from bust to boom and bust again, from properly elected governments to military coups and banana republic dictatorships. (True, Japan has been suffering prolonged recession, but its continued prosperity and stability only underline the contrast.)

    The man on the omnibus (an unusually well-off type, in truth, as few can afford the fares any more) will be quick to remind us - for like all Argentinians he is a proud man, rather superior in his bearing - that there was a time when things did follow the natural order. In 1908, Argentina, the eighth-richest country in the world, had a per capita GDP higher than Germany, France and Holland - never mind Japan, which trailed far behind. Twenty years later, Argentina, now also a flourishing democracy, continued to cruise along at number 12 in the world rankings, still comfortably ahead of Japan, and miles ahead of Italy and Spain - the two backward nations from which immigrants poured into Argentina a century ago, and to which many of their children, rummaging frantically in cupboards for ancient birth certificates, want to return today.

    Few place much faith in Eduardo Duhalde, Argentina's fifth president this festive season, or in the protectionist measures he has announced, the first consequence of which was a dramatic devaluation of the peso. An old friend in Buenos Aires sent me an e-mail describing Duhalde "as yet another Peronist char-latan" and anticipating "the disappearance of 'Argentinian civilisation', as happened with the Etruscans". My friend is a doctor and mother of two children. Her husband owns a jewellery shop. About two months ago, they were forced by lack of funds to abandon their flat and move in with her mother.

    Her predicament is utterly typical, and so is her pessimism. Maybe Duhalde will prove her wrong in the short term, but it is certain that financial measures alone will not be enough. As Felipe Gonzalez, the former Spanish prime minister and a close observer of Argentinian affairs, said recently, "the problem is not economic . . . Despite the depth and gravity of the economic, social and financial crisis, the problem is political."

    By which he meant that it is not the latest batch of politicians, as most Argentinians appear to believe, that is to blame, however corrupt and larcenous they might have been. It is the Argentinians themselves who bear the responsibility for their predicament.

    What is their problem? As the inhabitants of Buenos Aires, the city with the highest ratio of psychoanalysts in the world, would be sure to point out, it is manifold and deep. Reduced to its essentials, however, it is this: an abysmal lack of national consensus, of patriotic purpose, of social solidarity.

    No shortage, on the other hand, of nationalistic posturing. I last lived in Argentina between 1979 - when the military regime of Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri and co, the most Nazi-ish of all Latin American juntas of the time, was at the height of its power - and 1982, when Mrs Thatcher and her Task Force did the Argentinian public the service (as yet unacknowledged) of disposing of the military and ushering in an era, uninterrupted as I write, of civilian rule. One episode from that period has always stayed with me.

    In 1980, a visiting team of English rugby players, called "the Penguins", climbed a wall one drunken night and stole an Argentinian flag. The news made indignant front-page headlines all over the country. A couple of days later, an English friend of mine who was living in Buenos Aires spoke of the incident to a friend, in English, in a crowded bus. My friend expressed his surprise at all the fuss being made over a stolen flag when no one - not in the press, not anywhere - was even mentioning Argentina's 20,000 or so stolen people. Suddenly a middle-aged gent who understood English and had overheard the conversation leapt to his feet, explained its gist to the assembled passengers and shouted to the driver: "Sir, stop this bus immediately! This man has insulted our holy fatherland. He must get off the bus now!" The driver did as he was told and so, to warm applause, did my offending friend.

    Almost as depressing as what the military were then doing was the head-in-the-sand complicity of the public, the selfish disregard for the horrors - the tortures and "disappearances" - that so many of their compatriots were enduring. The point was reinforced in April 1982 by the fervour with which hundreds of thousands gathered at the Plaza de Mayo to celebrate the junta's transparently expedient "recovery" of the Malvinas.

    Part of Argentina's problem arises from the absence of a history around which principled patriotic sentiment - as opposed to flag-waving cant - can flower. The pitiful truth is that were it not for the official myth of eternal enmity towards the English, a people for whom many Argentinians actually feel a cringing admiration, there would be little on which to hang the sky-blue and white Argentinian flag. As a British child growing up in Argentina during the 1960s, it was with some confusion that I responded to the daily reminders at school about the "piratical" nature of los ingleses and that I memorised the details of Argentina's most memorable martial feats, their Agincourts, their Waterloos - the two "invasiones inglesas" of Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807, landings (they did really happen) by British sailors and red-coated marines which the Argentinian citizenry pluckily repelled.

    Yet a short and not particularly interesting history does not entirely account for, much less does it excuse, today's sorry state of affairs. Otherwise you would have to ask why Australia (another country that offers a painfully illuminating contrast) is such a prosperous and stable place.

    A large part of the answer to the Argentinian conundrum lies in the aspirations of the immigrants who arrived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Whereas those who went (voluntarily) to Australia, as to the United States, did so with the intention, by and large, of settling, those who went to Argentina usually did so with the intention of becoming very wealthy very soon. They called it "hacer la America" - "to make your America". The idea was to return home to Calabria or Galicia after a few years of hard work enviably loaded with cash.

    Only a small minority succeeded. Those condemned to stay behind have bequeathed to modern Argentinians a set of characteristics that distinguish them from all other Latin Americans: an indelible nostalgia for Europe coupled with a southern European contempt for the US; a deep frustration that, by some error of God, in GarcIa Marquez's phrase, they have ended up living not on the Mediterranean, but on the southern tip of South America; an adolescent longing for the idea that the miracle that evaded their ancestors will happen to them and that they will get rich quick.

    That is, in large part, the secret of the abiding success of the Peronist party. The reason Juan Domingo Peron and his wife Evita came to power in 1945, remained there for ten years and have never left the hearts of at least half the Argentinian population is that they offered to make true the Argentinian Dream. Vote for us, went their message, and all of you - every single one of you - will win the Lottery. And indeed, for a while, Argentina, brimming with beef and grain, reaped a post-Second World War peace dividend. But the illusion of prosperity ended once the nations of the north got back on their feet, whereupon Peron was ousted in a coup.

    Whether it is Peron's legacy or whether it is something that comes from deeper within, Argentina's tragic flaw is the corrupt ineptitude of its dominant national ethic. While in countries such as Japan and the US - the most apt and dramatic counterpoint of all to Argentina's historic failure - the virtue that society holds in highest esteem is honest toil, in Argentina the attribute that generates the greatest degree of admiration is what they call "viveza". Or, to use its more common adjectival form, to be "vivo". Which means, literally, to be alive, but its real meaning is a form of cunning or sharpness or quickness of mind in which cheating, whether by beating the system or making a fool out of an individual, is the defining ingredient.

    A good example would be Diego Maradona's "hand of God" goal against England in the 1986 World Cup, which he explained in a documentary for Channel 4 last year in terms of pickpocketing - an art which, he said, Argentinians held in high esteem. So the most idolised individual in Argentina since Evita Peron sees no contradiction between praising the viveza of the pickpocket and denouncing the "thieves" who, as he and the majority of his compatriots never tire of saying, have run the country these last 50 years.

    What all this translates into is a society where, with undoubtedly many honourable exceptions, the prevailing objective - the big idea - is to succeed by one's wits with a minimum investment of time and energy. Regrettably, Argentina's unique 20th-century trajectory from developed to (putting it very kindly) developing nation shows that short cuts don't work. To sustain success a nation needs to work hard and pull together. As Felipe Gonzalez says, there is only one thing for it, to start from scratch and build a "New Argentina" around "a shared project, a great national accord".

    That will not be particularly comforting to the clever, fashionably dressed, oh- so-European idler on the Buenos Aires omnibus, though it does provide him with the answer to the Japanese puzzle. The lesson, quite encouraging for the rest of the planet, to be drawn from the Argentinian catastrophe is this: it is not the roulette of geography that shapes the fate of a nation so much as the will and the values of its people.
    New Statesman - How viveza brought down a nation

    Qué les parece?
    Última edición por Pantuflator; 25/11/2009 a las 17:48

  2. #2
    Inspector de Braguetas Avatar de Kinda
    Fecha de Ingreso
    10 jun, 06
    Ubicación
    En protesta.
    Mensajes
    5,819

    Re: How viveza brought down a nation.

    me gusto mucho, esta bastante piola

    el problema de argentina somos los argentinos.

  3. #3
    1 2 3 14 Avatar de Poo
    Fecha de Ingreso
    20 oct, 08
    Ubicación
    Moron
    Mensajes
    3,614

    Re: How viveza brought down a nation.

    mmm sin duda que el pais esta como esta (en parte) por la mentalidad de los que lo habitan.

    pero en algunos parrafos el tipo se pasa de boludo... habla de "eterna" enemistad entre argentina-inglaterra cuando desde la independencia hasta 1920-1930 fueron nuestro principal socio comercial y un modelo a imitar...

    habla de que "no nos importo que maten 30.000 personas" pero que tipo pelotudo, la sociedad estaba desarticulada y la gente tenia un miedo logico a que la caguen matando... cuando a la gente de su pais la salga a matar su propio estado, me imagino que este tipo va a ser superman, no le va a importar ni su vida ni la de sus seres queridos y se va a salir a plantar contra la represion... ah, y todos sus camaradas van a hacer simultaneamente lo mismo porque no son garcas cobardes como los argentinos , y para colmo dice "la prensa no decia nada", el pibe parece que es retrasado mental o un terrible ignorante de la historia argentina si cree que en la epoca del proceso se iba a permitir que salga en circulacion un diario con "HAY 30 MIL DESAPARECIDOS" en la tapa.

    y por las dudas, dice que ser un pais europeizado es una virtud, parece que sigue en la epoca del imperialismo y la superioridad europea este muchacho
    Última edición por Poo; 25/11/2009 a las 19:47
    DEMACIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

  4. #4
    Get Bent. Avatar de Skull007
    Fecha de Ingreso
    25 feb, 05
    Ubicación
    ......
    Mensajes
    14,471

    Re: How viveza brought down a nation.

    por fin viejo, pense que nadie pensaba como yo cuando decia que los argentinos en masa somos 10 veces mas estupidos que cualquier masa de otra nacionalidad

    para el argentino, el es unico, irrepetible, el mas poronga, el mas vivo y trata de cagar a los demas siempre que puede, quiza no economicamente, pero de muchas otras formas si
    Gaming has changed. It's no longer about games, friends or having fun. It's an endless series of hassles, filled with updates and add-ons. Gaming, and its consumption of our money, has become a well-oiled machine. Gaming has changed. ID tagged consoles play ID tagged games, use ID tagged accessories. DLC inside their gamedata enhance and regulate their abilities. Game control. Multiplayer control. Handheld control. Console control. Everything is monitored, and kept under control. Gaming has changed. The age of fun has become the age of control. All in the name of making a profit from their loyal customers. And he who controls the gamers, controls history. Gaming has changed. When video games are under total control, gaming... becomes routine.

  5. #5

    Re: How viveza brought down a nation.

    Cita Iniciado por Poo Ver Mensaje
    mmm sin duda que el pais esta como esta (en parte) por la mentalidad de los que lo habitan.

    pero en algunos parrafos el tipo se pasa de boludo... habla de "eterna" enemistad entre argentina-inglaterra cuando desde la independencia hasta 1920-1930 fueron nuestro principal socio comercial y un modelo a imitar...
    The pitiful truth is that were it not for the official myth of eternal enmity towards the English, a people for whom many Argentinians actually feel a cringing admiration, there would be little on which to hang the sky-blue and white Argentinian flag.
    Fijate que dice official myth, es como un mito, y dice que si no fuese por ese supuesto odio (que contradictoriamente muchos argentinos admiran a los ingleses y también como vos decís fueron nuestros principales socios comerciales durante mucho tiempo), tendríamos poca base por la cuál plantar el mástil de nuestra bandera, es decir, una de las muy pocas cosas que nos unen es este supuesto odio a los ingleses.
    Cita Iniciado por Poo Ver Mensaje
    habla de que "no nos importo que maten 30.000 personas" pero que tipo pelotudo, la sociedad estaba desarticulada y la gente tenia un miedo logico a que la caguen matando... cuando a la gente de su pais la salga a matar su propio estado, me imagino que este tipo va a ser superman, no le va a importar ni su vida ni la de sus seres queridos y se va a salir a plantar contra la represion... ah, y todos sus camaradas van a hacer simultaneamente lo mismo porque no son garcas cobardes como los argentinos , y para colmo dice "la prensa no decia nada", el pibe parece que es retrasado mental o un terrible ignorante de la historia argentina si cree que en la epoca del proceso se iba a permitir que salga en circulacion un diario con "HAY 30 MIL DESAPARECIDOS" en la tapa.

    y por las dudas, dice que ser un pais europeizado es una virtud, parece que sigue en la epoca del imperialismo y la superioridad europea este muchacho
    Estoy de acuerdo.

  6. #6
    Kifito's & Co. Avatar de Kifsito
    Fecha de Ingreso
    09 abr, 07
    Ubicación
    México Distrito Federal
    Mensajes
    349

    Re: How viveza brought down a nation.

    Whoa... que no nos analice a los mexicanos el tipo ese pk nos hace mierda!

    A ver si aprenden a respetar al maestro, giles.

  7. #7

    Re: How viveza brought down a nation.

    Lo unico que me llama la atencion, es que es casi la misma perspectiva que tiene popularmente el argentino. Bah, es lo que decimos todos, más la vuelta de tuerca que se le da en una charla de bar.

    Ademas, tanto quilombo para llorar por el gol de maradona, dejate de joder.

    M
    Cita Iniciado por Bertrand Russell
    Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

  8. #8
    Banned
    Fecha de Ingreso
    10 oct, 06
    Ubicación
    made in argentina
    Mensajes
    5,901

    Re: How viveza brought down a nation.

    ^ hahahahaa

    El problema de argentina solo tiene una solucion argentina

  9. #9

    Re: How viveza brought down a nation.

    Tengo miedo de mal interpretar algunas cosas. Alguno que se de mañana con el ingles, si lo puede traducir seria genial.

    Siamo al hornelli.

    http://siamoalhornelli.wordpress.com/

    El blog de Dinapoli y Lelouch.

  10. #10

    Re: How viveza brought down a nation.

    por lo qe entendi... tiene razon en la mayoria de las cosas

Página 1 de 3 123 ÚltimoÚltimo

Temas Similares

  1. Viveza ARGENTINA?
    Por Grosoramos en el foro Shut Up!
    Respuestas: 91
    Último Mensaje: 19/10/2009, 23:30
  2. La viveza de unos, y la ineptitud de otros...
    Por Balmung en el foro Outlands
    Respuestas: 51
    Último Mensaje: 25/06/2005, 07:48

Permisos de Publicación

  • No puedes crear nuevos temas
  • No puedes responder temas
  • No puedes subir archivos adjuntos
  • No puedes editar tus mensajes
  •  

ESCORTS Capital Federal | ESCORTS Zona Sur | ESCORTS Zona Norte | ESCORTS Zona Oeste | ESCORTS Mar del Plata | ESCORTS La Plata | ESCORTS Cordoba | ESCORTS Rosario | ESCORTS Tucuman | Escorts Almagro | Escorts Belgrano | Escorts Caballito | Escorts Centro | Escorts Flores | Escorts Microcentro | Escorts Once | Escorts Palermo | Escorts Recoleta | Escorts Tribunales | Escorts Devoto | Escorts Villa Urquiza | Escorts Caba