Jonathan Wilson
speaker
963 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 6d ago
Jonathan Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think there was a sense the Argentinians were being slightly sidelined.
The Gauchos have been a huge political force during the Argentinian Civil War, and the Civil War is exactly the same as every other American Civil War, and I include here that essentially it's between the big city on the coast
and the rural landowners.
Do you want to be an urban liberal society that looks to Europe?
Or do you want to be a bit more insular?
And you have these, you know, caudillos, the sort of warlords, governors.
It sort of means both in Argentinian terms.
The big ranch owners, should they have the power?
That's the tension.
And Argentina had exactly that.
Well, the gauchos, you know, the cowboys who looked after these huge herds on the pampas, the real guarantor of Argentinian wealth.
Mm-hmm.
There is massive political force until the moment a British bloke called Richard Newton imports barbed wire in, I think, 1856.
And once you have barbed wire, you not merely don't need the gauchos, but the farms that have the barbed wire can practice selective breeding.
They get better meat yields and economically they crush the other farms.
So the introduction of barbed wire kills the gaucho.
And this is then played out in a footballing sense in that the British sort of retreat from Argentina just before the First World War.
And what is left is this immigrant society, the indigenous peoples have been driven to the periphery or slaughtered.
And you have a series of lectures given by Leopoldo Lagunas, the preeminent poet of the age, at the Odeon Theatre in Buenos Aires.
And he asked KS Acantinidad, what is it to be Argentinian?
Showing 801–820 of 963 · page 41 of 49
← Previous
Next →