Uki Goñi was born in the United States. Much to the chagrin of folks whose political fortunes—and embarrassment of power—have lately been restored, that would normally mean that Goñi was an American citizen. But his father was an Argentine diplomat stationed at that country’s embassy in Washington, D.C. when he (Uki) was born. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the first section of which achieved enfranchising freed slaves) does state that anyone born on US soil is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but it excludes the children of foreign diplomats from that jurisdiction.
So, Uki Goñi spent most of his first 14 years living out an American childhood not unlike my own: saying the pledge of allegiance in the courtyard of his local Catholic parish’s parochial school; wearing that AAA Safety Patrol belt the neon color of candied orange peel, making sure his classmates didn’t jaywalk; and hearing stories every November about the exploits of captain Myles Standish, Squanto, Massasoit, and a bunch religious dissenters—who, if they agreed on one thing, it was that they didn’t like Catholics; but who also (crowded in the hull of a beat-up Dutch cargo fluyt anchored in what’s now Provincetown harbor, in November 1620) signed a compact that they would “covenant and combine [themselves] into a civil body politic for their better ordering and preservation.”
But eventually the services of Goñi’s father were needed elsewhere, namely the Argentine diplomatic mission in Ireland. Just as his juices were flowing and his sense of self was taking shape, he landed in the middle of that country’s charms, and its notorious troubles. He was mostly sequestered from those convulsions, though, at a private prep school in Dublin; a place not devoid of its own darkness. His French teacher was dead-eyed and sadistic, and, as it turned out, was a native Breton who had enthusiastically joined the Nazi Schutzstaffel (the S.S.) in the Second World War and who was enjoying protection from prosecution for war crimes.
The strange juxtaposition of earthy homeyness he felt in Dublin with absolute injustice being willfully ignored (or maybe even furtively desired) was jarring—and all the more troublesome when he started getting used to it. But he was happy in Ireland, with high hopes of being a poet and musician. Youthful plans fall apart, however; or the scales fall from your eyes (I guess it depends on how you look at it), and when he turned 19, Uki’s family had to return to Buenos Aires. Having no financial means to stay behind and make his own way, he moved for the first time in his life to the country whose passport he carried.
Normally he would have had to fulfill military duty, but his situation in a diplomatic family gave him some leeway. So he set off in search of a job. His Spanish being tinged (how could it not be?) by flat American and lilting Irish vowels (making finding a job a bit tricker), he turned to the Buenos Aires Herald, the storied English-language daily newspaper, which was preparing to celebrate its centennial anniversary the next year year. And boldly (naively) he asked if they wanted to publish some of his poetry—which they promptly laughed off, saying they didn’t publish poetry, but that he could write some articles for them, if he liked; and if he proved to have a knack, they would hire him. As it happens, he did have a knack, but that might have had more to do with the confluence of factors outside his own proclivities (what people of a different age or bent of mind called destiny.) You see, Uki’s father had been summoned back to Argentina because his country was enduring troubles that—improbably—far outweighed those of Ireland.
Even though it’s chauvinistic, I doubt any American can help but feel like the story of Argentina’s path to Independence sounds a little like some imposter has copied clauses and phrases from a US history book and reassembled them—with a few fake bits to hold up the creaky syntax—into a pastiche about a thinly veiled, fictional, analogue country, whose history takes twists and turns that feel familiar but wind up with a completely different outcome. And the forger has pasted his cancel pages into an 80s hardback with a cocked spine and a plastic foiled dustcover, foxed with studiously sporadic brown dots, and has snuck his fabulation onto the shelves in the the public library of some run-of-the-mill town where no one would find it. But we do.
Spain’s grip on the South American colonies had grown weak because it was distracted by the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Either from valid grievances about colonial trade and yearning to decide their own fate, or simple post hoc justification of their motives (why not both?), Enlightenment ideas swarmed through the mouths, pages and streets of San Migel de Tucumán, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires. Local elites and intellectuals ousted the Spanish viceroy and established a provisional government. And on July 9, 1816, Argentina ratified the Declaration of Independence at the Congress of Tucumán.
General José de San Martín defeated the Spanish, but independence was fraught with internal rivalries between Centralists and Federalists (advocates of provincial autonomy).
Mneh. If he’s gonna stick his forgery on an American library shelf, that’s kind of a confusing way to use the word “federalism.” It’s basically the opposite of the way Hamilton meant it. Whoever this faker is, he spins a good tale, but when it comes to the niceties of style, he’s kind of a hack.
A flourishing sense of national identity among the fiercely independent rural and working-class folks finally achieved something like unity. Throughout the 19th century, leaders like Bartolomé Mitre and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, prioritized modernization and economic development—but they favored landowners and elites, laying the groundwork for new unrest.
By the early 20th century, industrialization had taken hold on the backs of European immigrants who came in droves, yearning to breathe free, but those immigrants brought along socialist and anarchist ideas, which fueled labor movements, culminating in the formation of the Radical Civic Union, whose leader Hipólito Yrigoyen became the first democratically elected president of Argentina in 1916, with overwhelming support of the working class, who had finally gained the right to vote. And a sense of genuine steadiness settled in for a time.
But then an alternate reality, with its own history—which its inhabitants call American history—infiltrated this reality, causing a rift in its history.
Ho ho man, this guy has gone off the rails.
In that other history, following what they brazenly call the Spanish-American war, the United States, (which these strapping, young people—so cock-sure of their manifest destiny—named themselves) had a good thing going in the western hemisphere, and they did their best to intervene in their neighbors’ affairs to make sure things went to their liking.
I think he’s talking about the Monroe Doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, “speak softly, but carry a big stick,” and all that.
These “United States” began fighting the so-called “Banana Wars”; supposedly policing the “ne’er-do-well” tropical states with their “corrupt and lawless” politicians. But that alternate reality was not left untinged by its encounter with this one. A figure not known to many in that alternate reality—because there were those who preferred his name and hierophantic knowledge never get out—Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a man whose soul was a melted wax clotted and embossed by the filigreed arrows clenched in the talon of the Eagle on the great seal of his country.
This Maj. Gen. Butler had fought in the Philippine–American War and the Boxer Rebellion in China. But though he won the Medal of Honor for bravery in the occupation of Veracruz and again in Haiti, and fought with valor in Honduras, by the time he arrived in Nicaragua in1910, to help begin a 21-year occupation of that county, he had begun to submit to the minute and vast evidence of our timeline. Oh, Butler’s mind, molded as it was by the pressures of his native reality, was an imperfect vessel for our truths. Consciously he harbored animosity to the people of our reality, referring to them with slurs from his own. As he wrote to his parents from Nicaragua, “Things are about the same down here and I see not the slightest probability of our getting away for several months yet; that is if we are waiting for the ‘Spicks’ to stop scrapping. They are the most worthless, useless lot of vermin I have struck yet; even worse than our "little brown brothers" the Filipinos, for the Filipinos will fight and these dogs won’t.”
But then immediately his thoughts turned more commensurate—if not, by our lights, coherent—as he confessed his doubts about his own beloved country’s motives: “What makes me mad,” he writes, ”is that the whole revolution is inspired and financed by Americans who have wild cat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a Government which will declare a monopoly in their favor. The whole business is rotten to the core and I am ashamed to think that a Republican Administration is, if anything, assisting the revolution.”
We need not expend too many words on Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler.
Too late!
But suffice it to say that when World War I rolled around, he was considered—despite his ample qualifications—too revolutionary to promote to a commanding role. He then, mysteriously to himself, felt compelled to tour his country with a speech he’d give at pacifist and socialist rallies. The speech was entitled “War is a Racket,” and he subsequently published it to some acclaim.
Eventually the Great Depression—a catastrophic event shared by this reality and our own (much like the diluvial myths shared by the various Mesopotamian traditions)—spread ruin throughout these “United States.” And in its wake a president named Franklin Roosevelt—possibly touched (if indirectly) by the knowledge of our reality that Butler had begun to disseminate in theirs—attempted to alleviate the immense material discomfort his country’s fealty to “unfettered” market economics had wrought. It didn’t take long for the barons of capital to see the threat of our reality slowly insinuating itself into theirs. (Not that our two realities are diametrical; it’s nothing so insipid as that.) And these barons did not take kindly to the election of someone who would threaten their security. In the words of one of their own historians (another in whose mind the crystalline structure of Butler’s knowledge had copied itself), these financiers were horrified that Roosevelt’s policies would undermine “both private and business fortunes [and lead] “to national bankruptcy. Roosevelt was damned as a socialist or Communist, out to destroy private enterprise by sapping [them] of wealth in order to subsidize the poor.”
And though you may find it strange, for it is hard to free yourself of a captivating duality, our own reality is replete with examples of this truth: Our souls are full of the same needs, and so no trick is simpler than commandeering the trappings of our enemies.
Between 1934 and 1935 finance employees and foreign legion members slowly attempted to groom Maj. Gen. Butler to lead a group of veterans in a coup against the president. Butler then did something remarkable (reinforced, we can only imagine, by virtue of his exposure to our alternate reality): He appeared before a so-called Congressional Committee—a council of the legislation of these “United States”—to testify about the attempted putsch. “The plan as outlined to me,” he announced, “was to form an organization of veterans to use as a bluff, or as a club at least, to intimidate the government, and break down our democratic institutions. The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000 men, which would be able to takeover the functions of government. My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institutions. I want to retain the right to vote, and the right to speak freely, and the right to write. If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe. No dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech, and print.”
Some have attributed Butler’s turn to pacifism to his “Quaker” heritage, which in that alternate reality is a religious profession that renounces all ministerial setting apart; which insists that all people share responsibility, in common, for ensuring peace and justice, because all people are guided by an inward light. But we know better. First, where was this Smedley Butler’s pacifist inner light during his many years of avid and passionate war-making? Why become not merely a soldier, but an outstanding soldier if this so-called “Quaker” heritage meant so much?
No, quite contrary to some flat hierarchy of mutual simplicity, we know that he was indeed a man set apart—ordinated with sacredotal rank—by his exposure to our reality.
Wow. You gotta give it to him. He’s just a first class confabulist. But who is this guy?! Or woman—I don't know. I'm just imagining a man right now because I talked to the librarian and asked her who could have possibly snuck something like this into the library, and woo boy, she had some ideas. Well, really only one idea. She was particularly devoted to the theory that it was this one guy who came two or three times a week over a period of a month, about a year and a half ago. He stood out to her because he always wore a face mask: the surgical kind, not the coffee-cone, N95 kind. And she said that the only people who still wear face masks are, you know, those people. I asked if they had any CCTV cameras, and she said they only had the one outside at the entrance: no public funding, you know?
She got back to me a couple of days later after having triangulated roughly when she thought she had seen the guy, and then looking through the footage for a while. And she finally found one shot of him coming in. Seemed like kind of a young guy based on the way he was walking, but I couldn't really tell because he was so covered up. Besides the face mask, he also had this wax canvas coat on, and the hood was up. But you could kind of see his eyes. They looked like puppy dog eyes. Of course there’s no way to know whether that’s really the forger. I’d be surprised if it were someone so young. I have reason to believe whoever it was is a trained book conservator.
So, a book is made of big folio sheets, printed with four pages on each side in a complex order, then folded into fours, stacked, and sewn and bound together, and then cut along their edges to make individual pages. That means each of these forged cancel pages has a counterpart. They didn’t just haphazardly paste these pages over the old originals. They meticulously detached the stitching with a pinpoint awl and tweezers, found each counterpart page, and bonded them with Japanese kozo paper and wheat starch paste. Then they artificially aged the thread and restitched the sections. It’s almost completely undetectable.
But WHY?! I mean, clearly they’ve got an agenda, And so do I! I’m trying to circle back to Uki Goñi here, so—oh well, I guess there’s no way but forward now.
During his two terms in office, Yrigoyen championed labor rights, expanded state intervention in the economy, and sought to reduce the influence of traditional elites, particularly large landowners and oligarchs. He introduced social reforms, including labor protections, increased public works and measures to improve education, all of which gained him strong support among the working and middle classes. He also made ample use of tariffs to reduce Argentina's dependence on foreign markets, who were fleecing them. However, these policies alienated conservative sectors and provoked hostility from all those powerful landowners, industrialists, and much of the military.
Yrigoyen’s second term coincided with the onset of the Great Depression, which, as we’ve already noted, was an event equally epochal in our own reality. And as the tide rose, engulfing nations with waves of economic collapse, unemployment, and hardship—leaving no shore untouched by its devastation—Yrigoyen tried to sandbag Argentina’s economy by doubling down on his policies—indeed wisely increasing public spending, but perhaps unwisely reducing the influx of foreign goods in the hopes of maintaining self-reliance.
Yrigoyen’s isolationist bent not only counteracted the priming effect of his public spending, the resultant suffering it exacerbated when the demand for Argentine exports collapsed provided his critics with a wedge to accuse him of cronyism, inefficiency—even authoritarianism. It mattered little that these accusations were largely baseless. Facts are thin walls that cannot insulate too much noise. It mattered what people felt. And what people felt was that he was too old, in poor health, slow and no longer fit for the job.
That was a set of environmental pressures perfectly attuned for a military coup. And so, on September 6, 1930, a military junta led by General José Félix Uriburu overthrew Yrigoyen, marking the beginning of a 13-year era of political instability and military “interventions” known as the "Infamous Decade.”
Uriburu couldn’t just turn the spigot and end the Great Depression, of course. And a debauchery of government efficiency didn’t much help ingratiate him to the public. But once his cohort had grabbed the bull’s horns, you could be damn sure they were’t going to let go. Elections in 1931 brought Agustín Pedro Justo to power. However, these elections were widely seen as fraudulent, setting a precedent for systematic corruption during the decade. The conservatives, often referred to as the Concordancia coalition, maintained their hold on power through electoral manipulation, including vote-buying and intimidation.
Yrigoyen had long ruffled feathers with those aliens from the United States’ reality by refusing to take sides during the First World War, claiming the mantle of non-intervention. But this was never simply a pragmatic maneuver in self-interest. You might say it was a principled stand, but perhaps a principle that if I may use the word ought—ought not to have had such high priority: namely the belief that if Spain—and (sure, why not) Italy and Germany—wanted to protect their cultural integrity, well . . . fair enough, and we “ought not” interfere with that. Yrigoyen might have found it unpropitious to say out loud, but he was fine with the implicit warrant: “everyone needs to get their own s**t together.” And this was a fleetingly rare point of agreement between the Radicals and the Concordancia. They happily maintained the policy of neutrality.
Only the Concordancia didn’t care about standing on ceremony. Rules and institutions were only useful inasmuch as they kept up the naturally ordered boundaries, such as those between the landed and the un-landed, the weak and the strong. So, when it came to getting Argentina’s “own s**t together,” they had no compunction not merely tolerating the fascists, but following their example, dissolving their Congress, imposing censorship, and suppressing political dissent.
As the economic situation worsened, urban workers and labor unions became disillusioned with government of all stripes The Radical Civic Union and other democratic forces seemed ineffectual, self-righteous, and corrupt; the Concordancia oppressive and just as corrupt. Among the populace, protests grew, and nationalist and socialist ideas gained traction (of a more rigorous sort than the gradual and halting policies of Yrigoyen) Meanwhile a nationalist faction within the military was happy to follow the Concordancia in rejecting liberalism—not to protect old inequalities, but to establish an autarkic, “socially cohesive Argentina.”
I don't know why I keep trying to listen to podcasts while I'm working. I cannot concentrate. I mean, I do. This guy just keeps rambling on. I thought I had a problem losing the plot.
The discontent with the Concordancia reached a breaking point by the early 1940s, and on June 4, 1943, that nationalist, reformist faction of the military—calling themselves the “Grupo de Oficiales Unidos” (the United Officers’ Group)—staged a coup, overthrowing President Ramón Castillo, the last in the string of presidents the Concordancia had propped up with their sham elections. The Officers’ Group didn’t have a singular, publicly recognized leader, since they were a clandestine organization.
General Arturo Rawson was the first leader of the post-coup government. However, his tenure was extremely brief—two days. He didn’t pass the purity test imposed by subfactions within the group who believed he was still too willing to include traditional conservatives in his cabinet.
Among the ranks of the Officer’s Group was a young officer named Juan Domingo Perón.
Perón had spent the decade prior to the junta studying the art of war, including three years ensconced in yet another alternate reality. The War Ministry under the Concordancia had sent him to study mountain warfare in the Italian Dolomites, and then assigned him as attaché in Rome under Mussolini and Berlin in Nazi Germany. Some have said that it was in those years—in that crucible—that an isomorphic strain had insinuated itself in Perón’s mind. But they are wrong. Yes, it was there he saw that something different from what had come before was possible. But what he witnessed happening there . . . wasn’t what he envisioned.
But I get ahead of myself. The big wigs in the Officer’s Group fought it out, trying to establish just how fascist they would indeed like Argentina to be, staying neutral in the Second World War, and playing a coy game of will they/won’t they sever diplomatic relations with the Axis Powers,
Meanwhile, Perón was shelved away, named to an office long-since written off as irrelevant: Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare. Where the presiding military officers had chucked labor rights and syndicalism onto the ash heap of history along with Yrigoyen, Perón realized the power this position could unlock.
But now I misspeak. I’ve been breathing the air of the United States’ reality for too long; accepting a logic that makes it sound as though Perón’s goal was merely securing political power and enacting his preference,
That was not his goal.
I’ve been breathing the air inside this guy’s skull for too long. I need a break. I’m going to go take a walk.
We’ll reconvene here.
See you in a bit.
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