Bond movie plot? Cool
But yes, the sheer level of "Argentina/Spain invades the poor, hapless Britons and the mighty Britain returns to rule the waves" number of threads can be infuriating, especially when its based on imaginary, nonsensical arguments like "Spanish govt does it to hide its bad economic management" based on stereotypes or a common template that doesn't fit to any real world nation.
Silly Nanwe, only Britain is allowed to have legitimate grievances, everyone else is only doing it for dastardly motives. Just look at the posts below yours.
That is the problem with scenarios like this, nearly all of them have little to do with the viability of the claim over the disputed territory and everything to do with the internal politics of the nations involved. Spain would/is only kicking up a fuss over Gibralter because it appeals to the Spanish equivelent of the Daily Mail reader! It also acts as a very good diversion from the complete SNAFU the Spanish politicos have created at home!!!
The spanish equivalente of the Daily Mail reader, that really made my day
FYI, it is Britain who loves making a mountain out of every molehill related to Gibraltar, fantasizing with an invasion every time Spain so much of complains about anything related to the place. Spanish newspapers forgot about in August: not a week passes by in british papers without a couple of mentions of the matter. It is the british public who gets off on jingoism: spaniards are very fed up with the concept after 40 years of fascist dictature, and you are incredibly ignorant of spanish society if you think its patriotism works in an analogous way to british patriotism.
Can I just say that this line of criticism comes across as somewhat odd from a guy who has a link to a (rather good, to be fair) TL he wrote about a Spanish-Morrocan war fought over Ceuta and Melilla in his sig box?
Ha, good catch.
I actually wrote that as both an homage and a deconstruction. I wrote it as an implausible spainwank technothriller because I found the idea of contemporary Spain being in the winning side of a military porn story hilarious. Maybe you can read it straight, but to a spanish reader the whole story is vaguely comic. And then there are the small touches that you wouldn't find in technothrillers, such as Spain actually shooting first and being the agressor, the US being bumbling, ineffective morons when they would have no realistic reason to be so, or the only relatable character being one of the "bad guys".
In this particular case, the Spanish government has been behaving aggressively towards Gibraltar recently (yes, I know - you'll claim it's Gibraltar bullying Spain, or somesuch).
Yes, like I said: only Britain is allowed to have grievances. Everyone else does it out of dastardly motives or to hide their incompetence. It has to be like the Falklands again, even down to the bad guys' motivations, right? Because it is impossible Gibraltar could possibly ever do anything that would bother Spain.
Asking what would happen if this got dialled up to eleven for some reason isn't that unreasonable - though I tend to agree with the criticism that some more thought needs to go into why Spain would suddenly do this, and how they could do it without alerting the British authorities.
Bullshit. The way the OP and some of the following posts were worded is downright offensive. It takes an entire country (a
friendly country, at it) and dehumanizes it: Oh, Spain doesn't need any sort of reason to start attacking Gibraltar and murdering its inhabitants. It's sort of their thing, you know. You would never see similar threads about Canada and St Pierre, or Brazil and French Guiana, or France and the Anglo Norman islands. Even the Falklands Mk II threads give Argentina a motive with all the newfound oil.
The only vaguely plausible motivation Spain would have to do such a thing would be if Gibraltar did some unspeakably retarded thing, such as collaborating with Morocco in case of Morocco stirring up conflict, laundering terrorist money, or protecting ETA terrorists or shooting at spanish ships in the middle of the bay. And in that case the british government would either take measures to stop Gibraltar from pulling that crap again, or swallow all its talk about self-determination (it wouldn't be the first time) before blood got to the river.
And I'm old enough to remember the Falklands War, and have friends who were veterans of and traumatised by that conflict. I find your dismissal of it as an "invasion novel" to be more offensive than anything the OP said.
Which is why I doubt very much any of your friends would view it in such an infantile way indeed.
Those who aren't old enough to remember, or who weren't there are much more likely to view the entire thing as something not entirely real. As entertainment.
