War & Peace Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges’s line lands like a cocktail-party epigram, but it’s really a moral indictment disguised as a joke. Calling the Falklands War “a fight between two bald men over a comb” turns a nationalist bloodletting into farce: vanity without the capacity to benefit, pride warring over an object whose value is almost purely symbolic. The wit isn’t ornamental; it’s surgical. By shrinking a geopolitically freighted conflict into a petty image, Borges exposes how state power often runs on the same combustible fuel as personal ego.

The subtext cuts two ways. “Two bald men” levels the combatants: Argentina’s junta and Thatcher’s Britain aren’t noble adversaries but mirror images, equally compromised, equally performing masculinity and resolve for domestic audiences. The “comb” is the islands themselves, rendered not worthless so much as radically insufficient to justify the cost in lives and trauma. Borges isn’t denying that territory matters; he’s mocking the way leaders inflate it into destiny when what they’re really defending is authority, credibility, a tottering narrative of greatness.

Context sharpens the bite. Borges, an Argentine who loathed the military dictatorship, watched the regime reach for a patriotic spectacle to distract from repression and collapse. Britain, for its part, found in the war a stage for revivalist confidence. Borges’s metaphor punctures both scripts: it refuses the romance of sovereignty and insists on the obscene mismatch between the stakes leaders claim and the human consequences they produce. The line endures because it names a recurring political trick: converting embarrassment into “honor,” then charging ordinary people the bill.