Often viewed with distaste as politically conservative, Borges’s engagement with the Malvinas/Falklands conflict provides evidence of a more progressive politics in his work. The poem, ’Juan Lopez and John Ward’ is set within a national tradition of writing that, as early as 1954, rejected the Argentine obsession with recovering the Malvinas; the same poem calls up key aspects of Wilfred Owen’s ’Strange Meeting’. For its part, ’Dead Man’s Milonga’ laments the sacrifices of war and contributes to a profile of Borges as a man of individual rebellion and mutual tolerance.