The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

In 1982, during and immediately after the Falklands/Malvinas War between Argentina’s military junta and the United Kingdom, Borges—an Argentine writer long critical of nationalism and of the dictatorship—made a caustic remark likening the conflict to “two bald men fighting over a comb.” The line circulated widely in interviews and press accounts as a succinct expression of his view that the war was a tragic, vanity-driven contest over a symbol rather than a rational cause, and that ordinary people were paying the price for leaders’ pride and political calculation.

The metaphor reduces a geopolitical war to an absurd quarrel over something neither party can truly use: a comb for bald men. Borges’s point is not that territory is meaningless in itself, but that the particular struggle—fueled by patriotic rhetoric—was disproportionate to its human cost and driven by ego, prestige, and mythic ideas of nationhood. The image also implies futility: even “winning” yields little real benefit, while the fight itself produces harm. It is a moral critique of militarized nationalism and of symbolic politics masquerading as necessity.

1) “The Falklands war was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”
2) “It’s like two bald men fighting over a comb.”