Sorry to be so off thread here but as I don't have e-mail I have no other way to reach Churchill's Hat. I can only get on the forums every 7-10 days and so I missed your delicious reply to my skree against the ingratitude of the French in the thread about the Villian of the World. I appreciated both your wit and the excellence of your parody of my post. You were very funny but your analogy was not quite tight enough; for two reasons. Though I will concede you about 30% of your argument.
First, you can't equate the English of 1776 with the Nazis and the Communists (except maybe in Ireland - no, not quite that bad even there). Had American lost the Revolution the English would probably have hung Washingon, Jefferson (not a bad idea) et al, but they would not have set up vast concentration camps or gulags and mass murdered huge numbers of people. I am one of those Americans who is quite willing to concede that American had no really bad grievances against England; we rebelled essentially because a bunch of rich men did not want to pay the cost of their own defense against the French and Indians and because there comes a time when colonies mature and grow up and want to run themselves and that time had come.
Second, we would indeed not have won our Independence without the aid of the French. For that, thank you France. But was this debt not repaid in full in WWI? If not, then surely WWII repaid it? And then we saved France and all Europe from the Communists for decades during the Cold War. It seems to me that the balance of debt has swung to our side, 3-1.
I don't mind being called arrogant;I'm not thin skinned and maybe I am arrogant. But we all like to cast ourselves in the best light and I prefer to see what you call arrogance in me as a sense of realism. As a student of history, and a Brit to boot, you know that great powers project that power, economically, culturally, militarily. This has always been true and always will be true; history is to a good degree deterministic. As Emerson once said so wonderfully: "Events were in the saddle, riding men". I simply find the designation of American as The Evil Empire to be overblown and downright silly. We have been nowhere as brutal as the Romans or the Nazis or the Communits or, even, the Brits in Ireland. If we were really evil, with our stock of nuclear weapons, we could impose our will on the whole world.
For instance, suppose Bush announced that, the very next time a single American died from an Islamic terrorist attack, a large Arab city would be destroyed by nuclear weapon? And did this every time an American was killed. You don't think that every tinpot dictator in the wretched Arab world would hop to and themselves knock off every terrorist operating out of their countries? After all, what is the good of being a dictator if you have no slaves? The Romans would have done the equivalent of that, and did. But Bush has not, because he does not want to kill arab civilians. So American soldiers die in Iraq every day instead.
And to those who went on about the area being more stable when Saddam was in power...well. A couple of years ago a group of Iraqi men went to see Bush at the White House. All had had both hands cut off by Saddam's torturers and were here in US to get prosthetic ones. They had also been branded on the forehead; for 'crimes against the state' dont know. I would like those speaking against our overthrow of his regieme to face those men and tell them that they would be better off if they were still slaves of Saddam.
But I've bored you enough. I just wanted to say that I have noticed a number of your posts and have always been impressed by your wit, knowledge of history and lack of rancor in your arguments. Keep them up.
thanks and again, apologies for the grevious misuse of this thread.
