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2acd456
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Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)
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africa
american-imperialism
anti-americanism
britain
british-empire
caribbean
imperialism
iraq-war
morality
politics
slave-trade
united-states
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Christopher Hitchens |
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7aaa6ab
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The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.
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british-empire
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Nick Harkaway |
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6037b67
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Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry... Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.
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british-empire
british-overseas-territories
cars
cavalry
churchill
englishness
german-army
german-empire
germany
infantry
kaiser
kaiser-wilhelm-ii
poetry
silesia
sylvia-plath
upper-silesia
war
wrocław
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Christopher Hitchens |
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d90fcc7
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It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him--the winning of a democratic election.
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britain
british-empire
cold-war
conservative-party-uk
crisis
democracy
elections
history
imperialism
power
russia
soviet-union
time
truth
united-states
winston-churchill
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Christopher Hitchens |