On Thu, Apr 05, 2001 at 01:04:52PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 05, 2001 at 12:07:41PM +0100, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 11:43:48PM +0100, Piers Cawley wrote:
> > > Remember, Britain hasn't been invaded or conquered since 1066.
> >
> > Methinks William of Orange would say otherwise.
>
> He's dead, so I can't agree with you.
> However, I believe you're right - England hasn't been invaded since 1066
> apart from William of Orange, and that was by invitation.
[Lots of twisted logic about why England wasn't invaded in the 1600s]
I wasn't going to drag this in, but someone eariler mentioned that
Japan was invaded and conquered in 1945. I could go into similarly
convoluted arguments about how no foreign invasion force made it to
the home islands during World War II and while some outer islands of
the Japanese Archipelago were successfully invaded, Honshu remained
untoched. And while an American occupation force governed the islands
for a few years, they were technically under the Emperor and his line
remains unbroken back through all of recorded Japanese history, etc,
etc, etc...
Also remember that Germany didn't surrender in the Great War (WWI).
They negociated a peace before foreign armies ever reached German
soil, defeated Russia and ended with the Wermacht in arguably better
shape than either the French and English armies (the Amercians cheated
by coming in late and are thus disqualified).
This sort of logic may apply to football matches (and, umm, mailing
lists and programming languages), but not to world history.
--
Michael G. Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Perl6 Quality Assurance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One
"None of our men are "experts."... because no one ever considers
himself expert if he really knows his job."
-- From Henry Ford Sr., "My Life and Work," p. 86 (1922):
