A very curious collection. Evidently the decline of the British educational system started earlier than the world suspected.
At least two of the examples quoted are falsifications or exaggerations. Nasser's nationalisation was certainly not an act of war, and was widely publicised before the event. No surprise there. The element of surprise lay in the military action by the British and French, acting in concert with Israel.
Regarding the mythical attack on the USS Maddox, it is surprising that this still survives to be quoted as a fact, even by a writer in the Telegraph (who probably shares one list-member's derisive dismissal of Marxists and Communists as Commies).
On the others, the sinking of the Maine was never satisfactorily unravelled - as has been pointed out, for the Spanish to have done it at the time was nothing short of suicidal, given the disparity in
military capability; the Boer invasion of Cape Colony was hardly a surprise, given the relentless pressure exerted by the British on the Orange Free State and on Transvaal; the Nazi-Soviet Pact arguably made it by a short head ahead of an alternative Anglo-American pact with the Soviets.
It is somewhat intriguing to read of the North Korean invasion being a surprise move against the Anglo-Saxon axis - where then did their sphere of influence stop, or are we to assume that it spanned the whole globe, in which case I would dearly love to know why the invasion of Kashmir doesn't count. Or take, for that matter, the case for the sinister Saddam having implicitly attacked the Anglo-Saxons, considering the huge volume of evidence that he was thought to be in the pocket of the Americans, and thought he had the wink-and-nod backing of the Americans for his invasion.
It was ugly and dirty, and what
the Iraqis did in Kuwait was barbaric, even after eliminating the baby-in-the-incubator urban legends, but here we are examining the role of surprise in the frequent early discomfiture of the Anglo-Saxon nations and their later, triumphant Wagneresque victories.
But as President Bush nearly said, 'Heck, two out of (9) ain't bad'.
...The sinking of the USS Maine; the Boer invasion of Cape Colony; the Kaiser's swing through neutral Belgium; the Nazi-Soviet Pact; North Korea's invasion of its southern neighbour; Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal; the attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, which triggered the Vietnam War; the attack on the Falklands; Saddam's invasion of
Kuwait...
Deepa Mohan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Deepa Mohan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I generally detest posting about politicians..but I found this interesting...Deepa.
Blair is Churchillian ANDREW ROBERTS DAILY TELEGRAPH
The most justifiable war in recent history is the one the 'English-speaking' people are fighting against the Taliban and Al Qaeda elements, says Andrew Robert
In 1956, Winston Churchill published the first volume of his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature three years earlier, and this new four-volume work won massive critical acclaim. AJP Taylor considered that "it is one of the wisest, most exciting works of history ever written".It was during his Wilderness Years of the 1930s that Churchill had conceived the idea of a book that would, in his words, "lay stress upon the common heritage of the peoples of Great Britain and the United States of America as a means of enhancing their friendship". Publication was delayed, first by World War II, then by his war memoirs and later by his peacetime premiership. Superb though Churchill's volumes are, they stop with the dawn of the 20th century, just as by far the most interesting part of the English-speaking peoples' story was about to begin. Churchill's tale ended with the British empire and American republic enjoying peaceful world-primacy, yet they were just about to be subjected to four great assaults: From Prussian militarism, fascist aggression, Soviet Communism and presently from totalitarian Islamist terrorism. In the fourth and latest of these assaults, victory is clearly nowhere yet in sight. Just as on 9/11, the English-speaking peoples have regularly been worsted in the opening stages of a conflict, often through surprise attack. As Paul Wolfowitz put it at a commencement ceremony in June 2001: "Surprise happens so often that it's surprising that we're surprised by it." The sinking of the USS Maine; the Boer invasion of Cape Colony; the Kaiser's swing through neutral Belgium; the Nazi-Soviet Pact; North Korea's invasion of its southern neighbour; Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal; the attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, which triggered the Vietnam War; the attack on the Falklands; Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Almost all were sudden, unexpected, not predicted by the intelligence services, and left the English-speaking peoples at a disadvantage in the first moment of the struggle. The next common factor was how badly the English-speaking peoples were faring even up to three or four years into the first three great assaults on their primacy. The most dangerous moment of World War I - at least after Paris had been saved by the battle of the Marne in 1914 - came as late as March 1918, when Hindenburg and Ludendorff flung everything into their massive Spring Offensive. By early September 1942 - only weeks before Stalingrad and El Alamein - Hitler seemed to be winning the war both in Russia and West Asia, while, had it not been for the battle of Midway, the Japanese might well have rolled up the entire Pacific theatre. Three years into the Cold War, 1948 saw Jan Masaryk's suicide during a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, Mao's victory in China, and the Berlin Blockade. Simply because a victorious exit strategy is not immediately evident in Iraq or Afghanistan today does not invalidate either conflict, as so many defeatists and Left-liberal political commentators argue so vociferously. Tony Blair's leadership in the war against Al Qaeda, the Ba'athists and the Taliban has been nothing short of Churchillian. Far from being Mr George W Bush's poodle, Mr Blair was advocating the overthrow of Saddam in his Chicago speech of April 1999, 21 months before President Bush came to power. The comradeship of the English-speaking peoples during the first three assaults was inspirational. On August 1, 1914 - that is, three days before war broke out - the New Zealand parliament voted unanimously to raise an expeditionary force to fight its King-Emperor's war 8,000 miles away, even though Germany posed no conceivable strategic threat. In Canada, the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry Regiment was raised from volunteers in eight days flat. Australia promised a contingent of 20,000 men before war was declared, and promptly raised double that in a month. Nor was this solidarity merely a question of racial unity: The 15,204 men of the British West Indies Regiment fought in Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, East Africa, India, France, Italy and Belgium, and won 19 Military Crosses, 11 MCs and bar, 37 Military Medals and 49 Mentions in Dispatches. In the next war, it was a myth that Britain "stood alone" in 1940; after Dunkirk, the only two fully armed infantry divisions standing between London and a German land invasion were Canadian. Although America was under no direct threat from the Nazis, it far-sightedly chose to pursue the seemingly counter-intuitive policy of "Germany First", even though it had actually been attacked in Hawaii. The massive American contribution - mobilising 14.9 million men (which was more than Germany's 12.9 million and double that of Japan) and spending $350 billion, which was equal to Britain and Russia combined - has sometimes been ignored during the bigoted frenzy of vicious anti-Americanism spearheaded by the BBC and Left-liberal newspapers. Mr Bush's foreign policy is denounced as neo-conservatism because of its reliance on pre-emption. Yet, was George Canning a neo-con when he destroyed the Danish fleet to prevent it falling into Napoleon's hands in 1807? Was Churchill a neo-con for having bombarded the Dardanelles outer forts in November 1914, before Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire? The right of self-protection from Napoleon, Hitler and movements such as Al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors is, as Enoch Powell pointed out during the Falklands crisis, "inherent in us", since it existed "long before the United Nations was ever thought of". By far the most justifiable war in recent history is the one we are presently fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban, the Government that hosted and protected Al Qaeda when it killed nearly 3,000 innocent people - including 67 Britons - on 9/11. Today, that war is principally being fought by 15,000 Americans, 4,500 Britons, 2,200 Canadians, 550 Australians and special forces contingents from New Zealand. Germany has confined its troops to the quiet north, France to guard duty on the Khyber Pass. Once again the English-speaking peoples find themselves in the forefront of protecting civilisation.
(Courtesy: Daily Telegraph)
Indrajit Gupta
'Ramsharan', 396, TT Krishnamachari Road,
Teynampet,
Chennai 600 018.
+914455511138
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