Blackrook
Diamond Member
- Jun 20, 2014
- 22,008
- 11,931
- 1,255
I've always liked the English, maybe it's all the movies showing how plucky they were fighting alone against the Nazis after the surrender of France. Also, the movies about how England fought alone against Napoleon after he conquered Europe and invaded Russia. Also, the movies about how England managed to survive an impending invasion of the Spanish Armada. All these movies were blatant pro-English propaganda, but they stirred me.
Also, England is the homeland of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, my two favorite fantasy authors. Their portrayals of a fantasy world where the free people of the West are up against forces of darkness stirred me. The meeting of the human, elf, dwarf, and halfling races to discuss the fate of the world, and organize to fight Mordor reminds me of the Western alliance, sometimes bickering amongst ourselves, but ultimately pulling together when push comes to shove.
So it was with great joy that I greeted the news that the English people had finally wrested its freedom from European domination, in particular, domination of Germany, over their economic life and domestic laws.
And it was with great irritation that I noted that the Scottish people voted to continue their enslavement to the bureaucrats of the continent. I have never much liked Scotland, and now I like it even less.
The English people have tried mightily to be friends to the United States, and I don't think most Americans realize how hard they have tried. While other nations posture and position themselves in the great global game, England always stands firmly by our side. They have fought by our side in every war since World War II, except for Vietnam, and it has cost them dearly in treasure, blood and political capital. While the French, the Germans and the Russians condemned our invasion of Iraq, the English pulled on their boots, grabbed their rifles, and joined us. They have fought and died, and they have fought and died, and they have fought and died, and the main reason for all of it is because they believe that being friends with the United States is what's best for England.
Please note that I use the term "England" instead of "Great Britain." I think we need to end the concept that it's okay for Scots to proud of Scotland, it's okay for the Irish to be proud of Northern Ireland, it's okay for the Welsh to be proud of Wales, but the English must sublimate their country to the greater whole, and not assert their own love of England.
I have my own issues with England, for example, their brutal mistreatment of Ireland during their hundreds of years of occupation. But the Irish have earned my irritation by their stubborn refusal to put it aside for more important reasons. Ireland has refused to join NATO, so they benefit from the security of the Western alliance without contributing to it. Also, the Irish insistence on planting bombs and killing policemen was irritating to me because I knew it was counter-productive. England only dug in her heels the more strongly, the more violent the Irish got. Only when the Irish rejected violence and the IRA was progress made.
Also, the Irish people are incredibly left-wing, and that irritates me no end because I am Irish-American myself and I know that left-wing politics and Catholicism as properly understood are absolute enemies, and one cannot be both a left-winger and a good Catholic, one must choose one or the other.
Do the English irritate me in any way? Yes, they do. Their long history of anti-Catholicism, which continues to this day, makes me not like them as people when they express it. They like to talk about the horrors of Queen Mary, forgetting the brutality of King Henry VIII which got the ball rolling. The fact is, King Henry VIII started a new church based on the worst of all possible reasons, he wanted a divorce and the Pope would not give him one. So, in retaliation, he stole all the Catholic churches, he looted all the monasteries, and he forced all the monks out of religious life and onto a state pension.
And now, it seems the long history of anti-Catholicism has really bit the English in the ass because now they have rejected Christianity altogether, and most English are now atheists. Which makes no sense to me that the people of a lush green country with so much natural beauty could not see the wonder of it as God's creation.
But, overall I like the English, and if they don't talk about religion, they are my favorite people, second only to Americans. And one of the main reasons I like the English is that they are serious about world events. While most Americans are disinterested in events outside the United States, the English pay attention to everything in every country. Amnesty International, the most important human rights organization, is based in England. They write reports on every country, and spare no one, in a way that is even-handed and unbiased. And they don't play moral relevancy games, they don't question that torture is wrong, they don't question that extra-judicial killlings are wrong, they don't question that indeterminable detention is wrong. They know it's wrong because in England these are considered wrong, and in their eyes, that is enough to say it's wrong in every country in the world.
Does that make the English cultural imperialists? Yes, it does. But there is nothing wrong with that. English culture is superior to most other countries, especially when it comes to human rights, and the English should be proud to let everyone know it, and hold every other country to the same high standard they hold themselves to.
Americans are cultural imperialists too, but our leaders' expressed interest in human rights do not translate to concrete action. We continue to trade with China, without using any of our influence that gives us to try to stop horrible working conditions, the outlawing of the Roman Catholic Church, the persecution of religious minorities, the re-education camps, or the horrible one-child policy that led to forced abortions. We basically give China a blank check on human rights because of our soft racism that Asian people can't be expected to meet the same human rights standards as white countries.
We did try to change the Middle East, but our clumsy efforts there have actually made things worse for Christians and other religious minorities. The English were almost always capable of accomplishing what they set out to do while they ruled their Empire. With a handful of men in Arabia, they broke up the Ottoman Empire. With a handful of men in Spain, they helped stir up rebellion against Napoleon. With a handful of men in France, they lent essential assistance to the Resistance against the Nazis. The English lack the overwhelming numbers and endless supply of money that the United States enjoys, but they accomplish a lot more with what they have.
There is a war coming, and this war will be worse than all the other wars we have seen before. And none of us now living will see the end of that war, because it will last for generations, perhaps even hundreds of years. And I think the English see more clearly than we do what is at stake in that war. And the war I speak of is the existential war with the religion of Islam.
The Nazis were a destructive force and 50 million died defeating them, but they lasted a mere 12 years. The Communists were the ultimate definition of evil, and almost 100 million died before they were defeated, but it was only one century before they were gone. But Islam has been a threat to the West for more than 1000 years, and it is not well know how close it was, that Christianity was almost wiped out completely, and only a few crucial battles turned the tide. And now, Islam is on the rise again. And it's not just the terrorism, that is only the tip of the spear. It is also the cultural attack, the women in burkas, the insistence on Sharia courts, the demand for special footbaths, the honor killings, the female genital mutilations, the hatred of homosexuals, the subjugation of women, the pedophilia against young boys, all of it forms one cohesive threat against everything the West loves and holds dearly.
And we are divided. While Muslim terrorist attacks escalate, we have an entire political party in the United States that wants to blame Christians and guns. We have forgotten the unity we had after 9/11 and fell to fighting amongst ourselves. Our wars have failed, our drone assassination campaign has failed, our secret prisons have failed, and we are still fighting against ISIS and the Taliban with no end in sight. And during all of this failure, the English remain by our side. I can't imagine what it is costing them to be supporting the United States as we continue to blunder through mistake after mistake because of the incompetence of our leaders.
And I think it's time we start listening more to the English. They have over 1000 years of experience fighting wars of this kind, and they have succeeded far more than they have failed. Our own experience, since World War II, has been one of repeated and inevitable failure. We barely held it together in Korea, reaching a truce that requires an at war footing even today. We lost Vietnam even though we killed millions of their soldiers. We won in Iraq, but then we managed to turn victory into failure with a premature pull out. We are losing in Afghanistan, which is the longest war we have ever fought, with no end in sight.
The United States is very good at winning battles and blowing shit up, but we aren't very good at knowing what to do when the enemy goes into the mountains and just won't give up despite our overwhelming military superiority. We have entire schools devoted to such topics as fighting non-conventional wars, but somehow all this knowledge doesn't translate to victory. We seem incapable of actually bringing an enemy to its knees, and forcing it to surrender.
What can we learn from the English? Well they managed to hang on in Ireland for hundreds of years despite a hostile local population. It took 100 years and the direct intervention of God to throw them out of France. They would have defeated the 13 colonies had the French not intervened to save us. They still control Scotland and Wales. They used to have an Empire that covered one fourth of the planet, and the only reason they gave it up is because the United States insisted that they give it up. None of the anti-English independence movements in the Empire would have succeeded on their own without American pressure on the English to give it up and grant independence.
And the English gave up their Empire because they valued our friendship more than they valued the vast influence and power that the Empire gave them in the world. They knew that it was not possible any more for England to pursue its own interests at odds with the United States. England almost died during World War II, and they haven't forgotten that the reason for that is because the United States did NOT see them as friend that had to be saved. And because they have not forgotten, they do everything they can to put themselves in front and center of American foreign policy and insist that there IS a "special relationship" and they have proven it time and again by getting involved in our disasterous wars that we do not even try to win.
And if I was English, I would be mightily pissed off at the fact that Americans don't even appreciate all that England does every day to maintain that special relationship. The cost is English blood, spilt on battlefields alongside their American brothers-in-arms. The cost is the humiliation England must feel knowing that the United States treats England like a spare part that doesn't quite fit into its vast war machine. The cost is the price England pays while the United States insists on fighting these wars its own way, which doesn't work, which is to throw men and money at every problem because we have endless supplies of both. The English know how to win wars on a shoestring, but we don't even try that, because we can just throw bunker busting bombs on the enemy's head, and then like little children, we wonder why the enemy doesn't just quit and go home after we've broken all his things.
Is there a point to all this ranting? Probably not. It's just that I have all this pent up frustration at the way our country seems completely incompetent to accomplish the most important task any country has, which is winning wars. If we were not so big and rich and far away from all other countries that threaten us, this incompetence would already have been our undoing. I do not know the reason for it, but it was not always this way. The United States won every war it was involved with all the way through World War II. And we not only won, we overwhelmingly crushed our enemies. We ruthlessly stripped California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas from Mexico. We didn't just defeat the South, we burned a path of destruction through Georgia that brought the South to its knees, and the South has only recently begun to recover its former power. We defeated and humiliated the American Indian tribes, and forced them into a life of poverty and government dependence from which they will never recover. We stripped Spain of every colony in its vast, world-wide Empire. We knocked the German Empire, the Austrian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire so hard that their empires broke up, and Austria and Turkey became small, insignificant powers. We crushed the Nazis and Imperial Japan with ruthless application of bombings that killed hundreds of thousands of civillians, we launched the biggest sea invasion in the history of mankind, and we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to clinch the win. And by the way, we sent men to the Moon, which is not a war but proves that the United States used to be capable of accomplishing mighty deeds, and now we are not.
What happened? Why did the United States lose the will to win wars? We don't even try to win. For decades, we never even attempted to defeat Communism, only to "contain" it. It was only when we elected Ronald Reagan, who hated Communism, that we began to pursue a winning strategy. But why did it take so long? Communism could have been defeated during the 1940's, or the 1950's, or the 1960's, or the 1970's by applying the strategy that Reagan finally used in the 1980's, which was to take the fight to the enemy, start an arms race the Communists couldn't win, and collapsing their broken system with internal stresses. But while the United States took its sweet time winning the Cold War, millions of people in Eastern Europe lived and died in oppression, and we did nothing for them but to crank in Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, urging them to rebel against the Communists, but never helping them when they did. The rebellion in Hungary, Czechoslavakia, and Poland are shameful incidents for the United States. We urged these oppressed people to rebel, but then stood by and allowed it to happen while Soviet tanks rolled over them.
And what does any of this have to do with England? It's this. England has lost many wars, but it has won far more wars than it has lost, and it is not only due to the bravery and pluck of its rank-and-file soldier, which is unmatched anywhere in the world, but also the cleverness of its officers and the knowledge and sophistication of its leaders. We need to tap into this resource because we are now in a fight that we cannot lose, the fight against the threat of aggressive, proselytyzing Islam, which threatens to cover the world with ignorance and darkness. They will literally throw every book out of every library, and replace it with the Koran. And our children will study the Koran, and the Koran will be all they know. They will not know mathematics, or literature, or science, or the arts, but they will memorize every passage of the Koran and they will believe it with all their heart and soul because their minds will be twisted and turned to evil by the evil words of Mohammed, perhaps the most wicked man who ever lived.
We need England's help. We need them and they need us. No country in the world can defeat the threat of Islam by itself, we need to work together against this common foe. But we need to put England back where it belongs, on an even footing with us. We need to stop treating them like second-class citizens. Man for man, and ship to ship, and plane to plane, their military is as good as ours. Their intelligence agencies are far superior to ours, and they don't have the constant scandals that plague our CIA. They have hundreds of years of hard-won experience fighting bloody, exhausting, horrible wars against ruthless enemies and they have prevailed in most of them. We need to tap into that. We need England, and now that they have thrown off the shackles of European dominance, we can form a better friendship with them than we've ever had before.
Also, England is the homeland of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, my two favorite fantasy authors. Their portrayals of a fantasy world where the free people of the West are up against forces of darkness stirred me. The meeting of the human, elf, dwarf, and halfling races to discuss the fate of the world, and organize to fight Mordor reminds me of the Western alliance, sometimes bickering amongst ourselves, but ultimately pulling together when push comes to shove.
So it was with great joy that I greeted the news that the English people had finally wrested its freedom from European domination, in particular, domination of Germany, over their economic life and domestic laws.
And it was with great irritation that I noted that the Scottish people voted to continue their enslavement to the bureaucrats of the continent. I have never much liked Scotland, and now I like it even less.
The English people have tried mightily to be friends to the United States, and I don't think most Americans realize how hard they have tried. While other nations posture and position themselves in the great global game, England always stands firmly by our side. They have fought by our side in every war since World War II, except for Vietnam, and it has cost them dearly in treasure, blood and political capital. While the French, the Germans and the Russians condemned our invasion of Iraq, the English pulled on their boots, grabbed their rifles, and joined us. They have fought and died, and they have fought and died, and they have fought and died, and the main reason for all of it is because they believe that being friends with the United States is what's best for England.
Please note that I use the term "England" instead of "Great Britain." I think we need to end the concept that it's okay for Scots to proud of Scotland, it's okay for the Irish to be proud of Northern Ireland, it's okay for the Welsh to be proud of Wales, but the English must sublimate their country to the greater whole, and not assert their own love of England.
I have my own issues with England, for example, their brutal mistreatment of Ireland during their hundreds of years of occupation. But the Irish have earned my irritation by their stubborn refusal to put it aside for more important reasons. Ireland has refused to join NATO, so they benefit from the security of the Western alliance without contributing to it. Also, the Irish insistence on planting bombs and killing policemen was irritating to me because I knew it was counter-productive. England only dug in her heels the more strongly, the more violent the Irish got. Only when the Irish rejected violence and the IRA was progress made.
Also, the Irish people are incredibly left-wing, and that irritates me no end because I am Irish-American myself and I know that left-wing politics and Catholicism as properly understood are absolute enemies, and one cannot be both a left-winger and a good Catholic, one must choose one or the other.
Do the English irritate me in any way? Yes, they do. Their long history of anti-Catholicism, which continues to this day, makes me not like them as people when they express it. They like to talk about the horrors of Queen Mary, forgetting the brutality of King Henry VIII which got the ball rolling. The fact is, King Henry VIII started a new church based on the worst of all possible reasons, he wanted a divorce and the Pope would not give him one. So, in retaliation, he stole all the Catholic churches, he looted all the monasteries, and he forced all the monks out of religious life and onto a state pension.
And now, it seems the long history of anti-Catholicism has really bit the English in the ass because now they have rejected Christianity altogether, and most English are now atheists. Which makes no sense to me that the people of a lush green country with so much natural beauty could not see the wonder of it as God's creation.
But, overall I like the English, and if they don't talk about religion, they are my favorite people, second only to Americans. And one of the main reasons I like the English is that they are serious about world events. While most Americans are disinterested in events outside the United States, the English pay attention to everything in every country. Amnesty International, the most important human rights organization, is based in England. They write reports on every country, and spare no one, in a way that is even-handed and unbiased. And they don't play moral relevancy games, they don't question that torture is wrong, they don't question that extra-judicial killlings are wrong, they don't question that indeterminable detention is wrong. They know it's wrong because in England these are considered wrong, and in their eyes, that is enough to say it's wrong in every country in the world.
Does that make the English cultural imperialists? Yes, it does. But there is nothing wrong with that. English culture is superior to most other countries, especially when it comes to human rights, and the English should be proud to let everyone know it, and hold every other country to the same high standard they hold themselves to.
Americans are cultural imperialists too, but our leaders' expressed interest in human rights do not translate to concrete action. We continue to trade with China, without using any of our influence that gives us to try to stop horrible working conditions, the outlawing of the Roman Catholic Church, the persecution of religious minorities, the re-education camps, or the horrible one-child policy that led to forced abortions. We basically give China a blank check on human rights because of our soft racism that Asian people can't be expected to meet the same human rights standards as white countries.
We did try to change the Middle East, but our clumsy efforts there have actually made things worse for Christians and other religious minorities. The English were almost always capable of accomplishing what they set out to do while they ruled their Empire. With a handful of men in Arabia, they broke up the Ottoman Empire. With a handful of men in Spain, they helped stir up rebellion against Napoleon. With a handful of men in France, they lent essential assistance to the Resistance against the Nazis. The English lack the overwhelming numbers and endless supply of money that the United States enjoys, but they accomplish a lot more with what they have.
There is a war coming, and this war will be worse than all the other wars we have seen before. And none of us now living will see the end of that war, because it will last for generations, perhaps even hundreds of years. And I think the English see more clearly than we do what is at stake in that war. And the war I speak of is the existential war with the religion of Islam.
The Nazis were a destructive force and 50 million died defeating them, but they lasted a mere 12 years. The Communists were the ultimate definition of evil, and almost 100 million died before they were defeated, but it was only one century before they were gone. But Islam has been a threat to the West for more than 1000 years, and it is not well know how close it was, that Christianity was almost wiped out completely, and only a few crucial battles turned the tide. And now, Islam is on the rise again. And it's not just the terrorism, that is only the tip of the spear. It is also the cultural attack, the women in burkas, the insistence on Sharia courts, the demand for special footbaths, the honor killings, the female genital mutilations, the hatred of homosexuals, the subjugation of women, the pedophilia against young boys, all of it forms one cohesive threat against everything the West loves and holds dearly.
And we are divided. While Muslim terrorist attacks escalate, we have an entire political party in the United States that wants to blame Christians and guns. We have forgotten the unity we had after 9/11 and fell to fighting amongst ourselves. Our wars have failed, our drone assassination campaign has failed, our secret prisons have failed, and we are still fighting against ISIS and the Taliban with no end in sight. And during all of this failure, the English remain by our side. I can't imagine what it is costing them to be supporting the United States as we continue to blunder through mistake after mistake because of the incompetence of our leaders.
And I think it's time we start listening more to the English. They have over 1000 years of experience fighting wars of this kind, and they have succeeded far more than they have failed. Our own experience, since World War II, has been one of repeated and inevitable failure. We barely held it together in Korea, reaching a truce that requires an at war footing even today. We lost Vietnam even though we killed millions of their soldiers. We won in Iraq, but then we managed to turn victory into failure with a premature pull out. We are losing in Afghanistan, which is the longest war we have ever fought, with no end in sight.
The United States is very good at winning battles and blowing shit up, but we aren't very good at knowing what to do when the enemy goes into the mountains and just won't give up despite our overwhelming military superiority. We have entire schools devoted to such topics as fighting non-conventional wars, but somehow all this knowledge doesn't translate to victory. We seem incapable of actually bringing an enemy to its knees, and forcing it to surrender.
What can we learn from the English? Well they managed to hang on in Ireland for hundreds of years despite a hostile local population. It took 100 years and the direct intervention of God to throw them out of France. They would have defeated the 13 colonies had the French not intervened to save us. They still control Scotland and Wales. They used to have an Empire that covered one fourth of the planet, and the only reason they gave it up is because the United States insisted that they give it up. None of the anti-English independence movements in the Empire would have succeeded on their own without American pressure on the English to give it up and grant independence.
And the English gave up their Empire because they valued our friendship more than they valued the vast influence and power that the Empire gave them in the world. They knew that it was not possible any more for England to pursue its own interests at odds with the United States. England almost died during World War II, and they haven't forgotten that the reason for that is because the United States did NOT see them as friend that had to be saved. And because they have not forgotten, they do everything they can to put themselves in front and center of American foreign policy and insist that there IS a "special relationship" and they have proven it time and again by getting involved in our disasterous wars that we do not even try to win.
And if I was English, I would be mightily pissed off at the fact that Americans don't even appreciate all that England does every day to maintain that special relationship. The cost is English blood, spilt on battlefields alongside their American brothers-in-arms. The cost is the humiliation England must feel knowing that the United States treats England like a spare part that doesn't quite fit into its vast war machine. The cost is the price England pays while the United States insists on fighting these wars its own way, which doesn't work, which is to throw men and money at every problem because we have endless supplies of both. The English know how to win wars on a shoestring, but we don't even try that, because we can just throw bunker busting bombs on the enemy's head, and then like little children, we wonder why the enemy doesn't just quit and go home after we've broken all his things.
Is there a point to all this ranting? Probably not. It's just that I have all this pent up frustration at the way our country seems completely incompetent to accomplish the most important task any country has, which is winning wars. If we were not so big and rich and far away from all other countries that threaten us, this incompetence would already have been our undoing. I do not know the reason for it, but it was not always this way. The United States won every war it was involved with all the way through World War II. And we not only won, we overwhelmingly crushed our enemies. We ruthlessly stripped California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas from Mexico. We didn't just defeat the South, we burned a path of destruction through Georgia that brought the South to its knees, and the South has only recently begun to recover its former power. We defeated and humiliated the American Indian tribes, and forced them into a life of poverty and government dependence from which they will never recover. We stripped Spain of every colony in its vast, world-wide Empire. We knocked the German Empire, the Austrian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire so hard that their empires broke up, and Austria and Turkey became small, insignificant powers. We crushed the Nazis and Imperial Japan with ruthless application of bombings that killed hundreds of thousands of civillians, we launched the biggest sea invasion in the history of mankind, and we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to clinch the win. And by the way, we sent men to the Moon, which is not a war but proves that the United States used to be capable of accomplishing mighty deeds, and now we are not.
What happened? Why did the United States lose the will to win wars? We don't even try to win. For decades, we never even attempted to defeat Communism, only to "contain" it. It was only when we elected Ronald Reagan, who hated Communism, that we began to pursue a winning strategy. But why did it take so long? Communism could have been defeated during the 1940's, or the 1950's, or the 1960's, or the 1970's by applying the strategy that Reagan finally used in the 1980's, which was to take the fight to the enemy, start an arms race the Communists couldn't win, and collapsing their broken system with internal stresses. But while the United States took its sweet time winning the Cold War, millions of people in Eastern Europe lived and died in oppression, and we did nothing for them but to crank in Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, urging them to rebel against the Communists, but never helping them when they did. The rebellion in Hungary, Czechoslavakia, and Poland are shameful incidents for the United States. We urged these oppressed people to rebel, but then stood by and allowed it to happen while Soviet tanks rolled over them.
And what does any of this have to do with England? It's this. England has lost many wars, but it has won far more wars than it has lost, and it is not only due to the bravery and pluck of its rank-and-file soldier, which is unmatched anywhere in the world, but also the cleverness of its officers and the knowledge and sophistication of its leaders. We need to tap into this resource because we are now in a fight that we cannot lose, the fight against the threat of aggressive, proselytyzing Islam, which threatens to cover the world with ignorance and darkness. They will literally throw every book out of every library, and replace it with the Koran. And our children will study the Koran, and the Koran will be all they know. They will not know mathematics, or literature, or science, or the arts, but they will memorize every passage of the Koran and they will believe it with all their heart and soul because their minds will be twisted and turned to evil by the evil words of Mohammed, perhaps the most wicked man who ever lived.
We need England's help. We need them and they need us. No country in the world can defeat the threat of Islam by itself, we need to work together against this common foe. But we need to put England back where it belongs, on an even footing with us. We need to stop treating them like second-class citizens. Man for man, and ship to ship, and plane to plane, their military is as good as ours. Their intelligence agencies are far superior to ours, and they don't have the constant scandals that plague our CIA. They have hundreds of years of hard-won experience fighting bloody, exhausting, horrible wars against ruthless enemies and they have prevailed in most of them. We need to tap into that. We need England, and now that they have thrown off the shackles of European dominance, we can form a better friendship with them than we've ever had before.
