Brit Go Home!
“Over-sexed, over-paid, over here.” That was the gripe when Yanks were saving Brit bacon. Well, clearly the sex part of our insidious plan worked. Now Surber reports some Brit who earns U.S. dollars over here is sqawking about our presumed efforts to undermine political institutions over there. Brit historian is not only fast and loose with the presumptions, a little vague on the history, too:
Linda Colley seems to think that after World War II, the United States decided to plop a bunch of troops in England, writing: “Since 1947, there have been US military bases in the UK: something that would have been unthinkable before 1939.”
I would think someone who teaches history at Princeton, which is Colley’s daytime job, might know a little more about the subject.
We didn’t send in troops in 1947. They were left over from the troops we began sending in 1942 as part of a build up for a joint venture we now like to call liberating Europe. The valor of the British troops and the soldiers from the rest of the Commonwealth is beyond question.
The sanity of some of their descendants is.
It gets better.
“Even leaving aside its military bases, America’s influence on the domestic ordering of British life has been enormous, though sometimes unrecognised. The central place of deposit for Britain’s historic archives at Kew, for instance, used to be called the Public Record Office, but is now re-named the National Archives. Why? Presumably because this is what the US styles its central place of archival deposit in Washington.”
…
Why next, we will force them to drive on the right-hand side of the road. And to call their lorries “trucks.”
Hey, I thought the plan was to just undermine their culture … those parts they haven’t undermined themselves … with Big Macs and Coca-Cola, and let them collapse under their own weight so to speak. And what the heck are we just giving them our improvements on their archaic political institutions for? Value added!
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 4:37 pm on Friday, November 23, 2007
5 Responses to “Brit Go Home!”
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November 23rd, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Too many of our universities are operating on a prestige that was earned decades ago, but which they no longer deserve. A hundred years ago, this woman wouldn’t have made it as a student, much less a teacher.
November 23rd, 2007 at 6:06 pm
“Schoolchildren in the United States are still taught that London’s decision to keep 10,000 troops in the colonies after 1763 was one of the precipitants of the American revolution.”–Colley
I think it was more like the colonials were upset because the British were stationing troops in the colonies, were forcing the colonials to pay for it, and were denying them any representation in Parliament.
However, it wouldn’t surprise me if you were teaching them otherwise.
November 23rd, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Yeah, by God, we’re gonna make the Brits toe the Yankee line! For instance, it’s about time they dropped the letter “u” from words like humour and colour, don’t you think?
November 23rd, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Hey don’t forget the members of the Eagle Squadron, they got to England before the 1942 rush!
I wonder who Ms. Colley’s teachers were that they gave her a passing grade and a diploma!
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Reminds me of Orwell’s comment about a conspiracy theory going the rounds among the Brit chattering classes in 1943-44. It was that the Yanks weren’t there to invade Europe but rather to prevent a Communist revolution by the British working class. Orwell wrote that you had to be an intellectual to believe such drivel, any cabbie kneww it was nonsense.
Colley probably thinks that the Soviet threat those US forces were there to confront in the late 1940s and early 1950s was simply imaginary, a delusion by American paranoids who should have been back in Midwestern law offices, not running around trying to get the world to recover from WWII. Which shows you who the real rubes are, the pig-ignorant lefties.