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The slave trade? Yeah, sorry about that.
Can you expand on your thoughts please? Short answers don't make for very good debate.
I was trying to illustrate how pointless an apology is by making it short. Irony doesn't really work on the net does it.The problems with apologies for historical events are many and manifest. Who should apologise to who and for what. Should the British apologise for their role in the slave trade. And to Africa where the slaves were taken from or to Brazil, the West Indies and the US where they were taken to? And should anyone thank the British for being the first country to take positive action to halt the trade? Again, who should thank them? Where does it all end?
Interesting that nobody is disputing the number 1 slot. When you say empire, it is hard not to think of Rome.
Henry VIII generally gets a good press, but he was a high maintainence monarch. He certainly didn't go in for balanced budgets. He also left a very precarious dynastic situation. We all know things turned out okay, but that wouldn't have been obvious at the time.You could argue that he was the biggest threat to the state he presided over.
Joe Hogarty is good on cathedrals. I think it is available everywhere.http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/europe-from-its-origins/id303246052
According to the Conspiracy theorists, no one ever dies and nothing is as it seems.That is what the conspiracy theorists want you to believe.I enrolled to go to conspiracy theorists' conference once. But my credentials were lost in the post. Coincidence?
Interesting story Donroc. George Orwell tells a story about a Communist who was in the lavatory when a party line changed, and returned to a conference to find himself a heretic.
Anyone can feel free to use America as their whipping boy though, Lord knows everybody else is doing it too. We will still be here the next time the world needs help. ;D
Sorry I didn't mean to be anti-American. Rereading what I wrote I see how it could be interpreted that way - so please accept my apologies. All I am saying is the US behaved pretty much in a way consistent with its own interests, as every other state has done throughout history. I am too long in the tooth to expect anything else. Yes the US did save the world from Nazism. And yes Britain's decline was inevitable given the rise of the US. But the US did very well out of the exercise of its power around the globe, and we are still living in the world created by that. When the emotions have died down, which will probably take another century or two, I think that it will not be seen as quite the pure good versus evil struggle that we have all been brought up to believe.
Well you could regard the whole reign of Augustus as an exercise in bogus tradition. For example rather than abolish the tribunes, which would have been a block to his power, he simply acquired the role of tribune himself. Virtually everything he did early in his reign was consciously maintaining the outward forms of the republic to mask his actual absolute power.
Actually, the vast majority of Lend-Lease Aid was forgiven as part of the Marshall Plan. The only weapons sold to other countries that were ever paid fro were the weapons and equipment sold prior to the enactment of Lend-Lease.
Britain made the final payment on lend lease on the 29th of December 2006. It was a reasonably prominent news story over here at the time. Lend lease was just one facet of US financial support for the UK during WWII. It was a reasonably generous programme given the situation, but it wasn't charity. Post war British history is dominated by the need to pay back money owed to the US as a result of the war. This has had a big impact on reducing Britain's prestige and influence in the world. Ever wondered why the UK is so often the only country voting the US at the UN?Well so be it- life is life and that is the way of the world. I would rather borrow money and have to pay it back than be invaded by the Nazis. A world dominated by the US is preferable to one dominated by fascists or the Soviet Union. But the US followed its own interests in WWII. It certainly wasn't motivated by a desire to 'save the world'.
I don't think that people looking back centuries in the future will think of the Americans as saving the world. They were the most successful combatants in WWII in the sense of being the country that came out best from it. This was the result of shrewd calculation on the part of the US government. It was neither altruistic nor devious. That is just how countries behave. I am in the UK and we were very lucky to be able to buy weapons from the US when we needed them. But we bought them. The terms were easy, but they were still paid for. And the US supplied them because they considered it a good move from their own point of view. It wasn't a generous gift, just good sense. If I were an American citizen I wouldn't have expected my government to behave any differently, and I would have been well pleased with how well they did.
I think the story is at least plausible. There is a story recorded in a number of places that during the Normandy invasions the Americans captured some enemy soldiers who spoke no language that anyone could recognise. That was until a British NCO who had served in India heard them and understood what they were saying. It turned out that they were from southern Russia near to Afghanistan. They had been captured by the Germans invading Russia and carried a third of the way around the world to fight in a war which they presumably had only the haziest idea of.
I think America today resembles the later period of the Roman republic. Rome grew because the farmers in central Italy wanted security, and they obtained it by military supremacy over their neighbours, combined with friendly relationships with them. Think American troops in Europe. Not exactly popular, but hardly hated or resented either.As Rome grew it came into contact with more alien powers like Carthage. These couldn't be assimilated so had to be destroyed. This led to the Roman state growing, and in turn to the rise of powerful families. These subverted the constitution to support their own interests.After a while the military became the most important force, and you had the imperial system which reflected that. In effect the whole empire became a protection racket run by the army.Will America follow the same route? We have already seen the army running a camp in Cuba to avoid the rules of the constitution. I would watch out for ex-generals running for office if I were you.
