Posted on 08/10/2007 12:07:48 PM PDT by bnelson44
Yup. I think they call it Yorktown.
The Tudors had pretty good reason for doing so, as the idiot English nobility had spent the previous 40 years doing their best to exterminate each other, which is fair enough. Unfortunately, in the process they killed a whole lot of non-nobles, who didn't deserve it.
The Spanish Infantry of the time were far and away the best soldiers in Europe. They beat everybody, when they could come to grips with them. The Dutch were only able to hang on because it's hard for the infantry to charge when it's waist-deep in mud.
Brits and Europeans Surrender. The lesson is not lost on Russia and especially China, a nation that now has some 30+ million extra young adult males due to the one child policy and sex selection abortion. What does a totalitarian and expansionist government do with 30+ million young males? If history is any guide, they use it to project power and control into other peoples and lands.
Just Britain and Europe?
It is fun to pop off at the French (especially), the Brits (about whom it is hard not to be sentimental), the smug Canadians and all the other Western countries that have lost their soul, their heart, and their will even to survive.
But is the USA that much different? We like to think we are not quite so far gone as the Euro-weenies but we're only an election or so behind. Why we are already using European law. [/sarcasm]
Sure we still have an Army that can kick some butt. But does anybody think that even the USA Army, already feminized and soon to be sodomized, has the grit that it once had? This ain't just rhetoric; if the currently favored presidential candiate is elected with a congressional majority we will see open homosexuality in the U.S. armed forces. Just an example, though.
What has happened to our public schools? Decent people are being chased out, increasingly giving them up to "urban" culture. Sure, some of our kids are doing great in non-public education. But what does it say that they have had to give up and walk away from the neighborhood schools where there parents were educated and that they pay for?
And our great American corporations....how many of them are really "American" in any meaningful sense? They have owners (shareholders)who live all over the world and they do business all over the world. They increasingly seek to operate from the cheapest shore without regard to nationhood. In what sense are they American corporations?
And, of course, there is the open southern border. We feel kinda good about having won a little battle recently on this front. But is the border controlled or is it likely to be? And when illegals are caught -- even for a serious crime -- aren't they often able to skip bail and carry right along? Doesn't every week bring news of another fiasco (this week from New Jersey) of an illegal -- previously apprehended -- out free and taking more American lives, either with a gun or while drunk behind the wheel.
And what do Americans believe? Tens of millions of them believe that George Bush steals elections, that the Iraq war is a sham affair ginned up by Dick Cheney to profit his buds at Haliburton, and that 9/11 was an inside job.
And are we secure now that we've created a huge new workforce of unskilled "urban" Americans carrying out a charade of airport security, under orders to give the same scrutiny to a grandma from Dubuque as to a group of young Arab men?
Those other weenies -- the French, the Brits, the Canadians and all the rest -- are probably finished. I could enjoy it more -- the schadenfreude and all -- if we were more than a half step behind them.
Funny.
I barely approve of it myself anymore. Sure, I still approve of those guys who fought the great wars (and the not so great ones like VN, as well). I approve of the prodigous productivity that this country once had. I approve of all that old Jimmy Stewart/Norman Rockwell stuff. I approve of the Boy Scouts (the G.S., are mostly dykes, unfortunately), of 4H, of football and of Michael Jordan, a moderately talented kid with huge desire and a fantastic work ethic.
But more and more, all that I approve of about America is in her past. See my #24. I feel like that Indian standing amid the litter with a tear running down his cheek.
Things have never been better besides the cultural PC war.
No, I am not new to America.
When you lose the culture war, you have lost it.
There may still be a hundred million true Americans in the country who can get together on FR and elsewhere, who constitute a large subculture that still has the right stuff.
But when those people -- our people -- have to flee America's public spaces, the place is cooked. We've fled the cities and the schools. People want to either homestead with their 2nd Amendment rights or to live in gated communities. We can chat up a little morale, here and there, there being so many of us. But there are so many more of them. And they have made us run away. We're done.
I hope you're right. And I realize that a viewpoint as gloomy as mine is useless to anyone so I am trying to spend less time with thinking about these things.
Time to leave it to a younger generation to make the best the can out of the mess they are being handed. No need, really, to burden them with my pessimism.
“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” John 14:27
Thank you.
I have been saying this for years. The British have given in and now are more trouble than they are worth as an ally.
Think Germany and Italy in WWII. The Germans would have been better off with the Italians on the other side.
Khe San? anyone...
They call us the ‘silent majority’.
We still hold the ‘melting pot’ sacred. Anyone in the world can become ‘American’. Do you know any place else on earth that can say that?
What we have here, IMHO, are folks who have forgotten that you need to fight for freedom. You may not see may of us in the public square due to the so called MSM ‘gate keepers’ and ‘king makers’ but do not underestimate the Americans that will fight.
In my limited view, the British made the same mistake in Southern Iraq as they once made in all of Iraq, when they held it as a protectorate under the old League of Nations: too aloof; not picky enough about who its local friends ought to be; too quick to trust and too trusting on the friends it chose to represent “local authority”; while it ran out of the barracks predominately only at the instances of serious local “deterioration of civil order”; all producing an attitude among the local population that the British were - because that’s what they preferred - not in charge, even on “security” matters.
Who stepped in? Lots of names of lots of local Iraqi Shia “leaders” could be offered as the answer to that question; but behind the majority of them one would find the financing and political organization of Iran. Britain’s problem was that it refused to produce a true counter-insurgency strategy (against Iranian funded militias) and preferred to pretend that it was not a foreign-funded insurgency, but simply disagreements among various local factions.
Many of the “local leaders” who have prevailed in Southern Iraq may be Iragi, may participate in the political parties and political process of Iraq but they have no doubt to whom they owe their success.
The full story has not yet been written, but when it is it will only be produced when the Iraqi nationals of southern Iraq who avoided the political snares of Iran write it and when they do they will likely hold the British as directly responsible, for their incompetence, as they will Iran, for its strategic competence.
I think this is a disgusting article. It is ignorant, baseless nonsense and is especially hurtful as British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have lost several men killed on operations this week alone.
Britain has been nothing but a friend to the US since 9/11 and has been its only ally willing to place troops in heavy combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ll be in Iraq until the US leaves (by the way, the US democrats are the appeasers here-BOTH political parties in the UK support our responsibilities in Iraq.) We needn’t have gone into Iraq at all. Bush told Blair that a follow up humanitarian British presence would be fine. But the UK is a real friend to the US and turned this down to put its troops in harms way. They’ll be in Iraq until the US leaves. The UK is increasing it’s commitment to Afghanistan, despite already being in the lead in the fight there.
The UK army is widely held in academic circles to be amongst the best, if not the best, pound for pound military force in the world. The Royal Navy is building two new aircraft carriers.
As for the Iranian incident slur on the Royal Navy: how quickly the author forgets the far bigger humiliation of US troops refusing to go on convoy duty in Iraq because they were too scared. Amnesia is great isn’t it? The author seems to forget that while UK forces won wars in Malaya and the Far East, the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Oman etc, successive US governments sounded the retreat in Vietnam, Somalia, Beirut etc. I have nothing but respect for the US military, but if the author is talking about nations in decline, then the US pulling out of any half-dangerous part of the world for the past 40 years has hardly been inspiring has it?
So, there’s no ‘anglo-American’ relationship is there? Tell that to the 237 fallen British troops and the hundreds wounded in the UK armed forces in the War on Terror. The UK is not a reliable ally? So, who is then? I can’t see anyone else standing with the US like Britain is.
This article is distorted nonsense. 51% of Brits approve of the US. For cynical Brits that is a good percentage.
And Axlrose, it’s hardly surprising to see you here. Why do you never post on the dozens of positive threads about Britain? Why do you never respond to intelligent questions posed to you that challenge your irrational hatred of all things British? What ally is more reliable than the UK? Name one.
Let me make this clear. I’ve said it many times before. I love the US and its people and have nothing but respect for its military. I felt that I must respond robustly to this article, however, as it is nothing short of a slur on brave British soldiers and the UK nation as a whole.
Truth hurts.
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