Nothing Special

My post on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has garnered a huge number of unprintable comments from not the better sort of Americans (although there is a better sort, and it is very good indeed) and from those particularly contemptible creatures, their nominally British wannabes. Herewith, then, a few facts, to which many more could be added.

America entered the First World War on, among other conditions, the partition of the United Kingdom by means of the creation at least of the Irish Free State. America foisted on us the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, under which we granted her the naval parity that we had just fought a World War more than anything in order to avoid granting to any other country. America thus destroyed our naval alliance with Japan, with all that followed from that destruction. Up to and including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, anti-British no less than anti-Japanese acts, designed to prevent the War from instead being ended by the British re-conquest of the Empire in Asia and the Pacific, the end to which the British Pacific Fleet had been cheered into Sydney Harbour because it was not the American one that had been expected to turn up and require that Australia and New Zealand cut all trading and migration ties to Britain, abolish the monarchy, adopt American spelling, teach American rather than British history in schools, and so on. Those remain key American objectives.

America’s efforts to detach Commonwealth countries from the Sterling Area forced us back onto the Gold Standard in 1925, sending our manufacturing industries into depression and thus causing the 1926 General Strike. America subjected us to Lend-Lease, not paid off until 29th December 2006, though paid off on that date, so that no debt from the War can any longer be said to exist. America required us to decolonise far too quickly, with disastrous consequences for numerous of the countries that she had forced us to leave. America entered both World Wars for her own reasons, and on her own strictly businesslike terms with us. Nothing wrong with that. But it gives the lie to the popular fantasy of a “special relationship”, a term which no American has ever used.

America has subjected us to more than 60 years of the presence on our soil of foreign forces, politically as unmentionable as they are permanently unforgettable, without any parliamentary authorisation. America maintains bases here with fake British names, entirely unaccountable to us. America also maintains such bases on two other pieces of our territory, denying democratic representation to the British inhabitants of one of them, and forbidding the British people of the other to set foot there at all. America charges us for the privilege of hosting American nuclear weapons and pretending that they are our own, but we have so little self-respect that we pay up.

America forced us to join the European superstate. America, fundamentally defined against any British presence in the Western Hemisphere, did everything short of send forces to fight for Argentina in 1982. America spent decades arming and directing our terrorist enemies (who “haven’t gone away, you know”) in order to bring about a United Ireland within NATO and the EU, up to and including more than complicity in the murders of at least three British parliamentarians, one of them a member of the Royal Family; America was funding and arming the IRA at exactly the same time as Gaddafi’s Libya was doing so. America invaded a Commonwealth Realm in the Caribbean, and has long had legislation in place providing for the forcible incorporation of Canada. One fifth of British casualties in the first Gulf War were killed by American “friendly fire”, which managed to get in before the enemy did. America seeks to disperse the inmates of Guantánamo Bay by flattering politicians in British Overseas Territories as if theirs were the sovereign states that their electors have consistently voted not to become. Slavish devotion to America took us to war in Iraq, and keeps us as at war in Afghanistan.