The Right to Offend

[Moonraker]

Thorne says: What concerns me, and saddens me, is that this country (USA) is generally among the first to jump in and offer assistance, both physical and monetary, whenever a disaster happens anywhere in the world.
TYWD

i dont want to comment to much on this for fear of hijacking the thread. But... come on. The fisto jump in. Bosnia, Rwanda or even when my country stood alone against Germany. Yes you jump into Iraq in search of the mythical WMD and come up with oil, but hey lets not play the benefactor role too much.

[ThisYouWillDo]

i dont want to comment to much on this for fear of hijacking the thread. But... come on. The fisto jump in. Bosnia, Rwanda or even when my country stood alone against Germany. Yes you jump into Iraq in search of the mythical WMD and come up with oil, but hey lets not play the benefactor role too much.

First of all, I'm a Brit. And Britain jumped into Iraq on a lie to the nation. We were in Bosnia too. (Why, I wonder aen't we in Zimbabwe or the Sudan, right now?)

Second of all WW's 1 & 2 happened a long time ago, and it's time to get over our little irrelevant niggles.

Furthermore, we stood alone with Russia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Burma, India, a whole hunk of Africa, and God knows where else, including, while they were free, Holland, Belgium and France. In my opinion, Britain with the help of its Empire would have held Germany in Europe while Germany exhausted itself on the Eastern Front, unless USA had come in on their side - which they might have done, but for Pearl Harbour. (When FDR declared war on Japan, Italy and Germany declared war on USA. Decision made.) And in they piled. And before you knew it, the war in the west was won, and half of our young female population had suddenly got pregnant!

However, let no-one overlook the fact that Germany was broken, not by the Brits, and not by USA, despite what Hollywood says, but by the Russian winter and the desperate Russians. The Germans rushed westwards in order to surrender to us.

I don't know how well we'd have fared if USA had left us to deal with Japan too. I suspect we'd have done very badly in both theatres. Japan captured Burma, drove us out of Singapore and attacked Darwin, Broome and Sydney Harbour. Certainly the Aussies were glad of the American involvement when it came.

If USA was guilty of dragging its feet, that's because FDR wanted to see the Empire broken up so that American interests could move in. Pure and simple.

Interesting fact, Britain had to repay the USA for all the help it gave during WW2, after we had bankrupted ourselves fighting. The last repayment was made (with accrued interest) on 31st December 2006. If there's a problem with US aid, it's the strings that are attached. But I expect we attach strings to our foreign aid too. We just don't noise it around the UK too much.

But we are in the here and now, and USA does provide more aid than any other single nation, whether that's playing the benefactor card too much or not.

But all of that should go in another thread, shouldn't it? The Grumpy Old Men thread. We're talking about whether people have the right to offend by abusing national or religious symbols, or definitive works of art ... or at least we were ...