The British Crown is a useless anachronism.

@ehBeth,

Maybe it's just me, but I feel kinda uncomfortable when someone's partner answers a question which could/should have been easily answered by the person in question themselves ....

As to the questions posed by this thread: The British Crown is a useless anachronism.

I had no idea you were so interested in the British monarchy till now, Joe! Smile

Me, I'm an Australian republican (in the Oz sense).

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

By "foreign military bases" you mean "US military bases," unless I missed some other country that saved you.
In any case, it may surprise you to know that I, essentially, agree with you. There is no reason, that I can think of, for American tax-payers to fund the national defense of the UK. I agree that the bases should be closed and our troops stationed there returned to the US as soon as possible, but on the dime of the British tax-payers who have benefited from these bases, not ours.

We've got the US-bases in Germany in the US-zone after the war. That's okay, since only in 1990 the US-rights over our country ended.

Officially there are still 10 US bases in England – however many more RAF bases have a US military and agency presence.
That's all because the USA have beaten back the Nazis?

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@Finn dAbuzz,

What caused the penny to drop, was it the talk of criminal activity or the threat to democracy?

Other than that your comprehension skills are sadly lacking. I have never once suggested that we could have defeated the Nazis all on our own, I've just challenged the revisionist postulations of buffoons like RM, who seems to think WW2 was an entirely American affair. The contribution made by the Soviets, and the blood debt they paid, is also something people like you seem most eager to gloss over.

At the end, you've fallen back on the lazy, kneejerk response typified by Foofie. Nobody in Britain is allowed to be the slightest bit critical of America because of WW2. It's just as well the Nazis hadn't thought up such a splendid wheeze, Britain should have stayed silent about Nazi attrocities because it was Blücher who came to Wellington's rescue at the Battle of Waterloo.

In any event the notion that we should bow and scrape to Americans, and continually touch our forelock because you decided to rescue us from the Nazis is a load of bollocks. You may have had a point, if you had decided to get involved in the Summer of 1940, during our darkest hour, when we stood alone. You didn't, you waited until you were bombed by the Japanese, and Hitler declared war on you.

America acted in its own interests, and while we shouldn't necessarily be critical of that, it doesn't mean we should spend the rest of eternity kissing your arses. You made a considerable amount of money with lend lease, which almost bankrupted us, and wasn't paid off until Blair's time in office, but paid off it was.

One postwar legacy which you similarly like to gloss over is the amount of British children and vulnerable adults who perished in the smogs of the 1950s. After WW2, our only asset was coal, and all the decent stuff had to be exported, leaving us with the high sulphur stuff that caused the smog when it was burnt in power stations. Is that something else we should be grateful for?

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@izzythepush,

You make it sound as though the United States is responsible for the decisions which lead your government to export coal, and burn high-sulphur coal in your power plants. You didn't "have to" do any of that, and the United States certainly wasn't responsible. You deploy about as good a logic as Foofie, at whom you sneer.

The first people to benefit from the financial drain on England were the Canadians, and they demanded, and got, gold. Lend Lease was just a way to get around a politically-enforced neutrality--a quid pro quo to justify giving direct aid to the English. What was purchased from the United States had to be paid for. It wasn't like the situation in India where millions would starve while their rice was exported to England. You weren't in a position to exploit the United States the way you did commenwealth countrires where the majority population didn't have white skin.

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@Setanta,

What do you think would have happened had we decided to write off the lendlease debt?

As for exploiting darker skinned people, you're in no position to talk. We gave India back. I think Churchill put it quite well.

Quote:

Roosevelt, at a White House lunch, placed Churchill next to the publisher and ardent campaigner for India’s independence, Mrs Ogden Reid, and sat back awaiting the inevitable explosion.

[Mrs. Ogden Reid: “What are you going to do about those wretched Indians?”]

Churchill: “Before we proceed further let us get one thing clear. Are we talking about the brown Indians in India, who have multiplied alarmingly under the benevolent British rule? Or are we speaking of the red Indians in America who, I understand, are almost extinct?” —1943

http://richardlangworth.com/churchill-by-himself/humor

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

That's a tu quoque fallacy, which is typical of you. Your nation undertook a massive financial burden in a failed attempt to maintain their empire. Now you're attempting to suggest that the United States is somehow responsible for that impoverishment. You keep prating about lend lease, about which you apparently know little. The United States wrote off massive amounts of money on the pretext of using commonwealth air bases and naval bases. Meanwhile, England was starving the Indians, while importing their rice to feed Indian and other commonwealth troops fighting in Europe and Africa, and all the while exporting food to India to feed the white troops who were making sure starving Indians wouldn't rebel.

If England was impoverished in that war, it was their own fault for the enormous expense incurred to keep an empire which they then lost anyway within a generation.

Rather than throwing up you rhetorical smoke screens, why don't you attempt, for once, to respond with logic and facts?

1 Reply

Quote:

Lend-Lease (Public Law 77-11) was the program under which the United States of America supplied the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, Free France, and other Allied nations with materiel between 1941 and 1945. It was signed into law on March 11, 1941, a year and a half after the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939 but nine months before the U.S. entered the war in December 1941. Formally titled An Act to Further Promote the Defense of the United States, the Act effectively ended the United States' pretense of neutrality.

A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $647 billion today) worth of supplies were shipped: $31.4 billion to Britain, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, and $1.6 billion to China. Reverse Lend-Lease comprised services such as rent on air bases that went to the U.S., and totaled $7.8 billion; of this, $6.8 billion came from the British and the Commonwealth. The terms of the agreement provided that the materiel were to be used until time for their return or destruction. Supplies after the termination date were sold to Britain at a discount for £1.075 billion using long-term loans from the United States. Canada operated a similar program that sent $4.7 billion in supplies to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. The United States did not charge for aid supplied under this legislation.

This program was a decisive step away from non-interventionist policy, which had dominated United States foreign relations since the end of World War I, towards international involvement. (emphasis added)

Source at Wikipedia

You're always whining about the United States not coming into the war sooner (yeah, so we could sit on the German border and glare at them the way your boys did in 1939 and 1940). In fact, this act was giving aid to England and commonwealth nations, as well as China, eight months before Japan attacked us and we had a casus belli. The United States is still a democracy, or was then, Presidents didn't go to war without the consent of Congress.

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@Setanta,

No response to the Churchillian quotation I see. How typical of you. Facts aren't something you normally care to concern yourself with, preferring to paint your own country in as rosy a glow as possible whilst blaming everyone else for all that's bad in the world.

You might want to consider the fact that Roosevelt was anxious that Britain kept fighting Germany, because a proxy war was in America's best interests. Isn't that always the case? At least this time America was actually helping the fight against Fascism, as opposed to that sordid business with Pinochet, arming the Contras, and the abortive coup against Hugo Chavez's democratically elected government.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

You're always whining about the United States not coming into the war sooner

No, I use that to counter the ridiculous suggestion that we should spend the rest of our lives praising you, because you acted in your own self interest. It's always an American that brings up WW2 in these debates.

Setanta wrote:

The United States is still a democracy, or was then, Presidents didn't go to war without the consent of Congress.

What has that got to do with anything? America didn't enter the war, despite making money by trading with countries that were acting in America's interests, until Pearl Harbour was bombed. The members of Congress were, I think you'll find, American.

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@msolga,

msolga wrote:

As to the questions posed by this thread: The British Crown is a useless anachronism.

I had no idea you were so interested in the British monarchy till now, Joe!

I think it's just sour grapes, because London beat New York to get the Olympics.

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@izzythepush,

Once again, that is tu quoque fallacy, and does not address the issue of how and why England ran up that debt. I've not said that the United States is guiltless in its dealings with other nations. What i have said is that the United States is not responsible for (this is so idiotic its incredible) respiratory diseases suffered in England after the war because you were exporting coal while burining high-sulphur coal in your own coutnry. It's just incredible that you think any such stupid claim will be taken seriously.

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@izzythepush,

I've not said that anyone should spend ther rest of their lives praising the United States--so now you're using a straw man fallacy. I didn't bring up the Second World War, so there's another straw man fallacy on your part. You just throw out emotionally motivated slurs, and use not logic whatever.

What that has to do with anything is that the United States could not enter a European war without congressional approval. Roosevelt wasn't going to get it and he knew. The only aid we sent before December 8, 1941 was Lend Lease, and we didn't charge you for that. Once again, your emotive spew is wonderfully fact and logic free.

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@Setanta,

If, after the War, America had not been quite so keen to give money to Germany and take money from Britain, those deaths could have been avoided.

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@izzythepush,

You're so full of **** your eyes must be brown.

But you're right, i'm sure, Bubba . . . you're always right, huh?

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@Setanta,

And you always fall back on tired old cliches because you can't think of anything original to say.

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I've had plenty to say, and facts to back them up. You're the one who is floundering here. You must imagine yourself to be some great literary craftsman, but i see you trotting out your habitual clichés and pejoratives all the time.

Since your rantings are always fact-free, here's some more facts for you. The Marshall Plan for European recovery gave England more than twice as much as Germany. That was $3,297,000,000 for the former as opposed to $1,448,000,000 for the latter.. Yet you want to claim that it was the fault of the United States that England was exporting low-sulphur coal while burning high-sulphur coal at home (a claim for which you have provided not a shread of evidence). You also continue to ignore the enormous expenditure made to prop up a crumbling empire.

You're not just a bullshit artiest, you're a very poor bullshit artist.

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@Setanta,

That doesn't alter the fact that America came out of WW2 unbombed and with a vibrant industry, a lot of the Marshall plan was in the form of loans. It was in America's interests to support Western Europe to stop the advance of the Soviet Union.

The 1950s smogs were a direct consequence of Britain's postwar debt, we didn't have smogs in the 1940s. If you want to believe that this debt was all down to mismanaging an empire, and nothing to do with fighting the Nazis than that's down to you.

To be quite honest I'm sick of any conversation with certain Americans turning into a discussion about WW2. When Ed Balls made the final payment in 2006 he said thank you, and that should be an end to it.

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@izzythepush,

I didn't turn this into a conversation about the Second World War, you brought up your idiotic claim about Americans being responsible for respiratory diseas and deaths, and i responded to that. You can cavil all you want, England still squandered a fortune to prop up their doomed empire. That makes it a line of bullshit to blame the United States for your environmental policies. You still haven't provided a shred of evidence for your claim.

The Marshall Plan was direct foreign aid, it was not loans.

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@Setanta,

Finn (An American) turned this into a conversation about WW2. What I said had some merit, the smogs were a direct result of our wartime debt. If you insist on taking all the credit for defeating Hitler, you should take everything that goes along with it, the rough with the smooth.

Setanta wrote:

The Marshall Plan was direct foreign aid, it was not loans.

Read the link you provided.

Quote:

The Marshall plan, just as GARIOA, consisted of aid both in the form of grants and in the form of loans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Expenditures

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@izzythepush,

I'm not Finn, so what he says means nothing with regard to what i said. That's another straw man. If you want to bring it up when replying to Finn, that's reasonable. It's completely unreasonable to bring it up when speaking to me. You haven't even shown that there was an increase in respiratory disease and deaths, nevermind that it can be blamed on wartime debts. You continue to dodge the issue of how muchwas spent to prop up your empire. Since you make claims without proof, allow me to do the same. All of any such deaths (still undemonstrated) were a direct cause of the money squandered to prop up your crumbling empire. Don't ask me to prove that, because i don't intend to be held to a standard you haven't met.

From that source:

Quote:

The UK received 385 million USD of its Marshall plan aid in the form of loans. Unconnected to the Marshall plan the UK also received direct loans from the US amounting to 4.6 billion USD. The proportion of Marshall plan loans versus Marshall plan grants was roughly 15% to 85% for both the UK and France.

Which means that England still received more than twice as much money in direct grants as did Germany. You haven't established you claim, let alone made your case.

I haven't claimed all the credit for defeating Hitler, so i'll pass on your bullshit stories, thank you.

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The British Crown is a useless anachronism.

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