THE BRITISH THREAD II

Australia is another country who'll put their foot in it if they ever decide to break from England.
They're one of the most geographically isolated countries on earth and their population is only 23 million, yet just to the north muslim Indonesia's pop is 10 times bigger at 230 million.
So if an "Asiatic Mahdi' should arise in the future and decide to invade Australia, the Ozzies will be up shite creek if they've split from England, because no way hozay will we be obliged to help..

Rhodesia never split from England.

This is the kind of attitude which loses Tory votes north of the border.

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Whoa Jimmy, what does this mean then?-

WIKI- "On 11 November 1965, following a brief but solemn consensus, Rhodesia's leading statesmen issued their country's unilateral declaration of independence"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodesia

I refer you to my previous answer.

Hillarious. Australia "liberated" East Timor "Leste" without too much fanfare. We let Indonesian troops use our training grounds, so we can use theirs. We also give their nation financial aid (why, I have no idea).

Thanks for the input though, and I'm sure someone considers your work to be fabulini.

Romeo, Romeo, where art thou, Romeo?

Have you got this yet?

By the way, if the Scots secede, the average IQ of the remnant of Great Britain will fall by about 20 percentage points, at a conservative estimate.

Romeo needs to get his geography/history right.

Britain is not "England". It's bad enough having to keep telling the Yanks that, without ignorant Brits getting it wrong as well.

The United Kingdom is and has been a nation state, composed of England, Scotland, Wales and formerly the whole of Ireland, now just Northern Ireland. OK. Got that? It had certain colonies which together formed an "Empire". These colonies were possessions of the British nation state, not part of it. You couldn't just go from Britain to India or Nigeria or Gibraltar or Jamaica if you felt like it, you had to get clearance first. Australia was a collection of separate colonies that came together as a federal state in 1901. After the first world war Australia became a fully independent self governing sovereign state, and the final remnants vanished in 1986. This independence was from Britain, not "England", so any splitting that Australia did happened a longish time ago.

Rhodesia was a colony which illegally declared independence because the white government and population did not want to give political rights to the native population. The situation was as in Apartheid-era South Africa. Rhodesia was not part of the British nation state either.

Scotland leaving Britain is totally unlike a former colony gaining independence. It would be more like what happened in Southern Ireland in 1922 and later, although hopefully with less bloodshed.

I just want to add that Northern Rhodesia (= North-Western Rhodesia and North-Eastern Rhodesia) was a protectorate.

Rhodesia referred to the former Southern Rhodesia only from 1964 onwards.
(I learnt it "the old way" at school - my younger sister couldn't use my school book with [cheating] notes later.)

So, we were watching "The King's Speech" last night and during the scene where the king's therapist is encouraging him to cuss, the king blurts out the word "tits." I thought "tits" was an American colloquialism.

Whatever gave you that idea?

Indeed,

I was simplifying things somewhat, in view of some of the potential readership's obvious comprehension difficulties.

Hi, George, so good to see you.

Strongly agree with your last sentence.

Well they survived a worse fall after 1922 when the Irish left.

Australia is still part of the Commonwealth, and Britain's Queen is still our Sovereign, and despite having a reasonable facsimile of a democracy, including compulsory voting, we also have a Governor General, who can step in to the fray, should our Sovereign deem our elected officials to be stepping too far from her "mark". We still get to pay for the "privilige" of a Royal visit, and the last public referendum into the Nation becoming a Republic, failed, mostly due to the Murdoch media franchise's scare tactics, re the costs involved in the switch over.

Of course, prior to the arrival of the British, the Dutch, and the Norwegians had visited, and named several regions, while to the north, the Macassans had been trading with the local indigenous populations for thousands of years. The existence of several massive deepwater ports on Australia's southern coastline was known to the French, Spanish, and Portuguese seafarers, and indeed, these ports were used often to restock with freshwater and shellfish.

Proven occupancy by Australia's indigenes spans forty thousand years, and quite possibly longer, given the age of the Bradshaw paintings, though no single tribe has ever claimed them as their own.

And as an aside, both the French and the Spanish explorers noted that the continent was inhabited, while the British were happy to declare the place Terra Nullius, though they did mention in several texts how the "wretched natives were obviously starving" and "clearly waiting for our salvation".

Long wait, that forty thousand years. Interestingly, the First Fleet almost starved to death, not wishing to explore the diet of the natives, preferring to rely on salt beef and flour, and rum, of course. :-)

I presume you're a closet Aussie mate? (Your A2K profile is blank)
And sure, Oz and Indonesia are pally at the moment, but like I said things could change in the future with the rise of an "Asiatic Hitler" bent on turning the entire western pacific muslim, including Australia, but if Oz has split from Britain we won't send out nuke subs and stuff to help, you'll be on your own!
History has shown that every nation should keep its guard up, for example in 1925 a guy told the US government-
"A Pacific war would start with a Japanese air and sea attack upon the U.S. military bases at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands"
http://liberty-virtue-independence.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/major-general-billy-mitchells-1925.html

but he was court-martialled by the shortsighted brass for causing trouble.
He was Maj. Gen Billy Mitchell, and of course he was proved right 16 years later with Pearl Harbor.

Again, thanks for the laughs. I'm not a closet Aussie. There's quite a few of us on this board.

As for our subs, take a look at this short video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqFVOL7mLd4

And as for Britain sending their subs out here, remember that it took over a month for Thatcher's fleet to reach Argentina during the Falklands conflict, so we won't be holding our breath.

You can also check for yourself, but our military was put in charge of the Coalition of the Willing, in the illegal invasion of Iraq.

The Australian forces are no slouches, my friend. Up there with the best.