art credit: en.wikipedia.org
Breitbart UK’s James Delingpole is one of my
favorite reporters/commentators, and his Independence Day column is a good
example of why:
For me, Independence Day means the birth of the Anglosphere. As an
Englishman, I don’t feel at all resentful that you triumphed over George III’s
Redcoats, nor do I count it as a defeat. It was a victory for all of us: the
settlers in the thirteen colonies got to forge their own destiny; the mother
country could focus her attentions elsewhere, notably India; we could all enter
a new mature relationship as free traders (bringing both parties massively
increased prosperity); and, best of all, it resulted in the U.S. Constitution.
Yes, of course, none
of these happened without bitterness, betrayal, and much bloodshed. As
happens in civil wars, it pitched friend against friend, father against
son, even husbands against wives. In Britain, it became pretty much a
replay of the English Civil War with “Roundheads” – Whigs and Low Church
Dissenters supporting the Colonists, and Royalists – Catholics and Tories on
the Loyalist side. Among the pro-American faction was MP Edmund Burke,
representing the key trading port of Bristol. He famously wrote, “The
temper and character, which prevail in our colonies, are, I am afraid,
unalterable by any human art. … An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth
to argue another Englishman into slavery.”
Burke was right. He
was talking about the impulse for liberty that courses through all our veins,
English and American alike. We are far, far more similar than we are different.
Certainly, we British have far more in common temperamentally and
intellectually with our fellow English-speakers than we do with our neighbours
on the continent – which is the true reason, of course, that we British just
voted for Brexit in the EU referendum. At heart, you Americans and we
British are instinctive patriots: heirs to the traditions established by
Magna Carta. We believe in our nations’ exceptionalism, and rightly so.
Andrew Roberts once argued that we should see the British Empire and the
post-war U.S. as discrete entities, but merely as a benign Anglosphere hegemony
which has been making the world a better, freer, safer place for four
centuries.
It’s because we
understand this that we are prepared to die so readily for our countries. We
are part of a tradition that goes back to the birth of democracy at the
Battle of Salamis when the Greek city states won their unlikely victory over
the Persians. Better to die a free man than live a slave.
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