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BOOK NOTE
| Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 2006. pp. xiii + 736. $59.95 cloth.
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This is a boys' own annual saga of English-speaking peoples in the twentieth century as they 'confronted' the 'four major assaults' from German Nationalism, Axis Fascism, Soviet Communism and Islamicist Terrorism. Led first by the British Empire and then by the USA, the peoples of Britain, the USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, British West Indies and Ireland, were subjected to 'assault after assault, ... each of which would be beaten off successfully at huge and tragic cost', often to those whom they defended, as in Iraq. However, the moral and cultural superiority of the English-speaking people prevailed, and even when they were forced to fight dirty, the other side was worse. Thus, the CIA's cultural wars – through, for example, financial support of the Congress for Cultural Freedom – were perfectly legitimate alongside the Soviet Union's disinformation campaigns in western media during the Cold War. Moreover the McCarthyite period in the USA
fortunately only blighted the lives of those relatively few people it affected for half a decade, whereas the USSR all forms of artistic expression were subjected to the state for nearly three-quarters of a century.
Similarly, the atrocities by American troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are nothing compared to what happens throughout the Middle East in gaols. The Versailles Treaty was perfectly justified and did not cause the economic failure of the Weimar Republic nor the rise of the Nazis; there is no mention of the deaths of hundreds of thousands Filipinos fighting against American reoccupation at the end of World War II, though deaths from the Japanese are recounted; and Manning Clark is a 'Leninist'. Roberts adopts a combative approach which denies the complexity of issues or the contentiousness of the conservative interpretations he invariably supports. For example, he suggests that the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II was directed against a legitimate military target although there were unfortunately high civilian casualties; US involvement in Vietnam was necessary to contain communism and ensure peace in other Asian countries; and the 1999 Australian referendum on republicanism showed that immigrants as well as native-born happily accepted the monarchy as a guarantee of political stability. Based on highly selective sources, the book is an anachronistic restatement of the civilising mission of the English-speaking powers' imperialism: 'one of the purposes of this book is to explain how English-speaking colonisation ... has succeeded triumphantly, and that those states represent the last, best hope for Mankind'. |
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| Auckland University of Technology |
RAYMOND MARKEY | |
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