Still True

While UK troops bleed and die for a cause only partially their own, I’d like to post again a few words I wrote when this site was three weeks old. Here they are:

VodkaPundit unashamedly calls England “the Mother Country.” Most of my forefathers got their asses kicked by Brits at one time or another; hell, some of us got kicked out of England herself — literally 86ed from an entire country. And yet I hold no grudge against the UK, even though I’m famous for doing so for even the slightest slight.

Why?

I could pay the usual lip service in thanks to England for inventing modern individual liberty, but that’s not it. Not all of it, anyway. I think, instead, the most important thing we mongrel Americans have kept from our pasty-white cousins is character. That same Jack Bull stubbornness which produced the Magna Carta; that created, endured, then got rid of Oliver Cromwell; that made for such hearty pioneers who first dared tame North America; that stood up to Napoleon when no one else would; that lost an entire generation of young men rather than see the Continent under the Kaiser’s fist; that survived the Blitz, and that lost an Empire while keeping a stiff upper lip.

These are the reasons I love the Britons. Except for one more.

In the last eighty years, the Brits have watched their upstart younger cousins here first grow as strong, then far stronger, than themselves. The French sneered at us for it. The Germans did worse. And everyone else resented us, at best. But not the Brits. Through every crisis from the Berlin Airlift to the Present Mess, they have stood with us shoulder to shoulder — even when their elites told them not to. And it is that strength of character we inherited from them which will allow us to prevail in the new global war.

Thank you, Britain.

And today, specific thanks to those men of the Desert Rats fighting near and in Basra.