The True Origin of the Fall of the British Empire: What Historians Get Wrong

Comments · 31

• MA

  @markbanash921 · 2 weeks ago (edited)

  The Empire may have fallen, but the mindset remained well after.<br><br>As an American student at the University of Salzburg in the 1970s, I was part of a multinational student body. &nbsp;Some of the British students would take the opportunity in some of our classes to remind Americans of the general lower social status of their country and its institutions, which they did in English despite the fact that the language of instruction was German. &nbsp;<br><br>Finally, after one young gentleman named Oliver made some disparaging remarks about my high school, I reminded him in English that if it wasn&apos;t for the United States, everyone in his wind-up, tin plated, coal smogged country would be working down at the Volkswagen factory. &nbsp;After that he gave me no lip.

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• ER

  @ericarbib4183 · 3 weeks ago

  It was under Eisenhower, not under Nixon.

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• TH

  @ThaboKoyana-s1o · 2 weeks ago

  Debt is an empire killer...

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• MO

  @monkmchorning · 3 weeks ago

  Empires bound by force are bound to disintegrate. If there is any failure, it is on the ruling class to adapt to a world without colonies.

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• GI

  @giridharan6091 · 3 weeks ago

  America, do you see any similarities?

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• XA

  @xapaga1 · 2 weeks ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGt8imgpbKU&amp;t=761">12:41</a> The American delegate Harry Dexter White was identified in the Venona decrypts as a person of Soviet intelligence interest. Whether Venona definitively detected him as a Soviet spy is still disputed, but one thing is certain that he had contacts with and assisted Soviet intelligence. White denied being a Soviet spy and conveniently died &quot;of a heart attack&quot; in 1948, only three days after being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Whether his sudden death was suicide or foul play remains a mystery.

• BE

  @bearcatXF · 3 weeks ago

  &gt;If domestic factors have any bearing on the outbreak of war in September 1939 they are to be found in the response of the British and French empires to the decline in their relative international strength and the cost and political difficulties of reversing this trend. For Britain in particular it soon became obvious that a sustained rearmament and increased government spending would produce crisis in the balance of payments, a decline in exports, more imports, a threat to the currency, labour difficulties, and so on. By 1939 a treasury official warned that Britain was sailing economically &quot;upon uncharted waters to an unknown destination&quot;. If Hitler were to be confronted militarily, while Britain and France maintained economic stability and domestic political peace, then 1939 was in some respects the best time to do so. Allied rearmament was planned to peak in 1939/40, while the advantage of using up unemployed resources and avoiding inflation was not expected to last beyond the winter of 1939. Oliver Stanley, president of the Board of Trade, concluded that &quot;there would come a time which, on a balance of our financial strength and our strength in armaments, was the best time for war to break out&quot;. <br> <br>Neither Britain nor France was prepared to accept an end to its imperial power and world influence, though neither could really afford the military effort of defending it. Caught between these two pressures, but reasonably confident of the brittle nature of the Nazi system, they opted for war. By June 1940 France was defeated and in political turmoil. By December 1940 Britain was almost bankrupt, entirely dependent on American finance and war production to keep going. The economy and political system of the Third Reich were only brought to collapse by the combined efforts of America, [the USSR] and Britain after four years of total war.&lt; <br>- Richard Overy <br> <br>WW2 did it.

• AL

  @allythorpe74 · 3 weeks ago

  Sorry, you need a flash warning. Only 26 second in and im getting dizzy

• GE

  @gertkaiser4273 · 3 weeks ago (edited)

  Excellent.<br><br>It seems whenever you turn a stone looking for “errors” in the first half of the 20th century up pops Winston. I didn’t know that he was instrumental in the gold standard fiasco. Well he was trying to machine gun the strikers. &nbsp;<br><br>Whilst the grocer’s daughter used the four plus two talks to allow Germany to reunite to insist that Germany paid of the Versailles treaty’s reparations and would not use the the need to rebuild East Germany to argue for lower contributions to the EU. At least she knew where money came from.

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• MD

  @MD-pu6tl · 3 weeks ago

  Guess who bought those assets?

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• RE

  @Recogne · 2 weeks ago

  It was greed that caused it&apos;s downfall (the same thing that is happening on the US now).😮😢😅

• AR

  @arikreukel · 3 weeks ago

  The fall of the British empire started with the Boer war 1899-1902. They started it with the reason to give aliens voting rights in the Boer Republics. After that war no British government could afford to take a different stand, and the appeasement started.