@Garius That was a pretty impressive post, I found myself resonating.
@Sunrazor You paint a rather harsh picture, but while it is not as bad as you portray it, you have a good handle on the truth. In both wars we appreciated the (essential) help, but we British did pay for it, and in both cases the USA did not join in through altruism. We don’t like being patronized and some bits of USA ‘culture’ are rather bemusing.
My own view of Europe in general is tainted by my view of the French, which may or may not be accurate. It is that they were once a great power, and they are hanging on to that image. They expect everyone to respect this once great power as if it still exists today. Sort of pittyful.
Garius, I appreciated your posts and to some extent stand corrected, but … your comments really apply to those who were legally defined as citizens, who they had to come to grips with, were not really immigrants.
Also please see my post in the related thread specific to immigration and assimilation. England’s track record with Jews in particular was not quite so beautific. They didn’t massacre them to no small degree because they had previously explelled them.
There is a vast difference between being legally a citizen and being treated as such. All your doing is closing down your definition of “immigrant” to remove the largest influx of people born outside this country that Britain has ever faced. Next you’ll be telling me they also don’t count if they were born somewhere else in the EU (what with us all being European Citizens now and all that).
I was not playing the semantics game. The point i was making was not a technical one but attempting to explain how, in effect, Britain got a kick up the arse that forced us to address the issue of what constitutes Britishness and from whence someone must originate in order to be British.
Quite simply the answer, over time, became “anywhere” - you’ll notice that one of the people i mentioned as an example was Chinese. Off the top of my head I could just as easily have picked examples from Poland, Russia, Argentina, the Ukraine and even America.
The process of opening up the British identity may have been forced upon us by how we treated those people from our ex-colonies but it did not end there. Once that ball began rolling, it has never (and almost certainly will never) stop.
Sure you went back far enough to dig up an example there champ? :rolleyes:
I must admit, I can’t say this with 100% certainty, but I’m reasonably confident that the Edict of Expulsion in 1290 hasn’t been big in political decision making, or indeed influenced our culture a great deal for a fair few years now.
Besides, as other posters in this thread have so eloquently pointed out, go back past the point of the first European settlement in America and our history is your history as well.
“mi casa es su casa” and all that! 
Anyway, i’ll find that other thread you’re on about in order to avoid hijacking further.
As an American who has never lived in Europe, I have a few stereotypes which I’d like to toss out for people’s comments.
On the positive side (for me, at least) I have the impression that Europeans are less religious and less uptight about sex.
One thing that might be a negative (if true) is that Europeans think they are more cultured - that they have better taste in things like art, music, food, wine, etc. Even Americans often seem to think Europeans are more cultured. My personal feeling is that culture and taste are totally arbitrary for most things and nobody should feel superior (or inferior) because of their cultural tastes.
On the question of getting along with immigrants, I was talking to a recent Russian immigrant a few years ago at a party. He felt that the United States was the only country he knew of where immigrants like himself would be fully accepted. He said he had a friend who had moved to Australia (which I think of as being a lot like the U.S.) who was treated fine but would never be accepted into social circles because of his nationality. My impression is that Americans are just a likely as anyone else to be bigoted towards people who look or talk or behave differently, but the US is one of the few places where the nationality of your parents or grandparents is almost completely irrelevant. In Europe and most other places social acceptance is often very dependent on ancestral “roots”. Is there some truth to this?
Fair enough. I was really thinking that millions of people can and do travel anywhere they want to live and work within the United States alone, which is damn near the size of a continent itself. (In fact, isn’t the United States’ total land mass larger than that of Europe?) The economies of the larger individual states that make up the United States are frequently larger than the economies of all but the largest European nations. I said “North America” without really thinking about it, but I should’ve said just the United States.
So my point really only holds for Americans, who could move to Canada or Mexico to work if they really wanted to, but whom rarely have a reason to do so.
Not really - Europe is pretty mixed up anyway - if someone speaks the language then nobody really cares that much.
Short of ghetto areas of course.
Mmmm… I don’t know about that. There’s huge racism and outright hate directed at Turks and Poles from, say, Germany and France.
Not so in the case of WWI according to this link.
Though if war debts hadn’t been suspended by international agreement in 1934, Britain might have had enough coming in on its own loans to repay America for WWI assistance.
An interesting link - thanks.
I guess that a lot of the debt owed to Britain was German reparations …
Which leads me to ask:
How can a country which had been totally devasted by war, the infrastructure all but destroyed, millions of its citizens killed, tthe whole place an utter and absolute shambles, be reasonably expected to pay anything.
To the victor the spoils, but really 
Apparently Keynes thought the same.
Actually after WWI Germany was not physically devastated, there were no bombing raids and they did not have rapacious foreign troops on their soil (well maybe a few in the Rhineland ) - nothing like what happened at the end of WWII.
Curiously, comparing WWI and WWII we seem to have made progress, both in destroying things and in putting them back together afterwards.
@smiling bandit Would there be much animosity in Germany towards a 2nd generation Turk or Pole ?
I’ven been to my share of foreign countries and have found that geographical borders don’t have a monopoly on jerks and a-holes. I basically can’t help but see the sewerness of the world at large – i.e. over-population and racial hatred.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
People talk about the evil of guns but few mention the stupidity of fools using their sexual organs to crap out one kid after another, as if it’s no big deal.
If I had to die and come back to this world, I’d want to be born in either Norway, Sweden, or Scotland. Any place that’s clean and well run and which hasn’t bought into this nonsense that multiculturalism is some kind of wonderful thing. Nice in theory but not in practice, sad to say.
No actually we’re a lot better at being ethnocentric,racist and arrogant then the Americans will ever be cos we’re pretty wonderful at everything we do 
And Nazi germany declared war on the U.S. not vice versa.
The Chinese,Mongols,Arabs and Indians all practiced imperialism amongst others without any help from Europeans.
We British are Europeans and far from moralising about what the U.S. should do we have been your closest allies and have paid the blood price for our loyalty.(Not that I’m knocking that just stating a fact)
Your perception of us having an air of superiority about our culture has more to do with your own self image then anything else ,you cant blame us for your thought processes.
Your revolutionary war as you call it was fought by Brits against Brits so were we being arrogant about ourselves to ourselves ?
Sounds a little schizophrenic to me.
The real premise behind the formation of the E.U. was to prevent any more European wide wars ,when you are economically interdependant it becomes more or less impossible to fight each other.
Yes our perception of racism in for example in the deep south in the past is of being generally institutionalised and serious but we dont castigate you for that in Europe we’ve had and still have racism ,just as the M.E. ,Asia,Africa and south America have racism amongst non Caucasian ethnic groups (but it seems that only us Caucasians actually feel guilty about it).
As to openness we have a free press over here plus individual freedom of speech so your ideas about the uniqueness of American openness just wont wash.
Europe is too big a place to stereotype. that said, I think Europe has ‘grown up’. By that i mean that the fires of nationalism have just about burned out. people realize that a better life means not swallowing crap from demogogic politicians. I don’t see "the old continent’ returning to its pre-WWI status anytime soon (massive, destructive continental wars every 50-60 years). Also, europe is getting old-unless the birthrate picks up, Europe will be one big old age home. that means-low growth, conservative politics, etc. Will Islam colonize Europe? that is the big question. If i were a Sweded, i’d be worried about that one.
All of these groups have been under surveillance and the targets of federal probes and prosecutions for years, resulting in their being markedly degraded as threats. If we had the Aryan Nations marching at a major sporting event and waving an anti-Semitic banner there’d be hell to pay, not to mention the uproar if the government website of a major U.S. city had an anti-Semitic web page.
Based on the link I provided, such events apparently are no big deal in Spain.
Except that the Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and Mongols were all, without exception, conquered by Europeans. (The Mongols were eventually overthrown by Russian rulers.) There is nowhere the United States can tread in the world today where we are not following in the footstpes of Europeans who came in and swept the local population into their net. Even the national borders in Iraq reflect British priorities after WWI more than anything else. Britain has a long history of interference, domination, and exploitation in the Middle East; that, along with a lingering sense of responsibility for its creation, is as good a reason as any for Great Britain to be an ally of the United States in the region.
As for “self image,” hey, the U.S. is the world’s most productive economy in absolute terms, and one of the top in per capita terms as well. Historically, people from less fortunate nations have risked their lives to travel and live here, even with no promises of anything when they arrive, just because they knew they would be better off.
That’s our self-image, pal.
This is too ridiculous to even respond to. :rolleyes:
It doesn’t really matter if racism is “institutionalized” or not; racism is racism, period. In some ways institutionalized racism is easier to fight than the silent, cultural forms of prejudice.
You’re joking, right? Is that why the “public interest defense” was removed from the Officials Secrets Act after Clive Ponting was aquitted? Is that why he was even indicted for publishing an official secret, because you have a “free press”? (Fact: No government in the United States has ever been able to convict a journalist specifically because of what they published.)
Is that why celebrities routinely sue newspaper or any media outlet in G.B. for libel, but not in the United States? Because you have a free press? I’m not sure you know what the term means.