Quote attributed to David Lloyd George, Britain’s Prime Minister during World War I. Censored the n-word because I’d imagine having the worst racial epithet in a GQ title is…frowned upon.
Googling to find out whether he actually said it, and if he did, in what context, I can’t seem to find a straight answer. The earliest source I’ve seen it from is his wife who repeated it in her diary; "At Geneva other countries would have agreed not to use aeroplanes for bombing purposes, but we insisted on reserving the right, as D. puts it, to bomb n**rs! Whereupon the whole thing fell through, & we add 5 millions to our air armaments expenditure."
Which kind of suggests to me that he was using it not in the awful way it first sounds but to mock official policy. Other sources say that he meant it as it sounds and was endorsing racism.
Aerial policing of the Empire seemed attractive in the postwar years when military expenditure was being cut back. The newly independent Air Force, looking for a role to justify its existence, was keen to do it. The Treasury thought it would offer financial savings and the plodding punitive columns with their carefully thrown-out screening picquets and lengthening casualty lists would be a thing of the past.
Thirteen times, with and without quotes, so far. Can’t account for misspelling such as in OP.
[nitpick: clearly “the word” is in the title; it’s just marked to show a reading of it you intend. Also, JFTR, I would think “worst” depends on whose ox is being gored. But this is by and large an American board, so I take your point[s].]
An IMHO point, but I’m not American and can’t think of a more offensive racial term used in English regardless of context, maybe ‘kaffir’ if you’re South African.
Anyone, thanks for the replies so far, I can’t get a decent read on whether the man was particularly racist (by the standards of the time) or not, he genuinely admired Hitler yet thought anti-Semitism stupid.
Naggers are annoying, but bombing them is a little extreme; besides, we’d have to get them all in one place at the same time. Maybe if we just showed them the bomb, they’d be stunned into silence, and the problem would be solved.
Since this was Lloyd George, I guess we can’t go all anachronistic and use nuclear weapons.
Lloyd George was a nasty piece of work and was certainly racist - but only in the same way as everybody else was during this period. This quote does not prove anything. The “N” word was common currency in English along with all the other offensive epithets and racial stereotypes and, as you’ve pointed out in the OP, DLG was mostly criticising the government’s handling of the disarmament talks.
What evidence is there for Lloyd George being a racist, other than that (probably misinterpreted) quote?
It seems that Brits used the n-word freely in those days to describe non-white residents of the countries they swallowed up into the Empire - including both Africans and Asians (the term was applied to people from India as well). So it would have been beyond ironic if Lloyd George had been referring to British subjects from those countries, seeing that some of them (i.e. India) contributed troops to British forces in WWI.
My point was that it would be amazing if DLG was not a racist, the vast majority of Britains in 1934 were racist by the standards we apply today. This was the period of Social Darwinism, when most educated people believed that not only were people from different races and nations different but that there was hierarchy of races with some superior to others. As I say, this hearsay quote is no evidence at all as to whether Lloyd George was more or less racist than his contemporaries.
Being a racist?! Are you kidding me?! The word nigger (I don’t like euphemisms) was a perfectly acceptable word for ‘African’ or what today we’d call ‘black’ back then. Hell, it was more polite than simply calling them savages or cannibals which others did. Probably the first truly polite word to replace it in English was ‘colored’.
There was a famous line spoken by politician and orator William Jennings Bryan (of the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ fame) when he was running for US President. There was trouble brewing in the Caribbean at the time and his aids had to explain the history of the area to him, including how the big island of Hispaniola was divided in half, one side colonized by Spain and the other by France. His infamous response was,* “My my, niggers speaking French!”*
Political correctness is an incredibly recent, distorting, unrealistic, and downright evil policy. It is exactly what George Orwell coined ‘newspeak’ in his seminal novel 1984…
I’m pretty sure the term wasn’t strictly reserved for people of African ancestry in 19th and early 20th century Britain. It generally meant dark-skinned foreigners for the most part.
Likely, Lloyd-George was making a sarcastic statement that in effect, they could have both spared everyone the issue of aerial bombardment and saved the Exchequer 5 million pounds, but that Britain just HAD to reserve the right to bomb ni**ers, meaning that they had to give all that good stuff up for the ability to bomb people in junky undeveloped countries, and in the process questioning the worth of the ability to bomb those people.
It wasn’t overwhelmingly racist, at least not by the standards of the day.
Hasn’t it always been a…if not nearly as offensive as it is today, still a pejorative term? Always thought ‘negro’ or ‘colored’ were the terms one would use in polite company.
I think it’s always been offensive in the US, where there were alternative terms like “darky,” which would shock the socks off someone if you used it today, but was a better word than the word that shall not be used, even in the 1800s.
In the UK, I don’t think it was offensive until the 1950s, when shared media with the US sort of put the kibosh on the word. There’s a PG Wodehouse novel from the 30s, where Bertie has taken up the banjolele (a 4-stringed banjo-ukelele hybrid), much to Jeeves’ annoyance, and is very excited to go hear some n*gger minstrels from the US perform. The term is used over and over again, and it bruises the eyes a bit, of an American reading it in the 21st century, but it’s very clear that nothing at all offensive is intended. When I first read it, I thought maybe it meant “black-face” as opposed to just black people, but after a little research, I was assured that someone from Wodehouse’s background wouldn’t use the n-word to describe white people in black-face.
When you read it in something like the work of Wodehouse, you just have to think of it somehow as a different word, one that has shifted meanings, like when you read Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” you have to remember that the meaning of “rape” has shifted.
US vs UK proprieties: When it came time for the American publishing of Nigger of the Narcissus, Joseph Conrad received a request to the effect of “uh, do you have an alternate title?”