English Politics Quotes
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Leese was imprisoned several times for various crimes including helping members of the Nazi Waffen SS escape at the end of WWII. He had been a veterinarian in the British Army Camel Corps and an expert on camel health. As a lover of animals he was one of the early animal rights extremists and became a virulent anti-Semite because of his antipathy to the Kosher ritual slaughter of food animals.
“Lord Haw Haw” was the name that he used in his propaganda broadcasts from Germany to England. Despite the fact that the broadcasts were anti-British and pro German, many in Britain listened to him regularly. He was very witty and many of his criticisms of British society were views held by many patriots in Britain. As pure entertainment, he was better than most of the BBC broadcasts during WWII. At the end of the war, Joyce was captured, tried and executed for treason.
Carlile was one of the heroes of freedom of the press. He was jailed frequently for publishing anti government or anti Church of England criticisms, as were his wife and sister. The government grew so desperate trying to censor his publications that they placed a high minimum price on the sale of all newspapers assuring that the average citizen could not afford to buy the “seditious and blasphemous material.” In addition to press freedom he was an early reformer for birth control, religious freedom, women's suffrage and rights (which he called for in the 1820s), and against child labor.
This is the first major history of banks written in the United States. He uses the example of England to show that politicians sometimes create and exaggerate national dangers in order to maintain public support.
Here we see the classic aristocratic arrogance of 19th century England. Bureaucracy was a French, Dutch and Spanish problem, not an English one. The reality was that England was developing the largest bureaucracy in the world.
There was continuing tension between England, the Colonial Governors of South Africa and the Boers. Immigrant settlers to South Africa from Holland. The Boers were very uneducated and not steeped in democratic government. They wanted to enslave and sieze the land of the Black residents. Under English law, the Blacks were also English subjects. The Boers insisted that any interference in their persecution and enslavery of the Blacks was oppression just as the Southern American Whites saw Reconstruction defense of the Blacks as oppression to them. The classic question is: “Is it oppression to stop people from opressiong others?”
