‘A people that idly sips its cognac on the boulevards as it lightly takes a trifling part in the comedie humaine,” Franklin Giddings, professor of sociology at Columbia University, taunted contemptuously in 1900, “can only go down in the struggle for existence with men who have learned that happiness… is the satisfaction that comes only with the tingling of the blood.” The blood that tingled was Anglo-Saxon. “The greatest question of the twentieth century,” Giddings believed, was “whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Slav is to impress his civilisation on the world”.
A century later, it’s not Anglo-Saxon pitted against Slav, but the west against China. Nevertheless, as the fallout from the Aukus deal reveals, something of the contempt for the French still remains, on both sides of the Atlantic, as does the sense of what Giddings called “the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon”, though today many prefer to talk about the “Anglosphere”. France, Tory lord Daniel Hannan suggested, is “not a reliable partner”, so “Anglosphere allies” have taken “responsibility for defending liberty”, demonstrating that “there are still some grown-ups patrolling the playground”.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3m48EOe
0 comments:
Post a Comment