Headline, January 27 2025/ EMPIRE : ''' STATE OF STARS '''

EMPIRE : 

''' STATE OF STARS '''

IN THE ANNALS OF FINEST-HOUR MYTHMAKING, there are two abiding articles of faith : first, that the United Kingdom bravely fought on ''alone'' after the fall of France, and second, that the New World ultimately came to the rescue of the Old.

The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is the primary author of this narrative. In his memoirs, he claimed that not until Pearl Harbour had he recognised that Britain would survive the Nazi onslaught.

With the United States finally involved, '' we had won the war,'' Churchill wrote. 

'' The Empire would live.'' Fighting alongside the Americans, he wrote, had proved '' the greatest joy.''

Alan Allport skillfully subverts both these myths in '' Advance Britannia '' the second volume of his elegant and unsparing history of London's role in World War II.

As he shows, Washington's involvement was not an unqualified boon. Churchill had wanted Franklin D. Roosevelt's help in Europe - not in the Pacific. Since their meeting aboard the U.S.S. Augusta in the summer of 1941, the American president had been urging Churchill to abandon Britain's '' backward colonial policy.''

Compared with the conservative Churchill, Allport writes, Roosevelt was '' a thoroughgoing Robespierre, a world revolutionary.''

Churchill's '' small island, '' as the prime minister liked to call it, also never truly fought alone : To help pay for the war, it ruthlessly exploited its worldwide empire of more than 13 million square miles or about 34 million square kilometers, and 491 million people.

Britain's haughty imperiousness, along with the financial strain it caused, left the colonies vulnerable and meant fighting in East Asia would almost certainly menace London's positions in Burma, India and elsewhere.

In the wake of Pearl Harbour, the Japanese forces swiftly fell upon Britain's Asian colonies, including the vital island of Singapore.

Singapore had long served as a redoubt of expat comforts, even as locals suffered under the abuses of imperial life

The English socialite Diana Cooper, who arrived in 1941, worried that the colony had slipped '' into a euphoric coma. '' The economy of the Malayan Straits Settlements, of which Singapore was a part, was fueled by what Allport calls British '' narco colonialism, '' a brisk trade in inch-long tubes filled with opium paste.

By the beginning of the Second World War Malaya had 300,000 addicts.

Allport, a historian at Syracuse University, does a good job of including the perspectives of the victims of British Colonialism as well as its perpetrators.

When the war broke out in the Pacific, some 85,000 British troops there quickly surrendered, and soldiers who fled south along the Malay Peninsula destroyed fuel pumps and other property as they went - ignoring the local inhabitants they had pledged to defend.

'' That's the end of the British Empire,'' a young Lee Kuan Yew, the future prime minister of Singapore was said to have remarked.

Malayas for their part put up little resistance as they watched the Japanese soldiers herd white civilians into internment camps.

Churchill had vowed that no British dominion would be '' overwhelmed by a yellow race.'' But the empire's entrenched bigotry blinded it to the vulnerability of its Asian possessions.

Still, Allport writes, ''the problem with focusing exclusively on Churchill’s personal sins is not that it is unfair to him: It is that doing so lets the rest of the British people off the hook.''

A racist imperial politics suffused every aspect of British life. Scottish soldiers harassed Black servicemen for dancing with white women; a senior British officer derided Japanese soldiers as '' subhuman specimens.''

LESSONS : Don't miss reading : Advance Britannia : How the Second World War Was Won. 1942 - 1945. By Professor Alan Allport.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See You all prepare for the great : '' Constitutional Democratic Convention* '' on !WOW! : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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