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To: QuisSeparabit; jdsteel

I’d be satisfied with the US being restored to it’s Constitutional basis of being 50 sovereign States united in purpose.

Get the fed gov back within it’s legal authority and we’ll be fine.


14 posted on 10/04/2017 9:25:04 AM PDT by John O (God Save America (Please))
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To: John O; jdsteel
Absolutely, John O! Britain too needs to return to old values, where government saw to defence, foreign policy, legal infrastructure and little else, other powers being devolved to the burghs (hospitals, policing, welfare and municipal administration), and citizens left alone outside of that.

We need to reapply old lessons, not split ourselves up into ever smaller and weaker units. E.g. Czechoslovakia—what good did carving them out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire do? They got to enjoy 20 years as an independent nation desperately pursuing alliances with other countries before being occupied by the Nazis for 6 years then run by the Reds for 44; 2 years after communism’s collapse, the Czechs—as if they weren’t weak enough—decided to split further. And now they’re two small voices in the EU. They’d have been better off staying part of Austria-Hungary. Author Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901–35) put it admirably as well as colourfully:

About Small Nations. What a curse to the earth are small nations! Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland, San Salvador, Luxembourg, Manchukuo, the Irish Free State. There are many more: there is an appalling number of disgusting little stretches of the globe claimed, occupied and infected by groupings of babbling little morons—babbling militant on the subjects (unendingly) of their exclusive cultures, their exclusive languages, their national souls, their national genius, their unique achievements in throat-cutting in this and that abominable little squabble in the past. Mangy little curs a-yap above their minute hoardings of shrivelled bones, they cease from their yelpings at the passers-by only in such intervals as they devote to their civil-war flea-hunts. Of all the accursed progeny of World War, surely the worst was this dwarf mongrel-litter. The South Irish of the middle class were never pleasant persons: since they obtained their Free State the belch of their pride in the accents of their unhygienic patois has given the unfortunate Irish Channel the seeming of a cess-pool. Having blamed their misfortunes on England for centuries, they achieved independence and promptly found themselves incapable of securing that independence by the obvious and necessary operation—social revolution. Instead: revival of Gaelic, bewildering an unhappy world with uncouth spellings and titles and postage-stamps; revival of the blood feud; revival of the decayed literary cultus which (like most products of the Kelt) was an abomination even while actually alive and but poor manure when it died… Or Finland—Communist-murdering Finland—ruled by German Generals and the Central European Foundries, boasting of its ragged population the return of its ancient literary culture like a senile octogenarian boasting the coming of second childhood…

(Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. “Glasgow.” (1934) Smeddum: A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology, edited by Valentina Bold, Canongate, 2001, pp. 97–109)

17 posted on 10/04/2017 12:08:30 PM PDT by QuisSeparabit (Still Scottish, Always British)
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