> On 2/7/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> > By the way, how'd the Brit ruling class come to understand that the
> > empire was cooked?
>
> The Lend-Lease Act of 1941. In 1942, Winston Churchill came to stay
> at the White House. One morning, FDR went into Churchill's room.
> FDR, finding him (coming out of the bathroom) stark naked, tried to
> back out of the room. Churchill said, "The Prime Minister of Great
> Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United
> States." Britain tried only one war independent of the American
> opinion after that: the Suez war of 1956 (against Egypt, with France
> and Israel). But Eisenhower immediately reminded it of who's the
> boss: he threatened to stop supporting the pound.
It doesn't make sense to say that there was one, single moment when the British Empire was fully cooked--otherwise, why did most of their colonies still have to fight for independence well into the 1970s? On this, I guess the local colonists had the biggest dog in the fight, but didn't Britain still support them in fighting nationalist movements in, for instance, Rhodesia and Kenya? In some cases, I think the US was working to keep the independence from happening as well (like in Angola). But maybe I'm confusing colonialism w/ imperialism in this case.