Plus ça…
Franco-British Tensions Stress Relationship
Britain and Europe, divided by more than a channel
Britain started war of words over credit ratings, insists French foreign minister
Remember St. Crispin’s Day!
Also remember:
France Surrenders, We’re in the Finals
Fog in Channel, Continent Isolated
Meanwhile, Little England?
Sir Gus O’Donnell: The UK faces break-up
Britain’s most senior civil servant Sir Gus O’Donnell has publicly questioned whether the United Kingdom will still exist in a few years’ time.
Henry V
Olivier does not a bad performance but seems hollow and empty after Kenneth Branagh….a truly stirring oration…..
“….do not ask for one man more….”
“we few…we happy few…
We, band of brothers…
That said I have little doubt that the actual event etc was vastly different….but we can dream can’t we….?
Contrast Churchill’s slow, delivery lacking much vocal emotion to Adolph Hitler’s energitic rants…….
Ah the benefits of having recording technology….
BTW Churchill had “mike fright”….the recorded speeches were actually an actor…..frequently Richard Burton…
When the myth becomes the legend..print the myth…
“Go tell the Constable….
We are but warriors for the working day….”
I bet the Brits are sorry they got rid of their aircraft carriers so they could fly from French vessels. Old sailors of the Royal Navy are silently thinking “I told you so” and wishing they had never gotten rid of their grog.
With 70% of the Scottish economy in the public sector, independence from the British Cow should work out real well. Scotland makes Quebec’s faux-independence look viable.
Even the once proud Oatmeal Savages can be domesticated with enough labour/welfare/nanny statism.
Sasquatch, given that Richard Burton was 15 in 1940, you are sadly mistaken. Burton did voice a Churchill documentary I believe, but certainly was not able to mimic the old, whiskey-and-stogie-muddled timbre that Churchill produced.
The actor in question was Norman Shelley, but that’s an urban myth. Nobody, other than Norman Shelley, has claimed he read the speeches.
I haven’t been able to find it at YouTube but Sir Humphrey Appleby explaining to the P.M. who has just mentioned the nuclear deterrent versus the Russians that, “We have nuclear weapons because the French do. Prime Minister, for 350 of the past 415 years Britain and France have been at war. Just because they’re our friends today doesn’t mean they’ll be our friends tomorrow.” [As I roughly recall the scene.]
the EU won’t break up, not in the long term, it will instead become the next caliphate…they’re being colonized and we’re next…
http://phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/2011/12/europes-unfinished-business.html
…the EU has done nothing to diminish the Judeophobia which led to the Holocaust in Europe. Indeed, the obsessional malice towards Israel has provided cover for a resurgence of the oldest hatred within the graveyard of European Jewry. As Giulio Meotti reports, Jews are being expelled from academia across Europe:
‘Several days ago the Israeli leftist author Moshe Sakal was booted from an academic conference in Marseilles at the request of Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish. The director of the conference, French-Jewish author Pierre Assouline, succumbed to the Arab pressure and said Sakal’s participation “was not crucial”.
‘A year ago, Marseilles’ university was the site of another anti-Jewish boycott, when the septuagenarian Israeli novelist Esther Orner, who is also a Holocaust survivor, was banned from the University of Provence after a group of Arab writers objected to her presence.
‘For the first time since Vichy’s collaborators, French faculties have been cleansed of the Jewish presence.
‘From the outside, European universities appear to many as genteel, cultured and tranquil oases of wisdom. In truth, European institutions of higher education are now brutal offsprings of anti-Jew hatred.
‘… Will the European Union, many of whose prominent members either participated or acquiesced in the destruction of European Jewry 70 years ago, put a stop to the obscurantist conspiracy of the grandchildren of those Max Weinreich famously called “Hitler’s Professors” to expel the Jews (again) from the family of nations?’
Of course, there are profound differences between today’s anti-Jewish animus and 1930s Germany. But there is also more than an unsettling echo; there is a direct line of connection. Many of the Palestinian Arabs are descended from ancestors who formed Hitler’s Middle Eastern front in Palestine, with a shared goal of exterminating the Jews. And their current agenda is being promoted by Europeans who, having created the EU to exorcise the continent’s demons, never fully faced up to the true and universal sources of the eternal hatred and lunacy that had caused the genocide of the Jews.
Given this, it is hardly fanciful to conclude that the current demonisation of Israel by the Arab-European alliance designed to soften up the world for Israel’s destruction suggests that World War Two has still not properly ended.
“I haven’t been able to find it at YouTube but Sir Humphrey Appleby explaining to the P.M. who has just mentioned the nuclear deterrent versus the Russians that, “We have nuclear weapons because the French do. Prime Minister, for 350 of the past 415 years Britain and France have been at war. Just because they’re our friends today doesn’t mean they’ll be our friends tomorrow.” [As I roughly recall the scene.]” – andycanuck
This is why I sometimes think that Canada was someone’s idea of a sick joke. The British and French have been enemies since the beginning of time. Lets try making them live in the same country and see how it works out.
Aside from the war of words, is there any reason to bring up Crispin? That was in October wasn’t it?
I like this version better. (I find the old version over-acted.)
Zendo Deb
“Aside from the war of words, is there any reason to bring up Crispin? That was in October wasn’t it?
I like this version better. (I find the old version over-acted.) ”
It is gratifying that at least some culture has touched you…it’s a start..a stumbling recitation in a B-movie…. Oliver at least remembered his lines…With Branagh the impression is of an ab initio speech…some feeling….not a cold rescitation.
look what all the bickering has done…
these politicians should be hung, drawn and quartered
http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/world/archives/2011/12/20111223-161558.html
The Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, has been taken to hospital complaining of chest pains, British media report.
A Buckingham Palace spokesman told the BBC that Prince Philip, 90, is in Cambrigde’s Papworth Hospital getting “precautionary tests.”
The royal family was in Norfolk for a traditional Christmas retreat when the chest pains hit.
The last time the duke was in hospital was April 2008, when he suffered a chest infection.
“He has had these chest pains before and I don’t think it’s anything untoward, but given his age, they are being safe rather than sorry,” said Dickie Arbiter, a former press secretary to the Queen.
“Either this is more serious and therefore they felt they really must issue a statement, or they’ve simply moved with the times and it’s going to get out in social media,” said former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond.
Prince Philip is the longest-serving royal consort.
Bemused – Phil is 90. The question isn’t “who’s to blame for his having this heart attck, the fiends!?!”
The United Kingdom is neither united nor a kingdom. Discuss among yourselves.
Whatever happens, it will work out fine. Scotland is an independent nation in spirit right now. So is Wales. Northern Ireland is changing and there’s a sort of large-scale truce in the modern Irish social reality, so being from Northern Ireland means you have parts of three different concepts of citizenship. That’s three more than me !!!
And then there’s the Isle of Man. What’s up with that?
I always laugh at North American conservative bloggers who wax on about the imminent demise of England. That’s the England of the Magna Carta, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Handel, Newton, Maxwell, Dickens, Orwell and Churchill you’re talking about, right?
Joke’s on you, actually, chums. But keep guessing, you’ll get something right eventually.
The Prince is fine having undergone surgery.
If I was Kate, I’d be the first to suggest we all go home and let Philip and Elizabeth have a quiet Christmas together.
Mr. O’Donnell, I believe the Isle of Man is where beatniks come from. It’s right near the Isle of Dude.
re: Richard Burton doing Churchill’s speaches
Burton was 20 when the war ended. Perhaps the writer is thinking of this, from Wikipedia:
I always laugh at North American conservative bloggers who wax on about the imminent demise of England…
Posted by: Peter O’Donnell at December 23, 2011 8:46 PM
‘Imminent’ demise?
Shit. Blighty demised a long time ago.
The wogs start at Calais.