From the UK Telegraph comes an interesting read:
What is the best thing England ever gave the world? Cricket? Boring. Parliamentary democracy? I think the Icelandics got there first. Capitalism? We just copied the Dutch.
How about the Declaration of Independence, ratified this day in 1776 by the Continental Congress, two days after the rebel colonies had declared independence from Great Britain. It has become so successful and universal that no one is even aware how English it was.
Today we live in a world where people assume that the ideals they hold dear are natural, universal human values; we think of human rights or religious tolerance or equality between the sexes as given.
But many of the ideas that were declared universal after the devastation of the Second World War stem from particular American ideals that were themselves a product of English political culture, and no other culture, except perhaps the Netherlands, could have produced it.
6 comments:
Brits we were until July 4th, 1776.
Uhrm, not all of us, Odie. :p And, I must say, even those who were loyalists were not accepted by the British as, well, ActuAl British. Colonialists, world-wide, were beneath being truly called British. And, for the most part, colonists were happy to have it that way.
The British claiming our Declaration, trying to own it, would be like us trying to say that the royals were ours, and the English owe us for them. I WISH we could have afflicted those on them, fleas on a dog as it were, but no.
Them having had at the time, AND IN FACT STILL HAVING, royals, means they were as party to the Declaration as Napoleon was involved in the creation of the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm sure some asshat academic is trying to prove both of those points. Ah, another reason to fire every single academic. Idiots.
Our rights are inherent, we're born with them, they come from God--not government.
Those who came to America had one common bond--freedom. Without freedom, you can't be anything, not even a blogger.
I Want My Country Back
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le7IV1ltgNE
Odie - there was no wall built around America, eh? Those who didn't want to join the party could leave anytime.
Doom - I could see the point of the author though. The Founding Fathers took things a few steps farther and actually created a nation from these concepts rather than trying to shoehorn individual liberties into a monarchy.
IWMCB - It usually comes down to who can can forcibly grant or take away liberties. Our liberties, though God-given, were won at the point of a bayonet and ripped from the hands of those who would deny them to us.
I fear it is coming to that point again.
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