Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...opened. The setting was glossier and glassier than ever before. To replace the sagging "temporary" prefab it has occupied since 1952, NATO now inhabits a six-story, A-shaped (for "Atlantic") building containing $10 million worth of Danish and Belgian furniture, German and Dutch electronics devices, Italian marble, British kitchen equipment, U.S. airconditioning, and (alas) a French telephone system. But as if to prove Parkinson's law of "plans and plants,"* the first sessions in NATO's new headquarters involved a skittish probing of the basic military and political assumptions on which NATO rests...
With the outspoken support of the British (who did not want to share a favored position) and the smaller NATO powers (who did not want to be further left out), the U.S. ignored De Gaulle's proposals. Partly to put pressure on Washington, partly because he is convinced that "France must defend itself by itself and in its own fashion," De Gaulle retaliated by striking at the foundation stone of NATO strategic planning: the concept of an integrated, internationally commanded defense force...
...British press was under no such restraint. Said the Daily Mirror: "Mr. Swart is the man who: FLOURISHED a whip to show how he himself would deal with restless Africans. DESCRIBED a wedding photograph of a white girl and an African as disgusting. SAID "when we defend White supremacy we are carrying out the Divine Will." Her Majesty's new appointee, noted the Daily Express, "opposed South Africa's entry into the last war" on Britain's side...
...protest that the Queen should have to receive "the organizer of South Africa's color bar Police State . . . the man 8,000,000 Africans fear . . . who has preached flogging ever since he became Minister of Justice." Added the New Statesman: "He does not hide his detestation of the British connection and his determination to break it. This man is now to kiss hands, receive the seal of office and thus become the official repository of British honor and approval" in South Africa...
...towers 6 ft. 7 in., managed a perpetual wan smile, and by the time he left for home the hue and cry had died down, even if no one was happy that the Queen's representative in South Africa should be a Boer with a pronounced anti-British bias (based on childhood memories of being herded into a British prison camp with his mother), dedicated to making his country a republic and taking it out of the Commonwealth. The Labor Party's executive committee last week passed a resolution urging party members to boycott South African goods...