Word: vansittart
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...piece of impudence," cried tall, gimlet-eyed Lord Vansittart, 68, in Britain's House of Lords last week. Bristling with rage, the onetime (1930-38) Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office told his peers how the Soviet news agency Tass ("a nest of guttersnipes") had wriggled out of a libel suit filed by Vladimir Krajina, Czech refugee and onetime resistance fighter. The Soviet Embassy had declared Tass a state organ (TIME, July 11), and a British court had no choice but to grant diplomatic immunity to Tass, which had accused Krajina of being a traitor. Krajina...
...Lord Vansittart protested such "preposterous and unprecedented" extensions of immunity at a time when all the countries of the Communist empire treat British and U.S. representatives "like stink." Answering Vansittart for the government, Viscount Jowitt, Britain's Lord Chancellor, brought cheers when he announced that the government was setting up a committee to consider changes in the law which made Tass libel-proof. To illustrate Tass's mendacity, Viscount Jowitt read a Tass report in Moscow's Literary Gazette of how Londoners "supplement their starvation rations ... On Sundays, armed with guns and traps, [they...
...Being tied up with Russia," declared Britain's bellicose Lord Vansittart (Black Record), "is like being married to an 18-stone* woman who is always deceiving one and then abusing...
...Vansittart [TiME, July 16] conveniently "forgets" to take into account the fact that the "Germans" of whom Velleius Paterculus wrote were the people who lived in northern Europe in the land which then included not only present-day Germany but also the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, northeastern France, Austria and part of Czechoslovakia. These same "Germans" make up the Saxon element of the inhabitants of the British Isles, and it seems to me that the English must be not a little proud of their drop of Saxon blood since they constantly refer to themselves as "Anglo-Saxons...
However, as Mr. Vansittart says, he doesn't have to go that far back. In fact, he doesn't have to go back at all. It shouldn't tax his muddled brain too much to recall that a few million Americans, many of German descent and including such notables as Eisenhower and Spaatz, saved the British Isles from invasion, and to realize that many others of German descent-Nimitz, Wedemeyer, Mitscher, Eichelberger and Krueger, to name a few-are helping to save the Empire...