Word: vitone
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Winston Churchill's critics knew that the British Empire represented billions in investments-with iron representation around No. 10 Downing Street. They knew that as Britain lost or relinquished her empire she would face an increasingly racking economic problem. Wrote Albert Viton last week in Asia: "[Britain's] whole economic system has been built on a foundation of imperialism, and to expect them to destroy with their own hands that foundation is to expect them to make greater sacrifices for the new world order than any people has made thus...
...Albert Viton's Great Britain is by long odds the dullest and most instructive of the three. A static, black-&-white study of Britain and her concentric rings of Empire, it ends by appraising the Empire at war, sets up those crises which await it at war's end, and delivers the opinion that it will survive them...
Even if the British do not lose the war, thinks Viton, they cannot win the peace. Unlike their enemies, they have everything to lose, nothing to gain. The Empire owes too much to "the resourcefulness and energy of the British people," too little to "objective material reality." "Powerful separatist movements" in South Africa, even in Canada, are a virtual certainty once the war is over. The war, says Viton, will be a forcing-bed for rebellion in the Colonies: the industrialization of natives, the use of natives in new colonial posts, the return of native soldiers, the rise...
Britain herself, Viton concludes, is in for a worse industrial collapse than that of 1920. Her Latin American markets are already being annexed by the U. S., and she is liable to lose trade in Scandinavia, the Balkans, parts of the Empire as well. With her exports reduced, thanks to labor shortage and lack of shipping, she must liquidate foreign securities to buy imports. She will lose her financial supremacy to the U. S. and thus her strongest bond with the Dominions. The problem of feeding the island population during the war will be slight compared with the difficulty once...
...closing chapter, The Empire Will Not Die, cool, hardheaded Albert Viton turns his back on the rest of his book, begins to comfort himself and the reader with such emotional catch-phrases as "this amazing little island"; to deliver such debatable statements as "Few countries can boast as high a type of manhood as that produced by the public schools of England"; to remark, "The septuagenarian Neville Chamberlain is symbolic of the virility of the English people"; and to snort "To say that war exhausts is as much nonsense as that exercise weakens." After his long persuasions that night must...