Existential Threats...then and now
Adam Gopnik, writing in the August 23 New Yorker with no apparent intended irony, says,
"How a great power at the apex of its influence, with no obvious rivals in sight - the British didn't want a rival navy, but were more or less content with a minor German empire - grew convinced that it was beset by an overwhelming existential danger is difficult for a contemporary American to understand, of course, but somehow that is what happened."
Having seen millions of my fellow citizens mislead to believe that an essentially rag-tag group of foreign terrorists threaten the very existence of our nation, it is not difficult at all to see how Great Britain, at the beginning of the last century, might feel that Germany posed an existential threat. What I find astonishing is that anybody could have missed the parallel.
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Mr. No (or is it Dr.?), you be the one to hold your breath, okay?
Irony is just around the corner, one hopes.
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