10 January 2006 Blog Home : January 2006 : Permalink
...I give him the country’s history in a nutshell. First, it was repeatedly invaded by the Japanese, then it was repeatedly invaded by the Mongols, then it was repeatedly invaded by the Chinese, then it was repeatedly invaded by the Manchus, then it got one big, maybe-they’ll-get-the-message-this-time invasion from the Japanese again, and in 1950 it invaded itself. This experience, I explain, has made these people the proud and noble mouth-frothing xenophobes we all know and love today, threatening to send hordes of vicious peasant warriors to Hong Kong if our Government does not honour their birthright as sons of the Hermit Kingdom, namely immunity from laws against assaulting policewomen with bamboo poles. Odell thinks about it. “Maybe it’s the other way around,” he suggests. “Maybe they kept on getting invaded because they’re assholes.”
I can't help thinking that there are other nationalities/countries which could benefit from a similarly rude summary of their history. How about France?Having failed to fight off the vikings and preventing them from colonising the cold north of the country next to the troublesome celts, the French thought they'd managed a cunning trick a thousand years ago by suggesting that they invade England. True this did remove the Norman threat from France, as Normans have rarely signified in French history since then, but it laid the foundation, not helped by some injudicious marital diplomacy over the next couple of centuries, for an England that has been hell bent on fighting most of its wars with the French or, if against someone else, trying to do it on French soil. A couple of centuries ago the French had a revolution and in their efforts to export this, they managed to get up the noses of the Prussians and they spent the next 150 years losing to them except when bailed out by the English. A few decades ago they came up with a cunning plan to get these former enemies to pay for the French lifestyle by joining something called the EEC, something which has worked a treat, although up until the present.
Other suggestions welcome