How Britain ruined the world

WHY WE FIGHT According to the author, Osama Bin Laden's hatred of the West stems from his early contact with Englishmen

A part of me wants to love the United Kingdom; because I'm an American, I've always looked up to the UK. The British seemed like older, wiser siblings—a little stiff maybe, but friends who have stuck by our side through thick and thin.

Having seen too many a smug Englishman drag the name of my country through the mud, I've decided to fight back. I ask that you stand
with meThen, all of a sudden, just when America began to come into its own as a 21st century superpower, the British started picking on us. No longer do I feel warmth in the UK when I introduce myself as an American. Instead it's anger, bitterness, a hollow superiority, and most of all, intense jealousy. Over polite business luncheons, I've been told that my president is an idiot. That my countrymen are dolts for electing him. That America is responsible for ruining the world.

I'm a patriotic man, and there's only so much abuse I can take. Though I hate to point fingers, Britain is in no position to be blaming the United States for the world's problems—problems they themselves created in the first place. Now, having seen too many a smug Englishman drag the name of my country through the mud, I've decided to fight back. I ask that you stand with me.

Below, just a handful of reasons her majesty's subjects might not want to throw stones, excerpted from author Steven A. Grasse's Brit-bashing jeremiad, The Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined the World (Quirk), in bookstores now.

THEY GIVE AWARDS TO COVER THEIR TRACKS
Cecil Rhodes sucked the diamonds out of Africa, seized lands to which he had no deed, and committed a series of massacres against the native hordes that were almost genocidal in their intensity. On top of that, he was an insufferable blowhard of a racist, famously boasting that "we" (the white English) "are the finest race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race." He was quite open about his desire to "paint the map red," a euphemism for taking over the globe.

Yet today, we hear "Rhodes" and think of a jolly and generous philanthropist. Like many a bloated British plutocrat, Rhodes was able to erase a lifetime of imperialist bloodshed with one gesture of charity, the Rhodes Scholarship, which has since been awarded to dozens of U.S. senators, cabinet members, and Supreme Court justices, all in the name of keeping up good Anglo-American relations. But this aura of prestige and benevolence disguises Rhodes's original motive. He was interested not in furthering the education of a few bright Americans with a full-ride scholarship to Oxford so much as bringing them back into the imperial fold. "Why should we not form a secret society," he wrote, "with but one object: the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule for the recovery of the United States."

While the Rhodes Foundation has thus far failed to achieve this sick dream, Rhodes's investment has paid handsome dividends in the form of thousands of American Rhodes Scholars, most of whom grew up to wield tremendous influence in American public life while nursing warm memories of their Oxford days.