Britain’s Immoral Foreign Policy

The Guilt of Upper London and the Mahan USA

Press Poisoners – Now on Television

Upper London’s Other Victims

The Oddity of Kosovo

Post-Truthful in Gaza

Britain Gave the World Democracy?

The USA as Redefined by Admiral Mahan

Press Poisoners – Now on Television

Irish socialist James Connolly complained in 1913 about the way that newspapers owned by the rich had learned how to manipulate the decent feelings of ordinary people. Pretending to care, but undermining everything that might actually help them:

“You find always a sloppy sentiment sloppily expressed in favour of Labour in the editorials, but all through the news columns, and in all its headings and sub-headings, you notice that always undue prominence is given to every item that tells against Labour, the views of its most unimportant enemies are heralded forth with the utmost prolixity, and the views of its most eminent partisans are slurred over and made to read as unintelligibly as possible…

“The Irish News has carefully rejected everything that tells for the organised Labour movement, and has carefully suppressed every item the mere chronicling of which might convey to its readers an idea of the justice, power, or growth of the working class in any part of the world.”^[1]

This remains the trick. Nice stories about China stopped coming when it became clear that China’s rulers were seriously undermining the USA’s hegemony. Having once been urged to take firm action against Islamic extremists in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, the story suddenly switched to Beijing being unreasonably nasty to the poor Uighurs.^[2]

At no time did any of our news media correct the widespread belief that Tibet was a sovereign state that China wickedly annexed in 1949. The main facts are clear: Lhasa as capital for the regional government of one of three Tibetan provinces had made a bid for independence in 1912. They never got any sovereign government or major international body to recognise them.^[3] The current Dalai Lama was born in Amdo, which never claimed independence. He was imposed without use of the traditional Golden Urn that was sometimes supposed to magically find the correct candidate. And this was largely thanks to pressure from China’s central government. The Lhasa government only made a new claim to independence after 1945, when it became clear that the Communists would win China’s Civil War.

Nor were the Dalai Lamas the spiritual wonders that most people see them as. Some were powerless. Some were murdered by Tibetan politicians; men who clearly did not worry about supernatural consequences.^[4]

Awkward facts get slurred over by saying ‘China claims’, even when few would dispute that the particular claim was correct.

You can imagine the anger and derision if some news source said ‘Poland says that Germany invaded them in 1939’. It is technically true, since Poland says it: but grossly misleading since everyone else says exactly the same. But similar methods are used to slight awkward facts that a serious news source cannot actually deny.

When I was younger, it was frequently said that Britain went to war in WW1 to defend ‘gallant little Serbia’. More recently it has been put out of public memory that this was ever said. Serbia’s ambition to conquer ethnically mixed Bosnia before 1914 is embarrassing when ‘Greater Serbia’ has been defined as an evil. And no one now mentions that the Serbian government in 1914 was dominated by people who had murdered the king and queen of one of Serbia’s two rival home-grown monarchies. Mentioning this undisputed fact would lend credibility to Austro-Hungarian claims that the Serbian government was behind the murder of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife.

The recent celebrations of the undoubted courage and sacrifice of D-Day were reported with never a mention that the Germans had more than half of their army tied up trying to stop the relentless advances of the Soviet Red Army.^[5]

Bias is standard. I tried imagining a variant on Orwell’s Animal Farm, with a chorus of media sheep bleating the following:

Russia holding Chechnya bad

Georgia holding South Ossetia good.

Serbia holding Kosovo bad

Albanian Kosovo holding Serb Kosovo good

China holding Tibet bad

India holding Kashmir good

Indian Fast Growth Bad

Chinese Fast Growth Bad

Chinese Cheap Goods Good? Pause, wait, it recently has eternally been Chinese Cheap Goods Bad

India the Admirable Largest Democracy, wait, now Bad Modi Dictatorship, wait, now Modi Hopefully Curbed

Similar cases, hard to do as a chorus, are Aksai Chin integral for India, though China could build a road through it and not be noticed till Indian visitors read about it in a Chinese news source. Western climate guilt is left in oblivion. It is hardly ever mentioned that we produce far more greenhouse gas per head than Chinese or Indians.

They’ve also got the public convinced that few Ukrainians wanted to be part of Russia. But the areas the Russians hold voted for parties that were against the Orange Revolution. Crimean and Donbass Separatism vanish mysteriously after being mentioned just after the Second Orange Revolution. So did Western sightings of Ukrainian nationalists using Nazi symbols.^[6]

This media nonsense is part of what I am calling Britain’s Immoral Foreign Policy. The USA is now even more guilty, and much of Europe far from clean. But as a Briton, I have a duty to say that the foreign politics of Upper London, and not at all what most Britons think it is.

Upper London has seldom had any good purposes. Defeating Nazi Germany was excellent: but for the government it was a war for Anglo global hegemony, with racism continued.

Upper London’s Other Victims

Lots of Tories had an enthusiasm for Hitler that ended only when he became seen as a threat to the hegemony of the British Empire.^[7] Churchill was different only in seeing much earlier that Hitler was not going to stay within British-defined limits. Mussolini’s fascism was not such a threat, and Churchill showed an open enthusiasm that embarrassed most other Tories.^[8]

Ordinary Britons suffered much less than the rest of the world from the global work of Upper London. The elite who came to power in 1688, and have so far kept their dominance. We got huge tracts of fertile temperate land where ordinary Britons could settle and live better than at home. Where both other immigrants and the survivors among original inhabitants had to adjust to our culture. But we did also suffer. It is both foolish and self-defeating to lump us together with our rulers.

I am not criticising Britishness. I’m fond of my own nationality, without claiming it is better than any other nationality. Just as I’m fond of my own relatives, without claiming they are necessarily better than anyone else’s relatives. If there were an ‘index of social usefulness’ they would rate high, but that should not be a guide to anyone’s feelings.

For my own nationality, we are not better, but nor are we worse. Britain crystalised a broad movement towards modern industry that was likely to happen anyway. And Global Sea-Powered Imperialism was begun by the Spanish and Portuguese, inspired by Italian ventures within the Mediterranean. These fell behind the rest of Europe, but France and the Dutch were ahead of the British in following the Iberian example. Even the Danes had a small empire, including slave-grown sugar.

The British Empire did have distinct failings, including an usually widespread and rigid racism. All the European empires had a racial bias, but Britain placed everyone categorised as White above all of the rest. I see this as English middle-class prejudices overcoming the more fluid view of the old aristocracy. Though I think it was only in the USA that the children fathered by slave-owners mostly remained slaves, and were often sold to strangers.

The other European empires mostly let family ties override racial bias. Novelist Alexandre Dumas was the son of the illegitimate son of a black slave mother.^[9] Pushkin was the great-grandson of a nobleman of African origin who was kidnapped from his homeland by the Ottomans. Freed by the Russian Emperor and raised in the Emperor’s court household as his godson.^[10]

The radicalisation of the 1960s pushed into mainstream politics in the 1990s. Blair’s dismal New Labour government did at least break rigid lines on race, gender, and openly-expressed sexuality. Only then could open gays and individuals not classed as White could rise in the Tory party, and then lecture us about how benevolent the Empire actually was. And incidentally, it’s only from the 1960s that it became normal for West Indian cricket teams to have a non-white captain.

But 1960s radicalism was also full of confusion, much of it encouraged by the drug-fuelled world of pop music. ‘Nothing is real, sang Lennon and McCartney, yet the current consensus is that neither of them was in fact a walrus.

A sensible complaint against 1950 technocratic values mostly failed to say just what is wrong with it. For me, much of its supposed rationalism is pseudo-rationalism. And one well-known case is the Trolley Problem.^[11] A runaway trolley is going to kill five people on the track ahead of it. You can pull a switch to divert the trolley and save them, but it will kill another person who is on that track.

For me, the issue is our natural human aversion to killing people, and especially to killing the innocent. If it were a matter of sacrificing one pack of vital emergency aid to save five equally useful packs, few would hesitate. But I am fairly sure that all existing systems of law would count the Trolly solution as murder.

A variant removes the track-switching, but gives you the option of pushing a fat man off of a bridge to stop the trolley. This is less popular, because it is more easily recognised as murder. But some people can still be persuaded it is rational, since more lives are saved.

Similar mental confusion was increased by the once-rational voice of global marxism suddenly declaring that Stalin had been something utterly different from Lenin

Overall, the left often made the wrong criticisms. One incident I recall is anarchist SF writer Michale Moorcock getting a slot on Channel 4 to moan about Britain recovering the Falkland Islands for the people who actually lived there. Argentina said that since the islands were near they were theirs: an argument that is certainly not accepted for Cyprus, where nearby Turkiye claims only one-third for a long-settled Turkish population. And unlike Cyprus, the Falkland Islands are one of many small islands that were either never settled, or abandoned as too tough for tribal life. But since Britain’s role was called imperialism, the justice of the actual case was ignored.

Moorcock once impressed me. But as I gained understanding, I increasingly saw him as a nice collection of everything that was wrong with the 1960s. I began ridiculing his pretentious heroes.^[12] Re-imagined one of them as Jerry Cuckoo, Slayer of the Abominable Milkman, the famous Door-to-Door Salesman of Appalling Dooms.

Moorcock was a gifted storyteller who wasted much of his talent on the wrong world-views.^[13] Was: it has been many years since he has done anything significant. And I’d suspect something seriously wrong with anyone who feels at home in Texas. Anyone except a Latino or an Apache.

The Oddity of Kosovo

Kosovo is one of the few Western ventures from the 1990s not to have ended in obvious disaster. Afghanistan is lost. Iraq disrespects them by being warm to Iran, and most recently by criminalising homosexuality, which was covert but legal under Saddam.^[14] But a flagrant breaking of existing norms for Kosovo runs smoothly. As of June 2024, 104 out of 193 United Nations member states recognise Kosovo. Mostly Western, or poor countries open to Western influence.

A notable absentee is Spain. They’d find it hard to explain why Kosovans had an inherent right to secede, but Catalans are criminals to even ask the question.^[15]

Also missing is Ukraine. Much of the world brackets the war with Russia’s disastrous 1968 invasion of leftist and reformist Czechoslovakia. Brezhnev’s blunder, and with hindsight the first stage of failure for pro-Moscow Leninism.^[16] But Kiev knows that the Russians moved into Ukraine because Kiev was planning to overrun the pro-Russian portions of the Donbass. Hoping to repeat another US success, when Croatia in 1995 conquered its remaining majority-Serb regions with a NATO-trained army.^[17]

Kiev had signed the Minsk Agreements, which would have conceded the original demands by the elected regional governments of the two Donbass regions. Which promised a referendum to see if they wanted autonomy: a vote likely to be won, since the last whole-nation election gave a majority to parties that had opposed the First Orange Revolution. Parties now banned nationally by Kiev, even though those parties outside the Donbass had condemned the Russian invasion.

For Crimea, Kiev complained about the haste with which the elected regional government of Crimea organised a vote to secede and then be taken back into Russia, where they had been till Khrushchev moved them in 1954. But no one has ever suggested a second vote under proper outside supervision. The Crimeans only accepted rule by Kiev by a narrow majority when the Soviet Union was dissolved, and when it was expected that Russia and Ukraine would remain friendly.^[18]

This was not a foolish hope. Ukrainians are a branch of the Ruthenian people: people who were conquered and oppressed by Poles and Lithuanians. They and South Russians also suffered over centuries from slave raids by Muslims based in Crimea.^[19] Moscow conquered Crimea and made lands called ‘Wild Fields’ safe for Ukrainian and Russian peasants to settle.^[20] The territory also included Jews, mostly inherited from Tsarists conquests from Poland-Lithuania. People who mostly had middle-class roles; Trotsky’s family were prosperous farmers there.

Ukrainians, some still ruled by Austria after the partition of Poland, intermittently claimed independence. Sadly, this invariably included massacres of Poles and Jews. The Poles have not forgotten it.^[21] They just keep quiet now, when they hope to weaken their old enemy Russia.

When the Tsars fell, Ukrainian nationalists claimed most of what had been two Russian provinces, but not including Crimea. Crimea had more Russians than Ukrainians, plus a majority of Crimean Tartars, descendants of the slave raiders. Almost all Tartars were deported to Central Asia after some had worked for the Nazis during World War Two. Russians became a majority, but were apparently not bothered by the 1954 transfer from Russia to Soviet Ukraine. Soviet Ukraine was run by people who were either ethnic-Russian or Russia-orientated.

The Donbass, also strongly Russian, felt at home there: though they had suggested they would better be separate from the new Soviet Ukraine when it was being established in the early 1920s.

Only when the heirs of World War Two Ukrainian pro-Nazi fighters came back from refuges in Canada did polarisation begin.

You don’t get this from most Western media. From the mainstream media you can still sometimes get excellent accounts of the facts, or at least those facts that fit the current politics. But you don’t get a fair assessment of the sort that the BBC News was once respected for. And is now disrespected widely, having blatantly lapsed into propaganda under short-sighted Tory pressure.

Years back, I read a book called Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War. It gives a reasonably accurate account of the foolish and unfair settlements. Then declares that in combination, they were the absolute best that could be done for a lasting peace.

This creature has feathers, webbed feet, a beak, and it quacks a lot. Therefore it’s a panda!

A joke about something that acts like a duck being a duck comes from the Old Right, and was often unfair. But not detached from reality, as the current stuff often is.

You can read on the Wikipedia how the ‘International Court of Justice’ managed to wriggle round the risk of a judgement on Kosovan independence that would have offended the USA.^[22] And also get a summary of the general debate over whether Kosovo made it acceptable for other regions that had a discontented regional majority to secede.^[23]

Majority Western opinion is that seemingly similar events must occupy entirely separate moral universes, depending on the wishes of the current President of the USA. They don’t put it quite like that, but it is another ‘quacking panda’. A thing that is classified in defiance of the evidence.

And they seem surprised that the Global South views such ‘international law’ with increasing contempt.

Post-Truthful in Gaza

Western media and politicians may even have become confused about the difference between lies and truth. I have made jokes about people being ‘post-truthful’; believing that reality was whatever you wanted it to be. A dream within a dream, some Buddhists say – but they still accept that planting rice and then tending it carefully is a good idea if you hope later to eat the risen crop.

I knew the idea from science fiction, notably the hilarious Thursday Next stories of Jasper Fforde. But I assumed that this was just fiction, and mostly missing from the other fiction of writers who play with the idea. I had supposed that politicians were also realistic about the world in general, and not just their immediate politicking. But now I doubt, and worry a little about the possibility that this unrealism might even extend to nuclear war.

I worry only a little, because the people in charge of the dishonest politics tend to notice when their immediate self-interest is at risk. Let Justice Be Done, Though The Heavens Fall – But Not in My Back Yard!

So far the threat of nuclear war has stopped NATO trying the air interdictions they have done elsewhere. I assume the military were firm about the matter, and threatened to go public if they were overridden. I keep an open mind about what we may eventually learn about the wishes of some politicians.

Elsewhere, it does seem that post-truthful ideas have taken over.

A governing Hard Right in Israel is officially designated as Without Sin. Suggestions that six months of horrors for Gaza might be wrong has been denounced as anti-Semitism and an outbreak of hatred.

With hindsight, it should be obvious that six months of televised suffering by Palestinian women and children was going to increasingly appal the public. But Israel and most Western governments not only call it unexplained anti-Semitism: they act in a way that would only be sensible for them if this were true.

I’m sure that the prolonged suffering of Gaza and the lesser but much less excusable suffering of the West Bank has generated more anti-Semitic hatred than already existed. But the main effect has been to undermine previous indifference or sympathy. And this shift has mostly applied to Israel, rather than to Jewish minorities in the wider world. Including more and more of the vital Jewish support in the world beyond Israel.

Well before October 2023, I had wondered whether there would eventually be a grand line-up of Muslim states that Israel could not counter. Could not threaten with nuclear weapons if Pakistan were included, with its own deterrent. It may have been the grand objective of Hamas, with loss and death accepted by people with a great confidence in their religion. Men with a solid belief that Allah will reward them with Paradise for militance, and send the neglectful to Hell.

Or they might have decided that life would not be worth living if their culture and faith were wrong. So they might as well die in the hope that it’s true. It is the same culture that produced suicide bombers, which lasted until it was clear they were getting nowhere. It turned out that people can live with bombs, as most of Europe did in World War Two.

Regardless, Israeli actions and the lack of serious US control makes a powerful Islamic combination against Israel much more likely.

The history of the Crusades is relevant here. British memories mostly stop with Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem, and the failure of Richard the Lionheart to reverse this. But in 1229 a nephew of Saladin turned over limited authority over Jerusalem to Emperor Frederick 2^nd, who was at odds with a series of popes.^[24] In 1244, the city was sacked, Christians decimated, and almost all Jews driven out. That was done by Khwarazmians, Muslim nomads driven from their original home by the Mongols.^[25] In 1260, Mamluks of Egypt defeated an alliance of Crusaders and Mongols, some of them converts to Christianity.^[26] Most Mongols in West Asia and in the territory that later became Russia eventually settled on Islam as the most reliable faith: those in East Asia settled on Buddhism. And finally the Mamluks cleared out the last crusaders by taking Antioch in 1268 and Lebanese Tripoli in 1289. The Ottomans later replaced them, but with no Christian power until World War One.^[27]

I assume the theorists of Hamas etc. know all this, and can take a long view.

Beyond the Muslim world, Israeli actions are one of many things that turn more and more of the Global South against the USA. Centred around a Russia-China alliance that the rest of the Global South sees as much less threatening than the USA. Japan might eventually flip.

This changing world must strengthen Moscow’s hopes of forcing Kiev to accept the status quo. To abandon dreams of conquering all of the ethnically-diverse ex-Soviet Ukraine on the basis of a bitterly anti-Soviet and anti-Russian nationalism. To conquer and probably drive out those who wished to return their region to the Greater Russian family.

Britain Gave the World Democracy?

The protesting liberal-left see current wars and the spread of autocracy a surprising, as well as distressful.

As a good system unexpectedly failing.

I see things otherwise. It’s not a strange failure in the system. It is the system. The norm for how the power politics work, if you look behind the fine words and empty promises.^[28]

Britain has had parliamentary government for nearly three and a half centuries: the famous events of 1688. But not even loosely democratic till the last quarter of the 19^th century. An era of limited democracy in Britain began less than a century and a half ago. Reforms in the 1880s made the vote secret, so it was harder for the rich to bully voters.^[29]

Votes were confined to the upper middle class in the grand reform of 1832, but were extended twice, and from the 1880s included a majority of adult men. No women till 1918, and only women over 30 until 1928. Not race-based in mainland Britain, though in Ireland the property qualifications probably meant that a majority of Irish Catholic men had no vote before 1918. But in the wider British Empire, serious self-government was granted only where those defined as the White Race had a comfortable majority: where they had swamped and partly massacred the original inhabitants. When the population was mixed, as in South Africa, voting was officially racist.^[30]

I also suspect that the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution were critically dependent on votes being confined to a rich minority till the 1880s. The rise of industry had been made possible by the emergence of a coherent body of scientific knowledge in Western Europe from the 15^th century. But I can see nothing inevitable about new economics causing the dispossession of most of the English peasantry with Enclosure.^[31] Nor the destruction by factory work of many small-scale skilled trades, or the gross exploitation of workers in the early Industrial Revolution.

My view is that it hinged on the system being parliamentary but not democratic. Autocrats and aristocrats tended to look after the population as a whole. They believed in massive social inequalities, but were less comfortable about major economic inequality. They tended to think that everyone had a right to be looked after in their own ‘station of life’. But the British upper middle class was much more self-centred, and much less willing to think about the likely long-term results. Many had the vote even before 1832, and they were the bulk of the ‘public opinion’ that governments had to worry about.

People speak of ‘British influence’ in the world. For me, it has always been a ruling-class power that was able to keep control even when there was a popular electoral majority. I’ve been calling it Upper London: the habit of speaking of government policies as the acts of ‘London’ obscures the fact that the actual policies are nothing like what most Londoners want.

The legacy that Upper London gave the world was never Popular Power: that was done by successive revolutions in the United States, in France, and in Tsarist Russia. In Britain, a voting minority who were economically privileged squeezed the rest.

In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, many were shocked that Britain could be a rich society full of extreme poverty. And after four decades of Thatcherism, many are shocked again.

Things were always more complex in the USA. Farmers and workers got the vote several decades earlier. And regional power was much more diffuse. New York is the single most influential city financially, and maybe in literature. But the visual media are strongest round Los Angeles. Politicians go to Washington, which was created to be a forum without strong self-identity. So for the US equivalent of Upper London, I hit on the phrase Mahan USA. Admiral Mahan was the single most influential person giving the USA the global role it had previously avoided.^[32] One among many, and lukewarm about early US imperialism. Global expansionism was implicit in taking the Philippines from Spain, crushing those Filipinos who had wished to rule themselves. And incidentally, the US suppression of Filipino wishes was an early instance of the widespread use of ‘waterboarding’; torture by controlled suffocation.

Mahon was not the only man involved. But he was central, and he makes a neat soundbite. Theodor Roosevelt had anti-capitalist ideas that have been banished from his party, the Republicans. Ideals that are currently marginal in US electoral politics as a whole. Hearst with his newspapers succeeded only when he was going with the flow: he was originally part of the Progressive Left, but supported Hitler in the 1930s.^[33] Mahon does not have political baggage like that.

The USA could have been something much better than what it became. Mahan was a significant part of the wrong turn.

Britain would have done better without the global ambitions of Upper London, just as Sweden and Switzerland did fine after giving up dreams of a wider empire within Europe. By having no direct connection with Europe’s imperial rule of the rest of the world.

Denmark also did fine after failing to become a major global imperial power, though they had a small stake in slave-grown Caribbean sugar.^[34]

The USA was begun by people wishing to make their own lives separate from European wars and empires. And also determined to go on robbing Native Americans, and not wanting to have African-Americans anywhere if they could not be slaves. But a Mahan USA was not the original goal. Trump is popular because he will retreat from it, though I doubt he would be willing to put it in those terms.

The USA as Redefined by Admiral Mahan

The Mahan USA supported by Upper London interferes everywhere. And calls it a threat to democracy when a voting majority dares thwart them.

And are not always clever about it.

I remember from back in the 1960s, it was a scandal when someone discovered CIA funding to the Moderate Left in Britain.^[35] Done even though front organisations were used, and would have seemed OK to the recipients.^[36]

At that time, the USA foolishly mixed Dirty Tricks and Soft Power in a single recognisable organisation. A diverse body – I remember hearing that the intelligence-gathering parts of the CIA correctly reported the likely failure of the various stunts in Indochina that other branches of the CIA were involved in. But no one doubts that torture and assassination were done globally.

They have got it better organised now. Separate bodies, some of which may be genuinely funded by right-wing multi-millionaires. Or by Imperial Liberals.

Or relationships may be complex.

Having read a fairly pro-Soros book about his life, I can’t help noticing that George Soros showed no sign of having inherited even his father’s middling business talents, till he moved to New York.^[37] Once there, he became a genius at speculation. Hailed as a philosopher after some empty blather about quantum effects. He seems unaware of Chaos Dynamics,^[38] which I’d see as more relevant. Where the failure of useful determinism is confirmed rather than speculative.

Could Soros have been created as a much cleverer sort of CIA front? Fed tips from stuff that the CIA was not supposed to use, but would come across in their legitimate work?

An operator where actual CIA funding would have been unacceptable?

Whatever, overall Imperial Liberal policy is not only dishonest and unjust, but increasingly backfiring. New Right politics has caused spasms of harder-line nationalism, including Brexit.

Attempts at a people-driven ‘Capitalist International’ have had little electoral success. The New Right needs to ‘bulk up’ with nationalism and with sly appeals to racism, as with the absurd Rwanda ‘asylum’ scheme in Britain. But they have been prone to lose control. And working capitalists are often bigots.

It is falling apart, and deserves to fall.

5459 words.

^[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1913/08/press.htm

^[2] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Bliaring-about-Xinjiang-and-about-Islamic-Extremism

^[3] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/42-china/tibet/tibet-and-international-law/

^[4] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/42-china/tibet/the-truth-about-the-dalai-lama/

^[5] https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams/Nazi-Germany-Was-Defeated-in-Russia

^[6] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Ukraine-Western-Media-in-2014-Reported-Nazi-Links

^[7] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/45-1-more-on-fascism-the-world-wars/britains-purely-imperialist-war-against-nazi-germany/

^[8] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/why-churchill-admired-mussolini/

^[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas#Birth_and_family

^[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin#Ancestry