The Undocumented Mark Steyn Read Online Free Page B

folks to figure out. The real loss is more elusive and more profound. For generations there have been Yawaru and Magati Ke songs: no one will sing them ever again. There are stories of Yawaru and Magati Ke heroes and scoundrels: no one will know them, no one will tell them. And no one will care, because only a handful of anthropologists will be aware they ever existed. The extinction of Yawaru and Magati Ke not only obliterates their future but their past.
    The death of even the smallest, meanest culture is a humbling event.
    Which brings us to Fred Thompson. The other day, Senator Thompson was on the campaign trail and told his audience: “This country has shed more blood for the liberty of other countries than all other countries put together.”
    More than “all other countries put together”? As I told our American friends, I’m the most pro-American non-American on the planet, but if that’s the new default braggadocio, include me out. The Washington Post ’s attempt to refute Thompson by championing the Soviets was as predictable as it was absurd—the Reds certainly shed a lot of blood but not obviously in the cause of liberty. Yet slightly more startling was the number of pro-Fred American conservatives who sent me scornful emails belittling the efforts of the Commonwealth.
    As old-timers will tell you at Royal Canadian Legion halls, the Dominion “shed more blood” proportionately than the United States in the Second World War. Newfoundland—not yet part of Canada—had a higher per-capita casualty rate than America. No surprise about that: Newfs and Canucks sailed off to battle two years ahead of the Yanks. And, if we’re talking hard numbers, almost as many Britons died in the war as Americans, despite the latter having thrice the population.
    To this, my U.S. correspondents responded that that was all very well but these chaps were fighting for King and Empire rather than engaging in a selfless campaign of global liberation for noble reasons. Arguing the respective motivations of a dead Canuck on Juno Beach and a dead Yank on Omaha is a shrill and unworthy argument, and anyway I generally incline to Patton’s line that the object isn’t to die for your country but to make the other sonofabitch die for his. But imagine what the state of liberty in the world would be like had the British Empire not decided to soldier on alone, against all the odds and all the expert advice, after the fall of France in 1940.
    Here’s another thought experiment: imagine no Pearl Harbor, no casus belli to draw in the Americans. And yet somehow the mangy old British lion and its loyal cubs in the dominions managed to win all by themselves, and at all those war cemeteries on the Continent there was no Old Glory, just Union Jacks and Red Ensigns. Fred Thompson would not be able to make his claimsto American über-exceptionalism über alles because the romance of America the Liberator would not exist. Saving Private Ryan would be about some bloke from the Cheshire Regiment, or maybe even the Princess Patricias. Hollywood would be forced to do as it did up to the Thirties: its tales of derring-do on far-flung shores would be mostly British—the Bengal Lancers et al.
    Instead, by 1945 Hollywood was making films like Objective: Burma , in which what was in real life an Anglo-Aussie campaign became onscreen an all-American one. British public opinion resented that enough to chase the movie out of the country. Fifty-five years later, the film U-571 told the story of a critical episode in the Battle of the Atlantic—the capture of a German submarine’s Enigma cipher machine by the Allies. In humdrum reality, it was a British operation. In Hollywood, it was left to. . . well, guess who? By this stage, British public opinion just gave a shrug, and left the picture to flop all on its ownsome.
    The Americans entered the war, and they won it, and they won big, unlike the Brits and Canadians. So it’s theirs to mythologize, as Senator