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Post by sheepy on Jun 11, 2023 13:20:44 GMT
There's little doubt that without external inputs Africa could not sustain its present population let alone the four billion projected for later this century.
But the ultimate optimum size of its population is something for Africans to decide not starry-eyed do-gooders in the West.
So do they get to decide what to do with all their mineral wealth too or will Europeans still get to take all that while they watch them starve? They have pretty much, give it to the Chinese in return for having investment in return. |
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Post by sheepy on Jun 11, 2023 13:41:29 GMT
Don't get me wrong I hope it works out better for them, but as the Yanks and the Chinese are both offering global solutions as the leaders of globalisation, I am not so sure the Yanks won't find a way to bomb them back to the Stone Age.
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Post by Dan Dare on Jun 11, 2023 16:39:16 GMT
About 1995, I think I first read Churchill As I Knew Him, by Bonham Carter. Later, I read Roy Jenkins' Churchill, and another of which I forget the details.
Over the years, I've also read several papers, reviews and publications from the International Churchill Society and elsewhere — I guess we've all been bombarded with Churchill fact and fiction, myths and legends, for decades... Jenkins’s biography was a good choice; he delivers a well-rounded assessment of Churchill’s life, career and legacy, steering a reliable middle path between the hagiography of Gilbert, the official biographer, and the character assassination of an Irving or a Charmley.
Jenkins was certainly not an ideological soulmate, and during his early political life would have considered himself a staunch opponent of Churchill the politician and all he stood for. Nevertheless, he was able to produce a ‘warts and all’ biography that was scrupulously fair, to the extent that he ends it as follows: “…When I started writing this book, I thought that Gladstone [the subject of an earlier Jenkins biography], was by a narrow margin, the greater man …[but] I have changed my mind. I now put Churchill, with all his idiosyncrasies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.” [912] With regard to Churchill’s second term in office, Jenkins is also generous in his assessment: “…It would it no doubt have been better if he had retired in 1953. The first two years of his second government were a considerable success and played a constructive role in the acceptance by the Conservative half of Britain that in the post-war world the clock could not be put back to the 1930s…The penalty he paid for his adhesiveness was that, in his later retirement, he was less consulted by his one-time subordinates than if he gone more easily. That was a small price to set against his forty-seven-year-span in Cabinet office and his one great and one better-than-average premiership.” [897] |
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