Brit-Am Historical Reports (30 August 2016, 26 Av, 5776)
Contents:
1. Why We Should Give Thanks for the British Empire By H. W. CROCKER III
2. The French Coronated King of England who Never Was. King Louis of England?
3. Jewish Purification: Stone Vessel Workshop Discovered in Galilee
4. Ukrainians and Cossacks named Yavan (Greece), Tartars as Kedar
5. Archaeologists Unearth [Aramaic] Magic Spells And Ancient Skeletons in Serbia
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1. Why We Should Give Thanks for the British Empire By H. W. CROCKER III
http://spectator.org/36542_forstmann-big-hearted-prodigy/
November 23, 2011, 10:09 am
Forwarded by:
origin@yahoogroups.com
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Brit-Am Preliminary Comment:
The article below says that the founders of the USA had the conscious intention of creating their own Empire. The British (against whom the early Americans rebelled) may have been in the right in some respects. Nevertheless from the point of view of history and the fate of humanity and of the Israelite peoples it was better that the USA became independent and did its own thing.
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As we Americans celebrate on this day of gluttony, football, and prayer (not necessarily in that order), we might offer up thanks for the institution that gave us our glorious traditions of liberty and prosperity. That institution would be the British Empire, which not only put us here, but gave us Christianity, limited government, and a system of rights founded in British common law. Somehow many of us tend to overlook that  something to do with 1776, most likely, and the idea that we rebelled against the tyranny of effete, toffee-nosed British snobs.
But really, it wasn't quite like that. As every American schoolboy should know, but probably doesn't, the British colonies of North America were the lightest taxed, most liberally governed (in the classical small government sense), freest, most prosperous, and most equitable portions of the eighteenth century world. The very rights the colonists believed they were fighting to defend were the traditional rights of Englishmen.
Indeed, many of the British generals assigned to put down the rebels agreed with them, and only parted ways with the colonists, and then reluctantly, when rebellious Americans took up arms against representatives of British authority.
Of course, some Britons,  equally devoted to British ideals of freedom and limited government,  scoffed at talk of  'oppression' and mocked colonial hypocrisy. Samuel Johnson famously quipped in his essayTaxation No Tyranny, 'how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?'
Rudyard Kipling took a similarly cynical view, 'Our American colonies, having no French to fear any longer [after the French and Indian War], wanted to be free from our control altogether. They utterly refused to pay a penny of the two hundred million pounds the war had cost us; and they equally refused to maintain a garrison of British soldiers'. When our Parliament proposed in 1764 to make them pay a small fraction of the cost of the late war, they called it 'oppression,' and prepared to rebel.
In this view, the War of American Independence was actually the War of American Ingratitude. King George III saw things as they were: 'The rebellious war now levied [in 1775], is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.'
That was precisely right, though it's a shock to some Americans who blithely assume that 'empire' and 'America' are like oil and water. The Founders certainly didn't think so. George Washington referred to America as 'our rising Empire.' Thomas Jefferson wrote of America as an 'empire of liberty.' Alexander Hamilton in Federalist One called America 'an empire, in many respects the most interesting in the world.' And John Adams and Benjamin Franklin both envisaged that the United States - because of its potential wealth, size, and resources - would become the seat of a greater empire than the British. The Founders were not opposed to 'empire.' They merely wanted an empire of their own, and were in fact appalled at British attempts to limit the colonists' expansion west across the Appalachians, which the British had designated as Indian territory in the hope of avoiding costly Indian wars.
When the Founders set about framing the Constitution, many of them thought as John Dickinson (one Delaware's delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787) did, 'Experience must be our only guide, reason may mislead us.' The Americans actual experience of liberty, rights, and limited government had come, part and parcel, from the British Empire, as had their confidence in practical experience and their rightful suspicion of reform based on reason alone, which goes a long way to explaining why the American Revolution didn't turn out like the bloody and destructive French one.
The British Empire gave birth not only to the United States, but to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with their similar traditions of freedom, countries with which most Americans feel a sense of kinship. The Empire also created the free trade centers of Hong Kong and Singapore. It was responsible for the abolition of the slave trade on a global scale. It fought, and won, two world wars, with America eventually at its side; and the Empire was, in its declining phase, our most loyal ally in the Cold War.
So today, as we tuck into a great feast, play touch football in the yard, and give thanks for our many blessings, let us give thanks as well to the British Empire that gave us our liberty, language, and laws, and remember that, despite a few in-law unpleasantries (now 200 years old), of all the available families of nations, our Mother Country was the best.
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2. The French Coronated King of England who Never Was.
King Louis of England?
http://www.catherinehanley.co.uk/historical-background/king-louis-of-england
Louis VIII of France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_VIII_of_France#Policy_on_Jews
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Extract:
On 14 June 1216, Louis captured Winchester and soon controlled over half of the English kingdom.[13] But just when it seemed that England was his, King John's death in October 1216 caused many of the rebellious barons to desert Louis in favour of John's nine-year-old son, Henry III.
With the Earl of Pembroke acting as regent, a call for the English "to defend our land" against the French led to a reversal of fortunes on the battlefield. After his army was beaten at theBattle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217 and his naval forces were defeated at the Battle of Sandwich on 24 August 1217, Louis was forced to make peace on English terms. In 1216 and 1217, Prince Louis also tried to conquer Dover Castle, but without success.
The principal provisions of the Treaty of Lambeth were an amnesty for English rebels, a pledge from Louis not to attack England again, and 10,000 marks to be given to Louis. In return for this payment, Louis agreed he had never been the legitimate king of England.
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3. Jewish Purification: Stone Vessel Workshop Discovered in Galilee
A 2,000-year-old stone production center points to ritual purity
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/jewish-purification-stone-vessel-workshop-galilee/?mqsc=E3847242&utm_source=WhatCountsEmail&utm_medium=BHDDaily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=E6B825
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4. Ukrainians and Cossacks named Yavan (Greece), Tartars as Kedar
Nathan (Nata) ben Moses Hannover (d. ca. 1663) wrote the work "Yeven Mezulah" (i.e. "Vally of Darkness," Venice, 1653). This describes the course of the Ukrainian-Cossack Khmelnytsky Uprising in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from a Jewish perspective.
He refers to the Ukrainians and Cossacks as Yevanim i.e. Greeks. This is assumed to be due to their adherence at the time to the Greek Orthodox Catholic rites.
[Nowadays ca. 70% native Ukrainians are Greek Orthodox (Moscow affiliated); ca. 15% Greek Orthodox (Kiev affiliated); and 6% Roman Catholoc Eastern [Greek-speaking] Rite.
The Turkish Muslim Tartars are referred to by Hannover as Kedar.
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5. Archaeologists Unearth [Aramaic] Magic Spells And Ancient Skeletons In Serbia
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ANE-2/conversations/topics/16035;_ylc=X3oDMTJzZDcxNWhnBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzE3MjM1NTE4BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTg0MTQ2NwRtc2dJZAMxNjAzNQRzZWMDZG1zZwRzbGsDdm1zZwRzdGltZQMxNDcwOTA1Nzk0
KOSTOLAC, Serbia, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Archaeologists are trying to decipher magic spells etched onto tiny rolls of gold and silver that they found alongside skeletons of humans buried almost 2,000 years ago.
'The alphabet is Greek, that much we know. The language is Aramaic - it's a Middle Eastern mystery to us,' Miomir Korac, chief archaeologist at the site in eastern Serbia, told Reuters.
The skeletons were found at the foot of a massive coal-fired power station where searches are being carried out before another unit of the electricity plant is built on the site of an ancient Roman city.
Last week, after carefully brushing away soil from the bones, Korac's team found two amulets made of lead that, when opened, were each found to contain rolls of precious metal - silver and gold - covered in symbols and writing.
They believe the inscriptions are magic spells, taken to the grave to invoke divine powers to perform good or evil.
'We read the names of a few demons, that are connected to the territory of modern-day Syria,' archaeologist Ilija Dankovic said at the dig, as more skeletons from the 4th century A.D. were being uncovered.
The fragile, golden and silver scrolls - which once unrolled look like rectangles of foil similar in size to a sweet wrapper - may never be fully understood.