Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Games with Frontiers

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‘A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing’
Neville Chamberlain, PM of Great Britain, talking about Czechoslovakia in 1938

Back in 1963 there was an significant milestone in the transition to modern warfare when the the name of the British Ministry of War was changed to the Ministry of Defence. Many other euphemisms about war have been used since then with ‘police actions’, ‘military advisers’ and many others becoming common.

At the same time the absurd situation arose, as the age of empires passed away and the British Empire was dismantled, that the only two remaining true empires, based in Russia and China, posed as anti-imperial powers, with the pejorative description ‘imperialist’ mainly applied by them to Western Powers who had already lost or given away their foreign territories. (more…)