In case any of us Brits though it was an American idea:
“We reserve the right to bomb niggers.”
(David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister 1916-1922, from his 1932 diary as cited in V. G. Kiernan’s “European Empires from Conquest to Collapse”, Fontana 1982)
I thought myself beyond surprise at the more forthright utterances of our forebears, but this one floored me. Of course his use of the n-word would have elicited less disapproval at the time of writing than it does now—and referred to anyone with darker skin—but even putting the word itself aside this is a shocking declaration of the defining character of Western foreign policy towards the East and Africa, a character that continues to this day.
