Re: [Marxism] Could Socialists Not Use "Great" before Britain!

[Bill Quimby <wquimby@xxxxxxx>]

On origins...

If we go back to the latin Magna - as suggested by several in this
thread - then the transformation to "Great" Britain is in error. The
Latin Magna meant "greater" as in "the land over there", "the land
beyond", "the land that lies outside this land". In that sense the
lands colonized by the early Greeks on the Italian boot were known as
"Magna Graecia" see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_graecia

- Bill

ï wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Nov 2007 17:07:47 +1300, John Edmundson wrote:
> 
>> Ireland has never been part of Britain, great or otherwise. The UK is
>> the United Kingdom of Great Britain and (now) Northern Ireland. Great
>> Britain relates to the whole island, including England, Scotland and
>> Wales and predates the existence of those individual nations, or even
>> the concept of nations as we understand them. 
> 
>   "Great Britain" is the name of Europe's largest island. "Great" 
> compared to "Lesser Britain", i.e. "la Bretagne" in French, the half 
> island on the north-west corner of France. Both are geographical names, 
> and do not describe political entities. Well, in the case of "Great 
> Britain", it is something ambigouus, but that is because there is no 
> real nation-state on that island. A symptom of that is that most 
> politicians on Great Britain speak of their country just as "this 
> country", avoiding to give it a name. 
> 
>> So I don't have a problem with the term, but I do tend 
>> not to use the term UK as that does tend to suggest 
>> the legitimacy of British domination of Northern Ireland.
> 
>   Yes and no, but "United Kingdom" is the proper name of the state as 
> defined by its central government, its bodies of armed men to secure the 
> dominance of its ruling class, its borders and customs barriers. 
> 
>   So it depends on what entity you want to speak about. The bourgeois 
> and imperialist state which is waging war in Iraq, Afghanistan etc, is 
> actually the "United Kingdom" (leave aside the "of"), not the island 
> Great Britain. 
>  
>    I am just looking at the 'Treaty of Canterbury' on the building of 
> the Channel tunnel, and there the persons enacting are described as "The 
> president of the French republic" (I retranslate from the French text) 
> and "Her majesty the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and 
> Northern Ireland and her other Dominions and Territories, Chef of the 
> Commonwealth" (maybe better "Head of the Commonwealth"); which reminds 
> us that "Crown dependencies", entities like the Channel Islands (Jersey 
> etc) and the Isle of Man (in the Irish Sea) are not part of the United 
> Kingdom, but only federated with it (which finds also its reflections in 
> treaties concerning the European Union, where those territories have 
> always to be mentioned specially). 
> 
>   After discussion for some time about British railway matters with 
> British people and learning more about those terms by that, I started 
> some months ago to use "Great Britain" mostly in the form of "on Great 
> Britain" instead of "in Great Britain". 
> 
>   The whole matter is very confusing, since there never came about a 
> real nation state on Great Britain. 
> 
>   Have a look at the english language Wikipedia disambiguation entry for 
> "Britain":
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain> and be amused. 
> 
>   Let me remind comrades in closing that "Cuba" is also a ambigouus 
> term, meaning a) short form for the state "Republic of Cuba"; b) the 
> island Cuba, c) the archipelago of that island and its surrounding 
> lesser islands and cays. 
> 
> 
> Comradely yours, 
> L.W.
> 
> Lïko Willms
> Frankfurt, Germany
> --------------------------------
> visit http://www.mlwerke.de Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotzki in German
> 
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