Britons are nostalgic for the British Empire based on a one-sided picture which the peoples of the former colonies do not agree with.

It is ironic that colonial laws imposed to help Britain repress the colonized people are now being used by some of them to repress others of them. One of these laws was imprisonment without trial. In South Africa it was used by the apartheid state to imprison those who criticized apartheid. In Israel it is used today to imprison Palestinians.

I disagree with the claim that the evacuation of Dunkirk was an "ignoble retreat". It was a retreat, for sure, but there is nothing ignoble about retreating in good order. Sometimes — as in the case of Dunkirk — retreating is exactly what an army needs to do to win the war. A good commander must have the moral courage to retreat when necessary.