{"id":2945,"date":"2010-07-03T18:25:44","date_gmt":"2010-07-03T17:25:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=2945"},"modified":"2012-09-29T17:21:12","modified_gmt":"2012-09-29T16:21:12","slug":"the-don-pacifico-affair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=2945","title":{"rendered":"The Don Pacifico affair"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was at a dinner party this weekend and met a lovely couple. He was a management consultant and Greek, while she was a lecturer in modern history and Jewish. The odd way that my mind works put this information about them together and came up with a memory of a school history lesson that must have been about 1963. In this lesson, we learned about the Don Pacifico affair<\/p>\n<p>The story was so odd that it has stuck in my memory all this time. David Pacifico was a Portuguese Jew born in Gibraltar (which made him a British subject). He had business interests in Greece where his home was was destroyed by anti-semitic rioters and the Greek Government refused to compensate him.\u00a0 So, in 1850, British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston sent gunboats to Greece to enforce his claim.<\/p>\n<p>You think I&#8217;m making this up? You can check out the facts <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Don_Pacifico_affair\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The Don Pacific affair was a terrible instance of &#8216;gunboat diplomacy&#8217;. The mentality still exists in international relations which explains why the Americans and British invaded Iraq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was at a dinner party this weekend and met a lovely couple. He was a management consultant and Greek, while she was a lecturer in modern history and Jewish. The odd way that my mind works put this information about them together and came up with a memory of a school history lesson that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2945"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9563,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2945\/revisions\/9563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}