No Ozzy, it's true. The main difference between someone else (not speaking of anyone in particular, here) who staunchly defends his nation's past choices and me is that I don't try and hide behind poor excuses to make my country look better.

Italy, during the twenty years when Baldy was in power, was armed only slightly better than during the first world war (and those who accurately study that war from Italy's point of view are punctually horrified at our soldiers' equipment and amazed we managed in the end to be on the winning side), and hardly under the sole point of view of air power and was woefully unready to enter war in 1940, having won the various skirmishes up to then only thanks to have resorted to cheating (too long a list to be reported here)... but then... when in the buttons room there's a self-important delusional scoundrel whose only hopes were to use the (fortunately never happened) victory of OTHERS to hog something for himself, never exposing his sorry hide but throwing the best men of a generation to the wolves in the vainglorious hope to make himself look good... this is what happens.

And looking at the present, I can safely say that my countrymen have learned NOTHING from past disasters.

This is the difference between those who make distinctions between their own against the others and me. What I was complaining about in my last post here, though, was not the attempt of making Italy look bad in itself, but the BBC's not-so covert attempt to almost say: "If it wasn't for them starting, we wouldn't have followed suit"...

Yeah right. Pull the other one, Brit. Pull the other one.

It is probably nothing and I agree with you that it was a poor choice of wording... yet...

Forgive me. I can maybe build a phrase with a poor choice of words, as I'm not a pro at writing and English being a second, mostly self-taught language for me (school English was useless... had I remained with its highly appreciated skills I'd be barely able to write and read "the book in on the table" and understand NOTHING of a speech), it can be almost expected of me, and maybe excused with the routine procedure of saying "he doesn't know what he's talking about"... but coming a pro of writing, like a journalist SHOULD be, it's just another animal.

And that's EXACTLY that roused my ire. If you're a professional of written words (because I dare hope the BBC uses such people, and not improvised two cents paparazzi) that kind of "wording mismatch" could be read as a purposefully placed slur. That's why I wrote I expected better from BBC.

Things being as they are, it's fault of no one hereabout. Let's close this matter here.