Big Orange Head = Irish Protestants!
Seriously, the only correlation I can think of is the late Victorian/Edwardian-era British national guilt over the injustices of empire. While Churchill, ever the imperialist, never batted an eye concerning the “righteousness” of British Empire, liberals, on the other hand, mostly young intellectuals in Parliament, the arts and academia, and mostly of the upper classes, began questioning the ethics and brutality of empire about the time of the first Boer War.
There began a serious liberal backlash after Arthur Conan Doyle’s exposé of Belgian King Leopold’s troops’ treatment of natives in the Congo in his journalism and in his popular book, The Heart of Darkness. It wasn’t long before Brits began to realize they had behaved just as cruelly within their own colonies. The Brits began experiencing cognitive dissonance on a national level. Even the Suffragette movement took time to get into the act by integrating complaints against the injustices into their speeches.
The liberals were countered with jingoist British writers like Kipling and essayist Hilaire Belloc. Belloc became famous for the short poem he wrote in answer to the “Liberal defeatist clamor” during the second, strictly punitive, 1898 invasion of Sudan (in which Churchill took part as a lieutenant in the mounted Hussars) in retribution for the total annihilation of General Gordon’s army by the Mahdi’s tribesmen at Khartoum 13 years earlier:
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not”
It was coming to a head just before WWI. But Churchill’s personal notes and diaries and those of his private secretaries show that he never questioned the rightness of the British Empire.
Likewise, we seriously began questioning our imperial motives and strategies after My Lai, a national sentiment that anchored itself into our consciousness after the Church Committee revelations and we’ve been wrestling with it ever since. It has increasingly affected our national self esteem and confidence as a people. As our political influence and economic power slowly, incrementally wains over the decades, I would say we are at about where the British were in 1912, just before WWI.
This is the only correlation I can think of, but I seriously doubt that all of this was going through your head when you awoke. The Big Orange Head = Orangemen is actually more likely, as unlikely as that is.
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