British Invasion

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Credit goes to Chris Bucholz of Cracked.com

In 1871, a story called "The Battle of Dorking" was published in an English magazine that depicted an invasion of England by some unnamed villains who happened to speak German.

As depicted in the story, the British military is woefully underprepared for such an invasion and is quickly rolled over, the British Empire falling and the world never knowing the Beatles.


Interestingly, the British loved the idea of being invaded by a foreign power, and hundreds of books with similar plots soon flooded the market, each one of them featuring England being invaded by basically every country on the planet. The Great War in England in 1897 had France and Russia as the aggressors and Germany as the ally, because why not? The same author got the sides right a few years later when he wrote The Invasion of 1910, this time featuring Germany in their traditional place as villains. That work is made particularly hilarious by the fact that it was soon pirated and published illegally by the Germans, who translated it and changed the ending to make the Germans win.


Perhaps the best known work in the genre is H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which swaps in Martians for Germans, but otherwise maintains all the London-stomping themes.


The appeal of these stories is obvious; they fulfill a kind of persecution fantasy, allowing a group to see themselves as the victims, fighting an absolutely moral war (what could be more moral than defending your own home?). And although the specific genre of "everyone invades Britain" has faded away, this concept has actually stuck around in other formats.

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