The Irish are more a lost people now than the Jews were when they wandered in the wilderness for four decades.
Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Since when did the US colonise a country? I think most of those other ones you can apply to just about any nation, so why single out the US…(except for civil war- Australia has never had a war “knock on wood”). By the way it’s Australia Day today 26th January, which the woke have labelled “Invasion Day”. Having said that – Happy Australia Day.
An important note on the negativity. My sons, the older three having spent at least part of their time in public school, and the ones who have gone on to college, said it isn’t just the sins of the past. Yes, much of American/Western history focus is about genocide, racism, bigotry, imperialism, sexism, oppression and such. But know also that when things that appear a positive are brought up in their courses, especially by their college years, they were typically framed as ulteriorly motivated. So the Civil War was only about slavery, but nobody actually fought to end slavery. Motivation was simply power or greed, or opposing slavery was an afterthought or something to stick it to the South about. Same with WWII. The only reason we fought was because we had to, and there were no lofty motives beyond quest for empire and ginning up business for the military industrial complex. Americans didn’t care what Japan or Germany did, it was all just an excuse. So most history focuses on the sins of America (and the West when appropriate). When anything we might consider good comes along, however, then it’s framed as if the motive must be anything but a good one. Which is tough for those who think we can argue against focus on the sins by at least pointing out the good in our history. And it does no good to point out the absurdity of such an approach. It is what it is. Whether absurd or not, this is what young generations have been learning for some time.
Last summer I read “The Devil and Bella Dodd” (by Dr. Paul Kengor, PhD and Dr. Mary Nicholas, MD). It’s a big part of the story of how we got where we are today with the state of American education. My biggest takeaway was that after her conversion, Mrs. Dodd wanted to get Americans teaching students the value of the many wonderful achievements of Western Civilization. (She wanted to start a college especially, but alas that never happened.) Building up the West, and transmitting a love of our history to the coming generations is going to have to happen through homeschooling these days, I think.
RR-
Working on it in my small way in my homeschool.
Most people I meet react favorably, some ask questions. It is almost exclusively liberals so worry if my kids will “keep up” with the public schools. This tends to be their subtle relay of asking if they’re being indoctrinated correctly.
“Since when did the US colonise a country?” Well, we did somehow end up with Hawaii, and we’ve been stepped in to assert our interests in the Caribbean and Central America at times. I’ve never studied Philippine history, but we may have gotten heavy-handed with them too. Not a bad record, not perfect. We’ve got a lot to be proud of though.
I like the way I’ve heard Brits talk about their history. They don’t get defensive or self-accusatory. People who weren’t us did some good and bad things and got us here, with some decent principles and some land. We can honor the good they did and learn some lessons from the bad. I’d say that white-washing is as bad conceptually as nonsensical denouncing, but I haven’t seen much white-washing in my lifetime. You may have to go back a full century in the US for that. Even the 1950’s were pretty candid about our failings, but more focused on our virtues compared to our enemies.
That political cartoon is one of the stupidest pieces of propaganda I have ever seen.
Trump should punish Ireland by making it a US territory…..all of it. Make them drive on the right side of the road. Deport illegal immigrants. Force them to watch The Three Stooges
I have a wee bit of Irish ancestry…one great great grandmother who married my Scot great great grandfather in Allegany County, Maryland. To this day I have distant relatives there.
We’re not colonizers, we’re liberators! Next up? We liberate
TrumplandGreenland from those Danish colonizers!Ireland use to have cultural barriers to the pathologies of occidental culture. Now
their chatterati imbibes and regurgitates the worst of it.
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Please note that Ireland’s cities absorbed and employed only a modest segment of their redundant agricultural population. A larger share migrated to Britain and an even larger share to North America. You’d be hard put to locate another country which shares this pattern.
Art:
An old Irishman reminded me many years ago that more Irishmen died defending the British Empire than died fighting it (including a large number of VC awardees in WWI). The Irish are good at assimilating to their perceived advantage and become “company men” quite readily, whether in the British or other European armies, or American politics, provided certain aspects of the culture are respected. When these were not (as in the case of the San Patricios in the Mexican War), they will rebel. Alas, the things for which they would fight (like identity or Catholicism) fade, and the “company man” mentality rules all.
BTW I’m descended from Dublin immigrants who came to Spanish West Florida in the 1760s and helped found Mobile, Alabama. Quite a few of us went the Spanish route and the last viceroy of New Spain was one Juan O’Donaghue, the first president of Chile Bernardo O’Higgins.
I just noticed “arriving late for WW1 and WW2”. Let’s call those “helping Europe but not as quick as the cartoonist wanted”. There’s also Vietnam and Iraq, let’s call those “helping others that the cartoonist doesn’t care about”. And McCarthyism and nuclear weapons, I’m going to call them “helping the cartoonist in un-pretty ways”.
The Irish Republic never arrived at all for World War II, maintaining diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany to the very end. During World War I, the Easter rising of 1916 was undertaken while Great Britain was in a death struggle with Germany. The Irish rebels sought military aid from Germany.
In answer to the question asked by the cartoon character:
‘YES!’