Happy St. Patrick’s Day

Coincidentally I was thinking of that Michael Lewis story last night, because I started reading the book ‘The Burning Of Bridget Cleary’, which is about folklore and fairies. (or more specifically the process of modernisation. Admittedly the story was set in 1895)
Here’s a quick review, most behind a paywall :

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n01/declan-kiberd/astride-a-white-horse

“In the spring of 1998 a Dutch TV crew arrived in the parish of Moyvane, Co. Kerry. They were making a documentary about poetry and landscape, and interviewed a farmer about a fairy-mound in one of his fields near the village. He explained that for many local people it was a forbidden place, and that he had never dared to plough it over because of the distress it would cause. As he was saying this, his mobile phone rang. The TV crew carried on filming as he transacted his business. ‘Tell us, sir,’ the interviewer said when he’d finished, ‘a modern man like you surely does not believe in the little people.’ ‘Of course I don’t,’ he chortled. ‘But I’m very frightened of ’em.’”

And my grandfather (from west Donegal), from what I remember of him, spoke like that. And he was a pharmacist, so I’d assume to some degree a man of science.
I’m not saying people neccesarily believed in them up until recently, but that might be beside the point. They certainly used them for purposes of storytelling and explanation, and carried the superstition over into other parts of their lifes.
Im sorry for going off topic, but I was genuinely thinking about it this morning.

Damn, I was thinking of posting some Flann O’Brien, but (now that I look at it again) I think it might involve what you call fairies of a sort:

“Fergus (‘The Pooka’) MacPhellimey, a species of rural demon, was born of respectable but poor parents in the County Cork, in 1876, a year memorable for the ravages of potato scale and shepherds’ scurvy. His father, known far and wide as The Crack MacPhellimey, was a hard working devil-tinker who attended fairs for the purpose of seducing farmers’ boys from righteousness by offering them spurious coins of his own manufacture which (by means of a secret chemical process) had the effect of rotting the pocket or mattress which contained them and imparting a contagious dry tetter to the human body – the object of the traffic being to make the afflicted boys utter curses and ungodly maledictions.”

It goes on like that for a little while.

John, is it about a bicycle?

@Phil: Well, yeah, except I think it’s a reference to Adams possibly being guilty of a brutal murder and, perhaps, being a master of mad bombers who blew up women and children.

It is like Charles Manson – Sinn Fein never got more than 2% of the vote in the Republic of Ireland during the troubles. Gerry Adams has gotten his image remade far more charitably than he deserves.

But whatever you may think about Gerry Adams’ career as a mass murderer, there is no denying that he has been of enormous service to Her Majesty’s Government.

Wars start when there are enough people, on both sides, who would fight rather than make peace. Wars end when, on at least one side, some of those who were ready to fight are dead and enough of the others have changed their minds. It looks as if the unique aspect of the contribution of Adams, and his allies, to the peace process was to make sure that enough of those on his side were deceived into thinking that defeat was victory; and that enough of those would never change their minds were assisted to become dead.

The article’s jumps into southern politics do (IMO) show signs of being almost completely wrongheaded. Certainly the relationship between Gerry Adams and the southern electorate is much more contested than he implies, and not even close to being resolved. It’s one thing to win a seat in Louth, another to head the main party in government.
The rise of Sinn Fein also doesn’t represent any sort of support for armed Republicanism or legitimisation of the Provos but (1) dissatisfaction with the other political parties (2) a lot of constituency work by Sinn Fein in (mainly) working class urban areas. The reason a lot of people might not ‘care’ about his past (and a LOT do) is mostly explainable generationally, that a lot didnt grow up with the Troubles in any meaningful way. (Or who, perhaps, are more undecided on whether he’s the man who brought the IRA kicking and screaming into the peace process, or whether he’s the man who brought them kicking and screaming into a pointless war) The idea that Irish journalists dont speak about his IRA past is also nonsensical. Rightly or wrongly this is more or less all a large section of them do speak about.
I agree with Phil that the comparison to Manson pathologises him. (as does most rhetoric now around the North, that they were all criminals, or victims of history etc This doesnt really allow for the sort of peace building a lot of former combatants on both sides have led the way in, from the bottom up) It also misses all the other questions he could have asked, about how reconcilliation will work in the north. How you can ever get justice for the innocent murdered in the Troubles. How do democracies deal with individuals or organisations with violent pasts. What kind of moral choices did the peace process require, were they worth it. How do you hold the likes of Adams accountable. What does that even mean. I mean he dances around these questions, but doesnt deal with them explicitly.
I agree with those who say Adams is responsible for great, unjustifiable acts of evil. I also dont know where acknowledging that truism gets anything. ( I do think he should step down, that he doesnt have the moral authority to head a major party in a long established democracy. I think that’s largely a meaningless position aswell, though )

(dont get me wrong, I thought it was a good article, for what it was looking to do. Although the martyrisation of Price and Hughes was a little much)

Bottom line: The reference to Manson seems just a throw-away and nothing to get worked up about.

A lot of murderers end up as “statesmen”. Begin and Arafat come immediately to mind, but there are scores of others, almost certainly including Mandela.

“A lot of murderers end up as “statesmen”.”

Show me a statesman who is not a murderer.

Little of what the PIRA did counts as terrorism, as I define it: violent acts of public theater intended to alter the emotional states of the intended audiences (e.g., the WTC attack, designed to enrage Americans and exhilarate Muslims, and having no military purpose ). Mostly, the PIRA made war. It conducted attacks on the ability of the British to maintain public order. Usually it tried to avoid killing people who were not involved in maintaining British rule in Northern Ireland. The Mountbatten assassination was an exception – that was pure theater. Other theatrical tactics – hunger striking, funeral processions – were not terror.

The murder of Jean McConville was not terror, either. It is clear that the PIRA – and Adams – were persuaded, rightly or wrongly, that she was a low-level informer who was a threat to their activities. They killed her for military reasons.

As the article explains, they did not want her death to be known or linked to them, and so they disappeared her. Disappearances are usually the province of state-sponsored terror, because the state needs deniability. Weak insurgent movements like the PIRA usually take credit for their victims, to demonstrate the inability of the authorities to protect the public.

The PIRA tended to disappear informants because the public killing of spies would have demonstrated a degree of disaffection among Catholic civilians. Killing people like McConville was not intended to instill general terror – it was done to eliminate specific enemies. This doesn’t mean that the people they killed were genuine threats – they were violent, paranoid men and they didn’t care much for due process.

Only eighteen people were disappeared during the Troubles and the PIRA has admitted involvement in nine cases. This is not nearly enough if the goal is terror.

Adams’ apology to McConville’s son is interesting:

“For what it’s worth, I’ll apologize to you. It was wrong for the Republican movement to do what they did to your mother.”

Keefe reads this as Adams’ way of apologizing for her death while distancing himself personally from the murder. Maybe so. Perhaps he has come to conclusion that she was not an informer. But it may also mean that Adams does not apologize for her death, but only for her disappearance.

Ze Kraggash @19: “Show me a statesman who is not a murderer”.

Gandhi? Mandela? Kerensky? Attlee? Carter? Do I have to go on?

@20 Bloix
Where would the Lloyd’s bombing and numerous Tube bombings – both actual and threatened – fall into your hirearchy of theater. Seems to me those were designed to exert public pressure and could neatly be classified, under your system, as legitimate terror acts in as much as they were aimed directly at the public and targeted their emotional state (i.e. you can get blown up anywhere).

#24 – “i.e. you can get blown up anywhere”

Most of the time when the IRA killed innocent civilians – innocent in their world-view – it was the result of a fuck-up. Their policy was to give warnings prior to the destruction of property. They wanted to bring the war to England but they did not target English civilians. And this was a reasonable strategy – they wanted the English to conclude that Ireland was unpleasant and expensive, not that the IRA needed to be crushed at any cost.

I have read allegations that in some majority-Catholic border areas the IRA did murder uninvolved Protestants in an effort to drive out Protestant families – to ethnically cleanse them. I don’t know nearly enough to know if that’s true or not.

Ze Kraggash @ #19: I meant murder as a career move toward becoming a statesman. For most US Presidents, statesmanship is a prerequisite for murder, rather than the reverse, with notably rare exceptions.

Stephen @ 22
“Scientific surveys of Iraqi deaths resulting from the first four years of the Iraq War found that between 151,000 to over one million Iraqis died as a result of conflict during this time. A later study, published in 2011, found that approximately 500,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the conflict since the invasion. Counts of deaths reported in newspapers collated by projects like the Iraq Body Count project found 174,000 Iraqis reported killed between 2003 and 2013, with between 112,000-123,000 of those killed being civilian noncombatants.” Wikipedia

So of the deaths they can calculate, about 65% were civilians. No “terrorism” involved, of course.

Not defending Adams, just saying.

Do you have to kill personally, or order it done, or is it enough to initiate policies that lead to death? Gandhi and Mandela both did the last, Kerensky tried to continue the war, Attlee was a soldier in World War I and a member of the War Cabinet in World War II, Carter approved a few military operations which led to death…

Death is the currency in which the mistakes of statesmen are paid. Sometimes also it pays for their successes.

I also remember when I was young before Bill Clinton was elected president our public broadcaster in Australia showed a documentary about him, and he was quite horrible when he was governor because to maintain popularity in his electorate he electrocuted a black man who had killed someone but then turned the gun on himself but instead of killing himself he gave himself a lobotomy.

The black man asked if he could leave his apple pie dessert for after his electrocution :/

Bruce Wilder — but he had lobotomised himself straight afterwards — he was not at all likely to kill anyone else so it was purely retributive sentiment which Bill Clinton appeased for the sake of popularity seeking so he could try to be president afterwards

We do not have capital punishment here in Australia even for murderers who don’t lobotomise themselves afterwards.

A convicted murderer, in other words, executed in accordance with law.

I get the impression most people do not take moral judgments seriously. It is all just anecdotes as vehicles for expressing petty resentments.

If it’s the “law”, it’s not your moral judgement, is it? I mean, you might get pretty good decisions out of the law, but by its nature, “in accordance with the law” can’t represent your decisions and you can’t claim any moral credit for them.

Not that all law is immoral, not for a second. It was hashed out by smart people… but it wasn’t done by you. You don’t have any input in the process, you didn’t make any decisions, you can’t claim any credit. Your moral judgement has to be yours or it’s someone else’s.

etv13 the flipside is surely that without the armed struggle the Brits would not have thought it worth the effort to pursue a peace settlement that led to a semi-independent Northern Ireland…?

@27 Bloix
“Most of the time when the IRA killed innocent civilians – innocent in their world-view – it was the result of a fuck-up. ”

So it doesn’t count when its an f-up? Why do we keep hanging all those Iraq deaths on Bush and Cheney then – clearly it was just a f-up. The Lloyd’s bombing, Montbatten, McConnel etc. quite a string of them then…guess the PIRA was just the most f-ed up political activist group ever, it couldn’t have had anything to do with terror.

I fully agree that over time Tube bomb-threats were just an inconvenience, that sort of numbness is inevitable after dozens of the things perpetuated over years. That’s not how they seemed at first, it was viewed as a distinct escalation and bringing the battle from “over there” to “at home.” Its your definitition not mine, but if this sort of consistent long-term effort doesn’t count I’m not sure what would ever meet your definition short of aircraft smashing buildings.

Henry

To me there are two ways of talking about this:

1.) we can look at particular actions the IRA has taken and also at the character and motivations of the key players – this will likely result in universal moral condemnation, which is fine as far as it goes

2.) we can compare the actions of the IRA to similar actions of e.g. the US/UK governments and their proxies – this should ideally result in some soul-searching and less self-righteousness on our part

Both are important, but number 1.) is history and so to me number 2.) is more relevant since it might actually lead to policy changes in the future (one can dream, right?).

The point is not to excuse terrorism, but to make people aware the our government’s actions are often no better and sometimes even worse than terrorism.

#43 – I’m not defending the IRA. I’m talking tactics, not law or morality. I’m pointing out that they didn’t generally kill innocent people for purposes of terror. Their usual method was to target soldiers and officials, and to kill others when they had determined that killing the specific individuals would advance their cause. When they did kill masses of civilians indiscriminately – like Bloody Friday in 1972 – it was generally because they had set a bomb and telephoned a warning but the warning got fucked up in some way, not as a part of a strategy.

crossposted with Bloix’s last comment.

It’s hard to disagree with the volunteer in the article who reflects that not a single death was worth it.

Peter T @33:

Now you are getting into Camusian territory.

Merely to be alive and in the struggle, merely “to act, is to kill” [comma added].

[it seems odd those haven’t been quoted above, when we’ve discussed innocent-casualty-free bombings like Canary Wharf and justified-target bombings like Mountbatten & Nieve]

#54 – We’re crossing.

Birmingham – a major fuck-up. There were telephoned warnings but not clear or early enough to allow the areas to be cleared. The IRA disavowed the attack and declared itself “horrified” and said that the bombers deserved the death penalty. (I mention this not to say that I believe that the IRA was not involved, but to make the point that the IRA clearly believed that the civilian deaths did not serve its purposes.)

Brighton – the goal was to kill Prime Minister Thatcher, who in IRA eyes was not an innocent civilian.

Guildford – the goal was to kill soldiers.

typo -FOCAL point (I think)

Ronan – no, I don’t believe A is the Adams/McGuinness line – as witness the McConville apology. It certainly was in the past, but the tone has changed significantly since the ceasefire (and, let’s face it, you wouldn’t expect the tone to change before).

Alan McBride lost his wife in the bungled, semi-abortive bombing of Frizzell’s fish shop; the guy planting the bomb blew himself up, and Gerry Adams was one of his pallbearers. McBride has said that for years the only apologies he could get were heavily qualified half-apologies: “we’re sorry for your loss, but no one is working harder for peace than Sinn Fein”; “what happened that day was wrong, but you have to understand what was going on at the time”. Then one day he set up a meeting with a former senior IRA member, who said “what happened that day was wrong”. McBride said that the relief he felt when the other shoe, finally, didn’t drop was enormous. And the fact that he’d received an unqualified apology was what made him able to listen to the IRA man’s own story. It’s easier to “understand what was going on at the time” when you’re not being told to forget about your own story.

beyond that I dont know what you mean by legitimacy, or even what more legitimacy the PIRA could want?

Writers not comparing an elected politician to Charles Manson? People not applauding that comparison? People like Eoghan Harris not denying SF any historical roots at all before 1969?

@62
“You were honourable people fighting in the name of a legitimate historical cause, and you committed crimes which can’t be forgotten or forgiven” would be a big step forward, it seems to me.

I think some would be willing to say that if the PIRA would say something resembling, ‘We were terrorists sometimes, but we think we had our reasons’ (obviously they wouldn’t say it just so)

History has chosen to go the path of letting it be water under the bridge since neither side is willing to be the first to say their half of the above…in a few generations, maybe, but right now too many of the living know too many of the dead.

indiscriminately lethal attacks on apolitical targets, calculated to produce maximum alarm. Author’s note: see also 9/11

Using proxy bombs to attack a building called the ‘World Trade Centre’, the Pentagon and the White House? (NB. I’m not saying there isn’t a difference between Al Quaeda’s ideology and tactics vs. the IRA’s…)

engels – Bali, Madrid and 7/7 fit that bit of the def. better.

Eoghan Harris has a very specific agenda, as do most of the writers at the Sunday Independent. I don’t think his perspective has any real influence on anything. That article also seems completely contradictory to what his position was during the 00s (the last time I read him) that the PIRA were more or less indistinguishable from the 1916 rebels.
I’m also not sure why Sinn Fein are the victims in this broader story ? There is a lot of intra elite dispute over who are the ‘heirs of 1916’ and how the commemorations should be organised. As is true in such contested, symbolic events, politics involves itself, as much from Sinn Fein, as from Fianna Fail, as from ‘the families’ etc etc
There are also any number of ways to cut this, so I could equally ask what would such a commemoration signify to Unionists ? Why is the Republican tradition the only tradition we care about ?
Not being smart, but I dont know what the Alan McBride story is meant to say? Of course understanding the context is important, as is where the other side is coming from. But this is obviously going to happen (and is, afaik, though mainly from the bottom up) in the North, rather than the UK or the South. Those who suffered were mainly in the North, not in the UK or Republic. What could either Southern Ireland or the UK add here? If you’re saying they should have some sort of truth telling process, or a reconcilliation commission, then I agree. But it’s going to be pretty difficult to set up, and in part because the Sinn Fein leadership object to multiple ideas of what the process would look like. Again, Adam’s isnt a reactive victim of everyone elses behaviour, he is a calculating political actor who will do what is in his and his partys interests.
I still dont understand what specifically you want Irish and British political culture to acknowledge ? The dichotomy really isnt between “you were brave warriors in the Republican cause, and bad things always happen in war” and “you were evil psychopaths, and your evil deeds prove it” Most people accept that they werent (mostly) literally evil individuals commited solely to criminality and mayhem, but that they were borrowing from and arguably continuing traditions with deep historical roots. But so were a lot of groups. Do we adopt the same stance with all of the paramilitaries, even those still going at it ? I still dont see why this means we treat them with kiddy gloves or sideline all the people who came from the same conditions, were born into the same traditions, and made better choices. Or indeed how there are any meaningful payoffs to doing so.

Bloix — if your definition of terrorism doesn’t include randomly grabbing people off the streets and leaving their battered bodies to be found a couple of days later, or murdering the heirs to family farms and business in border towns, then that’s entirely a matter for you.

I don’t know nearly enough to know if that’s true or not.

Well, maybe you ought to consider something that rhymes with ‘putting the duck up’ instead of spouting recycled Cause gobshitery in the mode of Rep. Peter King. The PIRA also terrorised its own community (as the Protestant paramilitaries did theirs) and drove the best and brightest young people out of Northern Ireland for a generation. ‘Military reasons’, my arse.

#71, 72 – as usual on these threads, I learn a lot from the people who disagree with me. If nothing else it inspires me to read online.

Random killings: in the Kingsmill Massacre of January 1976, gunmen stopped a minivan carrying 12 workingmen – 11 Protestants and 1 Catholic. They shot the 11 Protestants, killing 10 of them. Later someone placed a call saying that the killings were in retaliation for the random murders of six Catholics the previous night, and that if the Loyalists stopped their random attacks on Catholics there would be no more random attacks on Protestants.

The caller claimed to be from a non-PIRA group, and the PIRA repudiated the attack and said it wasn’t them and they were opposed to such killings. But in 2011 a police investigation concluded that the killers were members of a PIRA unit – although one that might have been acting against the wishes of the central leadership.

Obviously if the killers were armed and organized PIRA members, then the killings were morally and legally the responsibility of the PIRA. But that doesn’t mean they were conducted in accordance with the policy of the PIRA, which is a meaningful distinction if you’re trying to understand what PIRA leaders like Gerry Adams thought they were doing.

So, was the Kingsmill Massacre terror? On reflection I think it was – it was intended to terrify ordinary Protestants into refraining from cooperating with Loyalist militias just as much as it was intended to persuade those militias into refraining from murdering Catholics.

Which tells us that terror can be a defensive strategy as well as an offensive one.

Bloix’s point/claim is that it wasn’t random.

In many cases it was: drive over from the Falls Road to the Shankhill (or vice versa), pick an unlucky sod walking down the street, and done. Call a taxi driver out, done. Reprisal attacks were better if they were random. I’ll grant that the statistics show that the UVF and its cohorts win the random-murder contest, but there’s plenty on both sides.

(They’d never ask whether someone was a Catholic or Protestant. They’d try to avoid asking for names. Where d’y’live, where do you go to school, where do you go shopping, what team do you support?)

that doesn’t mean they were conducted in accordance with the policy of the PIRA, which is a meaningful distinction if you’re trying to understand what PIRA leaders like Gerry Adams thought they were doing.

They were running mobs to control their own community and strike at the other. They were petty, shitty criminal enterprises in the poorest bits of the UK, administering beatings and leg-breakings and kneecappings a-plenty with the assistance of military-grade kit and a steady stream of income from Oirish enthusiasts in the US. Much of that was directed towards petty criminals in places where the RUC feared to tread, in best mafia fashion, but enough of it was towards people who simply wouldn’t run errands for the local bosses.

Don Corleone died playing with his grandson in the garden.

#75 – “Don Corleone died playing with his grandson in the garden.”

One question that puzzles me is why the Irish reaction to English occupation was political violence, while the Sicilian response to Italian occupation was pure banditry.

Ok I’ll declare my interest up front. A significant proportion of Australians have Irish ancestry, and it is usually Catholic. My grandmother was Irish, she was Catholic and was born in County Armagh. I’ve visited Ireland and know some of the things that happened to the Irish under British rule, particularly in the famine.

All that admitted, I still have to say that I’m shocked by the apparent hypocrisy of some commenters on this thread. I guess a lot of you are British or American, and like us Australians (even though against the wishes of the majority of citizens in the Australian case at least), your governments and military authorised and fought the Iraq war from 2003.

As I pointed out above, estimates of Iraqi people who died in that war range up to about 500,000 and it appears that the majority of them were civilian non-combatants.

I’m not trying to justify what the IRA did, I don’t agree with it, but I am disappointed by the hypocrisy here.

Are the British, American and Australian governments ‘terrorists’, because they killed civilians? Are the military of those countries “terrorists”? Are the citizens of those countries who supported the way or didn’t actively oppose it supporting or condoning “terrorism”?

Because it seems to me you can’t have it both ways. If targeting civilians makes you a terrorist, you can accuse Adams and the IRA of being terrorists, but only if you admit that your own governments and militaries are terrorists too.

And just to make it clear, I am totally opposed to war and terrorism as a means of resolving disputes within or between countries, although I accept we have a long way to go before we can end those things.

the Sicilian response to Italian occupation

ITYM Italian, French, Spanish and German occupation.

See you at vespers?

“Because it seems to me you can’t have it both ways. If targeting civilians makes you a terrorist, you can accuse Adams and the IRA of being terrorists, but only if you admit that your own governments and militaries are terrorists too.”

I also have Irish ancestry and agree. One of my grandmothers immigrated half the way around the world here as a twelve year old with her older sister, who was so homesick that they returned to Ireland just two years later, before coming back here to Australia due to the poverty and lack of opportunity there.

Also in this part of the world post-colonial state building has been very problematic and often at a high cost to people that may be no longer held in living memories in the British Isles, just in books.

My favourite history professor who specialised in Indonesian history often spoke about her favourite history student – Kirsty Sword Gusmao. Who after graduating went to Indonesia and Timor and would take secret messages to imprisoned Fretlin [the East Timorese resistance] guerrilla soldiers , which was how she met Xanana Gusmao – who went from being an imprisoned “terrorist” under Indonesian rule to President and Prime Minister of an independent East Timor (now he wants to retire and be a pumpkin farmer).

East Timor would not have got its independence by this point of view – it was fortunate that Wahid came in before 2001 – since the West Papuan independence struggle now has very little chance of succeeding now especially with the transmigrasi policy.

By murdering large numbers of mainland civilians, the IRA absolutely caused terror among the populace.

john b – I’ll give you Birmingham (21 dead), although note that warnings were given – the bomb wasn’t intended to go off unannounced and kill large numbers of people, a la Piazza Fontana or Madrid. But the Guildford bombs killed four soldiers and one civilian. As for Brighton, it absolutely did not cause terror among the populace – I was there. It was big news, obviously – we went down the next day to see the hole in the Grand Hotel – but I wasn’t scared; it wasn’t me they were trying to get. It did make me hate the IRA that bit more* – what would have happened to British politics if Thatcher had been assassinated doesn’t bear thinking about.

*The irony of this discussion is that if you put me in a room with actual IRA sympathisers – like, say, most of the British radical Left for most of the 80s – I’d be the one denouncing them. They had no hope, no legitimacy and no justification for carrying on; as such they became a magnet for people who just liked the violence, and degenerated into banditry and racketeering as a result. I see Adams as somebody who realised a lot of this quite early on & spent several years trying to turn the ship around without getting murdered for his troubles. And eventually, of course, succeeded.

I find it noteworthy that Bloix, who has previously opined at length on these pages on the ethical unconscionability of BDS as a response to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, should defend paramilitary violence as the appropriate response to the British occupation of Northern Ireland.

Stephen, did you actually my comment? It was addressed to Bloix. Responding to the substance of people’s arguments might be fun than trying to police their use of key-words you dislike. Just sayin’.

It seems to me that if you ask: what were the IRA fighting for that could not be achieved by peaceful, constitutional means? the only answer is: the conquest of Northern Ireland and its incorporation into the Irish Republic, against the wishes of most of its population.

Debating-society logic only gets us so far here. It seems to me that if you ask former IRA members and supporters who haven’t recanted their former allegiance what they were fighting for, military conquest of an unwilling population is one answer you’ll never get. So either those people are both aggressive nationalists and pathological liars, or that’s not ‘the only answer’ at all.

There’s no such place as ‘the Irish Republic’ – it’s the Republic of Ireland. And as for ‘most of its population’, the majority of the population of the Northern part of the island of Ireland – the part that corresponds to the old province of Ulster – identify as Irish and Catholic. The majority of the population of the six-county province of the ‘Northern Ireland’ don’t, but that’s because the border of the province was drawn in such a way as to create that majority. But I assume you knew that.

Phil – I agree with you there. But it just seems to be one of those things (like any discussion of Blair or Bush) that will, rightly or wrongly, always be spoken about on those terms. (I have to say I dont have any real sympathy with any of the main characters who have an option to make it stop, which is a comfortable retirement)
What’s wrong with speaking off “the British occupation of Northern Ireland” ? A lot of people did see it that way, and certainly the British Army did tend to behave (at a times at least) as an occupying force. Or at least that’s the story Ive heard.

“It seems to me that if you ask former IRA members and supporters who haven’t recanted their former allegiance what they were fighting for, military conquest of an unwilling population is one answer you’ll never get.”

Maybe that’s not what they would have said, but for all practical purposes it’s what they would have got

Bloix at #77writes: the Irish reaction to English occupation was political violence.

The Troubles were not an “Irish reaction to English occupation”. Both IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries were Irish. The longstanding grievances which led to the civil rights marches which sparked the violence were between the minority Irish Catholics and the majority Irish Protestants within Northern Ireland. The British army were initially welcomed by the Catholic community on the streets, as preferable to the RUC police force and B Specials, seen as an arm of a sectarian state.

Well the PIRA’s war specifically was over what they perceived as a British occupation, and they used (and in some ways manipulated) the instability caused by the Civil Rights movement, the reaction to it and then the hamfisted response from the British , as a way to legitimise their agenda.
I would say that bloix is wrong that the ‘Irish reaction to English occupation was political violence.’ For some it was, but generally a small section of the population. Which isnt to say anything about the legitimacy or not of that violence in general, just it shouldn’t be overstated as to how central political violence was.

I don’t see how one can call the Tudor conquest and the Stewart colonization of Ireland an intra-Irish dispute.
I accept the correction from English to British.
The national myth of the Protestant Irish is that they are Orange, not Green – conquerors, not compatriots, settlers, not natives.
Yes, they are also Irish. But there’s a lot of tension in their self-identification as both Irish and British.

Bloix – I didn’t say the Tudor conquest or the Stewart colonization were intra-Irish, but neither of those happened in the 1960s or 70s, or even the 1920s.

By the 1960s, the Planters had been here for 350 years – definitely long enough to qualify for the Irish soccer team.

I think the current situation of a de facto Northern Irish polity which enables inhabitants to seek additional identities across the border and over the Irish Sea is a significant step forward, and I hope a non-sectarian state can be fully entrenched at some time in the future.

That said, prior to 1922 Ireland had clearly been regarded as one entity, and until the union of 1801 there was an Irish parliament that covered the whole island. Anyone supporting the Northern Ireland of 1922 on the grounds of self-determination would have had to welcome Hitler’s annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland.

I was trying to think of a US/Canada parallel to @104 (the hordes of Tory refugees, from families settled after 1688, fleeing from persecution in New England), but then remembered that it’s essentially the plot of Infinite Jest: draw a line from Lynn to Lowell to Albany to Buffalo, and give everything north of it to Canada (directing the wrath of Quebec separatists toward the US, which is one of the spots where the analogy breaks down; moreover the novel seems to take place in a world where Canada isn’t a Commonwealth country; or maybe one in which the US and Mexico are, as well).

Phil@90: there’s another explanation for IRA sympathisers being unwilling to admit that their aims would include military conquest of an unwilling population, other than their being both aggressive nationalists and pathological liars. They are of course the first, and some are also the second: but many were and are, I think, just having difficulty in thinking clearly.

I remember trying to explain to a friend, an Irish Catholic of republican sympathies, that the obstacle to a united Ireland is that many people in the North don’t want it. She replied, passionately, “But they OUGHT to want it!”. She’s an intelligent woman, with a good degree from a good university, but was not applying her mind to the problem.

Many IRA sympathisers, I think, honestly but entirely mistakenly believed that if they could shoot and bomb enough targets, the British army and administration would quit the six counties, and it would then be discovered that despite everything they had said and done over the years the northern Protestants would then tamely submit to a united Ireland.

Others, more in touch with reality, accepted that many Protestants would object to being incorporated, but hoped that most of them would leave for Britain, and that the remnant who resisted would be overcome by the victorious IRA and the Irish army.

I do not think that either of these beliefs was realistic, but I am glad we never had to find out.

But Phil@105: the population of the UK as a whole may have been opposed to Irish home rule, pre-1914; that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have paid attention to the wishes of the Irish, and equally it doesn’t mean that the Irish shouldn’t have paid attention to the wishes of the northern Protestants.

Phil@105

The population of Israel and the occupied territories is majority-Arab

Not quite.

http://passblue.com/2014/02/02/israeli-palestinian-population-growth-and-its-impact-on-peace/

Hal – you’re right; current figures give a total population in the region of 12.7 million, of whom 6.6 million are Jews, 5.5 million Arabs and 0.6 million ‘Other’. My mistake was partly lumping in the ‘Others’ with the Arabs and partly assuming that the 2.7 million people on the West Bank were all Arabs; actually the settler population accounts for half a million.

As for self-determination, I’m a great believer in the right to secede. What I’m less sure about is the right to secede from state A so as to be ruled by state B, which is what both Henlein and Carson demanded; it scarcely seems to qualify as self-determination. (Irredentism from within the terra irredenta – is there a special term for that?)

if Catholics hadn’t been treated as second-class citizens for 40 years

A bit longer than that.

@116

By the Northern Irish ‘statelet’ for 40 years.

Val: “Ok I’ll declare my interest up front. A significant proportion of Australians have Irish ancestry, and it is usually Catholic. My grandmother was Irish, she was Catholic….

All that admitted, I still have to say that I’m shocked by the apparent hypocrisy of some commenters on this thread.”

My grandmother came from Ireland also, and was Catholic. She came here with her sister when she was twelve and her sister was so homesick they went back to Ireland after two years, then returned to Australia again due to the poverty and lack of opportunities.

While you in Ireland and the United States became the possessions of England in the 15th-16thC so I guess you’re all quite used to it – here in the Southern Hemisphere colonial possession by England and the other European Empires is more recent, and then there has been the strife of post-colonial nation building.

The terrible effects of some of this is still in living memory in our region, where maybe all the people in Ireland with memories have died.

One of my Asian history professors often talked of a favourite student who grew up about half an hour away from my town. After graduating she moved to Indonesia and riskily delivered messages from the outside to imprisoned Fretlin (the East Timor resistance) soldiers in gaols. This is how Kirsty Sword Gusmao met her husband Xanana Gusmao who went from a guerrilla soldier to Prime Minister and President of the fledgling independent East Timor (now he wants to retire to be a pumpkin farmer).

With the sort of views expressed here how could the East Timorese have gotten their independence?

They were fortunate that Gus Dur became president of Indonesia before the global war on terror. It is unlikely the West Papuan resistance will gain independence for West Papua now given the war on terror and the transmigrasi policy and big mining corporations.

(I wrote a similar comment yesterday but it disappeared in moderation so hopefully the wording of this one works)

ZM:

For the most part, CT seems to be oriented too much toward European Union and its implications to have much thought to spare for the post-colonial world. For me, I’m embarrassed to admit I know almost nothing about Australia (I did read Kangaroo once, for a high school class, and I once dreamed I was hiking in New Zealand and stopped for lunch at a place that had a Red Sox memorabilia store).

unless you want to – literally – pathologise the political choices of an awful lot of people in both parts of Ireland (polling in the Republic of Ireland currently puts Adams’s party at just under 20%)

I would be very surprised indeed if Ireland turned out to be the only country in the world in which there weren’t about 20% of the electorate who were demonstrably pathological and willing to support the most outrageously disgusting people in the name of nationalism. Do the fans of Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders get the same sort of respect? Should we be twice as solicitous of ZANU-PF since it has more than 40% support? More locally, can you swear that you’ve never used the derogatory phrase “Kippers”?

My own grandfather and his family (Catholic) were burnt out of their home in Belfast not far from Sandy Row in the 1920s.

This does not incline me to want share a country with the Loyalists of today.

PS Best response to political canvassing ever:

“Well, I’m a racist, so I’ll be voting for the Liberal Democrats.”

Can’t argue with that.

bianca steele,

“For the most part, CT seems to be oriented too much toward European Union and its implications to have much thought to spare for the post-colonial world. For me, I’m embarrassed to admit I know almost nothing about Australia (I did read Kangaroo once, for a high school class…”

Well I suppose how to discourage Europeans from their historic tendency of going to war on each other regularly and then extending this warfare everywhere else in the world is a difficult to solve problem — but as Val said the IRA killed far fewer people than our governments sending of our militaries into Iraq recently. Maybe if the EU becomes a better sheltering umbrella then small areas that want to breakaway might find it easier to break away peacefully.

(I haven’t read Kangaroo but D H Lawrence was only here fairly briefly so it is more likely to be like his other books than like an Australian book. I prefer the older Australian authors mostly, but if you are short of time for reading Australian books you could have a mini-Australian-film-festival — My Brilliant Career, Picnic At Hanging Rock, Storm Boy, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, The Year My Voice Broke, Rabbit Proof Fence, Romulus My Father, One Night The Moon are all good — if you want something more cultish then The Cars That Ate Paris or Dogs In Space might be more to your taste, and there are a number of comedies I haven’t mentioned)

#128 on the other hand, if the leader of a political party is both a cold blooded ideologue who has ordered the murder of innocent women, and the owner of a twitter feed where he talks about rubber duckies and nude trampolining, I think it’s pretty unreasonable to demand that nobody sees this as bizarre or makes jokes about it. If Gerry Adams really doesn’t want to be seen as a weird and highly unpleasant gruesome clown figure, he’s going to have to meet us half way.

And even his own voters would surely have to agree “yes on the whole he’s not what you’d call a typical modern career politician”. Maybe that’s what they like about him, like Boris Johnson and George Galloway. Or maybe they get a frisson from the fact that he’s almost definitely guilty of manipulating damaged people into committing atrocities for him. In the latter case, they’ve got more in common with Charles Manson fans than they might care to admit.

“I would be very surprised indeed if Ireland turned out to be the only country in the world in which there weren’t about 20% of the electorate who were demonstrably pathological and willing to support the most outrageously disgusting people in the name of nationalism.”

Blair, Bush II, and Netanyahu come to mind far in front of Le Pen fille.

And maybe the people who voted for Nelson Mandela got a kick out of thinking that he was just as hard as Winnie underneath it all – only of course he wasn’t (but, you know, maybe he was…).

Or maybe they had good reasons for supporting him. And maybe “lots of people support somebody I could never support in a million years; they must be crazy” isn’t a very useful line of thought; it certainly wouldn’t do much for the level of discussion if any of those people came by.

@134

Hardened revolutionary William Gladstone and many others in his terroristic Liberal Party had no problem accepting the idea of Home Rule for the whole of Ireland, and had the million Ulster Protestants joined that polity they would have formed a substantial bloc weighing influence against your so-called ‘peasant autarky’. ‘Gaelic-speaking’ is also something of a red herring given that even De Valera didn’t manage to get more than a small minority of the Irish using that language routinely.

ZM,

No, Kangaroo isn’t an Australian book, more of a European in Australia book. It’s what Lady Chatterley’s Lover might be if you decided the really interesting part was the half chapter where Lord Chatterley’s talks about fascist politics, and got rid of all the romance and added a lot about half-made world-like “dark gods” of nature that make Europeans go crazy. It’s not like his other books that I’ve read, though, much more straightforward reading.

@126
Perhaps a comparison with the current situation in the Ukraine might be nearer the mark.

ZM @121
Thanks ZM for trying to get some conversation going around the point I made, but disappointingly I don’t think many here are prepared to look at this.

In addition to the points you and Bianca made respectively about the recency of the Australian colonial experience and the possibly euro centric focus of CT (seems like Europe and North America from my perspective), I’d add another –

I think most commenters and authors (excepting JQ) on CT are from UK or North America? And I think they are therefore more at the centre of the US-Anglospere empire, and perhaps therefore less aware of it than we in Australia are, being peripheral to that empire, both socially and geographically? They’re more embedded, perhaps.

Just following up my previous point, I’ve also noticed that there seems to be relatively little interest in Indigenous issues on CT, too (ie as well as relatively little interest in imperialism) – when discussion does get going there seems to be a disproportionate number of Australian commenters afaict.

I find this particularly surprising re North America, because I know from other forums I’m involved with that there are active discussions about indigeneity there.

On the whole I get the impression that issues of imperialism, colonialism and indigeneity don’t have quite the same engagement on CT as they do on Australian left wing sites. I think discussion has moved on from this thread, unfortunately, but I’d be interested to hear views on this.

Hidari @142: the parallel between the Ukraine and Northern Ireland does not seem obvious. Would you care to elaborate?

#55 – a small correction, or perhaps not so small: the Canary Wharf bombing was not casualty free. The blast killed Inan Bashir and John Jeffries, who were working in a newsagent’s nearby.

Val and zm. I’m genuinely lost as to what points youre making ? That crooked timber posters, with no interest or expertise on the subject , should write more about the complicated topic of indigenous Australian history ? That a post on Gerry Adams is somehow remiss for not mentioning European colonialism in Indonesia? How are either of you in anyway affected by, now more or less non existent , European colonialism , rather than the product of it ? What is it that we’re missing? That the relationship between ireland and the mainland UK was complicated ? That some conceptualized this relationship as imperial ? That we don’t understand the importance of the famine to irish social and economic development, emigration and traditions of irish separatism ?
This relationship (between ireland and the UK, historically and presently) has been much more contested up until very recently than that between Australia and the “empire”. But that relationship is complicated. Ireland’s history isnt just that between an oppressive centre and oppressed periphery. A lot of irish were committed and willing participants in British colonialism. As were a lot of other people, from all races classes and nationalities ,whose descendants might not be willing to admit to it.
I’m not trying to be snarky or confrontational here but I’m genuinely not following what the point is or what relevance this has to the topic at hand ?

Novakant: much as I dislike and despise Tony Blair, I don’t think you can blame him at all for Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, and his degree of blame for the mishandling of Iraq after the invasion is less than overwhelming
For lying about the reasons for the invasion, blame him as much as you like.

If Sinn Fein voters are like Charles Manson fans, what does that make the people who reelected Bush, Blair and the associated cabal after Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo etc. !?

I wish CT had a plug-in that let you post a sound file of a hack comedian saying “Am I right?”, and an audience whooping and clapping. I bet people would use it a lot.

I think this is built on a few false premises though (1) that objecting to the PIRA is objecting to all resistance (2) the idea that it is the English primarily, rather than Australians, who should do most to acknowledge the crimes commited against the indigenous people. You are a rich independent country. People in the isles aren’t just Australians who missed the boat (3) the idea that people in England, or the uk, are deeply ignorant of very basic parts of their history ( which isn’t to say people shouldnt approach their history clear eyed and apologise where relevant, And even perhaps offer some form of reparations. I agree they should. I just dont understand why the impression in Australia is that European colonialism is a big secret ?)

Ronan @ 160

Well when you do come back (if this thread is still open), maybe you could engage with this:
“Val and zm. I’m genuinely lost as to what points youre making ? That crooked timber posters, with no interest or expertise on the subject , should write more about the complicated topic of indigenous Australian history ? … ” etc

Just looking at that starting point, ZM and I had both clearly stated that what we were surprised by was the apparent lack of acknowledgement by CT commenters of the impact of imperialism/colonialism on indigenous peoples (and I had specifically said in the North American context) compared to what we observed in Australia. It was obvious that we were both seeing that as part of an apparent broader failure to acknowledge the impact of imperialism, rather than expecting CT commenters to become experts on Australia’s first peoples.

That was the most obvious example, particularly because it was first, but in general there was an ‘I’ll suggest you’re saying simplistic or silly things, and say I’m puzzled by it’ tone to your whole comment. We weren’t saying silly or simplistic things, and I’m pretty sure you know that, so why do it?

Isn’t it better to have a conversation on the issues, which are actually interesting in themselves? I’m not looking for an apology, but I think we should all aim for a good standard of discussion. In particular I think male commenters (as I think you are) should be very reflective about whether you’re condescending to women.

Val- that is genuinely the way I read your comment. I couldn’t understand the relevance and really didn’t get the point. I also found the conversation between you and zm condescending, as it seemed to ignore large parts of the thread and take your interlocutors as ignorant of basic aspects of “their history” . I would answer the reason indigenous people have been ignored is primarily because it’s irrelavsnt. anyway, as I said I won’t be going on with this much more. So I’ll leave it there

Ronan(rf),

“think this is built on a few false premises though

(1) that objecting to the PIRA is objecting to all resistance”

Well this is what people have been saying – violent resistance is wrong and violent resistors shouldn’t like teddy bears. But what about violent resistors that like pumpkin farming? How is it different?

” (2) the idea that it is the English primarily, rather than Australians, who should do most to acknowledge the crimes commited against the indigenous people. You are a rich independent country… ”

My point is not that Australians should not acknowledge colonialism here – my point is that English/British people should do more acknowledging of British colonialism than they seem to me to do.
Maybe just gardeners and gravediggers dimly mutter about it verbally and this broad common concern doesn’t get reflected in the UK media or CT comment threads though

” (3) the idea that people in England, or the uk, are deeply ignorant of very basic parts of their history …. I just dont understand why the impression in Australia is that European colonialism is a big secret ?”

I do not have the impression British colonialism is a well kept secret in the UK known only to a few – I am bewildered as to how I gave you that impression? As above, it seems to me from Australia that you in the UK do not have much of an ongoing public dialogue about colonialism and indigenous people affected by hundreds of years of Westminster’s policy making in comparison to us here.

Ronan @ 163
Ok i accept that it may be genuinely the way you read my comment, but can’t you see that could still be problematic? You could for example, have read the comment/s again and thought ‘oh I see what she’s getting at’. You didn’t have to assume I was saying something stupid. I’ll leave it at that.

I was trying not to be condescending, but it’s difficult when you are making criticisms like that. The thing is, it does seem to both ZM and myself that a lot of people on this thread (and I would say the OP) seem a lot less conscious than we are – and than we think educated left wing Australia s generally are – of what the impacts of imperialism were, and continue to be.

The Irish famine isn’t that long ago you know – maybe people should remind themselves about it http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

It would be interesting to hear Henry’s view of the relationship of the famine, the IRA, and Gerry Adams, for example. I reckon it could be a more nuanced discussion.

Just to make the point clear, so no one gets confused again – the points ZM and I are making are about imperialism and resistance, in a variety of contexts, because imperialism seems to have been left out of the earlier discussion.

(ZM please feel free to add if that’s too brief a summary).

Ok val. And I apologise for getting a little unnecessarily snarky and condescending in response initially. I’ll try give you a decent reply over next few days (if I can get to a comp) with my personal opinion on that. Just to say initially I don’t think the famine or even British imperialism are the best ways to frame “the troubles ” (Henry also wrote about the famine once iirc, if u search the sidebar thing in the corner)

Stephen @ 170
I’m sure ZM can defend herself, but I’ll just mention that I think you are taking her to be saying the opposite of what she is actually saying.

Just to repeat what I said to Ronan, assuming that the person you’re talking to is saying something stupid isn’t a great way to have a conversation.

Also – whether or not you think the English were responsible for the appalling rate of death in the famine, surely it must have crossed your mind that the Irish – or at least some of them – might think so.

Stephen,

“ZM@166: you aren’t strengthening your case by writing of “living memory of England taking over Ireland and English actions hurting Irish people such as in the potato famine”. There is no such possible living memory. By writing as if there is, you are showing yourself to be either astonishingly ignorant, or prone to melodramatic exaggeration.”

You have misunderstood because you are not relating that quote to my earlier comment which it referred to :/

In my comment you quote from I was writing in response to djr who had responded to an earlier comment I made at #121 where I said:

“While you in Ireland and the United States became the possessions of England in the 15th-16thC so I guess you’re all quite used to it – here in the Southern Hemisphere colonial possession by England and the other European Empires is more recent, and then there has been the strife of post-colonial nation building.

The terrible effects of some of this is still in living memory in our region, where maybe all the people in Ireland with memories have died.”

djr responded that the IRA’s killing was in living memory — so in what you quote I was clarifying to djr that when I spoke of people in Ireland with living memories all having died by now I was talking about people with living memories of England taking over Ireland and effects of English actions like the potato famine.

As I remarked in #121 I expect all such people have died so there are no living memories of these matters — unlike in our region in the South.

So if you had read my comments properly you would have realised you did not need to remark on the interesting fact that “There is no such possible living memory” :/

Thanks Ronan. I visited Ireland with my mother some years ago, it was the first time Mum had been back since she was a child. She’d never lived in Ireland but she used to spend a lot of her school holidays there, with her grandmother on the farm.
During the visit I bought a book on the famine, I can’t remember what it was called (and don’t have it with me now) but it was heartbreaking.

I read the earlier post by Henry you mentioned, I find it hard to work out where Henry stands on these issues.

Val, to answer your 167. My problem with explanations to ‘western imperialism’ is that I think they tend to obscure more than they clarify. Nobody, certainly I wouldnt assume Henry, would deny that Western imperialism has been a major driving force in modern world history, but the extent to which contemporary problems are primarily the result of western imperialism or domestic conditions in the country under discussion is going to be (IMO) dependant on what specifically we’re talking about.
In the case of Northern Ireland, the main problem was a sectarian northern state that found it difficult to accomodate Catholic political and economic demands. The main fault lines were domestic. London might be blamed for not paying enough attention to the way that state had developed, and should (IMO) bear some culpability for the way they responded to the crisis in the late 60s/early 70s, but the main drivers of both the domestic crisis and then the conflict were domestic actors.
You could, I guess, make a ‘British Imperialism’ argument about the roots of the conflict. Most plausibly about the partition of Ireland in the 20s. But as Puss Walgreen notes above there were very few good options about what to do with northern Unionists, and any policy that forced them into a southern state could very plausibly have led to ethnic civil war and would have degraded Irish democracy. You could trace that blame to back to the plantations of Ireland but then we’re entering into an extrememly deterministic view of history that works as little more than a morality play. Ireland had real problems of economic underdevelopment and political factionalisation independent of England.
I would say the same problem exists with using the famine as some sort of explanation for the PIRA, it obscures more than it clarifies. Whatever problems existed with the northern state were resolvable politically. It was not apartheid South Africa or even the Jim Crow South, the context didnt justify the amount of violence that ensued. Gerry Adams and the PIRA leadership used this context to push their own agenda, which did not have popular support either in the north or south, to use violence to unite Ireland, even though it is arguable the same condition could have been met through political action.
This wasnt an anti colonial struggle equivalent to what had/was happening in the global south, it was a campaign of violence with little legitimacy and little chance of ataining the expected goal. I dont think the famine really explains any of this, except perhaps as background to explain the relationship between Ireland and the UK, narratives among Irish nationalists and aspects of the armed tradition in Irish history. But the explanation doesnt go far.

“to extend the influence of the Irish Republic in Northern Ireland, ”

What are you talking about ?

The IRAs goal was Irish unification (or later a compromise of cross-border institutions). Expanding the territory and influence of the Republic of Ireland and its own power, by military force and by driving out protestants. This is literally imperialism. And they literally had the support of the Nazis and United States, two massive imperialists, who saw this as in their strategic interests. Also, the history of England and Ireland are long and complicated but do include a time when both were invaded by Norman imperialists.

I’m trying to suggest that Vals approach of pointing at the UK and shouting ‘Imperialist’ is naive.

“I’m trying to suggest that Vals approach of pointing at the UK and shouting ‘Imperialist’ is naive”

You could blame the Normans if you like I suppose. I would blame the Vikings for inspiring Alfred the Great to unify the five kingdoms – five distinct kingdoms couldn’t have been such a bother to the globe as a unified England would become.

I read part of a chapter once where the author said the hospitable and until then happy to stay in their own country Anglo Saxons were infected by greediness by the Normans – except he said that the naive old chronicle used the word greed but to be more sophisticated he would call it acquisitive.

I don’t know how you can quarrel though that after the English were infected by acquisitiveness by their Norman conquerors they took to imperialism with abandon?

Val – from Tom Garvin’s ‘Nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland’ , which might get to your question more specifically:

“In an unpublished paper, J.G.A. Pocock has characterised Ireland’s political experience since the Great Famine of the 1840s as one of revolutionary politics in the paradoxical context of a society which was becoming steadily more stable. The Irish revolutionary movement derived its energies from a series of grievances that were slowly being rectified. 2 The real enemy of the Irish rebel was not the British soldier or police but the reformer and the continuing steady adjustment of Irish society to commercialised, capitalist, modern civilisation. Emigration also acted as a safety valve to drain off the discontented and unemployed young. A further twist that can be added to this argument is that the rebels themselves sensed its validity and were tempted to preserve those evils in the society that generated discontent and helped their political project to survive.
Ireland has indeed been a modernising society since the Famine of 1845– 7, although that modernisation has been slow and has been resisted by many elements. The tragedy of the Famine was itself the occasion of a great, even convulsive, modernising change. 3 In some ways, few European societies have travelled as far as Ireland has in the ‘long century’ since 1847. This is so despite a persistent popular and even academic stereotype of the country as unchanging. The highly disciplined and austere Tridentine Catholicism of modern Ireland dates from the mid-nineteenth century. Linguistically, the country was also transformed; the language of the masses changed from Irish to English, and literacy in English replaced the non-literate use of Irish.
To change language entailed changing cultural worlds, and millions migrated mentally from the medieval Gaelic world to the modern world of the English language. Few countries have undergone so sudden and complete a linguistic shift; in parts of the island, the exchange of languages appears to have occurred in one generation. Again, the agrarian property system was revolutionised as a consequence of the Land War of the 1880s, as the land was transferred from a mainly Anglo-Irish and Protestant landlord class and became vested in the mainly Catholic and post-Gaelic tenantry. This tenantry in turn evolved into a newly dominant stratum of small-and medium-sized owner-occupier farmers. 4
The economy was revolutionised. Whereas in 1830 agriculture was mainly subsistence and the island was encumbered with a huge landless rural proletariat, by 1890 commercial agriculture, based mainly on cattle exports to England, had become important. The rural proletariat had largely melted away and the owner-occupier farmer dominated the scene. An important turning point in the life of any underdeveloped country had been reached and passed; Ireland since the 1880s has had many serious problems , but they have been insignificant when compared with the appalling situation of much of the population prior to the Famine. By the end of the century the main outlines of the process were obvious; 5 one Anglo-Irish observer of that time saw it clearly as a huge social and cultural revolution, one which could not fail to be followed by a political revolution.”

ZM

I apologise. I should have realised that when you wrote “I meant living memory of England taking over Ireland and English actions hurting Irish people such as in the potato famine” you did not mean, as I honestly thought you did, there was a living memory of England taking over Ireland and English actions hurting Irish people such as in the potato famine. Which is, of course, nonsense; but I do not see what else your words could be taken to mean.

Having now been referred to your earlier posts, I now understand that what you intended to write, but rather seriously garbled, was that there is a living memory in Australia of mistreatment of indigenous peoples, while there is no such living memory of the Irish conquest, famine, etc. On that, we can happily agree.

Incidentally, have I got that nomenclature right? When I was young they were called aborigines, and “indigenous peoples” is now a no-no phrase in some parts of the British media since it is thought to refer to pre-recent-immigration populations, and as such to give aid and comfort to the EDL and UKIP. Since we have recently discovered that “people of colour” is OK but “coloured people” is double plus ungood, I realise one has to choose one’s words most carefully.

On your belief that the English, uniquely, are responsible for Ireland’s problems, and that imperialism is relevant to the recent problems in NI, I do not agree at all.

I would, by the way, be very grateful for a reply from you or Val re your beliefs about the famine. I am always ready to learn from the deep insights that so many Australians have into the history of the other side of the world.

The idea that there is no recent memory of Irish opposition to membership in the Union (or England ‘hurting’ the Irish, whatever that might mean) is bizzare beyond belief. Whatever one might think about the Irish Revolution, it did actually happen, and framed a lot of that relationship (particularly among the elite) up until quite recently. There was, of course, quite recent living memory of war and rebellion.
Yes, I agree there is no recent living memory of the ‘original conquest’, or whatever. As for the famine, that’s more debatable and depends on what we define as a living memory. Is there really living memory of ‘English colonialism’ in Australia ? Rather than a living memory of Australian racism ? Orally, I could imagine, there is. But that would also be true of the famine, somewhat, up until relatively recently. But as a living memory ? (I’m not sure what that means)?
I guess I dont know much about Australian history so can’t answer these questions.

Ronan: I suppose, but am open to correction, that by “living memory” is meant “within the memory of people who are still alive”. In that sense, the events of 1916-22 and subsequent misfortunes are still, more or less, within living memory, the famine is not. If it means “people now living remember having been told about it by their grandparents” of course it goes back much further, but how far is admissible?

Possibly relevant anecdote: in the diocese of Gloucester, it was quite recently proposed to amalgamate two rural parishes, each occupying a deep and isolated valley in the Cotswolds. The Bishop went to one parish, the parishioners debated the proposal, and agreed it was necessary. He went to the other; they heard him out in silence, and then without discussion all said No.

The Bishop, when leaving, said to the churchwarden that obviously he’d said something wrong, but what could it have been?

`The churchwarden replied “No, Bishop, it weren’t nothing you said, and nothing you said couldn’t have made no difference. No way are we going to go in with that lot.They wouldn’t help us when the Danes did come.”

Danish invasions of south-west England, late 9th century AD. Living memory?

As for assuming my priors: they are my own and I will defend them to the death.

I should have pointed out that the antipodean argument seems more fully to be “it was an English government and the English are uniquely evil”.

If size of empire = evilness of empire, yes, if British empire = English empire.

If you consider possibility that some empires are better than others, and that British =/= English, then no.

If you consider possibility that in some ways, empire may be improvement on pre-imperial situation …

“The real enemy of the Irish rebel was not the British soldier or police but the reformer and the continuing steady adjustment of Irish society to commercialised, capitalist, modern civilisation. Emigration also acted as a safety valve to drain off the discontented and unemployed young.”
and
“millions migrated mentally from the medieval Gaelic world to the modern world of the English language.”

This is reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s “forced draught urbanisation”. It has a certain plausibility analytically, while entirely failing to capture the human experience. And, in particular, the human experience of those it was done to. As in “well, sorry about the dead kids, the emigration, the loss of language, but let’s move on, shall we.” You will not get at the roots of politics until you understand the rage this kind of approach inspires.

Stephen @ 187
“I would, by the way, be very grateful for a reply from you or Val re your beliefs about the famine. I am always ready to learn from the deep insights that so many Australians have into the history of the other side of the world.”

And I, similarly, am always grateful for living examples of patronising Englishmen talking down to the colonials. On imperialism, I rest my case, your honour.

I must say I think these late exchanges bear out what Val and I were remarking on about the differences between the Australian and UK (or USA) discourse on Imperialism/Colonialism/Indigenous peoples.

I think that the UK attitude to invasions and empires is the key difference , and from where the other differences spring. The UK attitude seems to be that invading other countries is perfectly understandable :/

Ronan(rf),

“The idea that there is no recent memory of … England ‘hurting’ the Irish, whatever that might mean… is bizzare beyond belief”

Well I guess you might be right since you live in Ireland so you are more likely to know about what’s current in living memory in Ireland than myself — but what do living people remember about the cruelties of England over the last century?

” Is there really living memory of ‘English colonialism’ in Australia ? Rather than a living memory of Australian racism ?”

In the case of Australia (rather than our region which I also referred to) I was thinking particularly of the living memory of the stolen generations — which is the name for indigenous people taken from their families as children in the mid 20thC.

The period of colonisation itself would be remembered not so much in memory but in oral histories as well as in history books and archives — if I have time later I want to make a comment about memory, oral culture, and history in D-squared’s New Zealand post — so I won’t go into a discussion on those matters here just now.

I would also point out that your comment seems to me to evince one of the distinctions I would identify between UK and Australian understandings of colonialism — from what I (rightly or wrongly) have come to gather is the standard UK perspective it is like you see the UK once started a colony in Australia then Australia got independence and English colonialism ended then and there — but from here the UK started a colony and we are still living in it , we have got parliamentary independence since the Australia Act in the 1980s but we share a Royal family and a Westminster system of government, common law, a language etc etc. Australia didn’t revert to what it was before English colonialism so in that sense the presence of colonialism is an ongoing living legacy.

Ronan @ 189
“Is there really living memory of ‘English colonialism’ in Australia ? Rather than a living memory of Australian racism ? Orally, I could imagine, there is. … I guess I dont know much about Australian history so can’t answer these questions.”

There are debates about this kind of thing here all the time – but they are not phrased as you phrase them. ZM referred to the stolen generations, which is definitely within living memory. There was attempted genocide in Australia, not just in terms of the number of people killed, but because the policy was to “breed out” Indigeneity (or “Aboriginal blood” as authorities conceptualised it then), and then a policy of removing children (stolen generations) in the twentieth century, particularly those who looked white … I can’t do it justice in a short post, but it was the legacy of imperialism.

(It’s a bit complicated, but one related thing is that you can’t tell by looking who has Indigenous heritage in Australia. I know personally about five women who are fair-skinned blonde- or light brown-haired, and have Indigenous heritage. Whether they claim Indigenous identity is a different issue and depends on their circumstances.)

My vague and perhaps unfair impression is that English people often think we’re a bit silly about all this stuff, we make so much fuss about it. I think a lot of English people (and I still have English relatives) just don’t get it, yet it’s constantly in the news here, and some of our (white) politicians have been known to weep in Parliament over this history. I know this is a digression from the OP, but maybe it can help you understand why we might see these issues differently, and cast a critical eye on British imperialism, even though in another sense, we’re the products of it.

Ragweed @204
Thanks so much, that’s really great, and it really does bring the thread back together again. What an interesting story and how it points up the cultural aspects of imperialism/colonialism and the difficulty in maintaining cultural heritage. There is work going on here on preserving Indigenous languages, but some have already been lost, sadly.

I would love to hear more about the conversation on indigenous people in the US, if it’s too off- topic here please feel free to leave more info on my blog (linked through my name) or contact me through there (my Monash university email is available there).

Something I have been learning, particularly through my involvement in CT, is how variable the U.S. is, how some parts are so progressive and some so regressive, as your example shows.

“Well I guess you might be right since you live in Ireland so you are more likely to know about what’s current in living memory in Ireland than myself — but what do living people remember about the cruelties of England over the last century?”

I think this might get to the heart of why I’m disagreeing with you so much, which is that I think you’re running with too general a model of what ‘British colonialism’ was, or what it can be remembered as. As I think I said above, Irish people have been both deeply involved wiling participants in British colonialism, and have also been (or imagined themselves to be, depending on your perspective) victims of British colonialism. (and a whole lot in between, a lot of which has nothing to do with British colonialism) They have been victims as a people on the periphery of the Union, and perpetrators as people in the heart of the Empire.
Any lived memory was from the revolutionary period (around 1912 – 1922/3) where an Irish struggle for independence developed. A lot of the living memory as it applies to the British (rather than internal Irish divisions) was how the British responded in that period militarily. A lot of that resentment lived up until quite recently and was exacerbated by the Northen Irish Troubles. (Im rushing now so wont say any more at the minute. There was also an oral history collection that took place vis a vis the Famine in Ireland in the – i think -1920s – 50. Im not sure when, but Ill try to link to it later)

Bianca – for the purposes of this conversation all I mean by Australian is ‘person with Australian citizenship.’ I don’t object to the British state (or monarch?) being seen as having culpability for crimes committed against indigenous people in the process of colonisation, but I havent thought anything beyond that to know what that culpability would mean in practice. (or indeed if such responsbility has been accepted) I genuinely dont have any answers to the rest of your questions.
My main objection is more to ZM’s use of ‘English’ as shorthand for ‘the source of all evil in the world’. I can certainly understand why an Australian leftist perspective might highlight things like ‘colonialism’ and ‘the dispossession of indigenous people’, which I’d assume is mostly because that’s what it means in their country/region. But theyre the most obvious heirs and beneficiaries of said dispossession, not random people in present day England.
Which isnt to say (1) I’m a fan of the British Empire, at this level of generality and distance or (2) that we shouldn’t ‘talk about it’, acknowledge it, apologise for it (or whatever – I’m not even British so dont even know who the ‘we’ is here) I just think the story of western imperialism comes to have less and less explanatory relevance as the decades roll on.

Ronan(rf),

“but I dont see how the English (or British, or whatever) can have any present day culpability for(or even expectations to have deep knowledge of )what is, at the end of the day, Australian history.”

Australia is like it is now because England colonised the country. While the parliaments of the two countries formally severed all ties in the 1980s — except for the Queen — this did not erase colonial history, nor did it change that we speak English, have a Westminster parliament, have common and conscience law from England etc . It seems it is easier for England to forget us in Australia than for us to forget her.

If you like you can think of it as like at the end of the Tempest where Prospero says of Caliban — who he taught to speak English (even though Prospero is Italian) and other things, and from whom he learnt where the berries and things were on the island — : “this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” . Although I would be hesitant to compare Indigenous people to the character of Caliban without substantial qualifiers, it seems to me that the English conversely to Prospero remain very reluctant to acknowledge the wrongness and negative effects of their colonialism.

But even if the English were greatly repentant unfortunately history is not like a play, so they can’t just take all the effects of their actions back to England with them in a boat like Prospero does at the end — except sailing for Milan rather than England.

“Perhaps unfarily Ive read some of your posts on this as a way of avoiding taking responsibility for the problems faced by indigenous people in the here and now…”

This would be an inaccurate representation of my views , but it might be how they could come across to you since generally I get cross at the glossing over of the effects of Anglo colonialism here and also there are never any threads on CT about Australian indigenous issues as far as I remember.

“[problems] which are the results (in large part, I would guess) from the way people who are now Australians have dealt with the indigenous population, and policies that have excluded indigenous people from economic and political life.”

There are a range of problems and they are not simply about recent exclusions of Indigenous people from economic and political life.

There are the scars of having their world invaded (a lot of Indigenous and other sympathetic Australians campaign for our Australia Day public holiday in January to be called Invasion Day instead), and as Val mentioned there was the stolen generations and assimilationist policy in the past.

What you might not realise is that many Indigenous people did not and do not necessarily want to have to assimilate all together or much at all into Anglo culture. Since the 1970s we have a policy of multiculturalism rather than assimilation — but it so happens that this is easier to achieve in painting and cookery, say, than in law and economics. As an illustration of how a simple economics approach would not be appropriate we have recently had a backlash against our foot-in-mouth Prime Minister who rudely said Indigenous people living in remote communities chose to do so as a “lifestyle choice” implying they should move to cities for employment etc.

Also another difference I think is that, at least from here, Ireland and Wales and Scotland — or, rather, their peoples — seem to have largely had their pre-Anglo cultures domesticated/erased and are more assimilated into English culture — which as England became a coloniser at the start of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution tends to be hostile to other non-materialist conceptions of the world.

For instance, I think it would be likely considered quite offensive here in Australia if someone wrote the equivalent of what Henry wrote in the OP “hasn’t a hint of stories about fairy rings and the Little People, and (b) actually gets things right” e.g.. “hasn’t a hint of stories about Bunjil the Eagle and Lalalganook, and actually gets things right”.

” I think (personally) what matters more and what causes more pain, are present day circumstances rather than the ‘scars left by history.’ … my personal opinion would be that resolving the conditions in the present will deal with the historical scars…”

Even if you were set on only focusing on the problems of the present I think you would be pulled into the past anyhow.

As the past assimilationist policies are fairly widely considered morally wrong and misguided as well as ineffective there is not much agreement about what resolving present conditions would involve, and there has to be an acknowledgement that any government policies aiming to address unsatisfactory conditions would need to recognise the wishes of Indigenous people — who are not all of one mind either.

For instance, I think it would be likely considered quite offensive here in Australia if someone wrote the equivalent of what Henry wrote in the OP “hasn’t a hint of stories about fairy rings and the Little People, and (b) actually gets things right” e.g.. “hasn’t a hint of stories about Bunjil the Eagle and Lalalganook, and actually gets things right”.

This. This is probably the most peculiar thing about English[*] people that I’ve ever encountered, their way of finding certain things, like folklore, utterly ridiculous (and assuming they wouldn’t ever happen to meet someone who’s not embarrassed by it). OTOH a genteel American way of handling it is to scoff at Stonehenge and Avebury and reserve one’s admiration for Taos.

* – and apparently Irish people, as this thread really is demonstrating that what I’d thought was an English sense of humor was instead, or also, Irish.

“Which suggests–implausibly–that any problems were caused by those people after they’d separated themselves from England, and not by any regime imposed from London, and not because of any ideology disseminated from England or from Europe more generally”

No it doesn’t suggest that. (and in fact in that same comment I accepted that, of course, the history matters. How could it not?) It suggests that the relationship between the indigenous people of Australia and present day Australians is so specific to Australia and independent of the day to day problems faced by most English people that expecting English people to know or care about it is unrealistic. I’ve accepted, and I dont think anyone hasnt, the culpability of the ‘British empire’ in this entire affair, which covers ideology, colonialism etc. (and have said that that culpability could be recognised by the British state) But again, Australians (as much as they apparently imagine themselves now as great enemies of THE EMPIRE – much like Americans, astonishingly) are those who have benefited most, and those who at the end of the day have to resolve this problem.
A genuine question, to get to something more specific than these sweeping generalisations, what exactly would it mean on a practical level for ‘English people’ to accept collective responsibility for the indigenous dispossession in Australia ?

“What you might not realise is that many Indigenous people did not and do not necessarily want to have to assimilate all together or much at all into Anglo culture”

Sure, but I dont know what “assimilate all together or much at all into Anglo culture” means? There is(obviously, as you know I dont doubt) no pure indigenous culture on one end, and a pure Anglo culture on the other. There are stages of assimilation, different methods of adapting a culture, various ways to combine ‘traditional culture’ to a ‘modern’ one. So saying they dont want to assimilate ‘altogether’ would make me assume they want to assimilate to some extent ? Or that they have done so, in a lot of ways? So what aspects of life dont they want to assimilate? Or who is the they we’re speaking about ? Is there homgenity within this commuity ? Can their preferences be so easily defined ?

dsquared @146 – on Mandela, see this post (and comments!). Obviously nobody’s suggested this was part of the man’s appeal, partly because it would have been in poor taste but mainly because it’s unnecessary: there are and were plenty of good reasons for supporting Nelson Mandela. I’m suggesting that it’s equally unnecessary in explaining the appeal of Gerry Adams – not to me or you, but to literally quite a lot of people.

As for [not letting] “millions of people support this person” shape your judgement of whether or not “this person is a dangerous weirdo”., I agree; I’m saying we should let it shape our judgment of whether they’re dangerous weirdoes (or dangerous-weirdo fans). If millions of people support a dangerous weirdo, then what they’re supporting isn’t Dangerous Weirdoism but a political philosophy, something they can talk about and justify to each other. That’s how people work; that’s the difference between supporting a political party and being a cult member. It even works when the weirdo in question doesn’t consciously have any ideas of his or her own. Silvio Berlusconi entered politics with no agenda beyond preserving his own power base and keeping the Commies out. In theory the result should have been a weird kind of political vacuum punctuated by bursts of anti-Communism and ad personam law making; in practice I could tell you a “Berlusconist” position on any debate you care to mention.

Obviously(?) when I say we should treat former Provos as honourable people with a legitimate political project, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be held to account for what they did, and I’m not saying everyone should support that project. Part of the problem with delegitimating people like Adams, it seems to me, is that it makes them harder to hold them to account or to engage with politically.

Bianca – no, that isnt the ‘debate’ at all, but I dont have time to go back over it so Im leaving it there for a while.

I got the definite impression that some people were … refusing to acknowledge that the imperial project, which Adams was fighting against, had murdered a lot more civilians than the IRA

I haven’t read the thread properly but I’d have thought it’s more likely they were disagreeing that ‘fighting the imperial project’ is an accurate description of Adams’ intentions or actions. For comparison, would you say that Osama bin Laden or Man Haron Monis were fighting the imperial project? (A genuine question, in case it comes across otherwise…)

There’s also this (which I suppose counts as distant government support for the IRA); I think the movie is going to be out soon.

Val@197

I note that you make no attempt to answer my question about the famine.

I do not see that you have any case against what you call imperialism, except to say you’re against it, whatever it is.

I do not know why you think I’m English. Powers of telepathy?

AS for being patronising (defined as “treating with an apparent kindness which betrays a feeling of superiority”): well, given ZM’s ranting about “if only Downlandish English people could have contented themselves with cruelly tormenting the long suffering Uplandish folks who unfortunately got tethered to the uppity Downlandish ones” it’s difficult to avoid a feeling of enormous intellectual superiority. Wouldn’t you agree?

Phil@217: you write “we should treat former Provos as honourable people with a legitimate political project”. The point that Ronan and I have been making is that the political project of the Provisionals was to conquer by force and incorporate into a united Ireland the majority NI Unionist population , against their very well know wishes.

Forgive me for not regarding that as an honourable or legitimate project. If you disagree, please explain why.

Phil: I perceive no leading question (in the usual sense of a question that suggests the particular answer required). ” If you disagree, please explain why” simply requests you to provide an answer. What it may be is entirely up to you.

I agree that in reality, the Provos were never by themselves going to be able to force the NI unionists into a united Ireland. Whether they thought that, with help from the RoI and maybe the US they might, I don’t know. If not, then “total and sustained divorce from reality” does seem an accurate description. Do you really think that they had any aims that could not be brought about by peaceful and constitutional means, apart from forcing the NI unionists into a united Ireland?

I would add that the serious political tradition of believing that the NI unionists didn’t really mean what they said about not wanting a united Ireland does indeed go back for a hundred years or more. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it was always an inexcusable delusion.

StevenJohnson: I said nothing at all about skin colour, did I?

For reciprocal difficulties, try the Irish conquest of the Brythonic/Pictish/English parts of Scotland, the Irish conquests of south and south-west and north-west Wales, the Scottish ravaging of considerable parts of northern England over the centuries, the Scottish invasions of the 17th/18th century, the centuries of Irish slaving raids along the British west coast, Alastair the Devastator’s conquest of north-east Scotland, the Irish invasion of England in 1487, the various Irish bombings of England over the last few generations …

And please don’t tell me that I can’t possibly mean anything but European empires. From where do you get your belief in your powers of telepathy?

Ronan,

There’s a difference between “under the boot of the English” and “influenced by English culture.” Every time ZM has said “this comes from England,” your response has been “stop blaming the English and take responsibility for Australia!”, which is an odd response (especially given that England is in some sense sovereign over Australia).

It seems to me–I may be wrong, I suppose–that in your view it’s optional to see oneself and one’s country as under colonial influence: that it’s a choice. You can “blame things on the parent country” or you can “see yourself as independent.” Various things must follow from that choice, I can’t think what all of them might be. To me it seems, to say the least, implausible.

On your other comment, I realized that part was ZM’s words, and I meant to respond to what you wrote that followed from it, not to the quoted part.

Anyway, I read her comments very differently from you, that we have to understand European imperialism and its limitations in order to move on from it. I didn’t see her at all as complaining about imperialism against white people, but rather suggesting that white Australians should lessen the consequences of imperialism against non-whites by rejecting European colonialism and the ideologies that supported it. By extension, Europeans should join Australians in doing that. (This isn’t my own position, but I do see the logic of it.) Though if your response is typical of those from Old Europe, perhaps she does have something to complain about?

Sorry if I got either of your positions wrong.

bianca – “given that England is in some sense sovereign over Australia”???

Even if you mean ‘Britain’ (there hasn’t been an England in the nation-state sense since 1707) there’s no sense in which Australia isn’t a sovereign state. HMQ is the Queen of Australia as well as the UK, if you’re thinking of her.

Ronan:

Again, no worries.

Niall McAuley ,

“ZM, you are reading Henry’s tone completely backwards in his Little People remark.
An Australian version might be to say that an article a) hasn’t a hint of hats with dangly corks, XXXX beer or convicts and b) actually gets things right.
Irish people used to hate the American Leprechauns & Paddywhackery image of Ireland. In recent years, we have been reclaiming it in ironic fashion:”

Yes, but as you remark in Australia we would think it is appropriate to be ironic about corks in hats and beer drinking — but I think it would generally be considered offensive to be ironic about indigenous spiritual beliefs.

engels,

“Well I never knew that Australians of European ancestry saw themselves the victims of colonialism before. You live and learn.”

I don’t think I have argued this at all, I have been arguing that England and the British Isles should care more and be more sorry for their imperialism and colonialism.

Also what you say would be dependent on family histories — some people’s ancestors came out here to be judges and governors or squatters (property owners) in the new colony and other’s were brought by force out as convicts or left because in the British Isles their lands had been confiscated through enclosures/intra-Britiish English colonialism and then they were subsequently impoverished or forced into the predatory industrial and mining labor system etc. Where I live a lot of people came hoping to find gold and make their fortunes, but lots of fortunes and lives were lost here as well. But the inequalities and miseries within the British Isles — which might be called colonialism in Ireland and Scotland and Wales but within England I’m not sure what you call it except the sad results of uniting against the vikings — were often related to reasons for moving to Australia.

But in immigrating here and making their lives here they were re-making this country in the image of Britain and were complicit in the British government and elite’s colonial and imperial project, and there were those who were directly involved in violence towards indigenous people, and those who displaced them with force to take their lands, and many more who were guilty of turning a blind eye to what was happening, or of saying suffering such things to finally die away was the inevitable fate for a primitive people.

These are uncomfortable issues still in Australia — but I think the difference with the UK is that we are regularly engaging in public discussions about them — whereas the UK seems just to try to be washing its hands of empire.

This is one of our important political speeches about it by former Prime Minister Paul Keating — but where are the speeches by the UK Prime Ministers?

https://youtu.be/CRNG3srP6zY

Stephen @ 225
“AS for being patronising (defined as “treating with an apparent kindness which betrays a feeling of superiority”): well, given ZM’s ranting about “if only Downlandish English people could have contented themselves with cruelly tormenting the long suffering Uplandish folks who unfortunately got tethered to the uppity Downlandish ones” it’s difficult to avoid a feeling of enormous intellectual superiority. Wouldn’t you agree?”

No I wouldn’t. ZM has a quirky, quasi folkish way of writing sometimes, it’s playful that’s all. Otherwise the statement above says more about you than ZM, and what it says isn’t nice. I won’t respond to any such comments in future.

‘You know perfectly well that no-one’s saying that’

No, I didn’t actually. I think it may have been Zm’s comment about how Australia ‘still feels like’ a British colony (which I thought was a bit silly) together with points about the lasting negative legacy of empire (which I tend to agree with) which I interpreted that way, but I’ll try to look and reply properly if I’m at a computer. I agree with her/his point about the lack of accounting for empire by mainstream British politicians, I think.

where I said “The first and only major organised uprising of convicts was by Irish settlers’ – I obviously meant by “Irish convicts” – Erk.

Val – this is not my reading of the thread. We were talking about Irish history, specifically the Troubles, when the topic changed: ie comments 83, 121, and your own in between.
for example:

“While you in Ireland and the United States became the possessions of England in the 15th-16thC so I guess you’re all quite used to it – here in the Southern Hemisphere colonial possession by England and the other European Empires is more recent, and then there has been the strife of post-colonial nation building.

The terrible effects of some of this is still in living memory in our region, where maybe all the people in Ireland with memories have died.”

we then got on to indigenous Australian history, nothing specific just the manner in which Australia was dealing with its past whereas Britain (or more specifically England) was not. ie 150
Which is fine. But my question above that you respond to:

“Ronan doesn’t acknowledge the difference between representatives of the British state and convicts. ”

was dealing directly with this point and I have made it over and over again. What is it ZM thinks the British state/English people etc should do to make up for colonialism ? Is Australia making up with its indigenous population really comparable to Britain making up for its colonial crimes (crimes Australia was directly implicated in) ?

I have not told you I know more about Australian history than you. ie

“although I’d be interested in anything you (or Val) had to say on the topic of indigenous populations in the region in general”

In fact I dont think Ive offered a meaningful opinion on Australian history.

In between all of this we were berated for our ‘euro centric’ focus ie 123, 147.
even though the topic of the thread was Irish history (not British colonialism in Australia etc)

Val – I am happy and interested to read what you have to say about Australian history or imperialism, but please don’t rewrite this thread. I like ZM’s comments a lot, enjoy her (as you said) ‘quirky, quasi folkish way of writing.’ But it does lead to reasonable misunderstandings (as no doubt do my own posts)

So how about we put all of what went before aside and talk about something specific? I am genuinely interested in hearing anything you have to say about indigenous rights in Australia (or whatever the topic) but there are genuine disagreements with a lot of the way ZM frames the history of British Imperialism. People have a right to respond to that.

Ronan @ 242
“So what’s the equivalent that could happen in the UK and Ireland to what the Australians are doing vis a vis the indigenous population ?”

The British could say sorry. Have they ever done that? (I’m asking, I genuinely don’t know)

It was a huge thing here when our former PM Kevin Rudd said sorry for the Stolen Generation. Also Keating’s Redfern speech, which ZM linked above, which acknowledged that we (current white Australians, descendants of the original invaders) stole the land.

Someone asked about reparations – there hasn’t been much concrete, that’s a real weakness. We’re now having a conversation about changing the constitution but I think we should go back to the issue of treaty first.

Has any British PM ever said sorry for the famine, or for anything specific? I don’t know if it’s very common to actually apologise for the whole invasion because that could open up a big can of worms, but saying sorry for specific bad things while acknowledging the general issue of invasion and takeover is something. I guess it’s not relevant now because peace has been achieved, hopefully long lasting, but that is an example of the kind of thing that states can do.

“Has any British PM ever said sorry for the famine, or for anything specific?”

(if youre asking about Ireland specifically?) Tony Blair apologised for the Famine in the lead up to the 1998 good friday agreement. (I dont know enough about the specifics, but link below)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/blair-issues-apology-for-irish-potato-famine-1253790.html

The Queen made a recent trip to Ireland (I wasnt living there at the time, but I think in 2011) where she acknowledged ‘sad and regretable’ mistakes, but stopped short of an apology. I’m not sure if there’s anything beyond that.
Certainly there’s no systematic process as seems to be the case in australia, but the context is a bit too different, I think, for that to make sense.
More generally i’m not sure about apologies the British state has made to former colonies (I seem to remember something being said in India or Pakistan, but cant remember)

haha we keep crossing over – I have to for a while now so that will stop it! cheers

Phil@248 “there is no supremacy; the British government has no say in what goes on in Commonwealth nations.”

Perhaps I misremember or never properly understood, but wasn’t royal prerogative used to dismiss Gough Whitlam? (Exercised by the Governor-General, not the Queen personally.) And, doesn’t Stephen Harper’s use of prorogation of Parliament also depend upon royal prerogative? (Again, in the person of the Governor-General.)

Phil @228 – I think you might like Roy fosters new book “vivid faces”, about how the revolutionary generation in Ireland ‘made themselves’ in the late 19th early 20th century. If u ever got around to it( I’ve only read bits and pieces so far) I think it might be up your alley.

ZM writes: I think it would generally be considered offensive to be ironic about indigenous spiritual beliefs.

Whereas in Ireland, we would be offended if anyone thought we were serious about the Little People.

Even if we are.

It seems to me that the role of Governor-General of Australia is much more “head of state in all but name” than it is “mouthpiece of the boss lady in the Old Country”, and it seems to me that this has been the situation for some time. But then, I’m not Australian.

And, doesn’t Stephen Harper’s use of prorogation of Parliament also depend upon royal prerogative? (Again, in the person of the Governor-General.)

Sure, but it remains “Stephen Harper’s use”.

As far as I can see Whitlam was dismissed by the effective Australian head of state, John Kerr, acting (as he had to) in the name of the titular head of state, Elizabeth Windsor. While you’ve got a titular head of state, he or she will inevitably be invoked when the effective head of state gets involved in politics – which, hopefully, he or she very rarely will.

No, the Governor General advised the Queen and the Queen agreed and dismissed the Prime Minister. But this is controversial in Australia still, and there is some evidence that the U.S. through the CIA was involved – Kerr had been in one of their funded organisations and a former agent said there was talk of the CIA involvement. Also the Governor General is not really the effective head of state – they mostly do community events and see visiting important foreign people since the Queen lives so far away and has other realms too – so they are just her temporary stand ins and they change every few years.

Well the same thing happened in Papua New Guinea recently except with more military involvement and a brief secession, but in that case the Queen agreed with the Prime Minister and dismissed the Governor General. I suppose she must play it by ear.

It wouldn’t implicate the UK government since 1986ish when we got The Act of Australia which took away the oversight of the Australian government by the Privy Council by acts of the Australian and UK parliaments (although the Australian constitution can only be altered by referendum so I think this should have gone to referendum, I’m not sure it is very valid to take away oversight by the privy council only by acts of parliament).

The Queen does not like to act without the advice of the current Governor General it is true — I wrote to Her Majesty just the other year to ask her to intervene when our Prime Minister was changed from one person to another person via telephone calls in a Chinese restaurant — a most improper procedure for changing Prime Ministers — but Her Majesty’s secretary wrote back to say HM would forward my letter to the governor general for advice — but the governor general at the time of the incident was the mother in law of the man who counted the votes in the Chinese restaurant, so she was hardly going to be amenable to telling him he had to only count votes properly in parliament not in restaurants if he wanted to change Prime Ministers* :/

*Now he is the Leader of the Opposition

““Are you talking about Sir Serei Eri? Can’t see anything more recent. If so, he resigned, so the point’s moot.” No the constitutional crisis from 2011 — I summarised it for you but the comment is in moderation. I think the govt there have declared a state of emergency this year, after the PM being charged with corruption last year — so it is not looking that good since the constitutional crisis

I really can’t say much about anticolonialism, but AFAICS Irish nationalism resembles that of other European nations, including my own. It’s growth in the 19th and 20th centuries is quite similar to national awakenings all over Europe. While some nationalisms failed, many nationalisms were at least as successful as the Irish one. Some of them did better and were able to achieve independence for the whole of the contested territory. In addition to a number of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, you have Norway (1905), Finland (1918), and Iceland (1944).

No, the unusual thing about Ireland isn’t nationalism, but the strong unionist tradition. You don’t find anything like that in Norway or Iceland. There’s a Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, but it’s hardly Ulster Unionism. Even Montenegro, where 44,5% voted against independence in 2006, wasn’t partitioned, despite unionist majorities in the districts bordering Serbia. I can’t recall that a partition of Scotland was part of the debate before the recent referendum there either. Henry Farrell has actually touched upon the threats of armed rebellion by the unionist minority before: https://crookedtimber.org/2009/12/10/bonar-law/. AFAIK, no-one tried to preserve united Czechoslovakia with the use of arms, even though a majority of the population was opposed to its dissolution.

By the way, Kosovo has a large number of politicians with a paramilitary background, including people with links to organised crime. What to say about politicians like Hashim Thaçi and other former Kosovo Liberation Army figures? There must be some parallels both to the IRA of the Irish War of Independence and to the IRA of The Troubles.

Actually, Finland declared independence in 1917, not 1918. My bad.

And the 19th century development from a rural, pre-capitalist economy to a modern monetary economy wasn’t unique to Ireland. It happened in other European countries as well. Funnily enough, aforementioned Finland managed this while the use of a non-Germanic language was on the rise, so there’s no reason that the Irish language had to decline in order to modernise.

“No, the unusual thing about Ireland isn’t nationalism, but the strong unionist tradition. ”

I’m not sure, ethnic groups cut off from their prior community/state after a nationalist revolution is surely common enough? (not in all cases, but a significant amount)

Donald Johnson @ 276
“I’ve never known what to make of the IRA–I know both sides committed atrocities, but never understood whether there was anything horrible enough about British rule in Northern Ireland in the late 20th century that would explain the support given a terrorist group.”

Returning to my earlier question about who is or is not a terrorist, can I ask why, if you “know that both sides committed atrocities”, you designate one side (the IRA) as a “terrorist group”?

For example, if the British army shot and killed 14 people who were taking part in a demonstration in 1972, does that make the British army “terrorists”?

I know that the British government classified the IRA as a terrorist organisation, but is this a “correct” usage, or is it because they were a non-state actor and therefore, in Weber’s terms, seen as having no legitimate right to use violence? As I’ve said before, it appears that people think of “terrorists” as organisations that kill civilians, but in fact states seem to kill civilians without being called terrorists.

ZM: Ireland’s problems lay in its economic underdevelopment rather than in English colonialism.

!

Because those two causal arguments are so distinct and easy to separate in any interpretation of the history of Ireland.

Val–you’re lecturing the wrong person. I have no problem accusing Wesern governments of state terrorism. I know that in guerrilla wars Western governments often behave as barbarically or worse than those they oppose. What I don’t know in the case of the IRA are the root causes. Not every group has a just cause quite apart from whether they commit crimes in its name, but again, whether this is true of the IRA I don’t know.

Donald Johnson @ 285
Sorry Donald for “lecturing”, it was just that you used the word terrorist specifically for the IRA (but not for eg, Ulster forces or British Army) in your previous comment, and I was wondering why you did.

It’s in context that several people near the start of the thread were expressing a particular repugnance for Gerry Adams as terrorist who was presenting himself as a kindly teddy bear and chocolate loving grandfather, I’m not sure if you saw all that. I wondered why Adams was singled out as particularly and peculiarly revolting given the huge number of others, including eg George Bush or our own former PM John Howard, who authorised a war which lead to many thousands more civilian deaths than Adams authorised (which he denies anyway). So I was interested in the way the word terrorist is used to construct certain people as particularly morally repugnant, but not others who do the same things. Sorry if you knew all that, will stop lecturing now :)

I wasn’t offended, just slightly surprised as I agreed with you and a few others up thread about how Adams is no worse a person (IMO) than people like Bush. But I suspect the majority of people around here would agree. I could be wrong.

@ 289
Sorry Donald, missed that! I don’t know if most would agree though, it seemed like some of the people early in the thread (who seem to have gone now) really did see Adams and the IRA as particularly repugnant. Maybe because the IRA bombs were a bit close to home for some people.

Ronan:

ethnic groups cut off from their prior community/state after a nationalist revolution is surely common enough? (not in all cases, but a significant amount)

I think what is unusual about the Six Counties is having enough of a concentration of a minority loyal to the old ruling power in one region to make a kind of re-secession or pre-emptive irredentism viable, and having the government of the ruling power endorse this (or get bounced into endorsing it by its own extreme fringe). I can’t think of any other examples of this offhand, apart from the Sudeten Germans.

Donald Johnson, Val: many people find no difficulty in regarding both Gerry Adams and George W Bush as deeply repulsive, and responsible for unjustifiable actions. But the parallel would be stronger if GWB had repeatedly and publicly asserted that he never had anything to do with the US armed forces, so he didn’t.

Donald Johnson
I just read back through this thread and realised I’d actually had a conversation with you about the George bush thing previously so … I dunno, I’m losing the plot I guess :) sorry

The fundamental similarity is that Bush and Adams both have innocent blood on their hands and deny it.

Don’t worry Val–I sometimes lose track of who said what in a long thread.

The reason Gerry Adams was singled out is because the article linked in the OP was specifically about Gerry Adams ordering the murder of Jean McConville. It wasnt about Iraq, or George Bush or John Howard. I would be surprised if many here (certainly none of the main pagers) had any particular time for Bush, Howard or the Iraq War, but the topic was on Northern Ireland, Gerry Adams in particular, and the victims of paramilitary murder. That’s why that is what people spoke about.
I agree there are a lot of questions that might follow from that; when is violence legitimate ? Is violence from non state actors less legitimate than that from the state? Is there a difference, morally, between personally ordering the murder of a single mother of 10(?) and being the head of an administration that authorised a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands ? Was Gerry Adams fighting an anti Imperial war ? Did the PIRA have a popular madate for what it did? Did it need one ? Did the context justify the violence ? Are the paramilitaries actions less legitimate since there was a peaceful political process (which the majority utilised) where they could have resolved their grievances ? Could they have resolved their grievances politically ? If not, did their grievances legitimise their violence ?
But to answer these questions we have to look at the situation specifically, rather than engaging in rhetoric about ‘colonialism’ or aspects of Irish history that are probably not overly relevant.
The actions of the security forces in Northern Ireland have been researched and debated at length over the past decades. I’d be surprised if anyone with a passing interest in the conflict didnt know the broad outlines of this; Bloody Sunday, internment, the initial militarisation of the conflict, the use of counterinsurgency tactics (mainly) on the border, collusion. Some of this has been acknowledged by the British State, other aspects havent. But more has been done to clarify their role in the conflict by the British than has been done by the paramilitaries. And the fact remains that it’s very difficult to make the case that the British were the main drivers of the conflict rather than the paramilitaries, primarily the IRA. The paramilitaries killed far more (I think approaching 90% of the dead) with the PIRA killing most.
I would say as well (and this isnt snarky, as is none of the above. Perhaps my tone comes across a little aggressive at times so Ill try and change that, but it’s not the intent) , that a lot of people in England/Britain, particularly on the left,*are* aware of their imperial past, it’s just that in a lot of ways those debates petered out as the Empire wound down. People In Britain and (particularly) Ireland are aware of the relationship between these countries historically and the questions involved, to what extent was it colonial, to what extent were the Irish implicated in Empire, how (ie not always violent) the Irish responded to British rule and why etc. But answering these questions does require moving on from tales of ‘English’ oppression and Irish subjugation (even if that is an important part of the story, particularly at certain points)
I do agree with a lot of what Phil said above, that we need a more sophisticated way of looking at the Provos and Gerry Adams, but the reason a lot of people might have expressed contempt for Adams is because some commenting above grew up with it in various contexts (either in England, The Republic or the North) That’s going to explain a good deal about what they think of Gerry Adams and the paramilitaries.

Novakant, sanctions aren’t ‘political violence’ and ‘shock and awe’ doesn’t ‘explicitly’ target the civilian population.

Sanctions and “shock and awe” cause collateral damage to innocent civilians, then, even if they aren’t “explicit targets.” Hmm.

Good point Bruce. Never thought of it like that

Sanctions often are meant to hurt the civilian population as a way of pressuring the government. There was evidence of this with the Iraqi sanctions, though generally the US would deny it. I said “often”, but if sanctions are harsh enough that should probably be changed to “always”.

Harold@305: agreed, sanctions and “shock and awe”, even if aimed at the enemy government and its armies, may often cause collateral damage to innocent civilians. Trouble is, apart from naval battles in mid-ocean or armies clashing in a desert, it is difficult to fight any war at all without causing collateral damage to innocent civilians. Now solution, of course, is never to fight a war at all, but …

The whole thread seems unsatisfactory to me, probably unsurprisingly given the OP. Debating which historical figure is the worse monster isn’t getting us very far. There is no contest between GWB and Gerry Adams over who is responsible for more unjustifiable deaths and suffering. The semantics of how you call their crimes is beside the point. Murder is a horrible crime unless a whole lot of people are killed, then it is heroic. The most admired historical figures are among the worst monsters. They only fall in disrepute and (sometimes) are judged as criminals when they lose. That of course is the problem built into the seemingly attractive idea of an international war crimes tribunal: only the losers of history will be dragged before such courts, never the winners, however greatly they may deserve it.

Gerry Adams has done terrible things – which, as many have pointed out, can be said about most statesmen – and also deserves a lot of credit for his role in bringing about a peace settlement that actually worked and brought a decades-long conflict to (hopefully) an end. And so btw does Tony Blair, who could by now be remembered as a revered peace maker if he hadn’t chosen to be a war criminal instead.

Having said all that, it seems clear to me that the (P)IRA’s strategy of armed struggle was a disastrous failure from the very beginning, and I wish leftists would stop reflexively making excuses for secessionist movements. IRA, ETA, PKK, LTTE and many others once were supported as worthwhile causes by many on the left because of their appeals to anti-imperialist struggle and revolutionary romanticism. All of them have failed at reaching their goals, have left great suffering in their wake (not all their fault of course), and I would argue have mostly closed rather than opened up spaces for progressive politics in their respective polities. They were all based on exclusionary nationalist ideology impossible to reconcile with an emancipatory vision of leftist politics (*). Their goals were not equality and rights for all but more power for their particular group, with the predictable effect of frightening almost everybody on the other side into antagonism. Non-armed civil rights movements, which appealed to universal values, were crushed by both side’s regression into nationalism and militarization. Exclusionary nationalism is anathema to all the left holds dear and it is a mystery why anybody on the left would want to support it. Armed secessionism, while causing untold bloodshed, has mostly failed and, where it was successful (Croatia etc.), almost always led to ethnic cleansing. Nonviolent secessionism has also mostly failed. I’m grateful that Quebec and Scotland have gotten to make their choice without bloodshed but still, the best that can be said for these movements is that they wasted huge amounts of political energy.

(*) I once heard an ETA supporter claim that their nationalism was not exclusionary because anybody willing to learn Basque was welcome.

ZM@284: I wonder if things were quite that simple. If you look outside the English/Irish dichotomy, you will see that Germany, for instance, has at all relevant times been far more economically developed than Ireland: and yet Germany hardly extracted land and resources and labour from any colonies.

Maybe one of the factors was that Ireland is desperately short of coal and iron?

Or more specifically British policy was to contain the conflict and not allow Unionists be ‘forced’ into a united Ireland.

FWIW, they are well-meant and I know what they are getting at, but I feel uncomfortable with claims like “Bush is a terrorist.” Terrorism (as it is widely understood) and “official” state warfare are obviously not the same thing. They are different in scale, nature, proximate goal and process, and all of these matter.

The state’s use of armed forces is backed up by a whole universe of social contracts, institutions and processes that are (seen to be) legitimate – the fact that violence is carried out in the name of the state is not a small thing, and it is not irrelevant to any of the parties involved – the perpetrators, the victims or the people in whose name it is carried out.

I certainly feel that this is true when it comes to civil conflicts / occupations. I’m pretty sure the Tamils, Gazans and Timorese I know would react badly if you told them they were victims of terrorism. Partly because that elides the fact that the whole state apparatus, not just the military, was/has been brought to bear against them. Partly because the violence directed against them was often not tactical or strategic: it was punishment. It was its own justification. It was the end, not the means.

But if it isn’t, by what criteria can we judge perpetrators of political violence like Bush or Adams?

“War criminal” seems okay to me.

Val: I’m not clear here. When you say that “terrorist” was used as a label to mark the IRA as illegitimate, do you mean that you regard the IRA as legitimate, or that the British government should have done so?

If so, from what did their legitimacy derive?

Stephen – of course bloody Sunday was a result of British policy ie the decision in general to militarise the conflict and specifically to use the paras. The fact that the pm didn’t explicitly order the shooting dead of protesters is beside the point. This is the same argument the ira made, civilian casualties were (mostly) “collateral damage”. And that’s mostly true, but they were still the result of an ira strategy which was willing to take risks with civilians life’s

Ronan: well yes, but “militarising the conflict” wasn’t, as I remember it, quite like that. The decision to send in the troops to preserve the peace wasn’t intended to result in a low-level conflict: that was the result of the IRA’s policy of attacking the troops who were initially seen as the protectors of the Catholics.

You do have a point that the decision to send the paras against a mob of lightly-armed rioters did result in a few of them going way beyond what their commanders had intended. But most, even of the paras deployed on Bloody Sunday, didn’t do that, and none war intended to. With hindsight, of course, none of them should have been deployed at all.

Collateral damage, as I understand it, is a matter of using force against a legitimate target that unintentionally causes damage to bystanders. I do have some difficulty in applying that to either Bloody Sunday or to the IRA’s bombing campaign.

I am tempted to look up and quote the Ballad of Claudy, but you probably know it.

Val: the cause of the IRA, as I understand it, was that the Protestant majority of NI should be conquered and forced into an united Ireland against their will: and the cause of the British government was that they should not.

Interesting that you regard these as legitimate, but the IRA as more so. I’m not sure what family background could explain that.

Ronan: that apart, I do very much agree with your 301 and 306. And I am grateful for the reference in 274 to the DRB review, which needs some thinking about. I would like to hope that ZM will read it also: it might persuade her not to take Tim Pat Coogan as gospel.

Val – if we’re generalizing, and I guess I am, then yes. (I wouldn’t agree with the definition of terrorists as non-state actors though).

TM – I liked your last paragraph in 313. I also have little to no patience with secessionist movements (more generalizing). But I really don’t agree that legitimacy or morality is judged by who wins. Plenty of winners are condemned by history, by their contemporaries, or never win the political legitimacy for their victories to stick. Examples are not hard to come by. Yeah, as The Temporary Name says, war criminals.

Oh, and yes terrorism is a label used incorrectly to mark groups as illegitimate, but it is also a real thing that we can talk about.

So, clarification – all terrorist violence is illegitimate (because it targets civilians), some state violence is, and illegitimate state violence is generally worse than terrorist violence.

And while there will always be debate about what state actions are or are not illegitimate, we’ve agreed some pretty clear international laws on the matter, which is about the best we can do.

I don’t know a great deal about the conflict in NI (a little more than most people and a whole lot less than some other people?) but as a person of the left I have real difficulty understanding why anyone who considers him/ her-self left of center wouldn’t think the British should just GTFO of NI.

Does anyone really think that in the (mostly) secular state of the Ireland of today that the loyalists who decided to stay would be discriminated against in the way (mainly economically and culturally?) the Irish Catholic minority of Ulster has historically been discriminated against?*

*Completely uninterested in the opinion of the righties (Stephen, et al) in the thread.

I dont know if Ive been cast with poor Stephen as a right wing lunatic, but I’ll offer an opinion anyway. I do think a united Ireland NOW would protect the interests and identity of Unionists. I also dont think it would have in the 192os. The reason there isnt a united Ireland is because a majority in the North dont agree with my postion (for whatever reason, and including on recent polling a majority of Catholics)
I think a united Ireland with genuine consent, in the long run is probably if not inevitabl then likely. So long as the words ‘genuine consent’ are keptin mind (ie not just when it becomes a demographic possibility)

I also think the British should then reconquer the country and start the process all over again ; )

The ‘terrorist’ label depoliticises in the sense that a terrorist’s beliefs are beliefs that mustn’t be discussed – just as a terrorist’s demands are demands that mustn’t be granted. Terrorism isn’t non-political (like crime), it’s anti-political (like treason).

It’s also worth mentioning that the Republic of Ireland, when founded, effectively laid claim to the whole island. My reading of this constitutional claim is that it was a dead letter more or less from day one, but Unionists understandably didn’t like to think that the RoI had it in reserve. So, as part of the broader peace process, there was a referendum in the Republic on dropping that clause, which passed by a huge margin. I’ve got a friend in Dublin; he’s the sweetest, mildest, most charming man you could ever meet. The only time I’ve ever seen him angry was when I asked him why he’d voted to drop the clause, if he wanted to see the island reunited some day. His reply was, essentially, that of course he wanted reunification, but that holding on to some fatuous, meaningless constitutional statement wasn’t going to bring it any closer – and might push it further away by making peace harder to achieve.

So that’s another reason why Ireland isn’t going to be reunited any time soon – taking reunification off the agenda, at least under that name, was part of the price of peace.

William 337: national borders are a big deal nowadays. The politicos call this the Westphalian system. Whatever, fact is that any self-respecting state/country regards this thing called Territorial Integrity as sacrosanct (ironically this is especially true for countries that have themselves been formed by secession). Some of the bloodiest conflicts have been fought about just that, territorial integrity. So the suggestion that any state should just give up part of its territory because a part of that region’s population (and it may even be a minority) demands it is never going to be an easy sell. By what criteria exactly do you suggest to decide whether territorial integrity should be respected or a right of secession be conceded? Why exactly should the British get TF out of NI, and btw, who exactly are “the British”?

TM @ 349
Have you read that great thing Ursula La Guin wrote about patriotism in the Left Hand of Darkness?

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession… Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”

I completely agree with that, but I’m just talking about a catholic peasant family who possibly found themselves on the wrong side of a political border, from their perspective. I don’t know, I never actually met my great grandparents or my grandmother on that side, I’m just going on vague recollections of things my mother said. The farm’s gone now, lost in The Troubles.

@TM: I did say I wasn’t interested in the opinion of the righties. But:

Nice condescension, though. I had an undergraduate major in history (99th %ile on subject GRE) and am familiar with the concept of the Westphalian System (1648, after all, is widely considered the beginning of “modern” European history). Anyhow, f*** the Westphalian System. I am not a nationalist and believe that there will never be a lasting peace in the world until the concept of national sovereignty gets tossed into the dustbin of history.

And if you don’t know who the British are, you are not half as smart as you think you are.

William Berry: personally, I am interested in the opinions of others, and I think that arranging people along a simple left (=right) to right (=wrong) axis is over-simple.

If I have understood you rightly, you believe that there should be no form of national sovereignty, but at the same time it’s very important that all of Ireland should be united. Have I got that wrong?

Ronan@341: you may be horrified to find that I also largely agree with your opinion there. I can see a possibility of a peaceful, harmonious, modern Ireland that did not exist in earlier times, and if it was by genuine consent I would have no real objection. But that consent has never existed, does not now exist, and will take a very long time to develop.

Is it right-wing lunacy to say that the same factors apply to the evolution of a peaceful, harmonious reunion of Britain and Ireland?

if terrorism is a particular, illegitimate kind of political violence, shouldn’t it be the aim to depoliticise the act, to prosecute the violence as a crime (as you would a war crime), and leave the political part to be reclaimed by politics?

Yes, and at this point my clever redefinition of ‘depoliticise’ comes back to bite me!

I think what the ‘terrorism’ label does is to suggest that certain kinds of violence are particularly abhorrent because they’re carried out with a political goal, and at the same time that certain kinds of political goal are abhorrent because they can only be pursued through violence. So a key part of defeating terrorism is identifying those political goals and putting them beyond the pale, if you’ll pardon the expression – if you don’t salt the earth of political debate (or cut off the oxygen of publicity), people will hear those ideas, some of them will be persuaded, and the inevitable result will be more violence.

To ‘depoliticise’ a terrorist act in the way that you suggest – to say, never mind about what you were doing it for, let’s focus on what you did – would break the connection between abhorrent action and abhorrent politics. As such, it would open the way for the political programme the bombers thought they were promoting to be taken seriously as a political programme, setting aside the fact that people did horrible and unjustifiable things to promote it.

Val 351: I love that quote, thanks. On the question of people finding themselves “on the wrong side of a border”: In cases of contested territoriality, there are always some people going to end up “on the wrong side”. The only solutions are (1) ethnic cleansing, (2) refusing to be defined by nationalism, or (relatedly) (3) stopping to take borders so seriously (or working towards a world without borders, or some such).

The third solution proposed here is not to be conflated with WB’s “solution” at 353. I like Stephen’s retort at 355 but let’s be clear: to say “f*** the Westphalian System” and oss national sovereignty into the dustbin of history is just asking for naked Hobbesianism where the stronger can do to the weaker how they please. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t look like such a promising way of helping oppressed minorities.

Stephen writes: There’s a well-known picture of a house with one end in Monaghan and the other in Fermanagh

There is a scholarly consideration of the economic impact of Partition on individual houses, especially public houses, in Spike Milligan’s Puckoon.

@364: Your arguments are not entirely without justice, Stephen, but the notion that it was mainly IRA violence that stood in the way of Mutual Consent and dances round the maypole is pretty funny, as if all would be different if the Irish nationalists of the past century had never learned from Carson et al. that sometimes your political position can gain in persuasiveness when you start waving guns around.

Thanks Ronan and bianca steele for the links you provided — I’ll put them in my reading list for a rainy day.

I think I overlooked another reason for the different approaches in the UK and Australia to colonialism — in the UK I guess you do not want to increase antipathy too much between people in your present day national community or near neighbours, whereas in Australia we can point out the grievous injustices of English colonialism and so forth but because the English are so far away (and don’t listen anyway) we don’t have to worry about causing present day hostilities.

Phil: the terrorism label is used as a move to classify “…certain kinds of political goal [as] abhorrent because they can only be pursued through violence.”

OK, yes, this I get. It’s a move to make the politics inseparable from the violence, which would then preclude any possibility of depoliticising the terrorist act and prosecuting the violence as a crime.

Ronan: yes, but with some reservations.

One is that all governments depend on access, when necessary, to armed force. The gun, or the sword, has always been a potential factor in politics: of course, from a liberal point of view, or from the point of view of running an efficient government, it has been highly desirable to keep it only potentially usable, and to pursue politics by non-violent means.

At times this has not been at all the case: Britain and Ireland for much of the 17th century, and more sporadically so in the 18th. After the Union, politics were of course at first decided by the presence of British troops, and later also by the presence of the (largely Irish Catholic) RIC; I don’t know their relative importance. Without them, I’m sure things would have been very different. Mind you, 19th century (or subsequent) Britain with neither army nor police would also have been very different, and I doubt the results would have been altogether edifying.

As the nineteenth century went on, things changed. The nature and conduct of politics under Parnell was not, I think, so much determined byBritish armed force. By 1913, with Home Rule imminent, the influence of British guns on Irish politics was temporarily unimportant. Not that threats of violence had altogether gone: the IRB hadn’t gone away, you know, and their only problem with guns was that they didn’t have enough of them.

Then the UVF brought guns back in a big way. It seems to me a pity that Redmond & Co did not see that, just as the liberal theories of government to which they had appealed meant that the UK government had to agree that Dublin should not be governed from London because the Irish people didn’t want it, the same liberal theories meant that Belfast should not be governed from Dublin because … But there we are.

I hope you will agree with at least some part of this. I do appreciate a discussion with someone with good information and an open mind.

Igor: pretty much what they said about Dublin “governing” Kingstown: that is, there is a limit to the size of exempted areas.

“legalised” sorry – damn spell check!

ZM:

in the UK I guess you do not want to increase antipathy too much between people in your present day national community or near neighbours, whereas in Australia we can point out the grievous injustices of English colonialism and so forth but because the English are so far away (and don’t listen anyway) we don’t have to worry about causing present day hostilities.

I think this highlights what I find infuriating about this conversation. Sometimes you talk about colonialism as being a bad thing that all of us who are successors to 18th / 19th century Britain should acknowledge and regret. Here I entirely agree with you.

But other times you talk about “English” colonialism as though it’s something specific to people in England, as though it’s a disease we pick up from the water supply. This makes it sounds as though you blame 19th century farm labourers or factory workers in England for the treatment of indigenous people in Australia, but think that this treatment had nothing whatsoever to do with the people who actually went to Australia. Yes, I know there were convicts and people driven to emigrate by extreme poverty, but free settlers vastly outnumbered convicts and life in the 19th century was pretty unpleasant for a lot of people whether they stayed in England or emigrated. The successors of the latter bunch are still very much in possession of the land they took.

To be clear, I doubt this really is your view, but it is what comes across from your writing at times, and may explain why you’ve found other people in the conversation to be “defensive”.

Stephen, Ronan, Phil:

A question relating to the OP: do you think Gerry Adams has accomplished anything and what is that?

I ask assuming we recognise that his politics, for good or ill, has turned on very slowly trading away the homicidal passions of the PIRA, for a constitutional order more inclusive or privileged for his political party. I am not asking for counterfactual claims it did not have to be this way. Given that it has been the way it has, do we credit him with Weberian slow boring of hard boards?

What is the significance of the resentments of those survivors feeling ill-used?

Or, of the resentments of opponents, who sought a different order?

Without inviting lengthy counterfactual, how far should we go in identifying the alternative order attached to said resentment, now or in the past?

I said early on and believe that Adams (to simplify) brought the ira kicking and screaming into the peace process, that sinn Fein are a legitimate and (from a left perspective useful) political party , that his political opponents are using his past to undermine sinn Fein , and that the political class and media should debate sinn Fein on their policies not his past ( ie go back to plutonikuns first comment above for what, I agree though hadn’t thought of in that manner, is the interesting questions on adams et al.) I’ll reply properly when not on my phone.
(I also think the ed malonoey “thesis” as represented in the article – that his biggest crime is selling out his ‘comrades’- is ridiculous)

..which isn’t to say I’d vote for them personally. I just think I value clientilist politics and constituency work more than the UK/US style of funnelling money into the pockets of the uber rich and calling it institutionally mature democracy

djr,

“I think this highlights what I find infuriating about this conversation. Sometimes you talk about colonialism as being a bad thing that all of us who are successors to 18th / 19th century Britain should acknowledge and regret…. But other times you talk about “English” colonialism as though it’s something specific to people in England”

Well this goes back to our earlier argument in the thread — what both Val and I have noted is that the UK dialogue on colonialism and empire seems quite different from the dialogue here in Australia. You said maybe I wasn’t familiar with England so how would I know the state of the dialogue — and I said I’d only visited Bath so perhaps you could sum it up for me, but you didn’t.

There are numerous awful things settlers did here and they are discussed with a reasonable frequency but also with discomfort and some people try to downplay them in various ways — we had what we called the History Wars here for a while about the matter.

You seem to me to be downplaying the fact that Australia was purposefully colonised as a project of Empire by Great Britain as a political entity — a political entity which was centred in England and had expanded from England as she took over her neighbouring countries before doing the same to as many other countries as she could.

British settlement here was not a process of various sundry settlers taking boats to Australia and in a ramshackle way deciding to set up houses and live here.

In terms of who made the decisions in Great Britain — both the Whigs and Conservatives were in favour of empire I think (maybe with dissenters?) — the High Tories were not in favour for some time then they gave in and favoured it too. Common people didn;t get the vote till after WW1 so they didn’t have a political party till then — I have not read what the new Labour Party’s view on colonialism and empire was between WW1 and 2.

I cannot think of much I have read about what the common people in England thought about colonialism and empire for the several centuries of its duration . Maybe there is a social history of this ?

One of the sailors in The Tempest complains something like that the English would pay a pound to see a dead indigenous American but not stop to give a penny to a living beggar on the street. But his character was from Milan I think rather than an English sailor.

Also the gentrifying of the middle classes and then the common people over the centuries probably came at the expense of colonies where resources and labour were extracted from — as you see from how there needed to be rationing when imports were few during WW2.

And this over-consumption continues today as you can see from my figures about just the residents of London consuming as much as could be extracted from land twice the size of the whole United Kingdom. So I can blame this on the bad habits got during colonialism too.

You seem to me to be downplaying the fact that Australia was purposefully colonised as a project of Empire by Great Britain as a political entity — a political entity which was centred in England and had expanded from England as she took over her neighbouring countries before doing the same to as many other countries as she could.

This is dreadful stuff. England conquered Wales before there ever was a ‘Wales’; what we now call Wales was first settled in Norman times (in other words the conquest of Wales began not long after the conquest of Yorkshire). The United Kingdom began as just that, a union of kingdoms – James I and VI would be mightily surprised to hear that ‘England’ had taken over his country. Ireland certainly was conquered, by successive British governments from the Commonwealth on. But to say that what became known as the British Empire simply represented ‘doing the same’ to other places as had been done in the conquest of Ireland is idiotic, frankly. Ghana was settled for gold, India for trade, America for religious freedom and Australia to set up a penal colony.

I have no idea what you mean by saying that ‘High Tories’ were not in favour of empire, or for that matter what period you’re referring to. As for whether most people in Britain were in favour of empire, I think most people in most periods are in favour of arrangements which benefit them. That doesn’t mean that they had any say in the decisions establishing and maintaining the empire, or that they should bear any blame for the crimes of empire.

Yes, the blockade in WWII led to rationing, but all this shows is that Britain was dependent on imports; the effect would have been the same if Britain’s major trading partners had been the USA, Brazil and Italy. As for over-consumption and “the bad habits got during colonialism”, if there were a correlation between former possession of an empire and levels of present-day consumption Portugal would out-consume the USA, which seems unlikely.

“The IRA’s hopes of an Irish Tet Offensive”

?????

Igor@389: see https://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/new-myths-of-the-peace-process-no-3-the-1987-pira-tet-offensiveor-one-last-push/

NB that I’ve never said the IRA Tet offensive was at all likely to succeed.

“I think that a lot of this latter part of the thread has to do with Irish people rejecting the idea that they are in any way indigenous rather than a European ethnicity like any other.”

Yeah, I think this gets to the heart of the disagreement.

Stephen,

1. As well as incorrect presumptions about the setting of The Tempest you seem to downplay the fact that although some common people could vote before WW1 it was hardly the majority. you say “True, there was not universal suffrage, but [after 1884] most adult males had the vote” — yet as we all know the common people were half of them females.

Although the three 19th C reform acts increased the number of voters — in 1780 just 3% of the population were enfranchised to vote in Wales and England and due to English discrimination Scots had an even smaller proportion of their population enfranchised at 0.17% — even after the third voting reform act in 1884 “an estimated 40% of all men still did not have the right to vote”.

So with 40% of common men precluded from voting and all common women, it is evident a majority of the common people were prohibited from voting.

“I have no idea what you mean by the gentrifying of the common people. Can you defend your use of this extraordinary phrase?”

2. The definition of Gentrify is “to renovate or convert so that it conforms to middle class taste; to render middle class”. There are numerous instances were common people after being flung from their homes and communities in the countryside after enclosure were expected to conform to middle class norms and aspirations.

If you can’t fathom this and need an example — just think of D H Lawrence’s mother playing the piano in his poem — would a common woman be doing this is 1430? I really don’t think she would — she would sing and maybe have some smaller more portable instrument capable of fewer notes and play it outdoors or in a small house probably not much good for acoustics so a piano would be wasted. Due to gentrification D H Lawrence wasn;t like his dialect speaking miner father causing a great concern with notions of masculinity which he wrote extensively about until he resigned himself to his death from tuberculosis and wrote poems about lettuces instead. If D H Lawrence hadn’t been gentrified as so many of the common people were his books that bianca steele and I were talking about earlier in the thread would have been quite different.

3. “I don’t know where you got your figures for the ecological impact of London. I would suggest that you provide similar figures for other great European cities … Are you in favour of depopulating them also?”

I got the figures from “City Limits: A Resource Flow and Ecological Footprint Analysis of Greater London”

I am not going to provide you with resource use figures for other European cities — if you think they are important for this thread you can utilise google and find them yourself to share.

I never said anything about depopulating London — obviously what I think is that Londoners should consume less not move elsewhere — the fact you jumped to a solution where acquisitive Londoners should colonise other countries as new settlers is rather telling…

Phil @ 387
“This [ZM’s comment] is dreadful stuff … idiotic frankly. … Australia [was, according to you, “settled”, but in fact colonised] to set up a penal colony”.

This view of why Australia was colonised is very simplistic and a misunderstanding of what actually happened, as anyone who knows much about it could tell you. Colonisation, as such, was out of favour at the time, particularly because of what had happened in America. However the British government was strategically and economically interested in Australia (as were the French). The penal colony was a kind of ‘suck it and see’ experiment – if it didn’t work, they only lost convicts, if it worked, they had a new land and a convict servant class to work it (which happened in fact).

I don’t blame you for not being expert in Australian history, but I do blame you for being offensive about ZM. Cast the mote from your own eye, etc.

With regard to The Tempest and its setting —

one — the setting is not really determinable from the text, Prospero sets sail with his library of books and some provisions of food, but we are not told how far he sailed nor the direction he sailed in nor where the island was he ended up in. The text however clearly engages with English colonial settlement in America

two — the setting is perfectly irrelevant to the piece of dialogue I brought up — which was specifically about English attitudes to dead native Americans and beggars:

Trinculo :

“Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man.

When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.”

Val – thanks for the correction, but it doesn’t affect my main point, which is that the three centuries of British imperialism was a complex phenomenon, with different motives and different actors involved at different times and places. Saying that Britain did the same thing to other countries as it had done to Ireland (let alone that England did the same as it had to Wales, Scotland and Ireland) is a massive over-simplification.

ZM – you’ve missed the point about Yorkshire, which is that the conquest of the Welsh kingdoms by the Normans began soon after the conquest of England by the Normans. The point is, it wasn’t a case of ‘England’ conquering ‘Wales’.

As you say ‚ they were all settled or colonised by the UK to fulfil various desires from the UK.

Various different ‘desires’, not all of which even involved the British state.

the USA is an outpost of English imperialism that broke away from Westminster’s control. It is not surprising that it overconsumes like London.

No, this won’t do. The thirteen colonies broke away from EnglishBritish control – and then what? Where did they get the empire which, according to you, is the foundation of over-consumption? Conversely, how would your theory explain the present-day over-consumption of Germany, say, or Italy? All First World nations over-consume to a greater or lesser extent; not all First World nations are former imperialist powers.

This is more interesting, though:

I would say — and would be interested in Val’s opinion or others from Australia — that the idea that descendants and beneficiaries of colonialism and empire do not “bear any blame for the crimes of empire” is a very right wing attitude in Australia nowadays. Centre and left attitudes tend towards notions of collective historical responsibility and reconciliation.

This is probably the bit we should be discussing. As a white English man from a working-class background, I don’t feel I bear any responsibility for what the British ruling class did to Ireland or Africa or India or China, let alone what the settlers did to Australia. Nor is anyone, in British politics, asking me to. We officially memorialise the Holocaust but not the Bengal famine, let alone the Irish famine.

I suspect one reason why the Australian approach is so different is the simple fact that you’re talking about the indigenous people of your own country. That, and perhaps something to do with class. If I think of Welsh or Scottish people being systematically disadvantaged in their own country – something which has happened in the relatively recent past – I feel solidarity and anger much more than shame and guilt: I feel as if those people were screwed over by much the same people as would screw me over if they had a chance, and for much the same reasons (nationality being mainly a pretext). This is also how I feel about Irish people being systematically disadvantaged for being Irish, within the island of Ireland – which, in a sense, is where we came in.

Phil,

“you’ve missed the point about Yorkshire, which is that the conquest of the Welsh kingdoms by the Normans began soon after the conquest of England by the Normans. The point is, it wasn’t a case of ‘England’ conquering ‘Wales’.”

I honestly don’t know what your point about Yorkshire, Wales, and the other colonies is.

Yorkshire was already settled/colonised by Anglos since the 600s. Then there was the Viking invasions — but I already blamed the Vikings earlier for causing Alfred the Great of the Kingdom of Wessex to think it was a good idea to unify all the English kingdoms.

Due to the Danish invaders Yorkshire had some Danish customs but before the Norman conquest the Kingdom of Wessex already had control of Yorkshire and it was part of Northumberland.

And although you blame the Normans for unifying Yorkshire with the other English kingdoms (even though it was already unified with the other kingdoms by that time) — you fail to remember that I tried to help someone with blaming the Normans above by telling them about how a bit of a chapter I once read said the Normans brought “acquisitiveness” to England which was blameless of the fault before.

Anyway — William The Conqueror had the greater claim to the Crown of England at the time — so it was not really conquering.

The Normans only had to conquer England because the English refused to recognise his greater claim — he was at least a Blood Relative whereas the King the English set themselves on coronating after the death of Edward the Confessor — Earl Harold Godwinson — was only an In-Law :/

So this is another example of how the English are such nationalists they don’t follow the rules of monarchy properly — if their proper King is a Norman Viking they prefer an English Earl In-Law to be King — and if they can’t escape from coronating a Scottish King they then prefer some confused notion of parliamentary sovereignty.

“Various different ‘desires’, not all of which even involved the British state”

Yes — they wanted some colonies for rubber, and some for gold. I fail to see how this counters the charge that England colonised her neighbouring lands then other further away lands. As the resources are not distributed evenly throughout the world it would not make sense to colonise everywhere for exactly the same reasons.

And it is quite nonsensical to think that colonisation did not involve the British State — I already pointed out that your idea of jaunty British folks deciding all by themselves to sail to Australia to make a colony was quite inaccurate — it was decided in Parliament to make a colony here.

Exactly which other colonies do you think were settled in this muddled way without Parliament’s say so?

“The thirteen colonies broke away from EnglishBritish control – and then what? Where did they get the empire which, according to you, is the foundation of over-consumption?”

America still mainly speaks English and has customs more like English than any other culture. They were a colony but wanted independence. Once the colony was independent of Britain did all the British immigrants go back to Britain? No — the British colonists stayed in America and the British colony did not go away it just stopped having oversight from the Parliament in Westminster and the King.

“how would your theory explain the present-day over-consumption of Germany, say, or Italy? All First World nations over-consume to a greater or lesser extent; not all First World nations are former imperialist powers.”

After unification Germany tried to get a large empire too but it lost two world wars and never got an empire. However, the independent colony America helped Germany and other countries develop to consume more resources with the Marshall Plan.

Do you really think that the global distribution of resources and financial capital has nothing at all to do with imperial history? That it is just an unfathomable quirk of history that European cities and settler outposts like Australia and America now consume more resources than African ones or Indian ones?

“”So this is another example of how the English are such nationalists they don’t follow the rules of monarchy properly”

“The English”? The English in 1066 equals the English in 1603 equals the English in 1788 equals the English in 1845? This isn’t even worth correcting, it’s just nonsense.”

Well hopefully you’re right on this matter and the English people of today are so different to their forebears in the 11th and the 17th Cs that when Prince Charles becomes King they will support the monarchy and his commitment to sustainable consumption.

ZM@395;

1. Yes, I am well aware that no women could vote pre-WW1. That was true no matter what class they were. But simple arithmetic shows that if about 60% of adult males could vote, then your claim that the common people could not vote only makes sense if you define the common people as being the poorer 40%. Nobody pre-WW1 would have agreed, I think.

2. So by ‘gentrification of the common people” you mean an increase in the living standards of the working class. I always supposed that was a good thing: are you really against it?

Sons & Lovers is a work of fiction. In real life Lawrence’s father wasn’t a miner. He was a mining contractor. That is, if the owners of a coal mine wanted to recruit a gang of workers, they wouldn’t necessarily do that themselves. They could go to people like the useful Mr Lawrence, who would provide the workers they wanted, and issue them with any gear they needed.

I quite agree that in the 1430s the equivalent of Mrs Lawrence would not have had a piano to play. Neither would the Queen of England.

Incidentally, re the Tolkien thread: do you realize that the school Lawrence went to is now classed as a public school?

3. Thank you for the reference to the City Limits article, which I read with interest. It states, among other things, that 41% of London’s ecological footprint is devoted to providing food, and that for London to be ecologically sustainable an 80% reduction in overall consumption by 2050 is needed.

Simple arithmetic shows that to achieve this, the population of London will have to be halved by 2050 if current food consumption is to be maintained, assuming that they then spend nothing on transport, energy, water and materials. If one is prepared to allow them some of those luxuries, either the population must be reduced by well over half, or food consumption will have to be seriously modified, or both. Would you disagree?

I didn’t conclude that Londoners would have to move to new colonies. I just concluded that many of them would have to go somewhere: possibly of course to the cemeteries.

You don’t seem to have taken on board my comment that the ecological footprint of any city, town or non-autarkic village is by definition greater than its geographical area. Think about it.

I don’t object to what I assume is ZM’s more general point about acknowledging , and somehow making amends for, the crimes of European Imperialism. I just dont know what this would mean as a practical matter. Certainly the acknowledgment of British crimes in Kenya , brought on by the Mau Mau court case, seems a good start. But such a process will always be political (ie the Famine apology) or reactive. I think, what I know very superficially as, the German response to the Holocaust (an ongoing process of historical truth telling) seems to have a lot of merit to it. I dont know a huge amount about that though, or even if it can be generalised beyond the specific case of the holocaust. Personally, I think this should be true of most countries though (and of course non western empires) History as morality tale has pretty much nothing going for it. The concentration on the ‘English’ is just parochialism.
I do think, as Ive said above, that those most responnsible for making amends to the indigenous population of Australia (and who have benefited most) are Australians. Perhaps the British state should apologise to them (as I said above), im open to argument on that (as I dont know enough about it) But the concentration primarily on the ‘English’ or framing it alongside the ‘colonisation’ of Wales and Cornwall does strike me as bizzare. (Ill stop there as Ive been accused of misunderstanding ZM’s point in the past, although in my defence it seems a few others have aswell. Defensiveness from the cheerleaders of Empire, I guess.)

1. “But simple arithmetic shows that if about 60% of adult males could vote, then your claim that the common people could not vote only makes sense if you define the common people as being the poorer 40%.”

If unenfranchised men are about 20% of the population plus unenfranchised women are about 50% of the population that gives us 70% of the population being unenfranchised.

70% of the population is a big enough group to be the common people.

If you want to quibble that there are more women in this common people than men — this is because this population of common people is adjusted to incorporate gender discrimination as well as discrimination on the grounds of wealth and income.

2. “In real life Lawrence’s father wasn’t a miner. He was a mining contractor. ”

He was a contractor — called a butty informally (I am unsure if this is reference to sandwiches?) — but Arthur Lawrence made it seem to his wife like he was a contractor who did not do underground mining himself — but this was not true — in truth he worked underground in the mines for 50 years with the additional responsibilities of being a butty. His wife was very disappointed and cross about this once she found out since she wanted a more genteel life.

“So by ‘gentrification of the common people” you mean an increase in the living standards of the working class. I always supposed that was a good thing: are you really against it?”

The common people only became the working class once landlords and the parliament enclosed their land. Then they lost many of their customs and had to work in mining and factories and be working class people. I do not think gentrification only relates to material consumption/”living standards” — it is also about dialect, customs, clothing etc.

The problem with raising material consumption/”living standards” is that England is only a small land — so if the 70% common people population want “living standards” to always be rising higher then as we see England does not have enough land to provide for this and then this occasions the taking of resources from other countries.

3. “Simple arithmetic shows that to achieve this, the population of London will have to be halved by 2050 if current food consumption is to be maintained… either the population must be reduced by well over half, or food consumption will have to be seriously modified, or both.”

Londoners can eat more sustainably and work more allotment gardens. Cutting out animal products would considerably lower the ecological footprint of food, as would growing food in the aforementioned allotments and avoiding importing food from far away.

England can convert land used for grazing to land for growing crops and as this will take more work then some Londoners can move to the countryside to work on the new croplands.

“You don’t seem to have taken on board my comment that the ecological footprint of any city, town or non-autarkic village is by definition greater than its geographical area. Think about it.”

Well it is true historically of cities that they take resources from elsewhere. But that is why there has been a move away from looking at cities only as buildings to looking at them as processes. But that does not mean that London should;t decrease its consumption — even if it’s ecological footprint stayed larger than the city itself it could maybe decrease to be half the size of the U.K. instead of double.

Rich Puchalsky: . . . this latter part of the thread has to do with Irish people rejecting the idea that they are in any way indigenous rather than a European ethnicity like any other.

I don’t think I understood this comment.

Ronan(rf) @ 406, where he quoted the reflections of the wonderful short story author, Seán Ó Faoláin (née John Francis Whelan), seems to capture some sense of the push-pull effect of the British state on Irish politics and political identity.

I think many flavors of Left have a discomfited relationship to nationalism in any form, and more broadly with any of the (hierarchical? authoritarian?) structures of political and economic development. There’s a desire for innocence and simplicity in everyone, I suppose, that can overwhelm common sense and self-awareness. Ideology is often founded on massive and obstinate sins of omission.

You know that I am interested in the generational rhythms of political, constitutional change, and I see in Ireland and Irish politics a cycle that started in the 1960s, with a reorganization of northern Ireland’s nationalist politics around civil rights and social welfare economics. That generation accomplished a transformative, constitutional change, without much touching the sectarian social divisions. Walls across the “interface areas” were a means to an end as was trading away the homicidal manias of the IRA and its Unionist counterparts.

I suppose it is true that the Irish are not interested in adopting the role of Hibernian aborigines to satisfy an anachronistic leftist analysis of colonial imperialism. It seems to me, though, that the various overlays of good cop / bad cop routines in Northern Ireland’s political struggles were predicated both on the overwhelming power of the British state and on the disinterest of the British state in continuing “colonial” domination in the British Isles. It isn’t just that the Irish particularly want to be a “normal” European ethnicity — whatever that means (!?) — but that the British state (to the extent that we can sensibly attribute manifest desire to that amorphous abstraction) wants them to be that as well, and could be persuaded, step-by-step, to constitutional arrangements that make it so.

ZM: Yes, I have been intending to respond to your request @ 166 but it’s taken a bit longer than I had hoped. I’m not the best person to give you a comprehensive overview of the modern UK view on anything at all, my first suggestion would be to read something like the Guardian (for a left perspective) regularly. However, let’s try…

“There are numerous awful things [that were done] and they are discussed with a reasonable frequency but also with discomfort” would be a good description of the discourse here as well. There is a lot of awkwardness about the whole colonialism thing. It involved killing a lot of people and taking over their countries, and there is clearly a general feeling that while this was seen as perfectly OK at the time, it really wasn’t and we shouldn’t do it again. But it’s easy to say that a bunch of people who are all long dead were bad people and we aren’t like them; to me (and, I think, a lot of the left) the more important thing is that reflecting on our past influences how we behave in the future, our relationships with other parts of the world today, particularly places which we messed up in the past.

Sometimes that’s about artefacts that we acquired in colonial times (e.g. the Elgin marbles – the left is generally in favour of giving them back, this hasn’t happened yet) or foreign aid or debt cancellation (again – left generally in favour – progress incomplete). You could say something similar about our few remaining overseas territories – particularly the Chagos archipelago – the left perspective is that there is an (ongoing) wrong being done, and that the islands should be given back (though Labour in government worked to prevent this). One of the drivers of opposition to the Iraq war a decade ago was an objection to neo-colonialist behaviour.

History also influences our openness or otherwise to immigration, particularly from the former empire (i.e. most of our non-European immigrants). It also creates a reluctance to “interfere” in immigrant communities, now with some pushback on matters such as FGM and sexual abuse of children. Fairly or unfairly, this sensitivity is also often considered to be a failing of the left.

What aspects are of most relevance here in the UK are clearly going to be different than in a country which is located on land taken from other people, where those other people are still around. That’s why we’re not really talking about “indigeneity” here, we are the indigenous people of the UK, almost all of us having heritage from a mixture of all of the northern European tribes who turned up here over the centuries.

As Phil said @ 401, the left doesn’t see itself as heirs to the colonialist tradition, more to the working classes who were being exploited in the UK by the same people who were exploiting lands overseas at the same time. There are issues with this viewpoint, of course, as clearly the empire enriched the UK as a whole, not just our ruling classes. Relatedly, Phil’s comment @ 96 discusses the left perspective on the original topic: “a melange of opposition to the broadcasting ban, support for British withdrawal & ultimate reunification, and who else are you going to support anyway”.

“were predicated both on the overwhelming power of the British state and on the disinterest of the British state in continuing “colonial” domination in the British Isles.”

I think that’s right. I was going to say something similar in response to Stephen @371 (about how Irish political possibilities were always conditioned by British might), but the reply became too confused and would have just muddied the waters.
To copy and paste again, I think this gets to a better way of analysing certain aspects of Irish history.

” By August 1914, in response to the home rule act (1912), British constitutional democracy had conjured into existence two private armies in Ireland. Irish unionists with Tory support created the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and imported German rifles to arm it. A rival body similarly equipped, the Irish Volunteers, was soon controlled by the Irish parliamentary nationalist party.
These events grimly pointed toward the post-1801 United Kingdom’s first civil war, which the Great War’s outbreak postponed, but did not avert indefinitely as the events of 1920–2 later demonstrated. What Richard English juxtaposes are Irish revolutionism and a determined, Whiggish, interpretation of British constitutional advancement. And this starkly demonstrates an elemental problem to be found elsewhere in this study. It is fully impossible to understand Irish separatist nationalism under the Union, without comprehending the failures of British unionist nationalism for ultimately, it is contended here, they are of a piece when studying nationalism in Ireland.

Critical to this argument is an understanding of the British constitution’s development from the 17th century, its travails and successes, and its slow collapse in Ireland after 1912. The British constitution’s advances in 19th-century Ireland recorded Catholic emancipation, educational, land, and local government reforms, and an expanding franchise. But British nationalism produced no viable answer and the British constitution no adequate mechanism to deal with separatist aspirations buoyed by burgeoning democracy and the flowering of the national idea. The frustrations and delays associated with devolved home rule after 1885, followed by partition and government sanctioned repression (provided by the ‘Black and Tans’ and other special police forces in 1920–2), and a coerced settlement in 1922, identify the failures of the British constitution to defend the rights of Irish subjects against the interests of the state.
Both before and after 1914, militarist loyalism and militarist republicanism were responses to the power vacuum the crumbling constitution had created. Studied in isolation, with the assumption of British constitutional stability somewhere in the background, separatist nationalism’s violence appears deviant and perhaps the unnecessary indulgence Richard English suggests. Studied within the wider constitutional context of the United Kingdom a richer, more plausible, view equally may emerge. ”

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/704

Sascha Clarkson,

you’re quite right I accidentally mixed up Northumbria and Northumberland, and Yorkshire was part of the first rather than the latter. But I was correcting someone who thought Yorkshire wasn’t English until the Norman arrival.

What were my “several other inaccuracies?”

ZM @ 419: What were my “several other inaccuracies?”

William the Bastard actually did conquer — your fanciful contradiction to the cornerstone of 1066 and all that could be termed inaccurate. Your history is fractured and your economics — you talk of resource consumption as if no organized process of production mediates!

Ronan(rf) @ 417

Thanks for the reference to Dr John Regan’s review of the book, Irish Freedom: the History of Nationalism in Ireland by Richard English. The author’s reply, frustrated perhaps by Regan’s careful prose, opted to attack Brendan O’Leary for his review of the book. O’Leary was far less restrained in taking down English. Sort of a Three Kingdoms perspective and fun.

I was correcting someone who thought Yorkshire wasn’t English until the Norman arrival.

No, you were misreading someone who pointed out that that it was historically illiterate to talk about ‘England’ conquering ‘Wales’, given that the Normans’ attempted conquest of the Welsh kingdoms began shortly after the Norman conquest of the North of what is now England.

I think European Cities were generally impacted by the flows of resources into Europe during the imperial era, plus the continuing Western domination in the post-war era.

So do I, so do (at a guess) most people on this thread. But that’s not the claim you made. You attributed London’s overconsumption to the British Empire and no other cause. To retreat to a more nuanced and accurate position when challenged, with the implication that it’s the position you held all along… there’s a name for that.

@425
It’s the northern hemisphere boys ganging up on ZM. Hardly fair. I have to jump in.

You quoted ZM: “I think European Cities were generally impacted by the flows of resources into Europe during the imperial era, plus the continuing Western domination in the post-war era.”

And responded “So do I, so do (at a guess) most people on this thread. But that’s not the claim you made. You attributed London’s overconsumption to the British Empire and no other cause. To retreat to a more nuanced and accurate position when challenged, with the implication that it’s the position you held all along… there’s a name for that.”

But just because ZM attributed London’s overconsumption to the British Empire (which may be an over simplification, but that’s not what you’re arguing about), doesn’t suggest she is saying that no other European countries had empires. We all know they did and it’s been discussed on this thread. ZM has, I think, suggested strongly that England was the worst (aka most successful) imperialist, but not that it was the only one.

So, as far as I can see, like others before you, in your rush to tell ZM how silly and wrong she is, you have said something that seems to lack logic. It’s poetic justice, but is it mansplaining?

Bruce Wilder,

I have already detailed before with a family tree that the current royal family are direct descendants of the Stuarts.

Queen Elizabeth II is descended from James I&VI’s daughter Elizabeth who was to become the Winter Queen of Bohemia after she recovered from the alarm caused by being the target of the gunpowder plotters. Whereas Franz of Bavaria is descended from Charles I’s daughter Henrietta.

I do not see the point of insisting that Charles I’s daughter’s descendants have a greater claim to the throne than James I&VI’s daughter’s descendants. Jacobites should modernise and shift their focus to supporting heir apparent Prince Charles in his writing letters to the Ministers in parliament and his efforts at sustainability and town and city planning reforms.

Phil,

“No, you were misreading someone who pointed out that that it was historically illiterate to talk about ‘England’ conquering ‘Wales’, given that the Normans’ attempted conquest of the Welsh kingdoms began shortly after the Norman conquest of the North of what is now England.”

I have not read any history which speaks of this Great Norman Empire you are referring to when you’re not telling me that Yorkshire wasn’t English until 1066 — which is about 400 years out.

Nor have I heard of England being referred to as (New?) Normandy — and the actions of its polity attributed to Normans.

And not once have I read of the Norman invasions of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, the Americas, India, Australia, etc etc. (Well, to be absolutely accurate that bit of a chapter I have already mentioned that said the Norman’s brought greed/”acquisitiveness” to England did mention they had stretched south of Normandy around about the time of their arrival in England as well — but I did not read the whole chapter or the rest of the book so I don’t know about what the author attributed to the Normans after that bit).

“You attributed London’s overconsumption to the British Empire and no other cause”

At no point did I say London’s over consumption was attributed to one — and only one — singular isolated cause :/
In fact in this very thread I have pointed out two other causes: (a) the habit of acquisitiveness brought to England by the Normans; and (b) the gentrification of the common people.

So I mentioned at least three causes — not one — and I am quite sure I could list even more.

But I think that despite acquisitiveness and gentrification without colonising other countries it is quite unlikely that England could have got so many resources to consume so over-much.

Peter T,

“Empire is a complicated business. My great-great-grandparents fled the Famine to Australia, where they took up farms on land taken from Aborigines. Perhaps they are owed an apology, and also owe one?”

That is true. There is a book called Caledonia Australis about the Highland Scots being dispossessed of their land and then dispossessing Indigenous Australians in Gippsland in Victoria near where one side of my family had settled. I have not been able to finish it the times I have started as it makes me too sad and troubled.

djr,

“my first suggestion would be to read something like the Guardian (for a left perspective) regularly.”

I already do this. It is from my reading of UK media and comments here that I have come to the conclusion that UK and Australian dialogue about colonialism and empire are different.

“But it’s easy to say that a bunch of people who are all long dead were bad people and we aren’t like them…the more important thing is that reflecting on our past influences how we behave in the future, our relationships with other parts of the world today, particularly places which we messed up in the past. Sometimes that’s about artefacts that we acquired in colonial times… or foreign aid or debt cancellation ”

I think this is different — as there is as much an emphasis on recognising what happened in the past in Australia — for instance there was the 1992 Redfern Speech I embedded earlier by Prime Minister Keating:

“And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition.
Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.”

And in the Howard Government of the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a lot of controversy that Prime Minister Howard refused to make an Apology to the stolen generation (which Prime Minister Rudd subsequently did).

So recognition of the past is a living issue here. But also where you say the “reflecting on the past influences how we behave in the future” this is a bit different. I think because England has largely retreated from government of her former colonies which in a sense is a withdrawal from present day responsibility — whereas in Australia I think in someways it can be easier reflecting on the wrongs of the past than knowing how to do much better in the present and future — so present issues are much more fraught and high stakes but also more about practice here.

“As Phil said @ 401, the left doesn’t see itself as heirs to the colonialist tradition, more to the working classes who were being exploited in the UK by the same people who were exploiting lands overseas at the same time. There are issues with this viewpoint, of course, as clearly the empire enriched the UK as a whole, not just our ruling classes.”

I think this is different as well — its a bit hard to explain. While people on the left might take some heart in identifying as or being part of national or international) leftist traditions or following in the paths of particular individuals that opposed colonisation and dispossession (I am not sure how common this anti-colonialism was on the left before the second half of the 20th C if we equate the left with the labour movement to be honest — although I looked at a paper and that seems the same in England — there were some working class radicals against colonialism but others who were jingoistic) — I think there is also a sense of having an identity as or being part of an Australian community.

So I would say that the general view is that we as Australians bear the historical legacy of colonialism and dispossession. And that doesn’t seem to be the same in the UK.

ZM:
I have not read any history which speaks of this Great Norman Empire you are referring to

Very amusing. But all I was saying (one last time) was that it’s historically illiterate to claim – as you did – that ‘England’ conquered ‘Wales’. That’s it.

At no point did I say London’s over consumption was attributed to one — and only one — singular isolated cause

What you actually wrote was:

“this over-consumption continues today as you can see from my figures about just the residents of London consuming as much as could be extracted from land twice the size of the whole United Kingdom. So I can blame this on the bad habits got during colonialism too.”

Which is what I and others objected to – not only wildly simplistic but moralising.

Val:
just because ZM attributed London’s overconsumption to the British Empire (which may be an over simplification, but that’s not what you’re arguing about), doesn’t suggest she is saying that no other European countries had empires

On the contrary, the over-simplification is precisely what I’m arguing about; I certainly didn’t suggest that ZM was saying no other European countries had empires. All I did (or tried to do) was correct an erroneous claim made upthread. Since ZM has quietly abandoned that claim I’ll consider my work done.

there seem to have been rather a lot of men wading in to tell ZM she is wrong, without necessarily being totally right themselves.

You don’t need to be ‘totally right’ to correct basic errors. If you tell me the moon’s made of green cheese, & I say that we’ve known it’s made of rock ever since Apollo 11 landed in April 1972, you don’t then get to claim that my error about the date disqualifies me as an authority on what the moon’s made of.

As for ‘mansplaining’, it’s news to me that ZM is female – whoever ZM is, the use of initials suggests that (s)he doesn’t want to broadcast his/her gender, a choice I respect. Do you know my gender, come to that? Do I know yours? (Plenty of Philippas and Valentines out there.) Do we care?

I think because England has largely retreated from government of her former colonies which in a sense is a withdrawal from present day responsibility

I don’t believe that Britain (please don’t call it England) has any present-day responsibility. Historical responsibility, yes – although for obvious practical reasons the colony ran without much day-to-day direction from Britain pretty much from the outset. For as long as Australia was a colony the responsibility for what was done lay ultimately with the British state (although not with the British people) – but that doesn’t mean that individual Australians weren’t responsible for what they did.

That’s a very powerful speech from Paul Keating – We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life and so on. I think an identity story has grown up over the last couple of decades, which claims that history – a history of having been the conqueror and dispossessor – as part of the present-day white Australian identity. There isn’t anything comparable for the British, and I’m not sure if there could be. I’m descended from wheelwrights and blacksmiths, and more recently from miners and domestic servants; my ancestors had no responsibility for British imperialism, however far you go back.

Bruce, thanks for pointing me towards that, it is good( and a handy corrective to the argument I might have overstated a bit in this thread)

Ronan@378: you agree that the liberal theories of government to which Redmond & Co appealed did mean, for practical reasons, that Dublin should not be governed from London because the Irish people didn’t want it, and conversely that Belfast should not be governed from Dublin. But you said that morally or theoretically, you found this questionable.

You also said you’d get back to explain this statement, which I find intriguing but not easily interpretable. Would it be too much trouble for you to do so?

Look forward to it with interest.

is it mansplaining?

Read more like Ozsplaining Irish and British history to me. Ymmv.

Rich Puchalsky @ 436

I guess that helps some. Though I feel confident that I have the basic outlines underlining the colonialism rubric, I’m not sure what the “inter-ethnic European conflict across arbitrary state borders” references.

I do think it’s hard to understand some of the back-and-forth without an acquaintance with the rhetorical narrative framework of British Commonwealth concepts of evolving legitimate and constitutional self-governance, over and against the older, darker and more organic political instabilities of the Three Kingdoms. The Irish Republican hostility to the Commonwealth is taken personally by a lot of Tories and seems inexplicable to them, a form of nationalist madness, and all reference to the bloody catastrophes of British rule offered in explanation are misunderstood.

The European project introduced some new welcome new possibilities into the political games of Irish politics. Europe provided leverage for secularizing the politics of the Republic and disestablishing the Catholic Church, which was a huge thing. And, Europe provided an economic basis that at least seemed more independent of Britain. I have a hard time connecting those developments to your “inter-ethnic European conflict across arbitrary state borders”, but if that’s what you meant, OK.

I think what Rich was getting at (and he can correct me of I’m wrong) was the question over whether Northern Ireland was a domestic ethnic conflict, or an ‘anti colonial’ one. I think it was both (though more the first)

..or even the conflict more generally. To copy and paste again (apologies) from Tom Garvin’s counterfactual:

“There is a common argument to the effect that the violent birth of modern Independent Ireland was in some way foolish and unnecessary, because the democratic politics of consensus , reasoning and bargaining would have achieved independence more easily and without bloodshed. Let me speculate briefly on what might have happened had the Rising not taken place. With the arrival home of the [First World War] veterans in 1919, and with the discredited Redmondites still holding on in Westminster, armed nationalism (which would have returned from the trenches with rather pronounced opinions about the British establishment and its right to rule anybody) would have been alienated fatally from constitutional nationalism. An incoherent but vicious sectarian war between North and South, with no new generation of political leaders in place, could easily have occurred . The Rising redefined the quarrel as one between two vaguely defined entities, England and Ireland rather than one between Catholics and Protestants.”

I don’t know what I think about the last sentence, but I guess my intial problem with the framing as ‘indigenous’ is I dont really know, specifically what people mean by that.

I do think the article Bruce mentioned above ‘Cuttlefish, Cholesterol and Saoirse: Review Article on Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Irish Nationalism’ by Brendan O’Leary is worth reading on these topics. (and availabl online)

Val: “eg Stephen says stuff like that and I’m the only one who picks it up – again.”

Well, I told him that he had to append “And my axe” to all of his comments after he tried to bring this dispute over to the JRRT thread and approvingly quoted Gimli’s opinion. I would call that picking up on his patronizing BS, though maybe I phrased it too obliquely.

Fwiw I did tell Stephen he came across like a right-wing spambot

“and I think there are interesting comparisons to be made between the way different countries (including Australia) respond to the history of imperialism.”

I agree. The article Bruce mentioned references Ian Lusticks book, which makes a specific comparison (with Ireland) to Algeria and France (and Israel and the West Bank) The comparison to French North Africa might be more applicable to Ireland than Australia. (unfortunately I know little about French North Africa) A lot of postcolonial comparative analysis has (afaik) generally ignored Ireland (as did the stuff on Central /Eastern European revolutions during and after WW1)
I think there are comparisons to be made, I’m just not sure what they are, and if going back centuries is the way to do it.

Ronan@450: what I mean is that the liberal theories, as held by the UK government in the years before 1914, led to the conclusion that Irish Home Rule could not be in conscience resisted, since that was what the Irish people as a whole wanted. Hence the Third Home Rule Bill. But the difficulty, as it seems to me, is that the Redmondites did not perceive that the same theories, as applied to Ireland as a whole, led to the conclusion that exemption from home rule for some part of Ulster (not necessarily the six counties as in fact exempted) could also not in conscience be resisted.

BY 1914, I would say, the UK government had in effect taken the gun out of Irish politics, in that there was no intention of using armed force to subdue Redmond & Co. This was part of a long process of taking the gun out of politics generally, which can be traced back a long way; in the Irish context, to O’Connell’s non-violent campaign and the governmental perception that armed force should not be used to subdue that. Whether the UK opposition, had they succeeded in winning an election, would have put it back in again, I don’t know. The people who did in fact put it back were, in my opinion, the UVF, but I don’t think they would have done so if the Redmondites had accepted that home rule for the south implies exemption from home rule for (parts of) the north.

Tom Garvin’s speculation as to what would have happened if the Rising had never taken place is interesting. But is not an equally plausible speculation that, at the end of the war, Protestant Unionists might have perceived the Nationalists not as their treacherous enemies, but as their reliable friends who had stood by them in many battles, and whose wishes should be accommodated? I admit that’s only speculation, but I’ve tried it out on Ulster Protestants, and a fair few agreed.

Engels@457: if you think that enthusiasm for depopulating London is a left-wing attitude, and opposing it right-wing, well, you’re entitled to your opinion. But it would mean that, in your opinion, a rather large number of people in Britain who think they are more or less left wingers are mistaken. One might regard that as slightly patronising.

Stephen, I don’t think that: I was refering to our earlier exchange (I mentioned it because Val implied she was the only person objecting to your comments).

@Sasha. I agree. Plus the repeated mention of the Good Folk may catch their attention— a thing to be avoided, especially in a medium so crass as the internet. It is mistaken to assume that all have retreated Under the Hill, and the next fiach fiáin may be closer at hand than one would assume.

“led to the conclusion that Irish Home Rule could not be in conscience resisted, since that was what the Irish people as a whole wanted.”

No, I don’t think conscience had anything to do with it. The Liberal commitment to the third home rule bill was clearly political , the bill was a fudge with little chance of implementation as it stood(which they knew), and the Unionists and Tories used this moment of crisis to bargain for their own position through mobilising and arming in Ulster. Partition was all but inevitable by 1914 (Ronan Fanning has written a new, pretty convincing book on this ‘Fatal Path’)
Concentrating on a weakened and weakening Redmond is really beside the point.

Phil,

“But all I was saying (one last time) was that it’s historically illiterate to claim – as you did – that ‘England’ conquered ‘Wales’. That’s it.”

Well you might say that it was not precise or detailed, but (1) I cannot write very detailed comments every time because then people complain of their lengthiness and a lengthy comment takes longer for me to write also; and (2) if you have a look you will see that many articles talk about the English invasion of Wales e.g. in general sites such as the BBC website or Historic UK, or in academic articles such as Aylmer (1990) : “a large part of medieval and modern “British” history can be seen as a process of conquest and forcible anglicisation, extending of course to Ireland as well as to Wales and Scotland”

In contrast to your take on the Norman Conquest and the Invasions of Wales meaning that English Imperialism was not in play here — the historian John Gillingham (1992) argues that it was in fact during this period that English Imperialism had its birth:

“Here I shall first argue that an imperialist English culture emerged in the twelfth century… four hundred years earlier than is commonly supposed.

At first sight there is something of a paradox here since for most people the hundred years or so after the Norman conquest was a time when Frenchmen ruled the roost, when the English were an oppressed people… hardly the most plausible soil for an imperialising English culture.
….
Since [the] perception [of a Norman invasion of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland] is both widespread and seriously misleading, it is perhaps best to begin with a few observations on the subject…. by the 1130s and 1140s the French connexion was no longer a source of national or ethnic tension.” After the Norman Conquest “The King and a tiny handful of the very greatest magnates , holding vast estates in Normandy as well as in England and Wales, may have thought of themselves primarily as Frenchmen, but the overwhelming majority of the landowners of England knew they were English… French speaking, of mixed ancestry… but English even so.
…
Among the [12 C] clerical elite a prevailing perception of the otherness and inferiority of Celtic peoples is easy to document…. the Welsh ‘are rude and untamed; they live like beasts and though they nominally profess Christ, they deny him in their life and ways’. ‘Who would deny that the Scots are barbarians?’…. [The Irish] ‘are so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture… they are a wild people, living like beasts, who have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral farming’ … by the mid and late 12th century such views were commonplace.
…
The perception of Celtic societies as barbarous obviously functioned in part as an ideology of conquest. … if I am right about the attitudes of authors in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, then it is equally clear that the English had been invading Welsh — and Cornish — lands for centuries without needing an imperialist ideology.
…
For many centuries England and the Celtic world had been very similar societies. But in the course of the 10th, 11th and early 12th Centuries profound European economic, social, military, and cultural developments affected the South East of England…
…
…revivial of Greco-Roman modes of perception resulted in the Christian view of the world, one which divided men and women into two basic groups — Christian and Non-Christian — being decisively supplemented by a non-religious system of classification, one which divided men and women into the civilised and the barbarians. In the course of British history this was to be the great divide, the creation of an imperialist English culture”

Source: John Gillingham “The Beginnings of English Imperialism”

“For as long as Australia was a colony the responsibility for what was done lay ultimately with the British state (although not with the British people) – but that doesn’t mean that individual Australians weren’t responsible for what they did….I’m descended from wheelwrights and blacksmiths, and more recently from miners and domestic servants; my ancestors had no responsibility for British imperialism, however far you go back.”

Well your ancestors possibly bought and used things from the colonies (sugar? tea?) and lived in a period when cities and towns were built on profits from colonies — so while they did not individually have a lot of power to exert on the matter they were still involved as part of a nation. But I don’t have time to write anything else on this right now.

Phil@466: the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Blake, somewhere r other.

ZM: that’s a much more subtle, nuanced and complex version of the conquest and anglicisation of the Welsh kingdoms, which can’t be boiled down to saying that ‘England’ conquered ‘Wales’. Again, you’ve replaced a sketchy and tendentious claim with one that’s much more sustainable. I’d rather you acknowledged you were doing it, but apart from that I can’t complain.

your ancestors possibly bought and used things from the colonies (sugar? tea?) and lived in a period when cities and towns were built on profits from colonies — so while they did not individually have a lot of power to exert on the matter they were still involved as part of a nation. But I don’t have time to write anything else on this right now.

Shame, because it’s a lot more interesting. I think my reply would be that if you go back through my family tree all you’ll find is accidents of birth – at no time did anyone decide to be part of British Imperialism, they all just happened to be born somewhere where they would go on to benefit from it. The white Australian relationship to imperialism is, necessarily, very different. (Even the transports didn’t have to stay there – several people made it back to Britain*. One bloke did seven years, made his way back home, got caught thieving, did another seven years and came home again – he died in the same place he was born. He must really not have liked it out there.)

*NB this isn’t entirely a serious point – the returners were only a very small fraction of the transports.

Phil,

“ZM: that’s a much more subtle, nuanced and complex version of the conquest and anglicisation of the Welsh kingdoms, which can’t be boiled down to saying that ‘England’ conquered ‘Wales’.”

Heavens above — what would you boil it down to then? The article is specifically arguing that English imperialism begins with the English — rather than Norman — conquest of Wales.

“Again, you’ve replaced a sketchy and tendentious claim with one that’s much more sustainable. I’d rather you acknowledged you were doing it, but apart from that I can’t complain.”

Brief argumentative claims that are then supported over the course of the thread with more and more evidence and detail is how internet comment thread arguments go.

“Shame, because it’s a lot more interesting. I think my reply would be that if you go back through my family tree all you’ll find is accidents of birth – at no time did anyone decide to be part of British Imperialism, they all just happened to be born somewhere where they would go on to benefit from it. ”

I quite disagree with you about this. It is like saying Australians and English people don’t bear responsibility for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq so long as they are not the actual soldiers or parliamentarians. It is very individualistic and just seems a way to absolve anyone of ever having any collective responsibility for anything.

Heavens above — what would you boil it down to then?

I wouldn’t boil it down to anything – that’s my entire point. It’s complex. If pushed I’d say that the absorption of what is now Wales into the realms of the Kings of England began in earnest after 1066 but was not completed until several hundred years later – which is not to say that the nation of Wales was conquered, because no such nation existed.

It is like saying Australians and English people don’t bear responsibility for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq so long as they are not the actual soldiers or parliamentarians.

If I voted against war, signed petitions against war, joined marches against war, am I still partly responsible for the wars by virtue of where I happened to be born? That seems harsh.

Phil,
” the absorption of what is now Wales into the realms of the Kings of England… which is not to say that the nation of Wales was conquered”

Wales was not absorbed — a sponge absorbs water but the English conquered the Welsh. I think you rather than myself are an outlier on this matter.

“If I voted against war, signed petitions against war, joined marches against war, am I still partly responsible for the wars by virtue of where I happened to be born? That seems harsh.”

Yes you are because you failed to succeed in stopping the war and are a member of a country not just an individual. Polling says the majority of Australians (I don’t know about numbers in the UK) did not support these wars — did we do enough to stop the wars? No.

Phil – you have failed – how can you live with the shame? Go and commit seppuku at once!

(Please don’t!!! :-) )

PS William Blake rocks!

Given the out-marriage rate among indigenous Australian women is approx 70%, after a certain number of iterations I guess we’ll all end up being indigenous.

Engels @486 – Absolutely right!

… and most Londoners would consider these things essential to their mental health

The veins start to pop out on their necks when I then point out that every single one of my wife’s relatives, AFAICT, including the ones who collaborated with the North, wish the Americans had won the war because of the extreme poverty and sense of hopelessness that overcame the South immediately after the North took over.

BTW, I agree with you on the deficits of left-wing “imperialism” talk. It over-simplifies what should not be over-simplified and Phil has spoken to this quite well. I haven’t been reading this thread closely, but my prejudices confirm that ZM is a transgressor in this department. [sorry ZM!]

OK, but now I want to put 2 cents in on Vietnam because it’s a pet issue of mine. What you say above might well be valid but it shouldn’t be said without a hefty caveat: 1) We don’t know what the situation would have looked like in the absence of US aggression in Southeast Asia. 2) US aggression in Vietnam and the surrounding area amounted to an unprovoked holocaust. It had no rational basis in US national security and it directly contravened the Vietnamese consensus for unification and a nationalist gov’t under HCM.

ZM@487: I fear we do not have the same sense of humor.

May I make a serious and friendly request? It may happen again that you say “X”, and someone comes up with a good reason why “not-X”. If you feel you have to reply with a humorous “ah, but if I make X true by definition, no matter how distant from reality that definition, then I’ve proved X, so there” could you please, for your own sake, put in something to the effect of “I realize this is a circular argument and not worth taking seriously, but I did want to have the last word”?

You see, if you don’t, there is a real danger that readers will conclude you are someone who wouldn’t recognise a logical argument if it danced up and down in front of you, wearing a T-shirt saying I AM A LOGICAL ARGUMENT and with flashing lights in its hair reading THIS IS A LOGICAL ARGUMENT and waving a banner saying I SUPPORT LOGICAL ARGUMENTS.

Which would, as I’m sure you would agree, be a great pity.

Re gentrification: I still think you’re confusing it with an increase in the living standards of the working class, which I think to be a good thing. After WW1, my grandfather’s family were able to afford a piano. I don’t think he would have regarded himself as being gentrified: in his will he insisted that there should be plenty of beer at his funeral, and that nobody who didn’t want to should have to wear a collar and tie. It was just that they liked music.

Re the population of London: I have already pointed out that the whole area of London would provide allotment and kitchen gardens to the extent of less than 16 yards square per person. Good luck with that for feeding them. If you’ve ever seen London from the air, you will appreciate that converting pitched roofs to gardens might be difficult.

Getting the Londoners to give up tea, coffee and chocolate is likely to be difficult without a dictatorship. And are you sure you’ve thought through the consequences of their doing so? You see, it’s not just London that has an ecological footprint far bigger than its area: as I have tried to point out, no city ever has been, or ever will be, able to provide most of the food, fuel, materials it needs from within its own boundaries. So it’s not just Londoners who will have to give up these luxuries: it’s Mancunians, Glaswegians, Parisians, Berliners, Milanese, New Yorkers … and have you considered the effect of this on, say cocoa farmers in West Africa. Bang goes their export trade. Bang goes their ability to get foreign exchange for things they would rather like to have. Is that really what you want?

As for Cromwell the Conqueror: are you really disputing the authority of the English Republic? If so, how do you justify the Republic of Ireland breaking away from the legitimate monarch, George VI? Or the possible creation of an Australian Republic?

NB that is meant to be at least partly humorous.

Seriously, though, about historical collective responsibility, it raises some dreadful problems. If you agree that your policies require substantial depopulation of London, you have to bear in mind that a very large number of Londoners are recent immigrants. Do these have the hereditary responsibility that you attribute to the English? Are they to be moved out into the countryside to become subsistence farmers? If not, are only the English to be exiled from London?

I never supposed that you did advocate blood feuds arising from historical collective responsibility. Trouble is, many of the recent problems in Northern Ireland, which is what this thread was originally about, do I think depend on exactly that.

I look forward to your fuller response to my questions on this last matter.

@ 490
Thanks Bruce that’s very interesting and illustrates how broad generalisations, such as I was making, can always be nuanced. I wonder if there is any connection between that Redmond family and Redmond Barry, the judge who sentenced Ned Kelly to hang, and who was also of Irish origin? Ned Kelly himself railed against Irish ‘traitors’, such as Irishmen who joined the Australian police force. So, definitely there were Irish supporters of imperialism and/or the largely Protestant ruling class, whichever way you want to put it, I just don’t think we had many who were both of Irish heritage and also Protestant.

My knowledge about Irish Catholics in Australia comes mainly from reading Patrick O’Farrell, and that was a fair while ago. Good writer though.

Mattski @ 491
Are you (perhaps inadvertently) suggesting or agreeing that imperialism is a left wing theory? Because I don’t think you can support that. The left/right thing is more about whether you think it’s a good/justifiable thing or not, and pace Bruce W, historians, like anyone else, are allowed to have values and political positions. If you want to suggest that left wing theories about imperialism are worse than right wing theories, I think you’d have to provide some evidence. Also if you’re going to criticise other commenters, maybe you should read what they write?

I don’t have time to respond to these criticisms today so a proper response will have to wait until tomorrow. But I will point out that:
1. comment threads and the comments therein work differently from essays;
2. people seem to be trying to hold me to a standard of detail and complexity and articulation rather higher than the standard they would apply to their own comments judging by the contents thereof;
3. people who largely make snide remarks or insults without engaging with or adding to content are annoying (sorry Mattski)
4. yes William Blake rocks — have you read Visions of the Daughters of Albion?

Val,

Are you (perhaps inadvertently) suggesting or agreeing that imperialism is a left wing theory? Because I don’t think you can support that.

No, I’m not suggesting that imperialism is a left wing theory. I’m suggesting that there’s a tendency to rely on generalizations on the left. Probably, this tendency is WORSE on the right. But prefer to hang with lefty-liberals, so it’s lefty-liberals who I’m often responding to.

I chimed in here mostly in response to Crytandra’s remarks re Vietnam. As you can see from what I wrote–I hope–my sympathies are unambiguously left-liberal. I have a SERIOUS problem with anyone justifying or appearing to justify what the US did in Southeast Asia.

I haven’t read everything ZM has written in this thread. Far from it. But I have read quite a bit of (her) remarks over a period of months & years. And I’ve followed some of the back and forth on this thread between ZM and Phil. Phil has made a cogent argument that ZM over-simplifies. I agree. Others, like novakant, who is certainly much further left than myself, noted a whiff of Stalinism in ZM’s approach. You know what? I think that is a valid point. What comes through loud and clear is that ZM has a pretty specific agenda and her concern for personal freedom isn’t particularly developed. Or so it seems to me.

And ZM is right to accuse me of quick, snarky hits. I’m a big fan of brevity. But I don’t agree that my comments usually don’t add to the discussion. I try to keep it short, but short doesn’t equal nonsensical.

Bruce,

Appreciate your remarks. Not always sure I follow you but that’s OK. I know where your heart is, and it’s in a good place.

:^)

mattski:

“I chimed in here mostly in response to Crytandra’s remarks re Vietnam. As you can see from what I wrote–I hope–my sympathies are unambiguously left-liberal. I have a SERIOUS problem with anyone justifying or appearing to justify what the US did in Southeast Asia.”

I strongly agree America should NOT have went to war in Southeast Asia.

My point is that the left too often try to hammer the rather messy facts of historic events into a one-dimensional narrative that reads like a morality tale.

“Others, like novakant, who is certainly much further left than myself, noted a whiff of Stalinism in ZM’s approach”

Of course. It is well known that from her small town in Australia ZM exiles all annoying internet commenters plus Londoners who don’t give up tea, coffee, and chocolate to a gulag in the form of being trapped together as a collective inside Bill Murray’s body in the Wes Anderson’ horror movie which plays on a loop like Groundhog Day but without conclusion…

@ 501, 502
“My point is that the left too often try to hammer the rather messy facts of historic events into a one-dimensional narrative that reads like a morality tale.”

I’ve been trying to suppress my inner essay marker (recognising that, as ZM says, Internet commenting is not the same as writing essays) but sometimes I don’t think I should have to.

If you’re going to generalise about what “the left” do, provide some evidence. And by “provide some evidence” I don’t mean ‘ZM said something that I haven’t read properly’, I mean evidence that shows how the left do this and the right don’t (because that’s the underlying assumption in your statement).

As I’ve mentioned before, I spent quite a large chunk of my life studying history, and I’m still doing it. I’m on the left, but strangely I also know that history is complicated and that interpretations vary.

Val,

A good example of my point is your own saccharin moralising about indigenous Australians on the property thread:

” …the friends and acquaintances I have who are of Aboriginal descent are really nice people … ”

” … the people I know of Aboriginal descent are lovely people.”

” … my … “best friend” was of Indigenous descent.”

” … read them and weep.”

“Aboriginal people survived for 60,00 years or so on this continent. In 150 years after white invasion, they nearly perished. They are not the problem”

For an academic version of same, try Lyndall Ryan, much of whose work was apparently fabricated and who admitted inventing facts during a channel nine interview when questioned about Windschuttle’s allegations, back in 2003.

I suppose Chomsky and Herman’s hagiography of Pol Pot’s Cambodia is a good and well known non-Australian example.

ZM,

Good question, however I wrote Marxian not Marxist for a reason. I have a deterministic and materialist view of history, so consequently everything that has happened was inevitable.

I have no idea where we’ll end up but I’m hoping it will be some type of high tech welfare state where every human need is catered for, androids do nearly all the work and we don’t have an oppressive elite, as we do now.

Now it’s The Walking Dead binge time. Cheerio ;)

ZM@503: for what my opinion’s worth, I don’t think you’re a Stalinist at all. I would be perfectly happy to suppose that you are a dear, kind, gentle person who would never willingly harm anybody.

But, alas, it does seem to me that the argument you have been putting forward about historical collective responsibility, and environmental footprints, leads to some rather awkward conclusions. See if I’ve got it right: you argue that

a) in former times, British imperialism involved some dreadful things that would never be tolerated now by enlightened western liberal opinion. Very true.

b) the current international trading system has been heavily influenced by past history, including historical British imperialism. Also true.

c) in the current international trading system, England in general and London in particular import very large amounts of food, fuel and useful materials, giving them an ecological footprint far larger than their own area. Likewise true.

d) the people responsible for British imperialism were the English, not the Scots, Welsh or Irish. Hmmm.

e) that responsibility was shared by the whole English population, even by those who had nothing to do with imperialism and were not able to do anything about it (including Phil’s English working class ancestors, and my more complicated set (Irish and Welsh peasants who went to live in England, English workers and craftsmen). I can’t see that.

f) this responsibility has been inherited by their present-day descendants, even though they were powerless to do anything about their ancestors’ actions. Nor that.

g) therefore, to make amends for their historical collective responsibility, the trading patterns of modern England should be altered so as to shrink the ecological footprint to a fair and sustainable level, which for London your source gives as about 20% of its present size.

Have I got that right?

If I have, I foresee seriously bad consequences, even if this shrinkage is restricted to England, even if (I can’t see why it should be) restricted to London.

A lesser but irritating matter: your proposal involves banning, or very seriously restricting, imports of tea, coffee, cocoa, and a wide range of fruits that cannot be grown in England. OK, they managed without them in mediaeval times, which are not now regarded as ideal.

Much more seriously, there is no way Londoners can support themselves from allotment plots smaller than 16 yards square per head. At the least, you are proposing a mass expulsion of Londoners (probably joined by people from all the other cities) into the countryside.

Where most of the good land that can best be used for arable farming is already so used. You could increase the area under crops somewhat, but not very much: and much of what you call “waste land” is seriously unsuitable for any sort of agriculture.

Furthermore, having restricted the imports of fuel, metals, ores, timber and so (which make up a good deal of the ecological footprint) on you will have seriously damaged industries, which will in turn reduce the productivity of agriculture. In particular, all phosphate fertiliser is imported: cut that back and crop yields fall. The UK already uses sewage sludge as fertiliser, so you can’t fall back on that. Fuel should be OK if we go back to coal, but there are objections there.

So I seriously fear that the result of your proposals would be, not just the movement of very large numbers of people out of the cities, but their exile from the UK (I don’t know to where) or their death from starvation.

Also, there is the problem of how you get the population to go along with your proposal. It seems to me there are two possibilities: the English people are persuaded that they must do as you ask, or they are forced (but by whom?) to obey. One is I think unlikely, the other deplorable.

I would far rather believe that you have simply not perceived the drawbacks of your proposal, than that you are deliberately aiming at forcible exile and starvation.

I am about to go to sleep, but if you don’t support my proposal for present day Londoner’s having a globally fair and ecologically sustainable footprint — what is your proposal for to remedy the problems of global poverty and unsustainable consumption and climate change.

Your idea seems to be Londoners are entitled to unfairly consume more than most people in the world do now — and not only that ruin the world for their own future descendants by destroying Earth’s life support systems because of their profligacy.

So you are arguing that Londoners have:
1. no responsibility for ancestral English/Brittish imperialism
2. no responsibility for present day global unfairness that grossly favours them over other people in the world
3. no responsibility for bequeathing an inhabitable planet to their children and grandchildren and descendants to come

And yet you also think — despite Londoners not having to bear any moral responsibility for past present or future deeds — that it is very immoral for me to suggest perhaps Londoners could limit their consumption to fair and sustainable levels

Ronan@469: I entirely agree that there was no real chance that the 1914 Home Rule Act could be carried through as it stood. But why was that? In my opinion, because the HRA, in accordance with the views of the Redmondites, vastly underestimated the opposition of Ulster Protestants to their being included in a Home Rule Ireland; and if the principle of self-determination, which was accepted by the UK Government and was the basis for the HRA, had from the start been intended to be applied to (parts of) Ulster as per the eventual abortive Exclusion Bill, then there would in all probability been no arming of the UVF, and no counter-arming of the Nationalists. I regard the first as the critical step that brought guns back into Irish politics.

I agree there was no way, by 1914, of avoiding some sort of partition of Ireland. Actually, I would say that once Home Rule with a Dublin parliament ha been decided on, there was never any way of avoiding it; short of German victory in WW1 and a German-assisted conquest of Ulster, which seems improbable.

I’m signing off for now. For personal reasons, I have to go to a place where internet connections are not likely to be available. Back early next week, I hope: I wonder if this thread will still be running?

Val @510:

“I presented some figures about the population growth/decline of white population and Indigenous population following the English invasion of Australia …”

I’ll address this one point and let the rest go thru to the keeper. Left-liberal historian Henry Reynolds, who as far as I can tell is the guru on these matters, puts the death toll from the fronteir conflict at something like 20,000 for both sides over 140 years. In other words, the death toll was in world historical terms, barely significant. The major killers of of the indigenous population were diseases, small pox, chicken pox, the flu etc…

Given the violent nature of pre-colonial Australian aboriginal cultures, as evidenced by the skeleton record and early settler/explorer accounts, their subjugation and inevitable extinguishment is a blessing for humankind.

That is my unsentimental take on the matter.

Phil: “I think the big cities of the world (all the big cities of the world, give or take a few) are ecologically unsustainable”

I don’t think this is true at all. On the contrary, rich rural Westeners generally live more unsustainable lives than rich urban Westerners do. Their sewerage isn’t treated and used as fertilizer, they have to drive long distances without using public transport, they sprawl out and use up wildlife habitat, their food generally gets transported over the same distances, they live in individual houses rather than apartment blocks with heating efficiencies, etc. The real problems are total population and resource usage per person in the West, not urbanization.

Phil @ 515 “I think the big cities of the world (all the big cities of the world, give or take a few) are ecologically unsustainable”

But cities are necessary: take Singapore, an island city state which lives by being a hub for trade and manufacturing. Obviously it couldn’t feed itself without such. Singapore is just one of the latest of a kind of human settlement which has thrived for millennia. If its trading partners could do things more efficiently without the middleman, it would simply not be there!

I’m not completely sure if you think this, Stephen, but just for as a point of information, the idea that Phil or I can have had no choice but to support the Iraq war etc financially isn’t true. We could have renounced our citizenship and moved to a country which didn’t take part in it, or withheld our taxes and accepted the legal consequences. Or, I suppose, taken up an economic role here that didn’t contribute to the British economy eg. begging or (attempting to) claim benefits. While I’m not advancing the opinion that any of these were advisable or politically meaningful courses of action it seems clear to me that the choice was available.

Odd: I just submitted a comment which vanished without a trace (no error, no message about ‘moderation’)

engels @523,

This seems to be happening. It’s happened to me once or twice recently. One of those CT strangeways, I guess.

526: Comrade!

Socialist utopia is everyone suffering equally.

Pravda! Although it’s just done it a second time so am starting to feel a bit persecuted at this point (not going to type it yet again as I think I’ll give myself RSI)

Good idea…

***On the question of cities, I’m with Rich. Cities put a lot of people in a small place. This has big efficiencies associated with it. Reduced transport costs, reduced infrastructure costs and less waste of valuable agricultural resources. Not only that but culturally cities are where human creativity really flowers.

Let’s run down to the theater and watch Aristophanes make fun of Socrates. That’s entertainment!

Crytandra @ 516
“Given the violent nature of pre-colonial Australian aboriginal cultures, as evidenced by the skeleton record and early settler/explorer accounts, their subjugation and inevitable extinguishment is a blessing for humankind.”

That is a vile and absolutely racist position. I don’t know why no-one else seems to have picked it up, maybe they’re not reading what you write. I don’t suppose any blog authors are reading this now, but you ought to banned for that.

Val,

No it isn’t racist, it is fact. We’ve had this discussion before. The evidence is overwhelming that hunter-gather, horticultural and agricultural societies were nearly all extremely violent. It is this no bad thing that we’ve moved on from that.

Of course I acknowledge that my own pre-modern ancestors were extremely violent and I’m very glad their cultures were “subjugated and extinguished”.

You are a perfect example of the major point I am trying to make, which I”ll restate: the left too often try to hammer the rather messy facts of historic events into a one-dimensional narrative that reads like a morality tale.

It is a pity that the far left so often try to delegitimize viewpoints they dislike with disingenuous accusations of racism. Disgusting and immature, really.

I don’t know enough about indigenous Australian cultures to speak to that, but I do know about Native American cultures. To dismiss the incredibly diverse range of cultures found in pre-contact North, South and Central America with a statement like ” hunter-gatherer, horticultural and agricultural societies were nearly all extremely violent” is such an incredibly sloppy oversimplification and distortion of the evidence that it is hard to see it as motivated by anything but racism. The claim that there is overwhelming “primitive” violence is a narrow sectarian position in the field of anthropology. Yes, it is equally wrong, and racist, to posit a universally peaceful or “in harmony with nature” indigenous culture, as most scholars and Native American activists will argue. The nature fairy trope is as offensive as the primitive savage trope.

In fact, it is that dichotomy in crytandra’s argument that I find the most offensive and racist – that the choice is either perfect nature fairies, or primitive women-beating savages (which the matrilineal cultures in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Cherokee, or Ojibwa would be really surprised to hear). That the imperfections of some Native cultures can be used to justify their cultural extermination and colonial domination – particularly by European cultures that have a tremendous legacy of bloodshed right up to the current century – is equally offensive. As is the notion that it is only through conquest and cultural extirpation, or the bizarre counterfactual that indigenous cultures would not modernize attitudes toward violence unless brought under the colonial heel. But perhaps that is true, because European cultures still have a major issue with inflicting bloody wars around the world, despite modern attitudes, and in the US we still have rampant issues of rape and violence against women, despite no longer having a primarily hunter-gatherer, horticultural, or agricultural society.

So please spare us the trolley. It really has no place here.

Thanks so much Ragweed you expressed that really well – much better than I did. I was a bit shocked actually, and didn’t express myself well. There is an awful side to Australian culture, I’m afraid.

There’s a bit of a difference between saying that a society/culture might be ‘objectionable’ and stating it should be ‘extinguished’.

I think Ragweed gives the more nuanced point of view.

Igor @541:

I’m happy that feudal cultures that once existed in Europe have been extinguished.

Is it racist to not miss serfdom?

Is it racist not to lament the passing of slave in the confederacy?

Novakant @ 542:

I’m talking about malignant cultures, not individual human beings. Put away that black armband.

Much of the left want to employ a conflict theory analysis to their own society and any like society but a functionalist analysis to the Other. The right want to do the reverse. I just happen to think that both approaches are intellectually dishonest and a critical, conflict theory approach should be applied equally to all without fear or favour.

Reducing a people or time in history to caricature is obviously a little ridiculous, not only for matters of racism and what not but because it’s boring and most likely innacurate.
But now that there might be people here who know what theyre talking about (val, ragweed etc) what was indigenous society in Australia like before the European’s came? Was it as diverse as North America (linguistically, culturally, politically) ? Or was it more homogenous ?
Back to the more general question of indigenous people and colonialism, would anyone like to elaborate a more fully rounded, long historical view of what colonialism meant for indigenous people? Was the clash of ‘traditional cultures’ and what we’ll call modernity always inevitable and going to lead to such dispossesion and violence ?

I already mentioned this on another thread but Crytandra’s assertions about violence are based on a small study of a few thousand bones from throughout the whole country, and the dominant fractures were broken arms. That is a small amount of bones from a very large area to draw conclusions from, plus people can break their arms by falling down like I did as a child.

In terms of culture/folklore Ronan, there are differing degrees of practice throughout the continent and also depending on individuals. In the North I think cultures are a bit stronger generally.

In my town the family was affected by the stolen generations — one elder remembers as a child the women would talk culture and in their language but tell the children to go away so they wouldn’t know anything that could get them taken away. He experiences this as a loss because he only began to learn his culture when he was older and a lot had passed away with the dead. It is important to share what he knows with the younger generations, and the year before last they published one ‘teaching’ the two smaller mountains near here Tarrengower and Lalgambook.

When Mattski writes “Let’s run down to the theater and watch Aristophanes make fun of Socrates. That’s entertainment!” I think of the two larger mountains near here. Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle who taught Alexander who took a great empire and how twenty-one centuries afterwards Thomas Livingstone Mitchell from Stirlingshire in Scotland walked through this country commissioned to survey it for Great Britain and give new names to things — but the names were both new and very old — the greater mountain to the south of here he named Macedon and the greater mountain to the north — Alexander.

Then I think again of that little boy who was told go scurry away because his mother and aunties feared he might hear and learn his own tongue and words in dja dja warrung might pass his lips and he would be stolen way like other children.

There is ‘folklore’ that is prevalent throughout the country, and others that is local. For instance there are images of the creator spirit the rainbow serpent in Kakadu in the north of the country and here in the south where I live. Where I live there are three totemic animals the eagle, the crow and the bat. The eagle generally in southern Victoria I think is associated with Bunjil the eagle who is the higher moiety, and at least locally the crow is associated with Raa who is the lower of the two moieties (I understand they had moieties in Rome as Caesar was associated with one and Antony with another but I don’t know if it is the same sort of thing?). Tales of Raa often have him trying to usurp Bunjil’s higher authority in some way, like giving people fire, while seeing an eagle is held to be a good omen.

There is also ceremonial lore — for instance there is the welcome to country ceremony which is now updated for contemporary times and indigenous people may conduct welcome ceremonies on occasions when people come together, or migrants can make an acknowledgement of country and of the traditional owners past and present. This can occur for instance at events with Shire council representatives or Members of parliament — or to precede a lecture at university. Another ceremony that is in current use is the smoking ceremony which is a cleansing ceremony. This is not as commonly practiced as the welcome/acknowledgment ceremony but is also sometimes open for non-indigenous people.

That is a very basic introduction off the top of my head about ‘folklore’ but it is not called folklore it is called culture.

ZM: “I already mentioned this on another thread but Crytandra’s assertions about violence are based on a small study of a few thousand bones from throughout the whole country .. ”

Untrue, and it isn’t “my assertion”. It is the assessment of respected anthropologists, including Peter Sutton, who is probably our leading indigenous anthropologist, and who has been taken into the kin system in a Cape York indig community.

The cultural practices I’m happy to see extinguished include cruelling; forced marriage; sorcery; pay-back; MGM and FGM; ritualised rape (eg the Dieri gang rapes organised by fathers against their daughters); trading of indigenous women for chattels (eg dogs) ; pedophiliac practices like “boy wives”; and general brutality against women, including smashing their skulls with hatchets and clubs. All of things are well documented and not up for debate.

The extinguishment of these things is no more lamentable IMO than the extinguishment of serfdom.

Mattski @ 531 and 548
I was going to write a more considered response to you earlier but I had just written two comments in a row. Since then, I have been busy, and another 50 odd comments have appeared. No deliberate slight intended.

You said this @499, in answer to a question from me:

“No, I’m not suggesting that imperialism is a left wing theory. I’m suggesting that there’s a tendency to rely on generalizations on the left. Probably, this tendency is WORSE on the right. But prefer to hang with lefty-liberals, so it’s lefty-liberals who I’m often responding to.”

Then Crytandra said this @501:
“My point is that the left too often try to hammer the rather messy facts of historic events into a one-dimensional narrative that reads like a morality tale.”

Then you @502, quoted that and said:
“I think you’re right.”

The point is you were, @499, talking about the right probably being worse, but caring more about the left. That is not what Crytandra is doing.

Although styling him/herself (I think it is actually him so will use the male pronouns) as centrist with some leftish views, Crytandra consistently attacks the left. In this thread particularly he attacks left wing historians as “black armband” theorists. That’s a very well known right wing trope in Australia. (He also enjoys attacking me, for some reason, and talking about how “ignorant” etc I am, while accusing me of insulting him).

So can I suggest that in agreeing with Crytandra, you might be agreeing to something a bit different from what you, yourself, actually think? Crytandra’s position on history appears to be a Whiggish narrative of “progress away from savagery and ignorance …” (http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/history/whig_interpretation_history.html) – surprisingly similar to a “one-dimensional narrative that reads like a morality tale” in fact.

You also @ 531 had a rather emphatic discussion of fairness and concluded with this:
“Unfortunately, at it’s extreme end what leftism amounts to is the lazy telling the industrious that they are obliged to share! And, in that case, leftism has gone horribly wrong.”

I think you are American? In general American politics are more individualistic and “liberal” than ours in Australia – in a broad sense we are a bit more communal and left than you. So you describe yourself as “left-liberal” but the statement above to me, as a left wing Australian, is a “centre-right” position. So this may be part of the misunderstandings we are having.

I wouldn’t mind talking more about fairness or equity but this is one of the main topics in my thesis and I’d find it difficult to have a brief discussion, so I think it’s a bit OT for this thread.

Just went and read this again:
“Given the violent nature of pre-colonial Australian aboriginal cultures, as evidenced by the skeleton record and early settler/explorer accounts, their subjugation and inevitable extinguishment is a blessing for humankind.”

And now I’m thinking again it actually does look like advocating genocide. I wish there was some CT author reading this thread.

Ronan @ 546
I think this article is a terrific starting point:
https://theconversation.com/dreamtime-and-the-dreaming-an-introduction-20833

I read the relevant chapter in The Politics of Suffering in the last thread you brought up Peter Sutton to justify your views, this is what I wrote then:

“Crytanda, You seem to be simplifying Peter Sutton’s work to present a more negative picture of Indigenous society than he does. The evidence of violence he gives in chapter 4 is convincing in the sense that it shows violence occurred — but he does not source sufficiently broad archeological evidence as far as I can see to make as negative a case as you are making.

“To have overturned simplistic and racist colonial stereotypes of Aboriginal people as savages living in a constant state of the war of all against all, whose lives were fantasised by others to be nasty, brutish, and short, has been a major educational achievement. But to idealise and romanticise the classical Aboriginal past as nothing but a time of peace and harmony also does no justice to the evidence and no service of historical truthfulness towards the very people one may admire and respect. While there is no evidence of large-scale organised Aboriginal warfare of the kind found in other parts of the world, and there was no warrior class or military profession as such, there is abundant evidence from all major regions of colonial-era Australia that limited forms of warfare, blood feuding, aggressive wife raiding expeditions, and incidental homicides arising out of individual confrontations certainly occurred often enough to have played a significant role in classical Aboriginal life. ” – Peter Sutton, The Politics of Suffering (2009)

ZM,

I never said indigenous Australians were “savages living in a constant state of the war of all against all”. Sutton is correct that this wasn’t the case and to say so would be racist nonsense. But it is the case that violence and violent death figured larger in pre-colonial indig life than it does in modern industrial society by a wide margin and Sutton acknowledges this.

We live in an exceptional era, even when we factor the wars that do exist.

I do love when racists pose as feminists. The rhetoric is so… special.

I do sometimes wonder if by self-censoring a silly, but mildly funny, insult like Crybaby, I’m going too far the other way

You wonder if not descending to actual name-calling is “going too far”?

No, Val, it’s not.

(Also, how big is that continent? I’ve known tigtog & lauredhel for years.)

Val – thanks for the link, I’m going read it this evening when I get the time.

ZM – thanks for the explanation, very interesting. I’m going to put in a long quote below about fairies (in Irish ‘folklore’) from a book (The Burning of Bridget Cleary) that I’ve been reading. You might know most of this but I thought it was pretty interesting)

” Fairies are normally invisible, but they are there. They live in the air, under the earth, and in water, and they may be just a little smaller than humans, or so tiny that a grazing cow blows hundreds of them away with every breath. They had their origin when the rebellious angel Lucifer and his followers were expelled from Heaven, and God the Son warned God the Father that Heaven would soon be empty. Like figures in a film that is suddenly stopped, the expelled angels falling towards Hell halted where they were: some in mid-air, others in the earth, and some in the ocean, and there they remain. They are jealous of Christians, and often do them harm, but are not totally malevolent since they still hope to get back to Heaven one day. To do so, however, they must have at least enough blood in their veins to write their names, and so far they have not even that much.
Fairies are not human, but they resemble humans and live lives parallel to theirs, with some significant differences: they keep cows, and sell them at fairs; they enjoy whiskey and music; they like gold, milk and tobacco, but hate iron, fire, salt and the Christian religion, and any combination of these mainstays of Irish rural culture serves to guard against them. Sometimes it is said that there are no women among the fairies. In any case, they steal children and young women, and occasionally young men, and leave withered, cantankerous changelings in their place. They can bring disease on crops, animals and humans, but by and large, if treated with neighbourly consideration, they mind their own business and even reward favours.
Questions about fairies, if asked in the Ireland of today, may be greeted with amusement or derision, but if not accompanied by too much earnestness, they will still often elicit answers. It is rare, and perhaps always has been, to meet people who unequivocally believe that a race of supernatural beings lives invisibly alongside humans and shares their landscape. It is much less rare, however, for stories to be told about such beings, or for features of the environment, both physical and social, to be explained by reference to them. Quite hard-headed people may sometimes be seen to observe precautions which seem tacitly to acknowledge the. existence, however marginally, of fairies.
Fairies belong to the margins, and so can serve as reference points and metaphors for all that is marginal in human life. Their underground existence allows them to stand for the unconscious, for the secret, or the unspeakable, and their constant eavesdropping explains the need sometimes to speak in riddles, or to avoid discussion of certain topics. Unconstrained by work and poverty, or by the demands of landlords, police, or clergy, the fairies of Irish legend inhabit a world that is sensuously colourful, musical and carefree, and as writers from Yeats to Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill have observed, legends about them richly reflect the imaginative, emotional and erotic dimensions of human life.
Legends of the fairies, told by skilled storytellers like James Delargy’s friend Seán Ó Conaill, are complex works of art, often taking up several pages of manuscript or print when written down. Not everybody who tells them is such an artist, however, and most fairy-legends are short. As Danish folklorist Bengt Holbek remarks: ‘What matters is not their artistic impact, but their function as arguments about reality … Legends debate the relation between our daily reality and some kind of possibly real “otherworld”.’ One feature which makes fairy-legends so tenacious in a changing cultural environment is the concision and vivid memorability of their central themes. Another is their connection to real, named, people, and to real places in a known landscape. Yet another reason why they survive is that their narratives interact so intimately with the practicalities and the emotional realities of daily life.
Viewed as a system of interlocking units of narrative, practice and belief, fairy-legend can be compared to a database: a pre-modern culture’s way of storing and retrieving information and knowledge of every kind, from hygiene and childcare to history and geography. Highly charged and memorable images like that of a woman emerging on a white horse from a fairy dwelling are the retrieval codes for a whole complex of stored information about land and landscape, community relations, gender roles, medicine, and work in all its aspects: tools, materials and techniques.
Stories gain verisimilitude, and storytellers keep their listeners’ attention, by the density of circumstance they depict, including social relations and the technical details of work. Most stories, however, are constructed around the unexpected, and therefore memorable, happenings in people’s lives. Encounters with or interference by the fairies in these stories remind listeners (and readers) of everything in life that is outside human control. It is not surprising, then, that death and illness are among the preoccupations of fairy legends.”

Val – I read that link (it was shorter than I thought) That was very informative.Thanks

When push comes to shove, the benefits of Imperialism usually outweigh the disbenefits by numerous orders of magnitude, other than for the first 3 or 4 generations of the colonized peoples subsequent to colonization. Monty Python said it best- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9foi342LXQE

Moreover, it is practically an Iron Law of history that, until very recent times, the strong colonized the weak. Accordingly, when Europe was weak it was (partly) conquered by Mongols and Muslims. Shit happens.

It is nothing more than petite bourgeois sentimentalism to constantly demand folk “acknowledge” and say “sorry” for the material and inevitable facts of history. The opposite, triumphalism and an attitude of superiority on the colonising side, are equally nauseous.

That’s CryBaby Crytandra’s Easter message. Amen ;)

I haven’t been following this thread, but I saw Ronan’s latest. Hilary Mantel’s The Giant O’Brien has a bit about fairies and old stories and the loss of older cultures. (The Alan Jacobs bio of C.S. Lewis I mentioned in the other thread does, also.) I suppose, on writing this, the novel could be taken as twee (and not in a good way, or rather not in a way that would be considered good by people who mostly like twee, which I don’t, usually). I’d say, fwiw, that to me it seems to have resonance far from just Ireland, so it’s not just romanticizing what one’s grandparents knew.

And, speaking of covering oneself in glory: several of the boys on this thread, with their imperialism apologetics, have not done well by themselves.

I am always fascinated by how, whenever there is a CT thread on imperialism or the military, so many “liberals’ are so quick to show their true colors.

@Ronan:

Yes, I could, according to my own definition of “imperialism apologetics”.

But I am sure we would each have our own definition, one that would leave us, individually, innocent of the crime, so I’ll just leave it there.

No, seriously, you couldn’t, unless you were being deliberately dishonest with yourself.

But, whatever yanks your crank.

Carry on.

Berry, having just glanced at a couple of Cytandra’s comments, well, I could make comments on imperialism, channeling or abusing Hobson, Luxemburg, Lenin, Harvey that could make imperialism look inevitable and somewhat amoral. Economics is not a morality tale.

Part of the reason the identity crowd hates us Marxians is that the feminist racist LGBTQ etc contingents lose in class analysis a lot of their glorious ecstatic opportunities for self-righteous liberal moralizing, the division of the world into good and bad guys.

I usually try to avoid such commentary as Cytandra indulges himself with, not because it is wrong, but because it can appear cruel and callous, like “There is no Santy Claus”

@ 580
“Part of the reason the identity crowd hates us Marxians is that the feminist [anti-]racist LGBTQ etc contingents lose in class analysis a lot of their glorious ecstatic opportunities for self-righteous liberal moralizing, the division of the world into good and bad guys.”

Not judgemental at all! Just dividing the world into people who are rational and correct, and people who are emotional and silly (but not a gendered insult of course).

I do always enjoy “the few remaining Jews in Germany are better off than they were 80 years ago, so why is anyone complaining” stance.

Also, good to know that you just think Crytandra is being brutally honest. At least that much of what you said is clear, and clarifying.

crytandra: It is nothing more than petite bourgeois sentimentalism to constantly demand folk “acknowledge” and say “sorry” for the material and inevitable facts of history. The opposite, triumphalism and an attitude of superiority on the colonising side, are equally nauseous.

bob mcmanus: I usually try to avoid such commentary as Crytandra indulges himself with, not because it is wrong, but because it can appear cruel and callous, like “There is no Santy Claus”

When I have more time, I hope to be a mean commenter who is just mean without adding anything informative (at least nothing ZM recognizes as informative) and to be assigned to Val’s pits of Manichean hell as rational and correct emotional and silly (whatever*).

Not that my “whatever” should be read as gendered, mind you.

@586
I think you will find it is bob McManus’ pits of Manichean hell you are being assigned to, not mine.

If I understood you correctly, which seems unlikely. The meaning of the comment was obscure, let’s say.

Bob McManus is of course correct. If Marx were alive today, and if he was to see how the left has been rendered flaccid by the malignancy that is identity politics and so-called cultural studies, the sick would rise in his throat.

An unsentimental Marxian analysis of history is preferable to the morbid and ahistorical moralising of the black armband crowd.

Well, I guess I’m not a Marxian, as the notion that

“everything that has happened was inevitable. ”

strikes me as either completly wrong, or just meaninglessly vague.
I think a person can adopt a moral position on a historical event. Perhaps not as much if you were writing a book on it. But on a comment thread ? Sure, why not.
In fact I think there’s something juvenile about closing your eyes to all choice and moral action in a historical moment. Every bit as much as dividing the world into simple categories of good and bad.
( I’ve also never seen anyone who claims clear headed amorality actually apply that perpective across the board. They just have different hobby horses)

Crytandra – how are your comments on ‘indigenous culture’ not morally loaded. ie

“The cultural practices I’m happy to see extinguished include cruelling; forced marriage; sorcery; pay-back; MGM and FGM; ritualised rape (eg the Dieri gang rapes organised by fathers against their daughters); trading of indigenous women for chattels (eg dogs) ; pedophiliac practices like “boy wives”; and general brutality against women, including smashing their skulls with hatchets and clubs. All of things are well documented and not up for debate. “

“Crytandra – how are your comments on ‘indigenous culture’ not morally loaded. ie …”

I assess history in consequentialist terms, that is, what maximises happiness and welfare. An ethical assessment is not the same as “moralising”. There is no blame involved.

The “free will” view of history is something that Marx killed stone dead Crytandra

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living… Marx

598: Pretty good stuff, you might study it a little.

For instance, it is “Men” not “a man,” “their” not “his/her” and “they” not “he/she.”

Do social groups have “free will?” Is there an aggregate “will?” An aggregate morality?

And I am glad you included the last sentence, because apparently those “circumstances already existing” are the “traditions” in “the brains of the living,” ideology and consciousness. Like individualism and free will.

Socialism and communism are social events, not individual achievements or choices.

Anyway, this is complicated and contested (bitterly by EP Thompson vs the Althusserian French, for instance), probably even more in the last 75 years than before.

“An unsentimental Marxian analysis of history”. Why, one can read Engels’ Condition of the English Working Class with a sense that here is a true scientific mind, as unmoved by the daily deaths of orphans as a biologist would be by the fall of moths after their brief mating flight. And the Communist Manifesto is a piece of dispassionate analysis, with never an emotional phrase. (since this is the internet, sarcasm indicator on).

Some years back The Economist showcased some research that showed that islands which had come under imperial rule late (owing to their position off the trade winds) were much poorer than those colonised earlier. It remarked as an aside that this wealth did not, of course, accrue to the original inhabitants, who had mostly not survived the experience. Still, for The Economist, more wealth was clearly a good thing, even at this cost. And I am sure they (and crytandra) will stick to their values even though it costs them their culture and their lives.

Bob seems have grasped Marx’ dictum that “men make history, but they do not make it in circumstances of their own choosing”, and put all the weight on the second clause. But the first weighs equally. There is no capitalism or communism or feudalism or anything else separate from people. “Capitalism” did not end slavery – people did. Sometimes in bloody war or revolt, sometimes in long service on unhealthy climates, sometimes driven by indignation to write novels or newspaper editorials or make speeches or commit themselves to politics. Often confused? Sure. Usually some mix of motives? Almost always. But not unsentimental in any way, shape or form.

Does crytandra want numbers? Roughly 500,000 aborigines inhabited Australia for around 30,000 years. That’s 7.5 bn life-years. They certainly had an impact on the land, but there is nothing to suggest that their way of life – in all its mess – could not have continued another 30,000 or longer. The current 25 million of us would have to be here undiminished another 600 years just to equal that record, and the current state of science says that we will have to change course very rapidly and radically to have much chance of doing that. And if we fail, there will be more than broken arms.

So – trying to bring this back to discussions about imperialism and morality in this thread – you might argue that “capitalism” was responsible for the particular horrors of the Irish famine, since it was the decision by land holders to continue selling produce as cash crops rather than distribute some of it to the starving that apparently made it so particularly bad. Yet this ‘decision’ of capitalism was enacted by land holders established and supported by the British/English imperial state, and the B/E government supported it, at least for a crucial time.

Without trying to make broadcast criticisms of all Marxists or Marxians, one of the problems I do see in discussions like this – not just on this thread – is trying to make materialist analysis cover a lot of other things that it doesn’t cover. Of course materialist analysis is important, I agree with that, but that doesn’t mean all the cultural and ideological stuff that goes along with it is unimportant. (Nor does it exempt Marxisn analysis, like mainstream economics, from the criticism that it only tends to recognise one part of the economy, but that’s another issue).

As regards moral questions, I’m not sure how far Marx discussed the morality of capitalists (rather than ism), but Engels (the original, TM) certainly did, and he was scathing in his moral judgements of them.

Trying to say that you don’t make moral judgements, unlike your (foolish) opponents, generally isn’t a very defensible position, I think.

Crytandra @569: the benefits of Imperialism usually outweigh the disbenefits by numerous orders of magnitude, other than for the first 3 or 4 generations

I know there are plausible arguments both for and against this position, and also that it’s been debated at length on CT, but I wonder if anyone has a reference handy, on either side? I think I once read that when Europeans arrived in India and China, both of them had a higher standard of living than anywhere in Europe. This, if true, seems to cast doubt on Crytandra’s statement.

geo,

try Stephen Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” for the affirmative case. I assume Val or someone else here can recommend a good resource for the negative case.

Of course I agree with Pinker, but his book is a prodigious work, and as with all such works, it is not error free.

I will just point out that the deaths caused by anglophone militaries in the last 14 years alone would have taken a very long time for indigenous Australians to accumulate , plus England and the USA have had nuclear weapons always at the ready to obliterate lives since 1945. I think indigenous Australians were less violent than present anglophone countries.

Also we present generations are currently irreparably damaging Earth’s life support systems to an extent likely to cause large amounts of deaths should we not change present paths through helpful remedies like my sensible suggestions for Londoners.

Climate change due to misuse of fossil fuels and too many farmed animals and artificial fertilizers is already responsibly for the civil wars in the Middle East which have caused refugee numbers to get to world war 2 levels. As well as all the people displaced in the pacific from the increased natural disasters due to climate change.

It took til 1968 to resettle all the world war 2 refugees after some period of reasonable peace (with notable exceptions) – except for present refugees we are looking at refugee numbers to keep growing as climate change is expected by experts to cause refugee and displaced person numbers to rise to 200-250 million by 2050.

I doubt any 100 years in history has been more violent and callous than the last century.

crytandra

Pinker’s record in these and related matters is not good (I’m going on reviews of Better Nature, since I can’t be bothered with the whole book, but his generalisations on neuroscience are pretty much panned by the experts). But he does have a point – larger, more complex, social systems are better at controlling small-scale violence (it is, after all, one part of what they are built to do). Unfortunately, they are also better at projecting violence, both against other humans and against the natural world. My point on population-years was that, over the long run, the numbers may well not favour the more complex, peaceful in everyday life, societies. One catastrophic collapse equals a lot of local violence.

An ethics without emotion? Take a moment to think about that.

“I suppose Chomsky and Herman’s hagiography of Pol Pot’s Cambodia is a good and well known non-Australian example.”

False. Chomsky clearly underestimated the scale of killing in Pol Pot’s Cambodia for several years–from what he wrote in 1977 and 1979 he evidently thought it was comparable to the death toll in East Timor during the same time period. He referred to the Pol Pot record as “gruesome”. He was wrong to be skeptical of the genocidal scale, but calling his views a “hagiography” suggests that you either don’t know what you are talking about, or you are making things up.

There was a similar debate regarding the scale of death during the Iraq War–personally, I think the correct figure is probably in-between the low Iraq Body Count figure and the high (1 million) figure that some lefties cite (based on extrapolating the second Lancet paper’s figure and also based on a poll done the next year), but if the high one were correct, no, it would not mean that Iraq Body Count had been painting a happy picture of Iraq under US occupation.

I agree that some on the far left often does turn things into simplistic morality plays with bad Westerners vs. the noble oppressed, but your repulsive generalizations about Australian aborigines shows that you aren’t really interested in sensible discussion. You are someone who casually makes statements that sound like advocacy for genocide.

“I wonder if anyone has a reference handy, on either side? I think I once read that when Europeans arrived in India and China, both of them had a higher standard of living than anywhere in Europe. This, if true, seems to cast doubt on Crytandra’s statement.”

Why don’t the Mughals and Qings count as Imperialists?

616: because they were not part of the specific white supremacist imperial movement we’re talking about.

In terms of mortality rates, perhaps Qing China was on a par with Western Europe in the 18th century, if population growth is any measure. (Peace + few major epidemics helps, though). However, in terms of technology, it was backwards and falling further behind, and had been so since the Ming.

@621
Man that is such a confusing argument! There is no way that imperialist Europe would have been marginal in terms of trade, but as I have had a few wines, I will have to wait until Peter T or someone sails in and sorts it out.

“Could there have been some melding of the wealth seeking, technologically advanced societies with the sustainable societies?”

This a false dichotomy. I’m surprised a supposedly educated adult would need to be told this.

Crytandra,

How is it a false dichotomy? I hereby challenge you to name just one technologically advanced sustainable society in actual existence.

The UN put out a report saying we are now unsustainable and need to start moving towards being sustainable only last year. But it is completely up in the air if the world will achieve that transition or not.

“We are at a historic crossroads, and the direction we take will determine whether we will succeed or fail in fulfilling our promises. With our globalized economy and sophisticated technology, we can decide to end the age-old ills of extreme poverty and hunger. Or we can continue to degrade our planet and allow intolerable inequalities to sow bitterness and despair. Our ambition is to achieve sustainable development for all.

3. Young people will be the torchbearers of the next sustainable development agenda through 2030. We must ensure that this transition, while protecting the planet, leaves no one behind. We have a shared responsibility to embark on a path to inclusive and shared prosperity in a peaceful and resilient world, where human rights and the rule of law are upheld.

4. Transformation is our watchword. At this moment in time, we are called upon to lead and act with courage. We are called upon to embrace change. Change in our societies. Change in the management of our economies. Change in our relationship with our one and only planet”

I am always fascinated by how, whenever there is a CT thread on imperialism or the military, so many “liberals’ are so quick to show their true colors.

That is because many so-called liberals deep down share the seemingly unshakeable conviction that “western culture” is inherently superior to anything else and think that sometimes it’s ok to break a few eggs if only the resulting omelet is sufficiently to their liking.

Cryrptandra, past this post I won’ t waste any more time on you, because you are dishonest. I criticized Chomsky’s initial skepticism of genocide in Cambodia while pointing out that he acknowledged “gruesome” atrocities, but rather than refer to what I said you go straight for the “apologist” label. You claim to want a left that isn’t childish and looks at the complexities of the real world, and then you deliberately use inflammatory language that sounds like advocacy of genocide for the Australian aborigines.

(wont let me link but website is ‘The Disorder of things’, post is ‘Modernity Is Everything; Empires Are Everywhere’)

As a Marxist, I’ve often thought that what Marxism really needed was its own Floyd Alvis Cooper, so I’m glad to see Crytandra step up to fill this important role.

@633
The person in question seems to enjoy criticising me in particular. Thinking about it, there was a guy banned from John Quiggin’s site a while ago who also seemed to enjoy criticising female commenters in particular, and if I remember rightly, he had a similar rhetorical style.

And now, for that limb. Really!

Engel @634 – well said my friend.

The problem with the whole “the colonized benefit from colonization in the long run” is that it is based on the bizarre counterfactual that indigenous cultures would have remained unchanged had they not been conquered and colonized. In fact, indigenous cultures and other colonized people tended to be very quick to adopt and adapt new technologies they encountered on contact with European culture.

Japan is a classic example. Never fully colonized and largely free from an outside power extracting massive resources and wealth, it was able to rapidly become a modern industrial society and major power in Asia (and engaged in its own imperial expansion, but that is another story).

Again, I don’t know the particulars in Australia, but there are countless examples in the North American case. Heck, the iconic horse-cultures of the Great Plains tribes – the first image most people have when they hear “American Indian” – was only possible due to adoption of a European beast of burden and the technology that accompanied that. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee and Seminole all adopted western agriculture, government and educational models, while maintaining distinct cultural ceremonies and traditions. Coast Salish fishermen supplied the saw-mills of Seattle with dogfish oil and formed logging crews to supply the wood. Today, the Sealaska Corporation, operated by the Tlinget, Haida and Tsimshian, is a half-billion dollar corporation involved in timber, construction, environmental consulting, information technology, and manufacturing, while grounding their practices within traditional tribal values.

I think the Cherokee experience is instructive here. By the early 19th century, the Cherokee had adopted thoroughly modern technologies for housing, agriculture, and governance (including a constitution complete with a 3-part government, separation of powers, and checks and balances), developed a written language, published dual Cherokee-English newspapers, and had a literacy rate higher than the whites in the surrounding Georgia farm communities. However, the white farmers wanted the land of the Cherokee and so the US government forcibly removed them, initially rounding up 16,000 men, women, children and elders into concentration camps and then marching them 1000 miles, on foot, in winter, to Oklahoma (1 in 4 died upon the route). Note that there was no “conflict of cultures” – the Cherokee were as or more economically and technologically advanced as any white farming community at the time – it was pure settler-colonial desire for land and resources.

So call me dubious when someone says colonization in the long run benefits the colonized. It is not just the dubious ethics of throwing 3-4 generations under the bus, which is bad enough, but the question of what would have happened had indigenous people been able to develop without their land, resources and labor being exploited.

And as for “if we didn’t exploit them someone else would.”
Really?

Robespierre @ 625
I am using “sustainable societies” to describe those that live in such a way that their environment is likely to sustain existing species (including humans) for the foreseeable future. As has already been pointed out, Indigenous Australians lived on the land for about 60,000 years. They changed it, but not in such a way as to make it unliveable for humans and many other species.

Humans are already responsible for a great loss of biodiversity and the extinction of many species. Climate change threatens to render the planet uninhabitable for us, as for other species. I expect that you know all that, so I am not quite sure what your question relates to.

“The problem with the whole “the colonized benefit from colonization in the long run” is that it is based on the bizarre counterfactual that indigenous cultures would have remained unchanged had they not been conquered and colonized. In fact, indigenous cultures and other colonized people tended to be very quick to adopt and adapt new technologies they encountered on contact with European culture.”

What I was trying to get at with the Mughals and Qings is that, with some exceptions (like as you say N America and Australia), European Imperialism was in many cases the replacement of pre-existing Empires. There’s no real counterfactual of indigenous cultures getting along on their own. China had the Qings, India the Mughuls, the Middle East the Ottomans, the Americas the Incas, and so on and so on.

So rather than an Indigenous vs Empire comparision, it’s often Empire vs Empire – and merely a choice of which one. And some of these Empires were absolutely bloody awful, I know European Imperialism was nasty – but can you imagine the Aztecs or Mughals with European technology? Can you imagine if the Middle East and N Africa were run by a slaveholding Ottoman Caliphate?

Ronan @631

I haven’t really been following the thread. However, re your quote from that post at The Disorder of Things — here’s a problem: what do you do when asked, as I was very recently in a conversation, about what explains the historical ec. divergence betw ‘global North’ and ‘South’. Of course one can answer: ‘well it’s v. complicated’ (which it is) and mention all sorts of things incl colonialism and its impacts, but then to start talking about “contingency” gets you where? Only to the statement that it wasn’t “inevitable,” which, imo, is less than helpful.

Of course ‘modernity’ was not solely driven by ‘the west’. But *something(s)* did happen to initiate a divergence over time, istm. China was ‘ahead’ of ‘the west’ until c. (very roughly) 1500 (or the preceding half-century). Portugal and China began overseas exploration at roughly the same time; after about 30 yrs the Chinese stopped, while Portugal continued. Why? (Wallerstein’s discussion of this in the first chapter of The Modern World-System v.1, which I was looking at earlier today, is I think helpful, though it’s about 40 yrs old and no discussions of these issues ever get universal agreement.)

In short, saying ‘everything is contingent’ raises (or avoids) the key question: contingent on what? If one waves that away, as that post seems to, with a dismissal of looking for “perceived antecedents,” I think that’s a problem. I thought historians were supposed to be interested in “antecedents” of trends and developments. But perhaps I’m being unfair to that post, which I still haven’t read v. carefully. Maybe I’ll do a post of my own on it. But I’m probably too busy or lazy or whatever.

ragweed,

In Japan distinct peoples were united in an imperial project. Sometime after that, unified Japan engaged in a vast imperial project in East Asia. This actually conforms my thesis.

As others have noted, grand imperial projects were not unknown to the Americas prior to western colonisation, and presumably, with differential advances in technology, the scale of these projects would’ve increased as they everywhere else in the known world. One wonders what would have become of the mass human sacrifice cultures of the Americas if that made major technological breakthroughs before the others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Estimates_of_the_scope_of_the_sacrifices

Crytandra,

you were just saying it was ahistorical to presume that indigenous peoples ways of living at the period just preceding colonisation would have continued forever – you must agree it also follows that it is ahistorical to presume like you do @654 that indigenous cultures in the Americas would always continue in their human sacrifice practices forever.

As it is Easter i don’t have time for a longer comment , but want to note that it is not very sound to attribute the positives of our present time to imperialism – since positives are often the result of anti-imperialism like things in Ireland now seem better than in the 19th C but this is not according to imperialist plans it is because Irish people (and supporters elsewhere maybe) did various things to be treated better and anti-imperialist people ended imperialism (at least in terms of formal politics) – and other seeming positives like high material consumption are problematic in terms of distribution and sustainability and consequences for the poor the young and future generations.

I thought you were implying the continuity of human sacrifice practices mixed with advanced technology by this statement :

“One wonders what would have become of the mass human sacrifice cultures of the Americas if that made major technological breakthroughs before the others.”

I suppose you may have been genuinely wondering , but genuine wonderment at this counter factual would seem to go against your prior negative comments about indigenous Australians

The Greeks and Romans also practiced human sacrifice.

Crytanda “IMO, there is no such thing as choice as there is no such thing as free will.”

Seems like a waste of time then to engage in debate? What good could possibly come of it?

I think Buzan attempts to answer that question in the book though.I read the first chapter on Kindle sample and it looks pretty interesting.

Crytandra: the difference between determinism and fatalism should be self-evident

Would you mind spelling it out nonetheless?