More than 200 years before the British ethnically cleansed its first colony Ireland in the 1840's of native Irish, whom like all of their colonies to follow, they regarded as subhuman, with their systematic, organized Holocaust that "disappeared" 6,257,456 Irish persons, there is the serious matter of Irish slavery, a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories by British mentored historians, well paid to airbrush these British crimes against humanity from our history books.
Where is the truthful education of our public (and PRIVATE) schools??? Where are the honest history books? Why is it not discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims not merit a mention in Irish or British history ? Or is history forever to be one that English pirates control: Unlike the African records, the Irish story has like its holocaust, completely disappeared like it never happened. Its not just holocaust denial by the British with regard to the Irish, its their inhumanity in British Occupied Ireland denial, right up to the present day. See torture, see internment without trial.
None of the Irish victims ever made it back to tell their story. They are the lost slaves of very expensive history books, that conveniently forgot like other history books of British mentored revisionist historians, the airbrushed history of genocide and the murder of 6,257,456 Irish people, revised down to a million to a million and a half, in one of the greatest examples of history being written by the victors, to hide British crimes against humanity in British Occupied Ireland. Below is the story of "The Irish Slaves That Time Forgot."
By John Martin
They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.
Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.
We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery?
King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.
The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.
During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.
As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.
African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.
The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.
In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.
This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.
There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.
In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.
But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.
Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories. But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?
Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer? Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.
None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.
But alas we seem to be moving further away from these things.
Re: "Sustaining and resourcing circles of protection for the weakest and most vulnerable is indeed an important aim." It is and actually it benefits everyone in the long-term, so you can actually make an economic argument (as well as an altruistic one) to support this idea.
It's a fierce big book....is it worth the effort?
BO'B is really engaging in a bit of strawman bashing with this effort. Objectivism is a non-philosophy philosophy. Like Creationism, it can't be disproven but doesn't add anything to our ability to understand the world around us.
The liberalism that I understand is about maximising freedom for the greatest possible number of people. You should have the freedom to live your own life however you want. But, that freedom does not extend to things that would impinge upon the freedoms of others. It's well summed-up by the maxim "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins". So you don't have the right to drive your car as fast as you want. Industries don't have the right to dump their waste into rivers. Advertisers don't have the right to make false or misleading claims about their products. Business owners don't have the right to discriminate against customers or employees on the basis of gender, ethnicity (etc). It's not at all the same thing as "do what thou wilt".
These are just some of the many ways in which liberalism differs from libertarianism. Liberalism recommends laws and regulations to keep rogue individuals from depriving others of their rights. Libertarianism, on the other hand, favours smaller government, privatisation, de-regulation. Let them do as they please; regulations are expensive and bureaucratic, the free market will sort everything out in time. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 effectively ended the racist Jim Crow laws. But Ron Paul, libertarian, opposes the Act because it restricts the rights of the individual to run their business the way they want. Not that he thinks segregation was a good thing, but he values the rights of the bus company to segregate its passengers more than he values the rights of the passengers not to be segregated. This is at odds with liberalism. And it means he's still a racist.
Liberalism is a religion/philosophy/political stance whereas "liberalism" (Irish Times style) is a mental illness that thinks it's Liberalism.
If Catholicism is the destruction of oak trees than "liberalism" is a massive waste of spruce trees....
No man is an island especially in todays world where we depend on others for nearly everything - work, food, clothing, even entertainment. So no matter what you do you are inpinging on others. The area of family life is one of the best examples where freedom these days is exactly the same as the libertarianism you describe.
As the Gospel says "You will know them by their Fruits" and America exemplifies everything that is undesirable in today's world .
The reason for this is American society has come to a dead end. This is evident in the fact that their version of human rights (which we are now aping here e.g. the children's referendum) in based on "Enlightenment" thinking with an emphasis on an atheistic individualism which seeks to replace religion with science, bans God from all aspects of life, replacing Him with a system that puts the interests of the individual over the interests of the common good and society at large. (as Breda points out above about Rand “Man – every man – is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”)
While there is a pretence of Christianity in American society "This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me;" This is obvious in the fact that the Judeo-Christian version of human rights based on the Mosaic Covenant which established an absolute right to the one true God, the right to the truth, the right to life, the right to a natural family and the right to ownership of property are noticeably absent from their legal system.
I guess all her 'friends' took her writings too seriously.
I think selflessness is far more in vogue these days in this country than the days when the vast majority stood by as a tyrannical church systemically abused and tortured and utterly destroyed the lives of thousands of vulnerable children, young single mothers and their families. Up until 1993 we had a law, vehemently supported by that church, that made it illegal for same sex couples to be couples, and today that church and certain organisations still oppose the equal rights for those couples. Some people are so selfish in their beliefs and their parenting that they implant their religious beliefs into the young vulnerable minds of their children in attempt to skew any chance of them making a rational, objective choice on their own (to the point where we end up with buckets of lukewarm believers who aren't sure why they believe or what they believe - quelle surprise). How selfish is it to mutilate the body of your baby boy because of your religious convictions? It's just my opinion: I could go on; I could be wrong
This cry that selfishness is a new idea that is in vogue is utterly ridiculous. Ireland was once a very, very brutal place. It is undoubtedly less so now. If you were a member of a vulnerable minority which year would rather live in?
While we have a very friendly reputation, we are certainly not good at looking after our own here. We're like the family who make the downstairs spotless for the big visitor while making sure that the dysfunctional members of the clann are kept quiet upstairs.
We have a way to go, but we are on the road. People like Breda O' Brien are trying to make us believe that we left some mythical better place behind us. It just isn't so.