It’s A Small World After All
Here’s something for three Irishmen to marvel at over beers on the White House lawn. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley may be related, according to ABC, sharing descent from a legendary 4th century Irish warrior. O’Bama, of course, hails from Moneygall.
Anyway, the racism thing didn’t pan out, but if anyone wants to find some common ground and get worked up about oppression while hoisting a few tomorrow in the world’s primary seat of power, now occupied by a biracial man descended from East African goatherds and Scots Irish slaveowners, they can sit around and curse the English.
Easy target. Might work. But that kind of thing can get complicated. I could spend all day cursing various aspects of my ancestry. There’s the English bits that invaded the Irish bits, the French bits and the Viking bits that invaded the English and Irish bits, the Saxon bits that invaded the Roman British bits, the Roman bits that invaded the Celtic bits, with all kinds of oppression, rape, murder, theft and slavery all around. I’m pretty sure the Celtic bits did a number on the prior occupants of the ancestral islands, but it all starts to get a little murky. Then there are the Catholic bits that oppressed the Protestant bits and the Protestant bits that oppressed the Catholic bits. It never ends. May sound like ancient history, but some of it isn’t all that ancient and hasn’t been entirely worked out yet. Welcome to the world.* Why can’t we all just get along? Hey, here’s a good one, if you want some third-world empowerment. I’ve got some English-Irish bits that got run out of New Zealand by angry Maoris. No Maori bits that I know about.
O, cruel cynicism. At Malkin’s, they’re wondering whether that big wad of cash Biden and Holder threw at America’s cops the other day had anything to do with, you know …
Maguire with the obligatory “Black Irish” joke.
Surber, with stereotypical leprechaun imagery, channels Teddy Roosevelt vs. hyphenated Americanism. Yeah, right, quote the rich white warmonger.
Collins: This is what Irish cops do to Irishmen in Amerikay, isn’t it? Where the hacks have no shame …
Morrissey at HotAir channeling Hitchens suggests Gates would have done better to make it about civil liberties, not race. Maybe, but that isn’t what Gates did from the moment he opened his mouth. I take a different view. I think it’s about being civil, and he wasn’t.
* Ancient history is actually the part in which all of us came out of Africa in the first place, where humans have been oppressing each other since the dawn of time. Mass movements up through the Middle East, breaking east and west as cramped neighbors tried to get the heck away from each other, then running into each other again with dire consequences, exacerbated not just by the multiple cultural and racial shifts that had transpired in the meantime, but by the basic lust for control over real estate and resources that marks even the most homogenous populations and probably was the reason they split up in the first place. There are some complications in the broad brushstrokes smeared across much modern understanding of human history, for example the growing evidence that the American Indians of Mongoloid extraction later supplanted by the Europeans weren’t the first human inhabitants of the Americas, but themselves supplanted, maybe violently, the original primeval Eurasian population of North America who are thought to be related to the modern aboriginal populations of Asia, Australia and Polynesia. These kinds of details can make a mess of simplistic views of human relations. Like the fact that Muslim Arabs and African tribal leaders were as heavily involved in the slave trade as the Europeans were, though I understand their role properly is considered somewhat more quaint. And like the fact that all of us have long histories of subjugating each other, pretty much whenever we can get away with it. Good thing we’re starting to move beyond that.
Kumbayah. Hey, speaking of the long tortured history of hominid-on-hominid oppression, anyone else at all curious about what happened to the Neanderthals?
Topics: Britain, Irish, Neanderthals, Obama, ancient mysteries, history, racism
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:42 am Comments (3) on Wednesday, July 29, 2009
3 Responses to “It’s A Small World After All”
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July 29th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Somehow, the comment about different parts of your past hating each other reminded me of author Mike Williamson’s rant about reparations:
http://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/rants/slavery.php
July 29th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
“Prior to the genetic evidence, there had been doubts that Niall actually existed, since he existed prior to written records and is often considered a mythological figure. Sources for Niall’s existence as a historical king come from Lebor Gabala Erenn, Annals of the Four Masters, and cronicles and legendary tales such as the Adventure of the Sons of Eochaid Mugmedon, and The Death of Niall of the Nine Hostages. However, the genetic evidence confirms ancient fables about Niall and suggests that he may be the forefather of approximately 3 million men in the world today.”
In fact, having had my own Y-DNA tested, I discovered that I am also a descendant of “Niall of the Nine Hostages”. BFD? Yes indeed; for I am not Irish or Scottish. I am an Ashkenazi Jew from Eastern Europe, which probably means that somewhere along the line, a Jewish woman was raped by some medieval warrior from the British Isles, and gave birth to a boy who became a Jew (because of his Jewish mother) and subsequently fathered a line of Ashkenazi Jews up to and including myself.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
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