Put it another way. It's plane to see that Fairfax has now reached pique stupid ...
Of course they corrected it, and the pond is wary of making jokes about typos - glass houses, errant spell-checker, whatever - but the pond doesn't demand money for its pique plane stupidity ...
Besides, the story - you can google it if you like - entirely missed the point captured by Colbert here:
Never mind, all this is just a preamble to a confession and an apology for the pond staying out of the latest round of the history wars.
There was the parrot screeching even more loudly than he usually does, and many others joined in the bush chorus, as if there hadn't actually been an invasion and a dispossession.
As if enormous things hadn't been accomplished in Tasmania and only the survival of mixed relatives of the original inhabitants muted mention of a genocide. As if there hadn't been invasions and dispossessions all over the world, including but not limited to the United States and Canada.
As if enormous things hadn't been accomplished in Tasmania and only the survival of mixed relatives of the original inhabitants muted mention of a genocide. As if there hadn't been invasions and dispossessions all over the world, including but not limited to the United States and Canada.
All sorts jumped on the bandwagon, including Joe Hildebrand - the pond's favourite rocket scientist - advising that History wars are not the real battle, in his own humble and condescending way advising Aboriginal people what they must think about the past ...
The fight for the living. And it’s not going to be won by complaining about Captain #@$%ing Cook.
Yes, get over it whining, moaning, whinging black people ... you've caused all sorts of problems, and just like the long-suffering Bolter, Joe's got the white man's burden on his shoulders ... and must you dig up the past, when Joe wants to bury it.
Forget about the past, what good has it ever done remembering anything, or looking at or teaching history with a calm and steady eye, or ...
And yet the pond couldn't help but remember the family discussions around the dinner table. The name of Oliver Cromwell only had to be mentioned - not for his treatment of kings but his treatment of the Irish - for fierce arguments to break out some four centuries or so after the original events. And that's before anyone got on to assorted famines and massacres and dispossessions and a general brutal disdain for the original inhabitants of the island
One branch of the family celebrated a distant connection to Daniel O'Connell, though the pond now suspects it had as close a connection to O'Connell by standing on O'Connell street in Dublin ... and then there was the other branch of the family that claimed a lineage that directly connected them to that dangerous Marxist James Connolly ... though the pond suspects they were just bog Irish refugees of the same kind as the pond's own bog Irish boat people peasant class ...
It turns out, Joe, that history is usually a war by proxy and that memories linger and have meaning ...perhaps you should have have thought for a nanosecond longer than your usual nanosecond Terrorist rocket scientist ramblings, before channeling Kyle Sandilands and provoking Luke Pearson to furiously scribble Don't tell me to 'get over' a colonialism that is still being implemented today ...
Never mind, it set the pond up for its favourite weekend past-time, doing a little history with prattling Polonius ...
Oh indeed, indeed. Because to invade a country and subjugate its people is entirely democratic, but to take a stand and want to throw off the tyrant's yoke and assert independence ... why that's outrageously undemocratic ...
Ah Cromwell, you old devil you, let us plunge in with prattling Polonius ...
Now this is all well and good as far as it goes, which is not very far indeed, though a few would have stopped to chortle at Republicanpublican Army ...
Things are never that clear in Irish history, and if a humble wiki, Irish Home Rule Movement, can make the pond wonder what Polonius was taking to make him so sanguine about home rule ...
And Polonius isn't being that original ... after all ...
And so on here ...
Now this being an Irish question, many can look at it from all angles and offer remarkable conclusions ...
Oh indeed, to be sure to be sure, it was undoubtedly too Catholic and undoubtedly too pagan ...
But of course lurking behind all this is an unresolved issue which still haunts the island ...
Ah, the graudian and the great war here ... which brings the pond to a few words by Heartfield and Rooney, which you can google here ...
Yes, to believe that the British would have left the island without maintaining some kind of control of all that mattered takes an unusual level of delusion, and they still infest a substantial proportion of it to this day ... evidence of their infinite capacity for fucking up substantial parts of the planet in the cause of their self-interest ... and they still might manage to fuck up the Europe project given half the chance ...
It was around this time that the pond realised it had almost completely forgotten about prattling Polonius and his provincial thoughts, but attention must be paid ...
Naturally the pond celebrated the Easter uprising. Compelling Australians to participate in the killing games of the first world war would only appeal to the likes of Polonius who did his own version of the white feather game in relation to Vietnam ...
Who hasn't in their Irish roots pilgrimage - a modern folly for the disconnected - paused at the post office in Dublin to mark the plaque and to mark the bullet holes still in the walls ...
... and quietly celebrate the way the British, or more particularly, the English were made to leave ...
You see Joe, history does linger. History does infest the soul, whatever that strange mix of emotions and mind might actually be ...and the ripples tend to go far and wide, and might even see Mannix and the pond in the same room on civil speaking terms ...
The pond might have been an accident of history arising from a tribe that joined in the invasion of Australia back in the 1840s, and as part of the winning tribe, has no intention of leaving, but please, don't scribble that history doesn't matter ... and be wary of whom you stand next to ...
DP - a bit unfair on Gladstone who proposed home rule in 1886. Mind you he was a bit weird, having his own family language and had a thing about rescuing prostitutes which saw him wandering around the East End at all hours.
ReplyDeleteSome people call him Jack. Now therein lies a tale.
DeleteI too share an Irish lineage. No-one famous, just a pig-thief who was transported at the turn of the 19th century. Yes, we are descended from boat people.
ReplyDeleteAnyhoo, my wife is in bed, not well, today. I took her in a cup of tea a little while ago and who's face was filling the tv in there? Prattling P! (on Insiders).
I dutifully placed the tea down and did a runner but what I did notice in the few nanoseconds that Gerry was invading my space is how beaten down by life he looked.
His facial expression and posture, in fact his general demeanour, is that of an old man who pretends he's fighting the good fight but deep down knows that he's sparring with shadows.
Gerry, lose the harridan of a missus and take yourself on a long, long holiday.
All I'm gonna say is the lovely Miss Thelma Plum commented in a better way on Twitter than I ever could...
ReplyDeleteWas trying to walk to Kilmainham gaol, the place were many of the leaders of the Easter uprising were imprisoned then executed, and came upon the archetypal little old lady walking in the opposite direction.
ReplyDeleteAsked: "Are we going the right way to Kilmainham gaol?"
"Yes" she replied. "Go down to the end of this road and then ... keep on going."
:)³
DeleteEven a loon like Brendan O'Neill disagrees with the prattler on this one.
ReplyDeletehttp://flashbak.com/the-easter-rising-1916-was-an-inspiring-blow-for-freedom-57980/
An undemocratic group killing innocent people - Ah, that would be the British Army, then...those buildings weren't smashed up by the small-arms of the rebels, but by the artillery brought to bear by the British.
ReplyDeleteWhat Mr Larkin misses about those "genuinely horrific ... sentiments" is that they were hardly unique to Padraig Pearse, as implied. Having read literally thousands of letters, diaries, memoirs etc of witnesses to the first world war, military and civilian, I can assert with confidence that these sentiments were widely held by the majority who beheld the imminent carnage (rather fewer held it after surviving said carnage. I have read comments describing bloodshed as "a cleansing and a sanctifying thing" from German university students, Hungarian farmers, British poets, French Academics, Italian street brawlers, Russian factory workers and even Austrian painters who perforce joined the Bavarian Army before achieving some transient political prominence.
It was one of the most important social outcomes of the First World war that such attitudes came to be viewed with horror in 1918, having been so commonplace in 1914.
But at Larkin got one thing right - he explains exactly what the description of Sinn Fein as "the political wing of the IRA" is totally wrong.