The spectre of a democratic and progressive country What on earth was that event last month in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh, all about? We were told that it wasn’t a celebration of partition, nor a commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Six-County political entity. Rather, it […]
Tag: Colonialism
Laughing at what we are
In what other country would there be web sites offering the equivalent of “funny Irish place-names”?—which in fact are not Irish at all but corruptions. And the great majority of these are not even corruptions in the usual linguistic sense—i.e. changes made over time by the usage of people (in […]
A broad sweep of the story of the Irish
■ Jerry Shanahan, Ireland: A Social History (Dublin, 2021) Much left-wing literature in the twenty-first century seems to suggest that history began in 1848 or, at the earliest, in 1789. This unmarxist view tends towards a blinkered understanding of the roots of modern society and the development of capitalism and imperialism. Therefore, […]
Understanding the past to unlock the future
Dialectics says that everything is changing and everything is evolving. Capitalism is no exception—so can tactics for abolishing capitalism be the same? Capitalism was nascent during Marx’s time; and by the time Lenin arrived it had evolved into imperialism, which he said is the highest stage of capitalism. Marx’s assessment […]
The natives are restless
One of the defining marks of a colony (or neo-colony) is its adoption of the ideology, and especially the language, of the conqueror.