Remember mate, you were taught by NUNS, not by proper historians..
And if they were Catholic nuns of course they'd try to make the Protestant English sound bad!
Incidentally, the brutal Spanish Conquistadores were Catholic..
All obviously true. The point of corse is that there are multiple perspectives on history. Were your elementary school history teachers "proper historians"?
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Walter Hinteler
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Sat 14 Jun, 2014 11:09 am
bump
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Walter Hinteler
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Sat 14 Jun, 2014 11:09 am
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Walter Hinteler
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Sat 14 Jun, 2014 11:09 am
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contrex
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Sat 14 Jun, 2014 11:40 am
@georgeob1,
georgeob1 wrote:
compact and self-serving itemization of what is no longer "acceptable"
Cowardly and dishonest weasel words. I am profoundly disinclined to genuflect in Orwell's direction. He was an MI5 stooge and informer. In many ways he was a cloth-eared bigot. His assault on political euphemism is righteous but limited, and his more general attacks on what he perceives to be bad style are often outright ridiculous. He was much quoted and alluded to after 9/11, and I think it is fair to say he is more admired in the US than in his native land.
Not at all. I merely pointed out that there is usually more to the "virtuous condition" you implied than merely the compact and self-serving list of now forbidden epithets you provided. (Indeed I strongly suspect their use has not yet completely passed from the scene in Britain.) Alternatively, do you claim that your list was a complete description of the changes to which you were referring?
Mine were not weasel words and they were neither cowardly nor dishonest. My impression is that most of the self-inflated affectation and pretense going on here is on your part, not mine.
I liked Orwell's works and believed he accurately captured important political and social realities of his time. That's why he is remembered. That, of course, doesn't make him - or anyone else - perfect in all things
I liked Orwell's works and believed he accurately captured important political and social realities of his time. That's why he is remembered. That, of course, doesn't make him - or anyone else - perfect in all things
What 'newspeak' do you see in British political discourse? Give some examples. It may be that we agree on more than we disagree.
What 'newspeak' do you see in British political discourse? Give some examples. It may be that we agree on more than we disagree.
I don't confine it to political discourse alone. Neither do I think Britain is very far ahead of the USA in this area.
London is becoming increasingly different from the rest of Britain in its population, culture, manners and economy. The equivalent differences are a bit less sharply defined here but they are no less significant than their counterparts there, though ours have a more complex regional pattern. Marin County north of San Francisco and Palo Alto south of it are vastly different from Oakland, Sacramento , Monterey and other cities in Northern California.
The extreme form of sappy reformist progressive thought prevailing in those places thrives best in the isolated moneyed enclaves protected from the unruly realities outside their gates and protected by wealth from the cost it entails. It is all detachment and virtue survivable only in an environment free of inconvenient reality.
The political tensions that result are remarkably similar in their manifestations both here and in Europe (no surprise, given our common humanity), though I believe we are, on average, a bit more resistant to it all. I sometimes wonder if the current (otherwise inexplicable to me) wave of Scottish nationalism evident in your country doesn't have some links to all this.
George said: there are multiple perspectives on history. Were your elementary school history teachers "proper historians"?
I don't attach much importance to what teachers told me because they were just one source. As we get older we prefer to find out the truth for ourselves from multiple sources such as books, TV docus and films, and nowadays the internet.
The fact remains that the USA is officially an English-speaking Christian nation thanks to the English settlers..
For example, here's English-speaking Gary Cooper taking Florida off the heathen Seminoles in 'Distant Drums' and they thoroughly deserved getting busted, their technological and spiritual progress had stagnated and they hadn't built a single theme park, burger joint or golf course in all the centuries they'd been running the place-
London is becoming increasingly different from the rest of Britain in its population, culture, manners and economy.
You sound too subtle to be simply implying, like (e.g.) Melanie Phillips that the capital is becoming 'Londonistan'. It certainly is more culturally diverse, affluent, and cosmopolitan than some other parts of the country, but so are Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and even Bristol, where my English home is.
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The extreme form of sappy reformist progressive thought prevailing in those places
Some emotive language here: needs unpacking.
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thrives best in the isolated moneyed enclaves protected from the unruly realities outside their gates and protected by wealth from the cost it entails. It is all detachment and virtue survivable only in an environment free of inconvenient reality.
Rod Liddle said as much in an interview in today's Guardian.
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I sometimes wonder if the current (otherwise inexplicable to me) wave of Scottish nationalism evident in your country doesn't have some links to all this.
This idea has never occurred to me before; they don't like being ruled from London, but they never have.
I am profoundly disinclined to genuflect in Orwell's direction.
Me too.
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georgeob1
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Sat 14 Jun, 2014 02:16 pm
@Romeo Fabulini,
I don't think we have any real disagreement here. It is simply a fact that I was educated by Catholic nuns and Jesuit priests in a community largely composed of first & second generation Irish immigrants (My parents were from Limerick and Waterford respectively.) There was indeed a different perspective on history prevalent in that community, and I came into full contact with it when I entered university (for me the Naval academy in Annapolis where the Anglo Saxon, WASP view of the world dominated.) By then I no longer gave much of a damn, but the experience and the perceptions it gave me increased my appreciation for the many ironies in human history.
We spent a lot of time at Annapolis studying the 17th & 18th century naval wars between Britain and France. I often found myself rooting for the French in these conflicts - their ships and gunnery were better designed; and their admirals had such beautiful names; Surcouf, de Glasionaire, de Grasse - compared to the British Hawke, Jarvis, etc. Still the Brits were more persistent, adaptive and focused on results (even to the point of executing Admiral Byng after losing to the French at Majorca). I decided the Brits were better allies, but there was much to admire among their opponents.
The extreme form of sappy reformist progressive thought prevailing in those places
Some emotive language here: needs unpacking.
I agree it's emotive language, but there's serious thought and observation behind it. I've been around a while; done many diverse things and; have experienced and studied a great deal of recent history and studied the distant past.
My central conclusions are that;
(1) human nature and the physical reality we inhabit are both far more complex than the theories we use to describe them.
(2) Human organizations and the principles on which they are based are inadequate to the complexity of the things they attempt to manage. Some succeed for a while, but all eventually run down, requiring destruction and recreation. There are no permanent, optimal solutions to anything.
(3) The greatest evils done to humanity have been at the hands of those who were sure they (alone) knew what was good for everyone else. In the grip of the (usually illusory) belief that he/she can solve a major problem in the world, a person can rationalize any horror to achieve it.
(4) Usually unanticipated side or secondary effects end up dominating most human contrived "solutions" to everything.
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Romeo Fabulini
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Sat 14 Jun, 2014 02:37 pm
@georgeob1,
Catholic nuns and Jesuits don't "educate" kids, they brainwash them and you seem to have swallowed much of their anti-English propaganda, and no doubt your Irish parents had a hand in it too..
Actually I like the Irish because they won't let anybody push them around, I once had an Irish ladyfriend and her temper was phenomenal, I slung a bit of bacon behind the settee once for her cat but it wouldn't touch it. I forgot to pick it up and she found it later and I was lucky to come out of the relationship in one piece, she threw me out and I had to walk 3 miles home in the bitter cold late on Christmas Eve after the buses had stopped running!
Anyway the Irish secretly like the English or they wouldn't have emigrated here in their thousands to live among us.
As for the French, they may have had pretty names as you say, but that didn't stop Nelson trashing their fleet at Trafalgar and putting paid to Napoleons hopes of invading England.
Who can forget Nelson's immortal flag signal as he went into battle- "England expects that nobody better mess with us!"
PS- I like the Irish sense of humour, 'Father Ted' is one of my favourite TV comedy shows of all time..
I have nothing but good memories of the Jesuits. They taught us critical thinking and that we had to assimilate a great deal of information and knowledge before we could really understand it. After the Naval Academy I went on to get a PhD in Science at Cal Tech Looking back they were very good indeed.
There was indeed some anti English propaganda in my environment, but most of these folks left Ireland in the first decades of the last century during what was a difficult time for them. I didn't detect any real hatred in it, and, as you indicated, there was a lot in English life the Irish liked and imitated. However my father got himself elected to our Congress and voted against Lend Lease, saying that one war in the century to save the British Empire was enough.
I've travelled a lot in Ireland and have many of relatives there. It is interesting to note in all the small towns from Waterford to Galway the old decaying Church of Ireland structure in the center of every town and the newer Catholic Church on the outskirts. There was no revenge or retaliation after independence and, though they saw the injustices, they didn't cultivate hatred. That's admirable.
Ireland is changing fast now and is facing some of the contradictions we both share.
I was raised Church of England, am now an atheist, but I have a lot of time for what radical Jesuits are doing, especially in Ireland.
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Romeo Fabulini
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Sun 15 Jun, 2014 04:21 am
Quote:
George said: my father got himself elected to our Congress and voted against Lend Lease, saying that one war in the century to save the British Empire was enough.
"The target marker flares looked quite pretty floating slowly down in the night sky" my mother told me about the time Hitler bombed Leicester England in Nov 1940. Her and her family survived unscathed, but other families didn't.
Sorry to hear your daddy didn't seem to care..
Anyway if America hadn't (eventually) come into the war to help wipe out nazism, the nazis would have been free to develop the atomic bomb and a big bomber to drop it in American laps, the writing was already on the wall-
"I completely lack the bombers capable of round-trip flights to New York with a 5-ton bomb load. I would be extremely happy to possess such a bomber which would at last stuff the mouth of arrogance across the sea."-Hermann Goering 1938
A nazi study of the effects of an atomic bomb blast on NY-
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Romeo Fabulini
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Sun 15 Jun, 2014 04:27 am
In fact the nazis had already made an experimental transatlantic flight before the war with a civilian airliner, so they had the capability of bombing America even back then if they'd wanted- WIKI- "On August 10-11, 1938, Focke-Wulf 200 Condor D-ACON 'Brandenburg' (below)
made a record-breaking nonstop flight across the Atlantic from Berlin to Floyd Bennett field in Brooklyn, New York.
The 4,075 miles flight (6,437 km) took 24 hours and 57 minutes against strong headwinds, at an average speed of 164 MPH (263 km/h). The return flight to Germany took 19 hours and 47 minutes at an average speed of 205 MPH (330 km/h) on August 13, 1938"
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contrex
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Sun 15 Jun, 2014 05:37 am
The RAF operated Condors; a Danish one was seized on British soil after Denmark was invaded by the Germans and taken into RAF stock as serial DX117. It was damaged and scrapped in 1941. Some were seized as prizes of war in 1945 and used by the RAF.
