Posted on 07/03/2009 8:10:11 AM PDT by C19fan
Pope Benedict XVI today announced the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman. The declaration means that the Anglican vicar, who shocked Victorian England by converting to Catholicism, will be given the title 'Blessed'. It also puts Newman just one stage away from becoming the first English saint in about 40 years.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
The good Cardinal beat Charles Kingsley to a bloody pulp. He’s done his share.
because they are all or at least were CoE???
My personal opinion is that it mostly stemmed from politics, not religion. You had the power struggles during and after the English Reformation, the wars with Spain, then the Irish problem, by the time all that was over a good Englishman reflexively hated Catholics.
I think you should call it Irish genocide. Maybe they have a guilt problem.
No-one here in Britain feels guilt about the "Irish Genocide", any more than Israelis feel guilt about the "Gaza Genocide".
This is because (like the mass killing of the Palestinians we read so much about in the quality papers) this putative mass extermination of the Irish people has never happened, except in the fevered brains of NORAID apologists. Indeed, NORAID and its ignorant supporters have blood on their hands for ever suggesting such a thing.
Could you say more about this. I googled Kingsley but found nothing about it.
And I agree, there was never any "genocide". Some wrong-headed government policies by people honestly trying to help, and some foolish nationalists who also honestly were trying to do the right thing. And a sprinkling of malicious people on both sides just to aggravate everyone. But no genocide.
What really set it off was Kingsley's writing about something Newman had published and so far forgetting himself as to say (paraphrased) "like all Romans, Newman teaches that truth is no virtue."
THAT put the cat amongst the pigeons. Kingsley was an excellent writer and an effective polemicist, but he was entirely out of his league once Newman brought the big guns to bear on him.
Newman's reply to Kingsley ultimately evolved into his spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro vita sua (Apologia for ones life - you can't say apology because Newman used it in the Latin sense of defense or explanation, not the English sense of acknowledgement of fault.)
You can read the whole thing, including the original controversy, here.
thank you!
I can understand wh the Brits would not feel guilty. They never do.
From http://www.allsands.com/history/events/irishgreatfami_bim_gn.htm
The British government and the British and Irish Protestant landowners still required the Irish peasants and laborers to pay their rent for the land they could not work due to the blight and the hunger upon them. In a lush island surrounded by water teaming with fish and land that fattened pig and cattle alike, how could one failed crop cause a Famine? According to British law, Irish Catholics could not apply for fishing or hunting licenses. Their pigs and cattle were sent to England to feed the British and to export for trade, while the landlords kept the fine cuts for themselves. Ireland was part of the British Empire, the most powerful empire in the world at that time - yet the British government stood by and did nothing to help their subjects overcome this hardship. In our time, an enforced famine such as this would be labeled genocide yet in the 1800s it was merely an unfortunate tragedy. As defined in the United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1987 Genocide Convention Implementation Act, the legal definition of genocide is any of the acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including by killing its members; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The British policy of mass starvation inflicted on Ireland from 1845 to 1850 constituted “genocide” against the Irish People as legally defined by the United Nations. A quote by John Mitchell (who published The United Irishman) states that “The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.”
Sounds like genocide to me. They didn’t even mention the blockades. They have blood on their hands.
Anybody who thinks the British had a "policy of mass starvation" is not thinking straight. The early Victorian governments did not have the administrative machinery for dealing with a widespread famine; they made honest efforts at relief but were thwarted by bureacratic snarls and stupidity (to expect the Irish to eat maize which they had never seen and didn't know how to cook was absurd). The government DID learn from its mistakes and later British relief efforts (in India, for example) were better organized and far more effective.
As I noted earlier, the Irish system of land tenure and the one-crop system was behind most of the problems, absentee landlords didn't help but the idea that they were (a) exclusively protestant (b) deliberately starving their tenants is simply untrue.
I've got Irish on both sides of my pedigree, plus I married a man whose maternal grandfather got off the boat from Cork. But I read history with a critical eye (it was my undergraduate major) and don't believe every rabble rouser just because they (a) claim to support the Irish; but (b) more likely just hate the English.
What a surprise. You betray yourself.
Not really. The only difference between the Brits and the Germans seems to be that the Brits had better press. Wherever the empire ruled someone died. You have good company though. Unlike the Germans, the Turks also have never had to say I’m sorry.
You may suit yourself. I prefer facts.
If you are going by facts you agree with me. Welcome aboard.
As I said, national prejudice can't be argued with.
My grandmother was able to talk to one of the eye witnesses...her grandmother. They were forcing them out by starvation. BTW how did the murdering thugs do in India. It seems they used the same system over there.
from http://www.hindu.com/2005/12/28/stories/2005122804961100.htm
n his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 million and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 320,000 tonnes of wheat.
And what about GWB, New Orleans & Katrina!
GENOCIDE!
And the CIA developed Aids to kill blacks, and...
“While this book will not have the impact of Davis’s City of Quartz—a scathing indictment of L.A.’s environmental ravagement, economic disparity and racial divides—in a perfect world, it would. Its subject is nothing less than the creation of what we now call “The Third World,” through a complex series of seemingly disparate natural and market-related events beginning in the 1870s.
Davis dives into the data and journalism of the period with a vengeance, showing that the seemingly unprecedented droughts across northern Africa, India and China in the 1870s and 1890s are consistent with what we now know to be El Ni¤o’s effects, and that it was political and market forces (which are never impersonal, Davis insists), and not a lack of potential stores and transportation, that kept grain from the more than 50 million people who starved to death.
Chapters brilliantly reconstruct the political, economic, ecological and racial climate of the time, as well as the horrific deaths by hunger and thirst that besieged the peasantries of the afflicted c0untries. As in City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and Magical Urbanism, Davis’s synthetic powers, rendering mountains of data into an accessible and cogent form, are matched by his acid castigations of the murders and moral failings that have attended the advance of capitalism, and by cogent detours into the work of journalists and theorists who have come before him, decrying injustice and rallying the opposition.”
12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Radical history of Los Angeles, February 25, 2007
By M. A. Krul (Utrecht, Kingdom of the Netherlands)
Davis is well-known in radical circles as a popular writer on various issues relating to labor movements and the like. This is essentially a history of the city of Los Angeles and its surroundings from a radical perspective. It’s quite well-done and very informative (at least to an ignoramus like me), but Davis goes overboard now and then in seeing a conspiracy to repress the poor behind everything. He also has the tendency to call historical incidences of repression a “holocaust” (he actually uses this word multiple times for different things), which I don’t like being used in this manner. Aside from that though, it’s a welcome different approach from the usual hagiographic or hip postmodern analyses of conglomeration cities like LA. There’s not much more I can say about it, as whether you like his left-wing critical vignettes or not will be mostly a matter of taste - judge it for yourself.
I think you hate the British so much that you'll use any stick to beat them with. But that puts you in bed with people whose philosophy, goals and methods you should abhor -- is it really worth it to sacrifice all your principles and beliefs just so you can hate somebody?
Nobody ever ran anything as big as the British Empire without making mistakes (you think as a Scot I like the idea of the Duke of Cumberland in charge of the punitive expedition after the '45?) But stop and think a minute. The British gave us Magna Carta and a system of common law that protects the rights of the individual. They gave us the jury system, that is by no means perfect but the best in the world at protecting the weak from the powerful and the apparently guilty but innocent from unjust punishment. They were the first to abolish the slave trade. They gave us inventions of all kinds, cures for horrible diseases, brilliant novels and poetry, and beautiful music. And their system of law and education has enabled many former colonies to thrive. If you've travelled around the Caribbean, you'll know that the former British colonies are the best-educated, most stable, and most prosperous in the region.
Get off the hate fest and appreciate what good the British have done.
Even the libs can be correct at times. Look at Tony Blair’s support of the U.S.
Too bad the Brits didn’t give a bag of rice with a copy of the Magna Carta. Perhaps some of my ancestors would not have starved to death. Unfortunately food was being shipped out, not in as my grandmother learned from her grandmother. They gave us cures for disease? Hell, they created disease by their starvation policies.
They made an absolute mess of the Middle East, so much so that even T.E. lawrence was disgusted with them. Murder in India, force starvation in Ireland, deception and death in the Middle East, and you blow it off as a “mistake”.
I find it somewhat funny we are discussing this on the fourth of July weekend, you know, where we celebrate our independence from you know who. I guess that was just a little mistake also.
I think we have beaten this topic to death and are going to just disagree. You love them and I don’t. Good enough.
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