Posted on 08/16/2007 8:00:04 PM PDT by Rb ver. 2.0
More than 1,200 years ago hordes of bloodthirsty Viking raiders descended on Ireland, pillaging monasteries and massacring the inhabitants. Yesterday, one of their more mild-mannered descendants stepped ashore to apologise.
The Danish culture minister, Brian Mikkelson, who was in Dublin to participate in celebrations marking the arrival of a replica Norse longboat, apologised for the invasion and destruction inflicted. "In Denmark we are certainly proud of this ship, but we are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings," Mr Mikkelson declared in his welcoming speech delivered on the dockside at the river Liffey. "But the warmth and friendliness with which you greet us today and the Viking ship show us that, luckily, it has all been forgiven."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
You know where this is leading don’t you.
Can you say Crusades.
Bloody vegetarians.
She should've eaten the snake instead.
what a snivelling worm this guy is.
No apologies necessary.
John Denver has already apologized for everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37EKy2ZIvjU
You left out the Arabs and Spanish. ;)
Took care of it in the following post...see above.
Yeah, well I am of Irish descent, and I say an apology is not good enough, not by a damn sight. Some flowers, though, might be nice.
PRESIDENT CLINTON IN AFRICA was like Clinton in the United States -— as phony as a three-dollar bill.
His apology for slavery while in Uganda was a complete farce. Most people of African ancestry in the United States originated in West Africa, not in Uganda, which is much farther east. It is doubtful whether anyone from Uganda was ever brought to the United States.
The idea that people in Africa are owed an apology ignores history as much as Clinton ignored geography. It was the people of Africa who captured and sold the slaves who ended up in the Western Hemisphere.
White men died like flies in Africa during the era of slavery. They were not about to linger around trying to capture Africans, even if the local rulers had let them. Europeans brought their ships to the West African coast, bought slaves that were already available and got out of there as soon as possible, before they caught malaria or some of the many other African diseases, for which they had neither immunity nor medicine.
Africans, like most other non-Western peoples, saw nothing wrong with slavery. Only within Western civilization, and within the past two centuries, did the idea arise and spread that slavery was a moral abomination.
Neither Africans, Asians, Arabs nor the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere shared this Western view of slavery. All of them resisted and evaded attempts to stamp out slavery. Only the fact that the West had overwhelming military power and worldwide empires in the nineteenth century caused slavery to be destroyed.
Where the West did not have direct control, their influence, money and threats caused other governments to ban slavery. But no other civilization derived from within itself a moral revulsion against slavery.
Yet innumerable writings, movies and television specials create and perpetuate the notion that the West in general — or the United States in particular — has some special guilt for an evil that the entire human race participated in for thousands of years, and which only the West belatedly recognized as morally intolerable.
Children are still being bought and sold by the thousands in Nigeria and Benin, and 30,000 African slaves are at this very moment being held under brutal conditions in Mauritania.
If anything, Clinton should have been listening to apologies for slavery from his African hosts.
Politically, of course, none of this matters.
None of what happened on Clinton’s Africa trip was really about history, geography or morality. It was about Clinton’s appeal to his political supporters back home in the United States, especially black politicians, whom he will need if special prosecutor Kenneth Starr starts indictments or the House of Representatives starts impeachment.
In a more subtle way, Clinton was playing the race card as surely as O.J. Simpson’s lawyers. And for the same reason — to escape the consequences of his own actions.
Although there is loose talk in the media about “Clinton-haters,” what ultimately happens to Bill Clinton is of minor importance in the grand scheme of things, and I doubt if many of his critics are really focused on him, as such.
What matters infinitely more is preserving the rule of law that has spared us the tragic fates of so many other countries, all around the world. We should never forget that, even today, the rule of law is the exception — not the rule — among the nations of the world.
Our great blessings as Americans come not from our personal merits but from our having the good fortune to live under a rare form of government, with a constitution dedicated to preventing concentrations and abuses of power. Preserving that far outweighs any of the so-called “real issues” that people want to get to, like another social program or another tax break.
It is not Clinton himself who is dangerous — at least not now, as a lame-duck president. What is dangerous is letting any president get away with flaunting the law, for others are certain to follow in his footsteps and continue dismantling the barriers against abuses of power. Those barriers are our only protection and the only protections for our children and our children’s children. That is the real issue.
.
The Vikings were just pillaging the monasteries that the Irish wouldn’t pillage!
phhh! how lame.
What is the British Navy Art...or is it Alex now...lol?
actually you both bring up nice points but I would quibble with the notion that the British Empire fell apart on it's own but given the description of G-man on his homepage I'm not surprised he prefers that analysis. In my view the Brits realigned with us out of necessity, shared culture and pragmatism.
However I was not really talking about the Brits only. I was referring to how quickly Western Culture has grown so weak and is afraid to defend itself against denigration from with from it's own institutions and how it has allowed itself to become so vulnerable to multiculturalism at best and Islam at worst.
thanks for the thoughtful comments
WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, June 17, 1997) — President Bill Clinton says he does not favor compensating the victims of slavery, because the nation is so many generations removed from that era that reparations for black Americans may not be possible.
But Clinton, in a radio interview that aired Monday, said he would still consider extending an apology to African Americans for their ancestors’ suffering. Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio) proposed the idea last week.
“I think it has to be dealt with,” Clinton told the American Urban Radio Network. “There’s still some unfinished business out there among black and white Americans.”
Clinton said rather than reparations, the nation needs to continue to work to erase the effects of past discrimination. Over the weekend, the president called for a new national dialogue on race, saying the nation should strive to become a “truly multiracial democracy.”
Clinton elaborated, too, on why he has undertaken the race relations initiative, and he urged skeptics to join the effort.
“If we can pull this off, the United States will be by far the best positioned country in the global society of the 21st century,” Clinton said. “And if we act like we don’t have to think about it ‘til the wheel runs off, there is a chance the wheel will run off. And even if it doesn’t, we will never be what we ought to be.
“That is what this whole thing is about,” Clinton said. “So I ask you, go out there and tell people, if they want to be cynical, skeptical, say, ‘I don’t know if it will amount to anything, I don’t know about that Clinton, he has to have something to do in his second term,’ whatever they are saying out there. Let them say it, tell them to participate anyway, saddle up. They don’t have anything to lose by trying.”
Also on Monday, Clinton appeared at two fund-raising dinners for black and Jewish supporters, netting the cash-strapped Democratic National Committee (DNC) $700,000.
The party, under investigation for fund-raising excesses last year, faces a $16 million debt. Party leaders plan to return $3 million in questionable donations, but have had to postpone doing so until they raise more money.
At the dinner for black supporters, couples gave $10,000 each; the price was $25,000 per couple at the second dinner, a shared fund-raiser between the DNC and the National Jewish Democratic Council.
* * *
Examples from the Counter-Argument
In the historical survey of global human tragedy the following people have already received either compensation or reparations:
(1) when the Abolition of Slavery Act received royal assent on 29 August 1833 and became law effective 1 August 1834, the British Parliament provided/decreed “a free gift to the (slave) owners (instead of a loan) of 20,000,000 British pounds (or U.S. $91.2 m) to compensate them for the loss of their slaves.” The British slave owners received compensation from their government. In addition, Britain is the European government that benefited the most from slavery because the Industrial Revolution and the bulk of its attendant financial/economic/industrial multiplier effects took place in Britain;
(2) in mid-November 1989, then President George Bush signed a military spending bill that guaranteed $500m in reparations to Japanese-Americans interned in U.S. camps during WWII. This genre of compensation was called an “entitlement” and Congress authorized payment of $20,000 to each of the estimated 60,000 camp survivors in 1990 to a grand total of $1.2 billion;
(3) in 1996, American POWs were paid compensation for the time they languished in Vietnam’s prisons;
(4) in March 1997, Swiss banks agreed to establish a $5 billion fund for survivors/victims of the Jewish Holocaust; and in October, Swiss banks set up a fund in the sum of $190 million to compensate some 28,000 Jews and other Nazi victims in Eastern Europe who will receive up to $1,000 each,
(5) in June 1997, 200 Holocaust survivors who were U.S. citizens at that time, became eligible for reparations from the German government
; (6) in October 1997, 220 Filipino veterans, who fought for the United States, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles under a 1946 congressional act, seeking full benefits and back pay, albeit compensation, from the U.S. government
(7) in South Africa, Black victims of human rights abuses committed during the country’s racist, brutal, dehumanizing and violent apartheid era, are due to receive at least $3,640 a year for six years under a reparations plan proposed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on 23 October 1997
(8) in December 1997, A German insurance company paid seven life insurance claims to heirs of Holocaust victims, after thousands of such families sued for $1 billion from 15 companies. One person in California, another in North Carolina and five in Israel were paid as much as $7,000 each in reparations
(9) on 12 January 1998, under pressure from Jewish lobby groups and the United States, the German government said it would pay $110 million over five years to provide pensions (reparations) to Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe. Divided among the estimated 18,000 survivors, the total would generate pensions in the amount of $128 a month for each survivor
(10) on 7 January 1998, the Canadian government apologized to the country’s “indigenous peoples”, viz, the Indian and Inuit communities, “for past acts of oppression, including decades of abuse at federally funded boarding schools” beginning in the 1880s and expressed “regret at past treatment” for them. As a solid, functional indicator of national reconciliation, the government pledged $245 million as reparations “to fund counseling and treatment programs for victims of abuse at the schools” and
(11) in mid-January 1998, the Clinton administration awarded the “Presidential Medal of Freedom” -- the nation’s highest civilian honor to Fred T. Korematsu, who not only defied the federal government’s 1942 exclusion order for the internment of 120,000 Japanee-Americans but also “stood strong against anti-Asian prejudice in the United States during World War II” and in February, the administration was feverlessly notifying about 80,000 interned Japanese-Americans that they are due to receive $20,000 each as a form of compensation/reparations for their inhumane treatment.
Source: http://www.trinicenter.com/kwame/20010615d.htm
.
.
As a descendant of Vikings that dropped in to England for dinner and stayed, I’m not apologizing for anything! In fact, I’m looking for new booty. Now shove off!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
