OT: Rdgeo Do you know the history of how the Brits enslaved and treated the Irish ? Or how they criminally neglected them during the Potato Famine ?
https://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/introduction.htm
"Most of the Irish countryside was owned by an English and Anglo-Irish hereditary ruling class. Many were absentee landlords that set foot on their properties once or twice a year, if at all. Mainly Protestant, they held titles to enormous tracts of land long ago confiscated from native Irish Catholics by British conquerors such as Oliver Cromwell. The landlords often utilized local agents to actually manage their estates while living lavishly in London or in Europe off the rents paid by Catholics for land their ancestors had once owned."
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When I first traveled there in 1980, on the way across England with my girlfriend, we heard horrible stories about the Irish heathens - loin cloth wearing, barefoot, purse snatchers and rapists they were. Of course, they weren't but you couldn't convince the Brits they weren't; we were lucky to have survived making it back to England, they reckoned.
So I have a BA in History and have Irish Citizenship by descendency - and an Irish passport I used for traveling in the mideast. By birth, I'm an American Citizen and live in Vichy California, where I was born in better times - 5th generation on my German father's side.
I'm a big fan of Churchill, and contemporarily, Daniel Hannan and Peter Hitchens; but I have a visceral bitterness for what the Brits did to the Irish. And their unapologetic arrogance.
https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Freedom-English-Speaking-Peoples-Modern/dp/0062231731/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398481405&sr=1-1&keywords=Inventing+Freedom
https://www.amazon.com/The-Abolition-Britain-Peter-Hitchens/dp/0704381400
My quote was the last line in Joyce's 'The Dead', chapter in his book, 'The Dubliners'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6FGIaWaQxA Go to 2:40 until the end.
Joyce was a brilliant writer, but was contemptuous of the Irish, so he went to Paris, where he continued to write about them, and hang out with other intellectuals in cafes and salons, who were the elites and knew everything; especially who to have contempt for.
Until the Nazi invasion, then he fled to Switzerland; isn't that what elites are supposed to do ?
4 years later, some of the descendents of the 3.5 million starving Micks who emigrated from Ireland's potato famine on 'coffin ships', landed at Normandy; they took France back from the Nazis and if Joyce had survived, I wonder what he would have written from his sanctimonious cafes and salons in Paris, after the Allies had rebuilt them.
I own MDM because I bought it for all the wrong reasons 17 years ago and I vowed never to do that again. It's a lesson. I hope it works out.