The Anglo-Saxon Invasion: Britain Is More Germanic than It Thinks

From a recent Der Spiegel article:

Biologists at University College in London studied a segment of the Y chromosome that appears in almost all Danish and northern German men -- and is also surprisingly common in Great Britain. This suggests that a veritable flood of people must have once crossed the North Sea.

New isotope studies conducted in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries produced similar results. When chemists analyzed the tooth enamel and bones of skeletons, they found that about 20 percent of the dead were newcomers who had originated on mainland Europe.

Archeologist Heinrich Härke of the University of Reading has now come up with a quantitative estimate of the migratory movement. He suspects that "up to 200,000 emigrants" crossed the North Sea.

I think this proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the English are not indigenous to Britain.

Another British imperialist pig is executed

A British colonial police officer has been killed in an attack in the north of Ireland just 48 hours after Irish Republican Army dissidents allegedly shot to death two British colonial soldiers.

Foreign invaders killed in the north of Ireland

British invaders Mark Quinsey and Patrick Azimkar were shot dead at Massereene Army base, Antrim. Apparently the Real IRA have claimed responsibility for eliminating these tools of British colonial rule.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1917-2008

Niall Meehan explores O'Brien's transformation from a leftist to a supporter of British colonialism in Ireland.

Review of "Finding Ireland"

William Birdthistle:

Mr. Tillinghast spends little time considering whether the millions of 19th-century Irish who starved in or fled from Ireland would have needed to construct a national consciousness in order to despise and distance themselves from their imported overlords. Similarly, he neglects to consider that disproportionate literary production of the Anglo-Irish might have owed something to its disproportionate wealth, education and leisure.

The more one reads of Mr. Tillinghast's argument, the more it appears to betray an uncritical reverence toward the ruling classes for whom he believes sympathy is warranted. He dismisses as ahistorical the late Conor Cruise O'Brien's charges of snobbery against certain Anglo-Irish writers, though he has no qualms about celebrating their contemporary with the garden, Edith, the seventh Marchioness of Londonderry: "Surely a more remarkable woman never wore a diamond tiara, sailed a yacht, or rode to hounds." Mr. Tillinghast confesses to pilfering a 19th-century boot-blacking bill from the Gore-Booth estate as a memento to be framed. One senses that he would much prefer to be within the demesne wall than without it.

Mr. Tillinghast is a wonderful writer with great depths of knowledge and powers of analysis, but this particular collection might better be titled "Finding Anglo-Ireland -- and Loving It." Finding Ireland in such a way is akin to finding India in the writings of the Raj. Perhaps Mr. Tillinghast, like the excavators of Celtic artifacts he disdains, is simply drawing conclusions based on the curious habits of the elite alone.

Mr. Birdthistle, a native of County Cork, is a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Irish parents are among the most protective in the EU when it comes to their children using the Internet, a survey has revealed

The Europe-wide study found they are least likely to allow their youngsters to give out personal information online, talk to strangers, visit chatrooms or use email or instant messaging. They are also more inclined to limit the amount of time their kids spend online and to have rules stopping them from setting up a profile on a community. Martin Territt, director of the European Commission Representation in Ireland, said it was good that Irish parents are wary of the dangers posed by the Internet. He said: "One of the most positive findings of this survey is that Irish parents are amongst the most likely in the EU to talk to their children about what they do online. With eight out of 10 Irish children regularly using the Internet, they need to be aware of potential dangers."

Good riddance to O'Brien!

Conn Corrigan on the death of Conor Cruise O'Brien:

Ferdinand Mount, the British politician and journalist, described the late Conor Cruise O'Brien as 'a man whose function it is to be gloriously wrong.' And nowhere else did Cruise O'Brien more clearly demonstrate this than in relation to Northern Ireland.

Such was his opposition to physical force republicanism in Northern Ireland, that he approved of the torture of republican suspects. Upon hearing about an Irish policeman who had beaten up a republican prisoner, Cruise O'Brien said that he refrained from telling his minister colleagues in case it would worry them - adding "It didn't worry me".

But it was really toward the end of his career in journalism that Cruise O'Brien would distinguish himself for being wrong on pretty much every pronouncement he could possibly make on Northern Ireland.

Cruise O'Brien consistently argued that talking to the IRA was utterly futile and dangerous. He advocated instead a security crackdown. In 1994, for example, he wrote, "The quest for a non-existent political solution distracts from the harsh necessity to meet increasing terrorism with more stringent security measures."

When the IRA announced a ceasefire in 1994, he wrote, "This is not peace; it is simply a prelude to a different war."

In 2001, he nursed a fantasy about how the IRA, through community policing, would try to eliminate the loyalist paramilitaries, before calling on the British to withdraw. Because of Sinn Fein's involvement with community policing, he warned, "Northern Ireland's slide into anarchy, under cover of the peace process, may become unstoppable."

And when the peace process did run into difficulties, Cruise O'Brien, excited at the prospects of being proven right, could barely contain his glee, and confidently predicted a return to war.

In 2001 he wrote, 'A few things are clear. One is that the IRA now believes that the peace process, useful as it has been to them in the past, has outlived its usefulness...the Good Friday Agreement appears to be doomed.'

In 2003, a Guardian interviewer talked about Cruise O'Brien's "undisguised pleasure" at the possible disintegration of the Belfast Agreement and the peace process. 'I'm glad to see this whole bloody thing crash,' he told the interviewer.

Because he sincerely hoped that the agreement would fail, he convinced himself it would.

Having been a critic of the Northern Ireland peace process from the very beginning, he eventually found himself backed into a hole he simply couldn't get out of - when political progress was being made.

In March 2007, he wrote that he was 'quite sure [Paisley] is not going to do a deal with the British and Irish governments.' Shortly afterwards, he was proved wrong - again - and that May, Ian Paisley went into government with Sinn Fein.

Thankfully by the end of his journalism career, very few politicians - at least the politicians who mattered when it came to Northern Ireland - took Cruise O'Brien's writings on Northern Ireland seriously.

Because if they had, no doubt Northern Ireland would still be at war.

While an intellectual heavyweight in many respects, Cruise O'Brien, on the Northern Ireland peace process, proved himself to be nothing more than a silly old crank.

A great Con indeed

The revisionist attack on Irish history

The traditional view of Irish history is based on the premise that the Irish people had a moral right to fight for their political, economic, social and cultural independence from imperialist Britain. An opposing view began to emerge in Ireland in the 1930s, according to Dr. Christine Kinealy, author of A New History of Ireland. At that time, a number of leading Irish Academics began following the lead of earlier British historians, in setting an agenda for the systematic revision of traditional Irish History, which they claimed was rife with "nationalist myths". Their declared mission was to replace this so-called mythology with objective, "value-free" history. In her essay, "Beyond Revisionism", Dr. Kinealy says that the revisionist movement gained a new prominence in the battle for Irish hearts and minds during the 1960s when the IRA campaign intensified. Challenging nationalist mythology became an important ideological preoccupation of a new generation of historians.