Not a dude, and not doing apologetics or trying to justify anything, either. I am merely making the point that if the British are to be judged on the sins of our fathers to the third and fourth generation, then I don’t think merely no longer being a part of the same continuing political entity absolves the Irish of theirs. But quite frankly I don’t give a shit who was to blame for what, because I’m not actually in any way culpable for anything anyone did before I was born.
People don’t really hate the English other than when they begin to justify their colonial atrocities.
Then why are we talking about colonialism? I never mentioned colonialism. I made a joke in the meme community about how I (an English person, FWIW) hate the English because I hate currently living in England. (Try and guess why.) It was Tomorrow Farewell who came in apparently putting the argument that Scotland and Wales deserve to be hated just as much due to the crimes of the past, and I just felt like pointing out that even on those terms both Irish people and Scottish people have been both victims and perpetrators to varying degrees.
The oppressed are coerced into the military all the time. The shtick is to make their living conditions so horrible, their chances of employment so shit that they have no other choice other than to join the military that provides them with the only reprieve.
Do you think every Irish person who served in the British army had no choice in the matter, but the English and Scottish soldiers were doing it only for the love of the game?
Scotland willing got into the union.
The Scottish nobility wanted into the union, and even then only after the failure of the Darien plan. That wasn’t true for the Scottish as a whole, and certainly not true of the Highlanders who were forcibly displaced and had their culture and language suppressed in many of the same ways the Irish did, contemporaneously.
Not a dude, and not doing apologetics or trying to justify anything, either. I am merely making the point that if the British are to be judged on the sins of our fathers to the third and fourth generation, then I don’t think merely no longer being a part of the same continuing political entity absolves the Irish of theirs. But quite frankly I don’t give a shit who was to blame for what, because I’m not actually in any way culpable for anything anyone did before I was born.
Then why are we talking about colonialism? I never mentioned colonialism. I made a joke in the meme community about how I (an English person, FWIW) hate the English because I hate currently living in England. (Try and guess why.) It was Tomorrow Farewell who came in apparently putting the argument that Scotland and Wales deserve to be hated just as much due to the crimes of the past, and I just felt like pointing out that even on those terms both Irish people and Scottish people have been both victims and perpetrators to varying degrees.
Do you think every Irish person who served in the British army had no choice in the matter, but the English and Scottish soldiers were doing it only for the love of the game?
The Scottish nobility wanted into the union, and even then only after the failure of the Darien plan. That wasn’t true for the Scottish as a whole, and certainly not true of the Highlanders who were forcibly displaced and had their culture and language suppressed in many of the same ways the Irish did, contemporaneously.