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Why the English oppressed the Irish
In everything I’ve read about the history of Ireland, I’ve only seen catalogues of English oppression. I’ve never once seen an account that explains why the English pursued the policies they pursued, and why they were so brutal to the Irish, over several centuries. Most histories made it seem like nothing but senseless, arbitrary cruelty. I thought that there had to be some reason for England’s course of conduct, even if it was a bad reason. It was as though no one wanted to mention any reason on the English side, as though that would be the moral equivalent of justifying American slavery or the Nazi Holocaust. Writing at The Corner, John Derbyshire takes the English side, explaining their oppressions of the Irish in terms of rational self-interest. The English had to maintain control over Ireland, because an independent, and necessarily weak, Ireland would have come under the control of one of England’s enemies (particularly France), threatening England. English independence thus required the brutal suppression of any manifestations of Irish independence. My tendency is to find a plausible reason for the behavior of the English, not to see them in the highly negative terms in which the Irish have typically painted them. But does Derbyshire’s account come close to justifying, for example, England’s driving the Irish off their own land into starvation in the 18th century?
Having just written the above entry, which was motivated simply by curiosity about Irish and English history, I suddenly understand how liberal guilt works. The thought came to me that some people would be upset that I had even referred to a historic English guilt, because that would weaken England’s will to defend itself now against the Muslims. For most people today, the idea of a historic misbehavior of England toward Ireland (or toward its colonial possessions in Asia and Africa) makes England seem guilty, turns English nationhood into a “source of shame” (as Melanie Phillips describes the attitude of the left), and removes people’s love of their country and their will and desire to defend it. It’s crazy that it should be this way; why can’t people see their nation’s historic sins in a more balanced perspective? Nevertheless, it is that way. For modern people, liberal values are the only values. Therefore serious violations of liberality in a nation’s past deprive the nation of worth in the eyes of its own people. So they turn away from their country, allowing its enemies to subdue it. For example, they welcome multiculturalism because (as Phillips has argued) they don’t think their country should exist, and multiculturalism is a way of changing their country into something else.
Exacerbated liberal guilt—and conservatives’ understandable fear of the harm that guilt will cause—make it impossible to discuss a nation’s history objectively. Email entry |