Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Headline from Politico—and I shan’t even dignify it with a link: Musk tells Germans to get over ‘past guilt.’


What the living f**k!? My predominant heritage from England—which is to say, an Anglo-Saxon and Celtic mutt, the former being Germanic in origin and also long-dominant in the UK, and the latter absorbing at least traces of Germanic influence over the centuries—alongside my notable and relatively recent ancestral ties to Germany and Denmark via grand-grandparents (and a grandmother from Ireland on my maternal side, but that and some Scottish lineage just mixes in within my inherent Celtic influence via England. My majority blood and my soul are Anglo-Saxon, and I most identify with England and Germany). So, that long-winded introduction aside, I am unquestionably well-positioned to comment as someone of predominantly Germanic descent. Our people, as a collective, committed an unforgivable atrocity against humanity during the 1930s and 1940s, an offence so grievous that it cannot and should not be forgotten.

In the broader expanse of history, those decades were but moments ago—mere blinks in the eye of time. “Get over ‘past guilt’”? We’ve scarcely even begun to atone for the immeasurable wrongs inflicted upon the Jewish people. That was no ordinary crime; it was an act of calculated, incomprehensible hatred—one that demands a reckoning far beyond what has yet been achieved.

You, sir, who dismiss this history with such cavalier arrogance, demonstrate an unforgivable ignorance of the weight of these events. The world has long been teetering on the brink of chaos, but now the descent appears inexorable. World War III looms perilously close, and yet such callousness persists. It is utterly maddening, to put it mildly. - Arthur Newhook, 27 January 2025

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook. @Sunking278 on X, and at the same handles on FACEBOOK. MASTODON - @ArthurNewhook@mastodon.world, BLUESKY - @arthurnewhook.bsky.social. DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED at https://tinyurl.com/ArthurNewhook.

Monday, April 17, 2023

Reflections on President Biden's trip to Ireland

Photo: By Milesoneill - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27775026

(Written on Friday, April 14) President Biden is in Ballina, Ireland, where I have an ancestral connection myself. Visited there as a toddler (1981), but my memories of it are about non-existent. Watching the live coverage on Sky News, as I have no interest in how the garbage U.S. media is covering it (if they're even bothering.) While I can only claim partial Irish ancestry (around 20% at the very most), my maternal grandmother was an Irish immigrant to America of Scottish and English ancestry. Born in 1910 in Galway (relocating to County Mayo during the first of two or three marriages), she left a daughter behind in Ireland around the time WWII started and then spent the next decade or so living somewhere in England (possibly Manchester.) Whoever my maternal grandfather was, he was apparently from somewhere in Germany (only making me more Germanic and Anglo-Saxon in blood than my paternal line already made me) …

My mother was given up for adoption around the age of four, and was raised by an older Yankee Protestant couple, and I am thankful for that as that woman was a complete wreck of a person (she died in 1992, which was the second of two unfortunate occasions when ‘Auntie Margaret’ - the aforementioned daughter left behind in Ireland - came to these shores for two extended visits; the woman took over my bedroom, and did nothing but bitterly complain about her distaste for America, and being in a Protestant home the whole time) …

As stated above, my memories of Ballina from 42 years-ago are extremely hazy - apart from one incident that will go unspoken except only to say it left a scar for life. I only vaguely recall it being damp, dreary, and rather poor. We did take a cross-country trip to visit the Dublin Zoo, which I am certain was the best part of the trip. In spite of having visited Ireland, my heart and soul is far more connected to England and Germany than any other lands where I have heritage. Many people I grew up around here in the Boston area were purely Irish, and Irish-Catholic at that. By no means do I have as much of a claim to that land as most Irish-Americans have, my spirit, body, and mind are forever WASP. No matter, though, I am still proud to share an ancestral homeland with President Biden, and I am proud that he is honorably representing a not-so-honorable country as ours abroad. Hells, maybe the president and I are distant cousins, and maybe that is why I relate to him. - A.N.

Copyright 2023, Arthur Newhook. @Sunking278 and @FloydEtcetera on TWITTER, and at the same handles on FACEBOOK. MASTODON - @ArthurNewhook@mastodon.world, and POST - @arthurnewhook.