I wanted to write a little more about rewriting history because I have had a few more thoughts and rememberings.
I grew up when the IRA terrorist activities were at their height. When bombs went off in England. When there was daily trouble in Ireland. There was no avoiding the fact that there really was trouble in Ireland and they were cross with the English.
One day our English teacher decided to get us to have a debate on the Irish situation. I actually went away and researched it, unlike my class mates. I got the encyclopedia from the library and I read. I was pretty horrified by what I found out. I discovered, in short, the potato famine. I had never, ever heard of this before. No mention of it had been made in my presence, despite the troubles. And I was a teenager.
So I put together my argument and I was proud and passionate about what I had to say. And off to class I went. I didn't get the reaction I expected.
When I mentioned the potato famine, the class laughed. They had never ever heard of it. Not one of them. My opponent thought I was making it up and egged them on. The teacher and I locked eyes in horror and sympathy. My opponent won the debate.
Most of our history is taught in school but certainly when I was there, it was a sanitized version. All the bad nasty bits taken out. All the things we did wrong removed. The crusades were not an attempt at religious genocide. The Romans persecuted Christians but no mention of the start of the Roman Catholic church.
We are not the only nation guilty of this. I know that a lot of people won't like this next comment... but the whispers about how the IRA funded itself suggested US ex-pats. After 9 11 it all changed that's for sure. The IRA lost it's bite and learned to talk very quickly.
We all reinvent things. Sometimes it is reinvented for us, marketing, spin, political secrets, non-disclosure agreements, trade agreements. Where do all those warring third world countries get their weapons from?
When my descendants look back on these times, how will history have been written? What things will have been exposed as documents become unclassified? What events will be forgotten? Which shameful things will be left out?
Working hard on the cottage
10 months ago
Oh, I very definitely heard the whispers about IRA funding...delusional Americans of Irish descent motivated by some strange loyalty (?) to fund The Struggle....or at least they were convinced of it...
ReplyDeleteI remember the height of it as well....a frightening time...
The book I just read for Mon's book club talks about the Hudson's Bay Company, which, by all Canadian curriculum teaching is second only to the Holy Church in its far-reaching benevolence, was quite possibly(probably, come to think of it..but we don't, until we're prodded to, do we?) a corrupt and brutal force that raped and pillaged this country.... But you'd never see it told that way in school....
If you believe Sinead O'Connor, the famine wasn't really a famine, the British shipped all the potatoes out so that the Irish would starve....
LOVE these posts...
xo
There was potato blight I believe. In the UK you can't plant potatoes in the same ground every year without getting it. Not sure why. They kept planting potatoes in the same ground and yields dropped every year because of blight (I think) until it reached a critical point. They were no longer growing any other foods to support themselves. The food grown on the Lords land was probably for selling and had long gone...
ReplyDeleteI imagine some landowners did let them starve but I don't believe every landowner did.... Good and bad everywhere....
A nasty, nasty business all round. I hope it would never happen again but, you never can tell.... The selling of GM seed that can not reproduce it's own seed in third world countries so farmers have to buy the seed every year is kind of similar though.... *sigh*