Settler Colonialism
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Let us listen in, learn something of Imperialism, since the language allows it. The cleverest people in London discuss the world amongst themselves. Of course I don’t like nationalism, she says, in reference to Scotland; the concept of Britain, England’s drag name, allows her to live as if she is happily of no nation at…
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I In the lamentable 2020 Programme for Government signed by three parts of Ireland’s permanent Partitionist Party, we find that the English-language introduction ends with a single long sentence in Irish. Then at the end of the réamhrá that follows—this being the Irish-language introduction to the document, that is, a translation of the introduction that…
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VI We might feel that Palestine represents something of our past; that in Palestine we see the history of vicious European colonisation repeated in the media era. This is not untrue, but Macdara has been unsettled by the idea that in Palestine we see our future: an overwhelmingly asymmetrical relation between elites and the people.…
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III Macdara will never accept that the massive violence of colonisation can be equalled by any violence perpetrated by an anti-colonial movement. In fact this seems to him to be a matter where clarity may be gained from taking a quantitative approach: compare the victims of any single anti-colonial movement with the numbers of dead…
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A change of tack for today’s post, on this Glorious Twelfth. Your correspondent was struck by a thought in writing one of his letters on Palestine and the injustices visited upon the Palestinian people: that the Jewish people, as a nation, have a natural claim to a nation state, particularly given the two millennia of…
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I While it was clearly the correct thing to do, not to mention a demonstration of a minimal ability to engage in diplomacy, the coordinated recognition by Ireland, Norway and Spain of Palestine came with a large serving of self-importance. Why the need for the leaders of all three cretinous Government Parties to stand side…
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Time seems to have sped up, and there is so much to process that this writer more practised in ancient grudge is once again working away in the glare of the news-screen. In recent days we have seen, of course, the continuing genocide in Palestine committed by extremists robed in the gentility that settler colonists…
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I Tom Murphy’s Bailegangáire does not exist—town without laughter—but almost any town in Ireland could be called Bailegangaeilge—town without Irish—except that it would be known instead as Ballygongwailga. It surprises and disappoints this writer that the Irish people consent to live in a land of makey-uppy placenames. The worst recent example that your correspondent has…
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I Like anyone in the Late Capitalist world, particularly that part of it stuck in the English language, this epistolarian has some ability to opine on the Present State of the United States. That he prefers not to do so is a proper reaction to that common situation whereby Irish people speak about the USA…
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The attempted rejection of Comparison when it comes to Northern Ireland—that is, the rejection of history, of naming the Occupation Administration as a settler colonial project, an ongoing act of violence—has as a quite natural corollary the need to encourage the promotion of a new species of vocabulary, the specimens of which remind the observer…