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Just a quick digest this week of my writings from elsewhere. Last Friday I had a piece in The Epoch Times, after I spoke to War Room Pandemicâs international editor Ben Harnwell in Rome about populism. Specifically, how the right stole the leftâs lunch and ate it, when it comes to representing the working man and woman.
As this populist movement continues to pick up support from ordinary people alarmed by raging price hikes, decrepit public services, and political corruptionâproblems the United States now shares with Italyâthe liberal-left seems determined to carry on waging a culture war.
âThey are the ones who lost that base by changing their political agenda. Instead of the welfare of the working class, they started going on about unisex bathrooms and pronouns and drag queen story hour. Well, tell me how thatâs going to help the guy working in the factory or his wife who works two jobs?â Harnwell said.
âAll you have to talk about as a party is not only drag queen story hour but the right to start trans-ing your child, without even the parents knowing about it. If thatâs the market stall youâre offering, youâre finished. And what do you have left? Rage against those who came and took your territory.â
And yesterday, I had a piece up on Spiked about my old employer, The New York Times, the management of which is now being accused of racism. Circular firing squad, assemble!
And finally, I write this from the wilds of County Clare, in the west of Ireland. The husband and I came down for one last jaunt before the long, cold, dark and very expensive winter sets in. Itâs a beautiful place, extremely hospitable people (France, take note) and a long â mostly tragic â history. (If you havenât heard the phrase, âto hell or Connaughtâ look it up.) [ED Note: please see comment below from @Thomas DâArcy for a fact-check on this point.] 10/10 would visit again.
[EDITING TO ADD A POEM MY FATHER WROTE AFTER A VISIT TO CO. CLARE IN THE 1970âS]
The Famine Land: West Clare in Winter
Jack Holland
Here the sharp rocks
Break through thin soil,
And the ploughshare grates
On the greenstone;
Abandoned cottages litter the fields with stones,
A land of skin and bone.
The owl hoots in the hollow tower;
Only on disuse
Can such silence fall.
The winds roar is a hollow sound
Full of silence in the funnel of the tower
Or blowing over the bleak fields
That once swarmed.
Here is the silence of absence,
Of the lost millions:
Swarming still in the hungry howl of the wind
The stony cliff face off of which our ancestors may or may not have been pushed by Cromwell.
Hi Jenny, thanks for the interesting article, as your articles always are.
Just a few little points. The best view of the cliffs is actually from the bottom, there are boats from nearby harbours that do a tour. Oddly enough Clare, although it is on the western side of the Shannon, is in Munster not Connaught. Clare does indeed have a long history, there are remains of Stone Age burials a few miles from the cliffs. Mostly the area's history is one of quiet prosperity, much of the land is good, being beside the ocean it's weather mostly avoids excesses of hot and cold, its trading links with Iberia go back to pre-Roman times, and its relative inaccessibility made the area less of a target for the raiding and piracy that was commonplace in many other coastal areas around Europe.
The link that you give for the phrase "To Hell or Connaught" contains information that is mostly nonsense. It is a nationalist propaganda piece. Connaught in the 1650's was not particularly infertile, quite the opposite. Connaught was not a vast penal colony. Very few Catholics were actually compelled to move to Connaught, mostly these were upper class landowning nobles. The lower classes remained where they were, their conditions changed little, the main change was that they had new masters. Their is little or no evidence that the phrase was uttered by Cromwell or his supporters. A better link is to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_for_the_Settlement_of_Ireland_1652
Also, to my post I added a poem written by my father in 1970's, and it's quite a grim one, haunted by Famine ghosts, so that no doubt added to my overall impression that Clare's history was darker than you say it was in reality.
That is very interesting! Both myself and my husband (who grew up in a Republican area during the Troubles) had absorbed the to hell or Connaught story as children. In fact, the reason I had conflated the cliffs with Cromwell's evil deeds is because my parents had photos of the cliffs from a trip we took there when I was a baby, and my father told me at some point the Cromwell had driven people off a cliff, a story that intrigued and scared me as a little kid, and that info just sort of marinated in my brain all this time. When we were on the cliffs on Saturday, I asked Brian if he also had heard the story, and he said he did. Neither of us fact-checked it, obviously! đ€Ł The phrase was further cemented in my brain in my teen years -- an age when you are susceptible to romantic storylines of persecution -- by the Pogues song "Young Ned of the Hill" which is most definitely a propaganda piece but a catchy little ditty nonetheless.
I was interested to see in a visitor's centre in Clare that they had kept out the Normans and did not have any English interference until a century or two later. Thanks for the correction!
We all probably know people we deeply care about who have gone off the deep end in recent years. Little things like reasoned sanity and human decency are often overturned by an obsessive hatred of President Trump and a deep contempt for anybody who is even suspected of having voted for him. It is easier to label people nasty names ("racist", "sexist", "hater", whatever) than it is to engage in reasoned discourse. All of this has a spiritual component. When people reject God, other gods will inevitably surface ("wokeness" for example). As we race toward the culmination of history as we know it, a biblical perspective is crucial. A website called olivetreeviews.org has some interesting things to say about this.
Hi Jenny, thanks for the interesting article, as your articles always are.
Just a few little points. The best view of the cliffs is actually from the bottom, there are boats from nearby harbours that do a tour. Oddly enough Clare, although it is on the western side of the Shannon, is in Munster not Connaught. Clare does indeed have a long history, there are remains of Stone Age burials a few miles from the cliffs. Mostly the area's history is one of quiet prosperity, much of the land is good, being beside the ocean it's weather mostly avoids excesses of hot and cold, its trading links with Iberia go back to pre-Roman times, and its relative inaccessibility made the area less of a target for the raiding and piracy that was commonplace in many other coastal areas around Europe.
The link that you give for the phrase "To Hell or Connaught" contains information that is mostly nonsense. It is a nationalist propaganda piece. Connaught in the 1650's was not particularly infertile, quite the opposite. Connaught was not a vast penal colony. Very few Catholics were actually compelled to move to Connaught, mostly these were upper class landowning nobles. The lower classes remained where they were, their conditions changed little, the main change was that they had new masters. Their is little or no evidence that the phrase was uttered by Cromwell or his supporters. A better link is to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_for_the_Settlement_of_Ireland_1652
Nice dog.
Also, to my post I added a poem written by my father in 1970's, and it's quite a grim one, haunted by Famine ghosts, so that no doubt added to my overall impression that Clare's history was darker than you say it was in reality.
That is very interesting! Both myself and my husband (who grew up in a Republican area during the Troubles) had absorbed the to hell or Connaught story as children. In fact, the reason I had conflated the cliffs with Cromwell's evil deeds is because my parents had photos of the cliffs from a trip we took there when I was a baby, and my father told me at some point the Cromwell had driven people off a cliff, a story that intrigued and scared me as a little kid, and that info just sort of marinated in my brain all this time. When we were on the cliffs on Saturday, I asked Brian if he also had heard the story, and he said he did. Neither of us fact-checked it, obviously! đ€Ł The phrase was further cemented in my brain in my teen years -- an age when you are susceptible to romantic storylines of persecution -- by the Pogues song "Young Ned of the Hill" which is most definitely a propaganda piece but a catchy little ditty nonetheless.
I was interested to see in a visitor's centre in Clare that they had kept out the Normans and did not have any English interference until a century or two later. Thanks for the correction!
I would love to shake that dog's hand more than any person I have ever met! Such beauty!
Aw thank you!! She really is a beauty. đ„°đ„°đ„°
She is lying next to me right now, fast asleep.
We all probably know people we deeply care about who have gone off the deep end in recent years. Little things like reasoned sanity and human decency are often overturned by an obsessive hatred of President Trump and a deep contempt for anybody who is even suspected of having voted for him. It is easier to label people nasty names ("racist", "sexist", "hater", whatever) than it is to engage in reasoned discourse. All of this has a spiritual component. When people reject God, other gods will inevitably surface ("wokeness" for example). As we race toward the culmination of history as we know it, a biblical perspective is crucial. A website called olivetreeviews.org has some interesting things to say about this.
I agree with you more with each passing day.