Richard Mellor
This video is not easy to watch. It can be sad, or we can elarn from it, see similarities with our own experiences, not the same, but similarities. We can learn from it.
From the age of about 7 on, I was raised in England. I went to Catholic schools in a town about 12 miles from the village in which I lived. We were Catholics but not particularly practicing or anything like that. The religious indoctrination aside, I always thought that I got a better education in a Catholic school but I can't say I know that for sure.
We were Catholics because a lot of my ancestry was Irish, great grandparents who came to England to escape poverty and starvation. I was taught by nuns and a fair few lay teachers who were Irish. As I entered my teen years I do recall learning about Ireland and the struggle for home rule that went on in the British parliament, Gladstone, Disraeli and Randolph Churchill stuck in my mind. As I got older, the IRA bomb sprees were ongoing, they blew up Mountbatten on his estate in Ireland and we didn't have garbage cans on the subways when I moved to London because the IRA used to put bombs in them.
I would watch the scenes from Derry and Belfast in Northern Ireland as British troops battled with Catholics in the streets but I never fully understood it all., not deep down anyway. By that, I mean I had no real understanding of Irish history and the role of English, then British capitalism in it.
The colonization of Ireland one could say, began when the feudal regime was still dominant but capitalist was being born within it and the capitalist class, still in its infancy were beginning to influence events just as they did financing the Virginia colony in the early 17th century in America in search of trade and new markets.
How could I go to Catholic schools all those years and never really understand or be aware of the vicious, violent, and what many historians refer to as, genocidal assault on the Irish people? I do not recall being aware of this until later years under my own inquisitive steam, or, perhaps I was taught and spent too much time goofing off as I was fond of fun.
I think though that it is most likely this genocidal colonial war against a people the British bourgeois referred to as "White Chimpanzees", or the "Savage Race" and who were portrayed in much of English society as stupid, dirty, bred like rabbits, was left out of the curriculum or just mentioned in passing. After all, Catholic I may have been, but I went to English Catholic schools and I was an English Catholic. I lived in a mostly Protestant village and have no memory of discrimination. The reason is that the religious division in Northern Ireland is a political issue as Protestant settlers were brought there to provide a base for for the colonization of the country by its larger neighbor. Politics is the difference.
Most importantly, history is taught, or written as they say, by the victor. Also, the dominant ideas or dominant ideology guiding any class society are the ideas of the class that rules.
Watching this video is not easy; it is sad to think of history this way but that is the reality of historical development in the era of class society. The US is, like Israel, a settler state and the history of the two are very similar. Instead of the Palestinians being driven from their land, it was the Native Americans that had to be ethnically cleansed on our continent as capitalism made its westward march. The Hollywood history of this romantic era of the civilized settlers taming the land and its uncivilized occupants is nothing but racist lies and political propaganda; it's what US capitalism fed to its citizens and the world. The British peasantry was driven from their natural lands and as capitalism spread, the Irish, the Kikuyu, the populations of other colonies had to be made propertyless and separated from their means of subsistence. They had to be pacified and made dependent on the new system and their labor and land, a source of wealth for the now global capitalist class.
In order to do this, to recruit its own poor and exploited masses to provide the shock troops, the cannot fodder for this process, bribery, (in the case of the US, massive handing over of Native land to settlers like the Homestead Act for example) terror, racism and the general demonization of the victims and their culture is used to overcome the resistance.
I recently read An Indigenous History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz and what jumped out at me in this book was that the war against the indigenous people on this continent is to this day, the most violent, most difficult and most prolonged war the United States has fought.
While the struggles of Naive Americans and the struggles of all workers and oppressed people to have their history told, has brought more attention to this "history form below" and we can watch videos like the one above, this history will never become mainstream. The US ruling class will not teach history that fully exposes their role and the role of classes in society so that we may draw certain conclusions that will help us understand how to move forward.
Racism in history will never be taught in a way that will result in a strong sense of unity between workers and all those who are exploited in one way or another by the capitalist system and its adherents. The history of the victors will always find a scapegoat, always point a finger at one or other sector of the class whose life and labor is the source of their wealth; will always Rob Peter to pay Paul. The victors will never write their own epitaph,
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