Showing posts with label Irish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irish. Show all posts

1916, 2016, Terrorism and Murder.

1916, 2016, Terrorism and Murder.

I was ‘raised’ to believe that the British Empire was cruel and vicious in it’s treatment of the Irish. The Fight for Irish Freedom!

Stories of oppression were caricatured, and there was only image, polemic, emotion perhaps yet no real feeling, no empathy for the poor as poor people; Ireland in the 1970s was not a good pace to be poor. It was pitiless. In a very Catholic and bank friendly way.

I was also ‘taught’ to think of the British Empire was a good influence on the World and all it’s peoples. Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation.

The British Empire, and all empires are at the core of Human Progress. I passed all my exams.

I was ‘schooled’ in the History of Kings, Queens, Princes, Wars, Winners and Losers and ‘learned’ to ‘celebrate’ their ‘achievements’ an to duly ‘appreciate’ their‘ legacy’

The reality of the lives of those who suffered at their hands was a rare footnote.

Most often their bit part in History was to perform as ‘stout yeomanry’ who fought ‘great battles’ or ‘simple’ folk, who toiled on the land, ‘protected’ by their Lords.

Great movies of great battles with great speeches by well  known celebrity actors, the historical drama, the almost documentary retelling of the myth is the most seductive manner possible. Heroes kissing their female conquests in between bloody battles, often still covered in the dirt of war; the woman soothes the warrior, she does not scold him.

There were a few bad apples, of course.

Just a few.   

People like Spartacus and Robin Hood sorted them out, put them in their place, if only for a brief moment. This underpinned the sense that justice exists, with the subtext that seeking it is futile and lethal alongside the inevitability of Power and Rulers, War and Taxes.

All of this guaranteed by God.

As if it was all ‘normal’ human behaviour.

This is what I was led to believe.

I was ‘radicalised’.

I don’t believe any of it.

It’s all propaganda.

It’s shit.

1916 was a shit thing to do, a shit thing to be involved in.

In consequence many more shit things were done,  guerrilla war,  independence war, civil war, economic war, religious war…

leading directly to the Dictatorship of Church and State in Ireland, a cabal that for 80 years masqueraded as beacon of Democracy on the International ‘stage’, all the whle managing the incarceration hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in religious and state care, where they were subjected to unfathomable, protracted, horrific physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuse, which was covered up by people who were not the perpetrators, who were ‘in loco parentis’ and this double breach of trust is still being ‘managed’ by Church and State in Ireland ….

That’s a shit thing to have done, to be still doing. And it’s not like the current set-up has made an effort – what accountability exists, does so because it’s all been driven by Survivors coming forwards and fighting with all their might against a hesitant, obstructive state and resistant deceitful Church. T

1916! The Banks!

1916! The Tyrrelstown evictions!

1916! The Magdalene Launderies!

1916! Mothers and Babies Homes!

1916! Catholic Baby Trafficking!

1916! Enda Kenny!

1916! Charlie Haughey!

Yeah, Right!

1916! LGBT Rights! ????

They don’t go together. Those rights were attained by peace, by struggle yes, but not by the gun. This supercedes 1916 in every way possible,  and they are a maturation of the political process amongst the grass roots of society, and the most effective way in which to challenge and confront oppressions.

They were a recognition of humanity that has been dealt with openly, honestly and with all due remorse and shame for the previous institutionalised marginalisation and bigotry, and a desire in people for human  justice, justice, justice!

1916, 1922, 2016…… look around you, my Irish brothers and sisters. What do you see?

Be honest and fearless, and kind. Be very kind, indeed.

All the men with guns are terrorists, they are murderers. The legal definitions are irrelevant to human flesh and bone, to the reality of that kind of violence, on all ‘sides’.

I will not glorify it. I will not justify it.

I will subject it to a substantial critique based on the evidence, the outcomes.

Tom Clarke, the 'leader' of 1916 was driven by revenge, religion and ideology, not by love. He was a 'radicaliser', he was a 'mentor', a manipulator and he was a 'jihadist' teacher. He was a Wahhabist. Religion as justification for murder. Funding for militia. Training Camps. Those who want to can justify anything, defend the indefensible.

Understand 1916 in the context of 'The Troubles'.

The NI Civil Rights Movement that was about poverty; institutional discrimination and deliberate impoverishment. It was not about Republicanism vs Unionsim. That was injected into the shituation to undermine the Civil Rights narrative. Collusion. Secret undercover 'operatives' working for the British Security State, an all the militia, escalated the violence and the narrative changed. And they have maintained that pretense for decades. A movement of integrity that is seeking Civil Rights is more of a threat to Power than any violent militia.

The irony of the times, the 1916/2016 mirroring shows that whilst the people are growing in awareness, the rulers are becoming ever more blatant about their position, and their media parrots these lies and false narratives because they cannot acknowledge that growing awareness, as it's emergence after centuries of delusion exposes their primary insecurities, which being narcissistic in nature they take very, very personally  and deep within their reactionary violence their souls are charged with fear.

Selfish fear. Lethal fear.

Power has one directive : to retain, enhance and project that power. Everything it does submits to these necessities.  Everything it does can be understood through this paradigm. The Bully, the Institution. They are the same thing, at different degrees.

Bullies replacing bullies is not Freedom.














Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Letter to media re: release of chapter 9 of The Murphy Report.

To the Editor,

The release of Chapter 19 of The Murphy Report is a reminder to everyone concerned with the welfare of all our children. 

It is a reminder that is well overdue, a reminder that cries out for Justice for all those children who over the years, have been sexually assaulted, brutally beaten, humiliated, bullied and psychologically tortured by clergy and by lay-persons in Church and State Residential Institutions entrusted with their 'care'. Justice.

It is a reminder that there are many, many adults today who bear the scars of these crimes, whose lives have been absolutely undermined by the toxic effects of these Adverse Childhood Expereinces, who have lived with shame, pain, confusion, fear, lonliness, psychological and physiological breakdowns, addiction, family breakdown and more, many of whom have been held responsible by Society for those symptoms, for the unbroken cycles of abuse that have disfigured their lives.

How many times have Surviviors been told to 'pull your socks' up by well-meaning, insistent yet impatient and ultimately un-empathetic helpers?  Charity is all well and good, yet if Society does not directly address the roots of the problem, the problem persists.

Survivors suffer still, many decades after the initial trauma.

The long drawn out process of breaking through the resistance of State and Church to achieve a full disclosure and accountability, resolution and closure for what went on - the endemic brutal and extreme mistreatment of children - for so long that in cannot be called 'accidental' on any level, is part of what I see as a wider pattern of fear. Cowardice.

These crimes would have remained masked and obscured were it not for those Survivors who first confronted their own fear, to bring charges against their abusers, often in the face of resistance from family, community, the State and of course the Church itself.

Who has the most to fear?

Is it the Irish State? Is it the Vatican? Is it those perpetrators as yet un-named? Is it Irish Society?

Or is it the Survivors?

As a survivor I fear that Irish Society does not really 'get it', is still largely in denial - we know, yet we do not allow ourselves to feel the full impact of the truth - and Irish Society is even still unwilling to address the matter openly, because it is not simply the story of Survivors of Church and State abuses of children - it is the story of how Irish Society relates to children, and the failure to place the welfare of children above the preceived interests of adults, of State and Church Institutions and of matters financial.

This is also a matter of Power Relationships.

The greatest natural disparity of power is that between an parent and an infant. That disparity is mirrrored in the disparity of Power between Governance and those who are Governed. Even in a democracy.

This Christmas, think of the new born, think of the future you are building for that child, for all children.

Think of the variance between the idealised birth in a manger in Nazereth, of a childhood that has not been recorded in the Gospel, which remains shrouded in mystery, and then think on and feel the reality of so many children, across the world, who suffered so terribly for so many years at the hands of Church and State and how that too has been shrouded in secrecy.

Ireland's story is part of an international pattern. As Indigenous Aboriginal Residential School survivors will affirm in Canada, Australia, North America, South America, Africa and Asia.

How many years must Survivors beg and cajole and litigate and struggle for Justice?

How many more reports will be conducted? How many surviuvors have died whilst these investigastions have been carried out, and ho wmany more will pass before the truth is made public, before justice is served and real change with regard to the welfare and status of children has a foundation that is solid and is made visible by the actions of Society?

What would Jesus do?


Kindest regards

Corneilius Crowley



Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe




Bookmark and Share

Corneilius is published ...... Irish Times, Letters, 28/12/09

The Irish Times published my letter following on from the recent Irish Priests Abuse Crime Report, on Saturday 28th of December 2009.

I discovered this on Christmas Eve, by chance, via a webiste in Ireland, whose author, Colm O'Gorman, a man who has done much to open the closed and hidden expereiences of the abused in Ireland, had something to say of my (not so seasonal) epistle to the media.....

He is kind, and his contextual understanding is a message the needs to be heard and thought about..

http://colmogorman.com/?p=561

The Irish Times Web page...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2009/1128/1224259621186.html

The letter is a shortened version of this piece published below..

I am ever concerned that the understanding of the over arching societal practice of power and abuse is taken as a priority for open source discourse and that people are enabled to communicate with clarity, the lived experience and what that means... and for adults entrusted with care of others to act from knowing, not from belief, as Tony Blair and others like him would have it.

In this the personal is political.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe







Bookmark and Share