Well Prudy the above shows a picture of my ancestors in
Limerick.....women always did get it in the neck, didn;t they.
Consider in America, the Kennedy Family - the Mother was a Princess in
the Catholic Church, and her sons were systematically
slaughtered......all of them but one, who escaped death twice but none
could compare to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Our lines were the same - Rose Fitzgerald and my family had the same
ancestors on my mother's side......so this is the brick pile but it is
still claimed by the Fitzgerald family - or one of them anyway -
Now the 7 Fitzgeralds were slaughtered, hanged drawn an quartered by
King Henry, for he feared his throne and greatness - the Fitzgeralds
were known as the "good Fitzgeralds"....one escaped to France in this
vicious vendetta - Gerald of Og, was first Fitzgerald and I would of
course if I could lay claim to this heap of old rocks even though now
they have gone into a "catering to peasant" class to make an honest
living.
So what England did to the Irish Fitzgeralds - America did to the John
Fitzgerald Kennedy famly and we carried the same blood line and this on
my father's side.......old new American families were they say "very
close knit" and it was just 30 years ago, that I discovered the Mafia
once owned all the quarries in Cleveland area - and hey, that was my
family.....
So now here is an item from the Irish Newspapers.......no matter how
poor the Irish are they will always have a certain amount of class that
comes with good breeding and no doubt the Catholic Church instills a lot
of pride even to this day in Ireland though still persecuted by the
likes of an Ian Paisley but there will always be another Bernadette
Devin (love that name) to come along and raise the flag for Irish
Freedom......the Irish knew who John Fitzgerald Kennedy was - for his
ancestors and mine at one time battled for the title of Al Ri. (see
Earl of Wexford's book for more on this background)
So these men were all brave, tall and Lord Thomas had red brown hair,
gray eyes, and every 7 years it is said he still rides a big white horse
across the countryside - for he arises out of the lake in Limerick on a
horse with silver heels....when heels wear down he gets all his estates
back stolen from the Irish by the peasant Kings.
Nice story here for you see the Irish are about the only ones who
seemingly appreciate what America has done over the years.....Jews want
all those reparations and gold - they forget 55 million people died in
WWII......Colin Kelly was first pilot to lose live, we had Commando
Kelly, we had the Sullivan Brothers all died on a great ship, we had
Audie Murphy an we also had a Fitzgerald in the Civil War who fought for
the United States of the Confederacy.
Then we had the USS Liberty to - Isaeli's Contribution and thanks
expressed back in 1968? Hit and run......
Saba
I still have my great great grandmother's solid silver tea set - it is a
family treasure and the only thing she brought to America - she was
kicked out of her family after marrying her tutor - a Walsh but the
Walsh Mountains legend is they fed 5000 people at one time......
So Prudy be sure to pick up under subject matter the heap of ronce mine,
for this was once mine if you believe in reincaration/ - on my father's
side and there was a Fitzgerald Cursethat came with the titles....only
way to overthrown a Fitzgerald was to kill them
The 20th century
belongs to America
Over the past 100 years, the American people have sustained Western
civilisation by acts of courage, generosity and vision unparalleled in
world history, writes Harold Evans, in the opening essay of a 10-week
Irish Times series on the 20th century.
Less than halfway into the 20th century, Henry Luce wrote an essay for
Time, the magazine he founded, and headlined it The American Century. It
sounded presumptuous and bombastic, and it was widely resented, most
keenly by those who never read a line of it.
What had America given the century except Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood, Al
Capone and the hamburger? Luce, in truth, had written a critical essay,
not one of celebration.
He was bemoaning the fact that America had failed to realise its
glittering potential.
Americans were "nervous or gloomy or apathetic", unhappy because they
had been unable to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to
the reality that they had become the most powerful nation in the world.
They had muscle, but no moral will. They were not throwing themselves
with joy and gladness into spreading the ideals of civilisation, of
justice, truth and charity, "lifting the life of mankind from the levels
of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the
angels".
Luce was writing in 1941 - before America's entry into the second World
War, before the victory on the battlefields of the Alliance it came to
lead, before the Marshall Plan, before the rebuilding of Europe and
Japan, before the long ordeal of the cold war, before the collapse of
the Soviet Union - before a series of triumphs, I would argue, that make
Luce's headline premature but prophetic.
It all seems inevitable now, but judgment has to begin with Frederic
Maitland's dictum: "It is very hard to remember that events now long in
the past were once in the future." Luce flew in the face of the
isolationist sentiment still prevalent in America even as island Britain
stood alone against Hitler. It was espoused by America's great folk hero
Charles Lindbergh, and John Kennedy's father, and Henry Ford, and the
chairman of Sears Roebuck, and the demagogic Father Charles E. Coughlin,
with his millions of devotees, and high-powered Senators both Democratic
and Republican.
The historian John Chamberlain spoke for them all in deriding the whole
idea of America making a commitment in idealism. It was "straight-line
Prometheanism". Americans, he wrote, were not so heroic. Luce's
programme required a faith that "can only be sustained for short
periods"; and since people are not normally Promethean in large numbers,
Luce's programme must, in ordinary times, fall into the hands of
hypocrites skilled in using great slogans for nefarious purposes. An
interventionist America might well degenerate into "an imperialism that
will fail in liberality and become something close to the Nazi thing".
The Nazi comparison sounds absurd now, but Chamberlain wrote without
knowledge of the Holocaust - and the balance of history was
overwhelmingly on his side. Why should America be immune to Acton's law
that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely? It
would be disingenuous to suggest it escaped altogether.
McCarthyism was the use of great slogans for the nefarious silencing of
dissent. The ill-judged intervention in Indochina begun by President
Kennedy, accelerated by Lyndon Johnson and painfully relinquished by
Nixon was a close run with imperialism; so were the CIA coups in Chile,
and Iran, and Guatemala, the sabotage in Cuba, and the readiness to
countenance brutalities in Central and South America whenever some
banana republic colonel told Washington his critics were all Commies.
President Eisenhower was none too soon in his valedictory warning of the
military-industrial complex menace to democratic government: only in
recent years has it been revealed that the US army and the Atomic Energy
Commission poisoned thousands of Americans downwind of the 126 atomic
bomb tests, and untold numbers elsewhere, then lied about it for decades
to avoid just claims for compensation for injury and death.
These are grave failures, but in the final analysis they are crevices
the climber stumbled into on the ascent of Everest: blunders and moments
of peril to be examined and understood and regretted, but suggestive
also of the stupendous nature of what was attempted and what was
achieved. The flag planted on the summit marked nothing less than the
survival of Western civilization.
Yes, it is of note that in only its second century the United States
became the world's leading economic, military and cultural power. Yes,
it is remarkable that in this short period it did not merely double or
triple the wealth of its citizens but increased their
well-being five times over, so that they came to enjoy a standard of
living and an expectation of life heretofore unknown in the history of
the world. But none of this adds up to a decisive claim on the century.
The glory of a people does not lie in their economic indices, their
actuarial tables or even the fame of their designer jeans; it lies in
their idealism, in the use they make of their resources, in the kind of
people they become amid the temps of pride and greed.
In the 20th century, the essentially isolationist American people did
more than grow rich and expand their domestic freedoms, despite
McCarthyism and racism. They sustained Western civilisation by acts of
courage, generosity and vision unparalleled in the history of man.
One can argue endlessly about America's cultural and commercial
influence. Is the world a duller place because there are Macs in Moscow,
jeans in Jaipur, Coke in Chile? Have vacuous sitcoms and tyre-squealing
movies corrupted values and killed native talent?
Doesn't American education suck? Isn't American business ruthlessly
unfair? What the hell are they doing to the language? Yes, no, and
maybe, and yes and no again; mix according to taste. But there can be no
equivocation about America's defence of freedom. The second World War
would have been inevitably lost if America had stayed aloof. Traditional
isolationism would have bequeathed the planet to a genocidal
totalitarianism.
The Nazi extermination of six million Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and Poles,
and Japan's more or less systematic decimation of the Chinese, Filipino
and Korean peoples, and their live medical experiments on human beings,
were grim portents for the African, Arabic and Indian nations. Their
peoples were even more despised by the Axis's racial supremacists.
Sustained by slave labour and murder, by sophisticated modern weaponry,
by the technologies of surveillance, and possessed of the moral
sensibilities of a tapeworm, the New Order would have perpetuated a long
dark night of the soul.
One need only look at the rigid social systems, the inhuman scale of the
architecture, the bombastic ceremonies, the flaccid and constricted art
that the dictators so relentlessly promoted, to glimpse what would have
been built on the ashes of Western civilization.
As it was, the second World War was the overwhelming event of the
century, indeed the greatest single tragedy in the history of mankind.
More than 50 million people lost their lives, perhaps 20 million of them
civilians.
Whole populations were uprooted from their homes and countries, millions
of families ripped apart. It is true that the army which did more than
any other to defeat Hitler was the Red Army. The German Army and the SS
spent 7,146 divisional combat months on the eastern front, but only
1,121 in Africa, Italy and northwest. But if the Red Army did more than
any other single force to crush Hitler it was in the service of a
dictator every bit as murderous; and Stalin himself conceded that Russia
would have been vanquished if it had fought without American military
production: The Red Army marched in American boots.
But America did not simply lead the Allies to victory in the second
World War. That was only a prelude to even greater things. Good and bad
nations have won and lost wars for centuries. What was unique about
America was what it did after the last shot had been fired.
By 1950, America had committed itself to a global role unimaginable even
three years before, nothing less than the creation of a new liberal
world order based on freedom and respect. No design has been nobler in
conception or more brilliant in execution than the complex of
international organizations for economic welfare, education, collective
security and human rights that America nourished in the second half of
the century. No victorious power has treated its vanquished enemies as
America came to treat Germany and Japan, two nations that had cost the
lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen.
The fates of the peoples conquered by the Soviet Union and the Americans
and their allies could not have been more different. The 20 million
Germans in the Soviet Zone (later Eastern Germany) exchanged one yoke
for another. The 40 million in the west found restored in full measure
the freedom they had lost in 1933, and America gave to the Japanese a
freedom they had never known.
The Soviets seized factories and deported skilled workers. Their claims
for reparations (from all zones) were not unreasonable, considering the
damage they had suffered, but in both Germany and Japan the Americans
were net givers, not takers. The Germans lucky enough to be occupied by
the Allies got the billions of the Marshall Plan; with the impetus of
the Korean War (where America again made a sacrifice for freedom), the
Japanese got about as many dollars. American experts taught their
ex-enemies the techniques of mass production that had assisted their
defeat. The Soviets everywhere installed secret police.
In Japan, almost the first action of General Douglas MacArthur, the
Supreme Commander of The Allied Powers, was to dismantle the secret
police. The Soviets jailed opponents of Communism - and executed
non-cooperative Communist leaders. In Japan, the conservative MacArthur
freed Communists and socialists from prison. The Soviets rigged
elections and controlled the press and trade unions. In Germany, having
purged the Nazis, America swiftly restored democracy and free speech
from the ground up.
In Japan, the new constitution America introduced within a six-day span
gave the people a bill of rights, including freedom of the press and of
assembly, an independent judiciary and freedom to bargain collectively
for wages.
The constitution also guaranteed equal rights for women - a clause still
absent from the constitution of the United States itself. The critics,
left and right, have argued that all this in Europe and Asia was done
cynically to provide customers for America's market-hungry industries.
Of course, in pressing for free trade and restoring the world economy,
America was pursuing its enlightened self-interest. And why not?
But that is not all there was to America's new role. The insistence of
successive administrations on greater European cooperation was not to
America's obvious economic advantage, nor was the rebuilding of Japanese
steel, shipping and car industries.
The criticism altogether ignores the force of moral idealism in America.
It ran deep among the increasingly prosperous American taxpayers who
footed the bills. It still does.
The idealism offended some people in Europe when it took the form of a
crusade against Communism. Ideology supplanted pragmatism and many
errors were made. The red hand of the Kremlin was seen in every
nationalist movement, with fatal consequences. The political containment
of the Soviets, advocated by the State Department's guru, George Kennan,
was transformed into a costly military containment.
It diverted resources from world recovery, and the anti-Communist
hysteria fomented by a misreading of Kennan threatened civil liberties.
He assessed the consequences in an article in 1995: "We paid with 40
years of enormous and otherwise unnecessary military expenditures.
We paid through the cultivation of nuclear weaponry to the point where
the vast and useless nuclear arsenals had become (and remain today) a
danger to the very environment of the planet. And we paid with 40 years
of Communist control in Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. We
paid all this because we were too timid to negotiate."
Kennan's criticism merits respect. But America did not, in the end, pay
for the Cold War by sacrificing its values to its fears. It defended
them with its faith. It emerged from the tribulations of the 1950s a
stronger and freer society. And the fact remains that the triumph of
liberal democracy over the Communist totalitarianism was a pinnacle of
the American century.
It would be a conceit to claim the collapse of the Soviet Union as
wholly an American triumph. Many hands tore at the Berlin Wall,
including those of the European democrats, Pope John Paul II, the
dissidents, the American trade union movement, the last leader of the
Soviet Union, the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev - and, one might add, the
first leader, Lenin, who laid the foundations of a society that was
bound to collapse of its own deadweight.
No single brow will probably ever be able to claim the wreath of victory
over that dangerous and depressing totalitarianism. But there can surely
be no doubt that, in its spiritual as well as its material beneficence,
the American example was, in the long dark years, the torch of freedom
all the world could see.
We should pray that freedom flames as brightly in the unpredictable
gusts and gales that lie just around the corner in the new millennium.
Harold Evans is author of The American Century, which will be re-issued
in paperback in November by Pimlico (£25 in UK); vice-chairman and
editorial director of The Daily News, US News and World Report and
Atlantic Monthly and former editor of the Sunday Times (1967-1981).
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