Saturday, March 16, 2024

Irish Heritage

   

                                           


Practically everyone must know that the great migration of the Irish to America took place after the terrible potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century. However, even before that disaster the Irish had been the subject of persecution going back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century when King Henry VIII seized control of the English church. 

The Irish were longtime enemies of the English and when Henry, who considered himself King of Ireland as well as England, attacked their thousand-year-old faith the enmity only grew worse. Later, Henry’s daughter Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully to subdue the Irish Catholics throughout her reign. After the Puritan revolution in England in the mid-seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell brutally suppressed Irish resistance. By the end of the century William and Mary, after driving Mary’s Catholic father James from the English throne, delivered another devastating blow to the Irish at the battle of the Boyne.

The almost perpetual Irish resistance led the English and their Protestant friends in Ireland to pass penal laws that had the effect of depriving most Irish Catholics of all their rights including the right to their own confiscated properties. 

Many Irish left their homeland for good in the century before the great famine. They were sometimes called the “wild geese” and many of them made a name for themselves in Europe. In the nineteenth century the ruling family in Serbia was the Obrenovich family, heirs no doubt of some Irish O’Brien. Years ago, Ed Obradovich played linebacker for the Chicago Bears. His family must have come from central Europe but there must have been a Brady ancestor. I recall meeting a Polish American priest whose name, Okonski, must have derived from O’Conner. John Konecny, a long ago squash buddy, looked as Irish as Paddy's pig.

When the Irish came to America, they didn’t starve because of the availability of jobs and land. Nevertheless, despite separation of Church and State in America, the Irish were still objects of prejudice and discrimination primarily because of their Catholicism. I recall an American historian saying that the most long lasting and abiding prejudice in America was directed not against Jews or Blacks but against Catholics. That assertion may be disputed by some but the KKK was so called because its hatred was directed against Koons, Kikes, and Katholics.

Just because national or ethnic groups have been victimized by prejudice and discrimination does not mean that they themselves cannot practice such behavior when given the opportunity. Growing up in New York City in the 40s and 50s I vividly recall that only Irish need apply for membership in the City’s Transit Workers Union. I have never forgotten the resentment of my mother-in-law when her Italian parents were told by an Irish priest that they did not belong in predominately Irish St. John’s church and that they should attend the Italian church in town. 

Still, the success of the Irish in America means that we all are in their debt. I would just like to give a few personal examples. I was born and raised in the Woodside section of Queens, a neighborhood after WW2 made up largely of the descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants.  My best friend was my cousin Pete whose father’s ancestry was Irish and German. Pete’s father, my Uncle Pete, was a New York City policeman who always seemed all Irish to me, and so did my cousin even though his mother was Italian. My next best friend was Dermot (Dermie) Woods whose family was very Irish. Both of Dermie’s older brothers had served in the Navy during the war.

St. Mary Help of Christians, my parochial elementary school, matched the ethnic make up of Woodside. There were some Italian kids in my class, but the majority was Irish. I still remember Richie Moylan, John Regan, Tom Fay, Charley Dunphy, and top student Pat Ryan who would go on to become a Jesuit priest and get a doctorate from Harvard in Islamic studies. His father was a saloon keeper. 

Most of the nuns were of Irish ancestry. They were of the order of St. Dominic and their formidable black and white habits helped them keep almost perfect order in classes sometimes numbering over 50 students. Only years later did I come to find out that many of them were barely out of their teens and still attending college.

It seemed natural for me to follow cousin Pete to Power Memorial high school in Manhattan. Power was a Catholic school for boys run by the Irish Christian Brothers whose most famous graduate would be Lou Alcindor, who would later call himself Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I still remember some of the Irish brothers with great affection and respect. There was Brother Hehir, my first home room teacher, a saintly innocent old man who was the butt of innumerable pranks and jokes by us “dirty little stinkers.” No one fooled around with wise old Brother Gleason, however. He was the Latin teacher with a passionate love of ancient Rome. Only years later did I discover that it was the Irish who had saved Western Civilization during the Dark Ages when monks in the mold of Brother Gleason preserved and later revived the lore and wisdom of antiquity. Finally, I remember Brother Conefrey who ran our honors class and exposed us modern barbarians to the wonders of English literature. 

Monastery Iona*

For some reason that still remains unclear to me I went to college at Fordham University, a famed Jesuit school in the Bronx. The Jesuits had been founded in the sixteenth century by Ignatius of Loyola, a young soldier from the Basque country in what is now northwestern Spain, but the Jesuit fathers at Fordham seemed to be largely of Irish ancestry. Nevertheless, in 1957 they taught and revered an old curriculum based on a model devised during the Renaissance. We studied Western philosophy, theology, history (eight credits in medieval history were required), rhetoric, literature, and language under scholars named O’ Sullivan, O’Callaghan, Mc Nally, Walsh and Clark. 

Three cheers for the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. 

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* Iona photo courtesy of David Orme.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Trump Enthusiasm

 

A recent poll indicated that 97% of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 would again vote for him in 2024. If the poll is correct, of the over 74 million who voted for him four years ago, about 72 million would vote for him again. Despite the repeated claims of his political opponents whose opposition borders on hatred, Trump does not represent a tiny, fringe group of MAGA hat wearing, flag waving supporters.

Super Tuesday has come and gone, and Trump practically swept all the Republican primaries by overwhelming margins, after earlier record-breaking victories in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Michigan.  Nikki Haley, Trump’s last remaining Republican opponent, has now dropped out of the race. She was the last hope of the anti-Trumpers, and commentators still claim that Trump cannot win without Haley voters. In reality, a large percentage of Haley votes came from Democratic Trump haters who would never have voted for her in November.

Interestingly, these same commentators never bother to wonder how Haley or any of the other Republican contenders could have won without the votes of Trump enthusiasts. Did Haley or Chris Christie actually think that over 70 million Trump supporters would vote for them after their repeated Trump criticisms? Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was smart enough not to openly criticize Trump or his supporters during his short-lived campaign, and quickly endorsed Trump after he withdrew from the race.

What explains Trump’s popularity?  During his successful campaign in 2016, I never in all my life saw such enthusiasm for a candidate. Now, eight years later, his popularity remains intact.  Two impeachments did not hurt him, and the recent multiple indictments have, according to a chart in this week’s Wall Street Journal, only increased his popularity. Is it just poor education or irrationality on the part of his supporters, or is there something else? Here are some reasons for the enthusiasm.

In the first place, he already has experience as President. This is very important. I remember that back in 2016 many commentators believed that Trump could not last a month as President. They felt it would be almost impossible for him to even form an administration and govern. Nevertheless, whether you like him or not, you would have to agree that he was up to the job. I will not list the many accomplishments of his term since he continually refers to them in his speeches. But more than anything else, he was always up front, a true leader in both foreign and domestic affairs. Even during the Covid crisis, he was on stage practically every day during this national emergency. Whatever you think of vaccines, there is no doubt that he acted with firmness and alacrity in their development.

Secondly, there are his words, his manner, and behavior. Detractors, who will never vote for him anyway, want him to tone it down. But his supporters want him to do just the opposite. So what if he fooled around with women in the past, not one of his many critics ever accused him of sexual misbehavior while in office. He certainly never had sex with a young intern in the White House. 

So what if he ridicules his opponents. His supporters love when he pricks the balloons of the high and mighty. Think about it and compare his jibes to those insults hurled at him by his haters. Did he ever call anyone a mother f----er? Don’t his critics have a sense of humor? His supporters, after being ridiculed and derided as deplorables, love his combative personality. Did nice words ever prevent Mitch Romney from being derided as a heartless nabob who wanted to deprive grandma of benefits?

Trump detractors never mention his actual performance as President. They just don’t like him, period. Basically, they dislike the fact that he is a white businessman who is not only wealthy but who also flaunts his wealth. But his supporters love the fact that he made his money in the private sector battling in the shark tank that is New York City real estate. They want a shark in the White House and not a feeble old man like his successor who somehow made millions for himself and his family as a career public servant.  

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Thursday, February 29, 2024

Review: The Spanish Inquisition

 

      

The Spanish Inquisition has become a code word for human cruelty and injustice.  Who will ever forget the three red-robed cardinals in a Monty Python skit breaking into someone’s living room shouting, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” During his term even President Obama equated the Inquisition with the atrocities perpetrated by ISIS Moslem fanatics in devastated Iraq.

 

Some years ago I pored through Benzion Netanyahu’s massive study of the Spanish Inquisition. If the name sounds familiar, it is because the author was the father of Bibi Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister of Israel. Although Benzion Netanyahu took a leading role in the founding of the State of Israel, he will perhaps be best remembered as a great scholar. His field of study was the Spanish Inquisition and his masterpiece, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, revolutionized the study of the subject. 

 

Few people understand that the Inquisition in Spain was not directed against Jews in Spain but against Christians. The Inquisition had no authority to persecute or even investigate the Jewish population. It was specifically chartered to deal with popular charges leveled against Christians of Jewish ancestry and their families who had converted to Christianity. These converts were known as “conversos,” and there were elements in all levels of Spanish society who suspected that the conversos were not sincere Christians, even if their families had converted more than a century before.

 

Periodically charges were made that the conversos had only converted to gain political or financial advantage. Indeed, they were often suspected of adhering to their Jewish beliefs and practices in secret, and even working to undermine Christian society. Some regarded them as a kind of “fifth” column in the struggle against the Moslem Kingdom of Granada.

 

It is true that many of the conversos had prospered during the century before the creation of the Spanish Inquisition. Some had risen to high places in the administrations of the various Kings of Castile. Aristocratic grandees who regarded themselves as pure-blooded Christians without any trace of Judaism in their veins were often jealous and contemptuous of these conversos in high places. Among the lower classes it didn’t help the reputation of the conversos that some of them had become tax collectors for the Royal government.

 

Netanyahu’s 1000 plus pages demonstrated that the charges leveled against the conversos were false. He marshaled an enormous amount of evidence to show that the conversos were almost always sincere, even dedicated converts to Christianity. Like many converts, before and after, these converts from Judaism to Christianity in medieval Spain could even be more zealous or committed than the cradle Catholics of the time. 

 

Descendants of conversos often became theologians and clergymen. Some bishops and abbots of famed monasteries could trace their origins to converso forebears. Even Torquemada, the first head of the Inquisition in Castile and a favorite of Queen Isabella, had converso roots.

 

Nevertheless, in times of political turmoil, military defeat, or economic hardship the conversos were often blamed. Sometimes the charges erupted into mob violence and riots. It was to deal with these charges and riots in very difficult times, that Ferdinand and Isabella sought permission from the Pope to set up an Inquisition in Isabella’s Kingdom of Castile.

 

The young Isabella had inherited the throne under the most dangerous of circumstances. Castilian grandees or warlords disputed her right and authority. The King of Portugal put up a rival claimant to the throne and launched an invasion of Castile. Once these threats were somewhat subdued, the young Queen had to turn her attention to the constant border menace of the Moslem Kingdom of Granada in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula.

 

Islam was a real threat. In 1480 an Islamic naval expedition had landed on the Adriatic coast of Italy and destroyed the city of Otranto. The invaders tortured and killed 12000 of the 22000 inhabitants of the city. Every priest was murdered and the Archbishop of Otranto was sawed in two. Those who were not killed were forced to convert or taken into slavery. In Spain there was constant border fighting and raids with Moslem Granada.

 

It was a time of great peril from both within and without and fear led to the inevitable outcry of charges against the conversos. Isabella established an Inquisition in Spain to deal with the charges directed against the conversos and unite her country in the war effort. One modern historian has called the Spanish Inquisition “a disciplinary body called into existence to meet a national emergency.”

 

The word “inquisition” has the same root as the word “inquiry.” The inquisitors were to look into the charges, call witnesses, and take testimony. The fact that the great, great majority of the conversos accused before the tribunal of the Inquisition were released is a testimony to Netanyahu’s thesis that they were innocent, sincere Christians, and that the charges leveled against them were baseless. Since the publication of Netanyahu’s book, historians have had to alter their perspective on the Inquisition, its methods and its results.

 

In many ways the Inquisition represented an enormous improvement in methods of justice prevailing throughout the European and Moslem worlds at the time. The proceedings of the Inquisition were carried out in public and not in secrecy. Its prisons were only temporary detention centers with conditions much better than in local jails. There were no pits with giant swinging razor sharp pendulums. Torture was rarely used in contrast to the methods almost universally used in other European and Moslem countries. Even when torture was applied, there was little danger to life and limb.

 

Studies of the Spanish Inquisition that followed upon the publication of Netanyahu’s masterpiece have shown that the “scenes of sadism conjured up by popular writers…have little basis in reality,” and that the inquisitors “had little interest in cruelty and often attempted to temper justice with mercy.” Indeed, as one historian noted: “The proportionally small number of executions is an effective argument against the legend of a blood thirsty tribunal.”

 

Nevertheless, the Spanish Inquisition has become synonymous with barbaric cruelty and injustice. In the wars of religion that followed upon the Protestant Reformation, a “Black Legend” arose primarily in Protestant England, which found itself involved in a life and death struggle with Catholic Spain. The Black Legend has gained mythical status and is still used as a weapon to batter Spain and the Catholic Church. It was one of the factors behind the hatred engendered in modern history by the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

 

In one of history’s interesting footnotes, the bitterness and hatred engendered by the Spanish Civil War did not prevent Spain under Generalissimo Franco from standing almost alone in offering sanctuary to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. The Franco government maintained neutrality throughout the war, and insisted that all Jews who could claim Spanish citizenship be given safe conduct back to Spain from Nazi occupied countries. The Franco government even went so far as to offer Spanish citizenship and sanctuary to all Jews who could trace their ancestry back to the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

 

Benzion Netanyahu’s masterpiece is now recognized by scholars like Joseph Perez and Henry Kamen who have followed his lead. Nevertheless, their findings will probably never eradicate the myths still propagated today. Politicians and ideologues will still continue to grind their axes, as will popular TV shows like Monty Python. 

 

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Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Tucker Carlsen Interviews Vladimir Putin

Last week my wife and I watched Tucker Carlsen’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The interview lasted a little over two hours, and it took us two nights to get through it, but it was well worth the effort. So far, the interview has received over 18 million hits on YouTube although the American media seems reluctant to mention it.

Credit must go to Tucker Carlsen not only for scooping the rest of the journalistic world, but also for allowing us to see Putin unfiltered by media bias. Carlsen limited himself to a few questions and then just let Putin respond with hardly any interruption. It was a breath of fresh air. In the beginning Putin asked if it was going to be an interview or a talk show, and for the most part Carlsen was content to hear him out, and not engage in incessant back and forth.

I did not take notes but here is my recollection of some of the insights provided by the Russian leader. Putin came across as extremely articulate, experienced, and levelheaded with a deep grounding in Russian history, as well as in current world affairs. Indeed, he prefaced his response to Carlsen’s first question on the Ukraine war with an almost 30-minute disquisition on the history of Russia in which he went all the way back to its ninth century origins. In that discussion he included an historical analysis of the origins of what is now known as Ukraine, a word that means fringes or borderlands in Russian. Indeed, he believes that Ukraine has always been a part of Russia, and that the Ukrainians are Russian, and not a separate ethnic group. 

To Putin the war in Ukraine is a Civil War and not an invasion of a foreign country. He traced the current conflict in Ukraine back to 1991 with the demise of the Soviet Union. In the West, we call it the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he regards it as an attempt by the then Soviet leaders to normalize relations with the West and usher in an era of mutual security and prosperity. He even stated that he had asked President Clinton if Russia could join NATO. Initially, Clinton seemed agreeable but after consulting with his security advisors, the offer was rejected. Instead of a partner, the US would continue to regard Russia as an adversary.

Moreover, he claims that after 1991 Russia received assurances that the NATO alliance would not extend any further east, but that the promise was subsequently broken, especially during the Obama administration when the door seemed to be opened to Ukrainian membership in NATO.  Putin traced the start of the war in Ukraine to 2014 when a coup in Kiev overthrew the then pro-Russian government. He believes that the coup was engineered by Western security services, and that the new government in Ukraine then began to seek close ties with NATO. He also believes that the new Ukrainian leadership contains many who had fought with the Nazis against Russia during WWII.

Nevertheless, he insisted that he is open to a negotiated settlement of the war and argued that he had agreed to one only months after the fighting started. At a meeting in Istanbul both sides had agreed to a settlement but at the last minute, Boris Johnson, the then British Prime Minister, had stepped in to quash the deal, obviously with the backing of his NATO and US allies. 

Johnson has retired but the war goes on. Putin claims to be still open to a negotiated settlement. He also believes that the war is hurting the West more than Russia. Western sanctions have not hurt Russia whose economy is now the largest in Europe, but they have forced Europe to pay exorbitant prices for imports of liquified natural gas. Speaking of that, Putin did not claim to know who blew up the Nordstream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, but pointed out that the culprit would have to have had both a motive and the capability to pull it off.

These are just a couple of the issues that Putin discussed with ease and calmness, but I would like to end with Carlsen’s last question concerning a reporter from the Wall Street Journal who has been imprisoned by the Russians for espionage. Actually, Carlsen asked if Putin, as a goodwill gesture, would release the jailed reporter to him for return to the USA claiming that everyone knew that the reporter was not a spy. Putin responded that the man had been caught red-handed with classified documents but that he would prefer to leave his fate to the negotiations currently going on between the security agencies of both countries. 

In this interview Putin did not appear as a madman or a Hitler out to dominate the world. As mentioned above, he spoke with calm, self-assurance. He knows his geo-politics. He is aware that China has overtaken the US economy, and that India is in third place. It is a new world, and the West must learn to live with it. Tucker Carlsen has been criticized for even conducting this interview. Some have even called him a traitor, but we are not at war with Russia, and Carlsen deserves great credit for letting us see the Russian leader with our own two eyes.

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Note: By now it is difficult to find the whole interview on YouTube but it is well worth viewing in its entirety. Here is a link.