What Has Britain Ever Done For Us?

There is a moment in everybody's life, I think, when... Oh, God. They ask themselves, you know, how would I respond in the bleakest of situations, the darkest of circumstances? What would I be like on a battlefield or in a war?

On Monday night, Joe, that moment came from me. We finished recording the podcast. I had to drive across Dublin. I had to go into the M50. And as I was driving up onto the M50, you might remember Monday night in Dublin, there was torrential rain. It was pouring down. Rain wasn't going to stop.

And just as I was getting up to the M50, my windscreen wipers started slowing down. But being a positive, slightly stupid human being, I decided I keep going. I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have to say, I have

I went on to the motorway, and my windscreen wipers stopped completely. So there I was on the motorway alone in the dark, unable to see anything driving in rush air traffic, but cars flying by me at 120.

Kilometers an hour. I didn't know what to do. I said, this is it. This is the moment. This is when you need to grace under pressure. This is what guts is all about. But at the same time, Joe, you know what kept coming into my head?

And this speaks to, you know, how you've become an earworm in my life. I said, you know, here the windscreen wipers frozen on my car, my old car. And I thought, I bet Mickey Hart doesn't have this problem. I bet Mickey Hart. You know, whenever you're watching, if you ever watch ITV3, during the day,

They always have these appeals, you know, for elderly people. And, you know, for, for, you know, sort of worn tour in early as of the world, you know. And now a Christmas appeal on behalf of the unfunny. Well, I was looking to get out of there alive. I was looking to get off the unfunny. That's worse than the story about you cutting your hand.

If anyone out there, if anyone out there, let's say, I mean, look, Mickey Hart's last rental from Derry must have very low mails on it. If the garage has that, the owner, I've seen this car. It's a model that I couldn't describe. But let's not describe it. I've seen the last time I saw it. It was at the back of a lorry. We had carted through central Dublin.

But if there must be a rental dealership out there that have been given cars to Mickey Hart and Marty Morrissey and Mickey Graham, although they took his back from Leidrum, I think he only had it for 48 hours. But there must be someone out there who could give a used rental car to Dion.

Or although it does love the Kippra electric car. So if there's any Kippra dealers out there, no pressure. We'll put the free state. Well, please not logo on the side of it. Who would?

We put a little, little, little sticker, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't laser that. Well, it was a Christmas, Christmas appeal for the Christmas deal. I was just talking about the moment of, you know, the moment of truth there, where you thought this is it. Do you know if you want to come to the end, or cars are coming at me from all angles. I couldn't see a thing. I was trying to get off the motorway and I had to keep going for, for what seemed like miles and miles. It was, uh,

And if anyone came across me, I was trying to dry. I'm doing, you know, a few of the things I have to say, the grace under pressure didn't always stand. I wasn't quite sure what to do. I just kept one of those dermal and D.F. stories in the morning. Hi, hi. What did you have for breakfast this morning? Guru, call us. Did you have way to fix off? You should take the train more often. I couldn't. Yeah, I couldn't. No, I'm taking the train. We've had.

trouble up north again with them. I like it in the train to Belfast. We've had trouble up north again with the concerned Protestants. The concerned Protestants are now campaigning, the ones who live in central Belfast, they're campaigning to brace yourself for this one against the extra train journeys that have been announced.

from Belfast to Dublin returned. Right. And their spokesperson told the newsletter this week that there were already far too many. There were already far too many train journeys to the perfidious free state.

I mean, if I was speaking to them, I would explain to them that, in fact, they have far more friends in the Free State than the Northern National Institute. Talking to one year, somebody said on Twitter the other week, Dion is my favorite unionist, they said. Yeah, I mean, I know that

Fenton O'Toole, just a few weeks ago, was given a talk out in America, our favourite Dublin Unionist. He said that there was no alternative but to partition the north because that would have been very unfair not to partition it because the unionist population of the north were terribly progressive and plural.

and wouldn't have understood the superstitions of the Catholic Church or the sort of hatreds that is bread, that is breaded the Catholic mentality. I'm very Cromwellian of him, but I mean, I mean, I would have, I might have pointed out to him, I might have, but of course I wouldn't, I might have pointed out to him that that immediately the partition was announced. The there were extensive

pogroms against Roman Catholics in the north, including the driving of the small Catholic workforce of the shipyard into Belfast Loch. And Catholic homes were burned out for a period of two weeks of joyous celebration. I mean, no one knows how to let fire like the Idulists. And this sort of

You know, I suppose it's a bit like Stockholm syndrome. This idea that the British were a very benign.

a very benign influence on Ireland and that in fact, as Burghum said yesterday morning, I think it was this morning actually on the radio, on news talk that, you know, people should stop booing the British and in fact start thanking them for everything they've done for us. And I took a look at this, I had actually had a couple of very interesting cases over the last sort of 30 years, may ramble through the courts. And there are four stages

of progression to full blown Stockholm syndrome, okay? And you'll obviously, as a sufferer, Dion, you will readily appreciate the four stages. I'm waiting to come in here. But at least you've had the courage to talk about your Stockholm syndrome. So the first thing you do is, all I could think about was the free state established, minimizing the abuse. It wasn't really that bad.

um, suppression of your own anger at your oppressor. Dependent behavior on the abuser. And then I thought of, you know, John Britain, God rest in saying to his majesty, King Charles, as he then was Prince Charles when he visited Ireland saying to him, our, our dearest ambition is to be more like you.

and then rage and fear when separated from the abuser. So, of course, after partition, whenever you were separated from the British, separated from your abuser, of course, you had rage and fear against anyone who criticized them. So, you know, the Irish times went and, you know, the mainstream media and the RTE, for example, you know, which is a

I mean, the difference between RT and the loyalist newsletter is minimal. Genuinely, I mean, the people in the North, when we talk about RT, people just laugh and say, honestly, can you believe it? I mean, can you actually believe the output? What are you talking about there? Give me an example there of how RT mimics the newsletter.

Well, I mean, we've discussed how through the troubles, for example, Ian Paisley was lauded as a hero. When you're talking, you're going back, you're not talking about today. No, no, I'm talking about the troubles. And then now the revisionism that we see, which I think in fairness, people are starting to look with a colder eye on this. And I was very struck by Moore Holmes's contribution on news talk.

Mer as you know, is a spokesperson for loyalism and closely linked to the LCC, which is the sort of umbrella group that represents the

criminal loyalist gangs, you know, the three loyalist paramilitary organizations, which are still active in the north, more or less exclusively in drug deal and no sort of punishment, beatings, et cetera, et cetera. But he said that

He couldn't believe that people in Ireland were thankful for what the British had done, and they really ought to reflect. My answer to that was, well, whereas in the North, we wouldn't be thankful, generally speaking in the South.

You know, they have a reverential attitude to the British, you mean, whenever the royal wedding occurred, it had the largest viewing, or the royal funeral, it had one of the largest viewing figures for the years. Go with the figures in the north. I wonder, because, you know, I think that's great. Wouldn't be great. It's too close to us.

But, I mean, let's look a wee bit at, I mean, the loyalists in central Belfast, for example, who are campaigning against the extra train journeys to Belfast, you know, they are quite serious about that, you know, that there are too many train journeys to Dublin. And that would be, you know, one of my own homes is he would be supporting that, you know, because obviously Dublin is

in their minds is sort of a mythical place of Roman Catholics and religious repression and things like that. Even though these people are represented by parties who are grossly homophobic, poke fun, transgender, transgender friends and neighbors,

I mean, I don't use the word conservative because I don't think there's anything conservative about the denial of basic human rights to women, you know, who are largely racist, you know, and yet they say, well, look, you know, this sort of repressive, free state, but that's

Let's look a bit at... Well, Joe, can I just before we look at what it is? Britain's great contribution to us. I mean, the British government, the British Empire was responsible for at least 20 times the slaughter of Nazi Germany. Now, of course, it spanned a much longer period. But I'm sure that 100 million people who died in India

as a result of the ravages of the British Empire. So articulately set out in various books now that have emerged over the last five to ten years from Caroline Elkins to some of the books that we have discussed on the podcast written by Indian academics who got hold of a huge cache of material that had not been burned and that was located.

in London in the last sort of 15 years, but 100 million people in India, including the sort of depredations that are horrifying even now in light of some of the things that we've seen in this century, you know, cutting off the thumbs of Indian weavers to destroy the flourishing Indian weaving trade, you know.

cutting off the hands of workers, you know, walking around with we borrows full of hands, getting photographs with them. You know, and Ireland, which was the, we were the laboratory for genocide. That's how Caroline Elkins, the famous Harvard historian who's won two Pulitzer Prizes now for her two works on the British Empire. You know, first person to really do a proper academic statistical job and we were the laboratory for genocide.

I mean, when Cromwell came here, 618,000 Irish people were either massacred or died as a result of the outworkings of the massacres. Do you know what percentage of the Irish population that was at the time? Tell me. 41% of the entire population. There has never been a genocide like it in history. And we're to be thankful for that.

I mean, and that doesn't include the tens of thousands of men, women, and children who were exported to Barbados to be used as slaves there in the empire project in the Caribbean. And I mean, if anyone is interested in checking those figures, you can find them in the Civil War, 1642 to 1651 by Michelson John Parker.

or at the English Civil War, Peppers in War of Castle in England.

So that's like that six hundred and eighty thousand deaths through fighting, disease, everything that came, came, everything that came with the massacre, you know, I mean, and then obviously beheading the beheadings, you know, the ethnic cleansing, the massacre of civilians and draw her on Wexford, the forced removal of the conic, the hell or conic, you know, and don't forget the chrome mills campaign and it was very short.

It really, you know, it, it, it, it, it, it, this all happened in lightning quick time, you know, and an interesting comparator I thought of was to look at. So that's 41% of the population of Ireland. And, you know, we're very thankful for what Cromwell did to us, you know, I mean, I for one, I for one I'm extremely thankful, you know, and, and very, very grateful.

Funny it doesn't make me angry, you know, I think maybe that's because of personal experience of, you know, how wonderfully we were treated by the British in the north. I mean, very thankful for that. We'll come to that. But a good comparator of 41% of the population was I thought to look at

the terrible loss, and I don't say this sarcastically. I mean, it's sincerely the terrible loss of the British people during World War II, from the actions of the enemy, and war-related deaths, the bombing of London, the bombing of the various cities, Birmingham, et cetera, et cetera. But the entire death toll

of Great Britain during the Second World War was 0.6% of the population, 0.6%. And so you put that in the context of what happened in Ireland. Cromwell alone, let's forget about the famine, a million people dead, a million people displaced. Cromwell and his supporters

And Cromwell wrote this at the time. They are a little better than savages, but Barry and in their lifestyle and habits, they are subhuman and dangerous. Doesn't it have uncanny echoes of the Israeli propaganda about the Palestinian people and are to be treated accordingly? So this was the elimination of a population based on racial and religious hatred. No, it was a genocide.

and fueled by a contempt for human life here. But one of the most interesting things about Cromwell's campaign was that many aspects of that came to be used by the British Empire as they moved outwards through the world. Ireland was the laboratory, as I'm saying, and particularly the way they presented themselves.

as morally superior, as educating these savage people. You know, the penal laws destroyed our education system, but we learned in the hedge schools, you know, and it gave birth to people like Sheamus Haney and Brian Free. But, you know, savages are people are savages, you know. And at the height of the British Empire, right,

During the war of independence, this is one of the sort of fascinating details that emerges from Elkhon's second master world.

Among the sort of the key guy, Churchill's key guy in Ireland was a Devonshire-born director, son called Henry Hugh Tudor. Okay. And apparently it was great fun, Hugh, as he was known to Winston and their other chums. He was Churchill's garrison mate in Bangalore in 1885.

A time of a time of as Churchill recorded himself messes as in, you know, the fancy dinners for the officers mess a time of messes and barbarism You know, it's hard to beat a bit of barbarism

Dion. Yeah, it is. It is. There's nothing as much fun as butcher and innocent men, women and children. But I mean, and the future Prime Minister wrote that in a note to his mom saying the only thing to do here is barbarism and masses. Feel sorry for them. They're bored, bored, I'm really. So. Huey, then.

Because he was such good fun, you know, when the old dinners and that and he was just wonderful fun, you know, he'd been to eat and, of course, and all that type of thing. But anyway, he then was appointed as the commander of the Jean d'Armarie. They were nicknamed Tudor's Tufts. And you know where they turned up next? Tell me. In Dublin. Okay. And in 1920,

on a day that has become infamous. Huey led his chaps, no doubt, after a wonderful lunch in the barracks, into Crow Park, where they murdered and maimed countless innocent spectators. And I have to say, I don't know about you, Dion.

But I am grateful for that massacre. I mean, I think that we should be thankful for that. When people... Are you not grateful, Dion? Be honest. For a bloody Sunday, I'm not massively...

for any of the other reasons, you know, Cromwell, all that stuff. You know, I'm trying to... I'm trying to stress the positives. But, you know, when you frame it like that. But at the same time, like Cromwell, let's take this positive. Cromwell was 400 years ago. I think we can move on from Cromwell.

We're just talking about how grateful we should be to the British, which is where we kick off here. And this is still a very strong, you know, infinite gale, for example, it's still a very, very strong pillar of their thinking. Well, I don't think that we see a hold on a second. Should we, should hold on a second, Joe? Should we be, forget about being grateful. I think we can be

There we can be friendly and we can actually have you know the reality that's a different reality you know i know this is this and reality today of so many people's lives that are intertwined gone to Britain.

made very happy lives in Britain, British people who live here and have very happy, fulfilling lives here. And I think that's the thing that we look at in a way that we look at. A lot of Irish people went there, Dion, and had the signs in the windows, no blacks, no dogs, no Irish were treated with horrific risks. No, I understand that, Joe. I know that. Some BBC programs.

I mean, I understand that, but that doesn't mean that other people who had a different experience, that their experience isn't valid too. And I live there for a long time, and I know lots of Irish people who live there and who would just consider a place where they've

They were able to get on and live a life that they mightn't have had in Ireland, and one of the things that one of the things that it did allow is for people getting away from, and I know you're being flippant a little bit, but one finner or two says about partition. I understand there is an element of what he's saying about how Ireland was at the time under the cut.

What you're talking about and pogroms in the north is absolutely true. And this again is a classic consequence of empire. We've talked about this. As you said, we talked about, you know, what happened. What happened in India to apologize for it.

what happened in India, around partition, and how that led to the most horrific massacres between Hindus and Muslims. What happened in the south, you talk about Pogman in the north, there were, look at what happened in the south to Protestants at the same time. This partition, and I know what,

squaring the circle of partition and figuring out what you deal with, how you deal with the million Protestants on the island. Then you've made this point. I'm making a different point. I'm talking about the legacy of Britain and whether or not we should be grateful in Ireland for their contribution to Ireland. Yeah. But I'm saying that we don't. British Prime Minister Lloyd George, David Lloyd George, was so delighted with Huey and his gang.

that he spoke about how in all he was, of how nonchalantly they can kill, tallying them up, he said, as though they're runs in a cricket match. And do you know what he described them as? Those scallywags. And Churchill, of course, who was the secretary of state for the colonies, was Hughie's most sort of fervent supporter. And do you know where Hughie went next?

And why he went. This will be good. Oh, Jesus, this is good. You see, Michael Collins and the boys started to think about taking out the most lethal of the British killers in Ireland. Hmm.

And intelligence came to dear old Huey. He was drinking sherry in the mess at the time. It was wonderfully changed his clothes after a massacre that morning. You know, I mean, honestly, they had such fun in Ireland. And news came to him that Collins and his men were training their guns on him, that they were going to go for him and get him regardless. And do you know where he went then?

guess where you went then, go off a guess. You went to, where could you go? Where would I, where would I, you know, where did Churchill, where did Churchill send him then? Where did he go? You can go to India. Do you go back to India? They sent him to Palestine. You know that place that never existed. They sent him Churchill, Churchill sent him to Palestine in 1922. Two, two, and I quote,

to get a handle on these disorderly natives in our Palestine Mandit. And so they sent him there, Churchill made him the chief of the colonial police. And I want to just read, if I may, a letter that good old Huey sent to Churchill while he was in Palestine, up to his knees in Palestinian blood.

I led a battalion to slaughter those troublesome Edwin Bedouins who had been marching on a mound to protest high taxes levied on them. This is my favorite bit. This tribe was invariably friendly to Great Britain, but as you know, politics are not my affair.

human beings who were marching peacefully against the back-breaking taxes that were being imposed by the British on them. He wrote another nice letter to Churchill about Palestine, a place that never existed according to the Israelis. Not only could Palestine be a wonderful tourist country, but we have discovered vast sums worth of natural resources.

Should Britain appropriate these resources and increase my policing budget, our difficulties in the region will smooth out? I am certain that the Palestinians will be easier to pacify than the Irish. They are much different people, much gentler people, and it's unlikely that the Arab, if handled firmly, will ever do much more than agitate on top. Yeah.

And I suppose, you know, the interesting thing when you read the very scholarly books that have been written in the last decade about the British Empire is that when I was a wee bit of heart, I mean, I would have hearted them ahead growing up. And this is how effective propaganda is. And my head growing up down in our house, right, in spite of all the stuff that was going on.

I mean, we've been carted off to a Putin style. We would say, you know, in future, I want to say a British style concentration camp, because that's exactly what it was. A detention camp where there was no charge.

There was no trial, 2000 Catholic men taken there, right? Didn't see him for four years. But in spite of that, you always grew up thinking that the British were actually benign, you know, that they were educating the savages of Africa and the savages of India and Pakistan. And then once they had divided and conquered, and then once they were sort of

keeping control of all the vast resources of their empire. We're the people who are trying to bring peace to these savages. They had ostensibly a system, of course, but the big thing that they had was an unrivaled propaganda machine that cast them as bringing the rule of law.

bringing enlightened principles, bringing social progress to these pitiful sort of savages who we are fortunate to be able to turn their lives around and set them in the right direction.

We see I think I think what they also had is you propaganda might be one part of it. They also had what we call today soft power in that like they had and a bit like America. They had a great cultural influence, you know, so whatever it was, it wasn't just like alongside.

everything you've detailed, there was the soft power of Britain, the cultural impact, it's games, it's writers, it's everything like that. All those things added to the sense of

are probably clouded people from seeing those elements of the underbelly of the empire, and seeing the other elements of British life and of the cultural life. That suggests.

that the Indian civilization, which was one of the great civilizations of Earth, as you would expect from a country, sort of at that stage, almost 400 million people.

that they were somehow savages, which is how they were cast. No, but they were most civilized people, a poetic, an artistic and extremely musical people. After the 1857 uprising of the local people in India, the British decided to make an example of those who survived.

by loading them into their cannons and blowing them across the various communities that they came from.

imagine that putting a human being into a canon, imagine this family, knowing that that was going to help children. And it didn't matter whether it was women, men, children, you know, these sort of people who we should be grateful to, or the slaughter of the MoMo in Kenya. I mean, and this was in the late 50s, don't forget in the late 1950s, because as Caroline Elkins said, you know,

that how they, what they did in Ireland and India, you know, the use of their concentration camps and the war wars of which some photographs still exist, absolutely horrifying. Everybody's horrifying is what the Nazis did to their sort of prisoners, to the Jewish people and the Poles and the Russians, et cetera, during World War II. The massacre at Amritsar, you know, the terrible depredations in Ireland.

As she put it, all this state-inflicted savagery was just the British Empire warming up. Half a million, half a million, momo. You know, the most gentle people. They were raped, they were treated as slaves, it was mass pillaging. I mean, the thoughts struck me. The thoughts struck me when I look at all these depredations. Why on earth would care stammer not stand with Israel?

I mean, they learned it all, they learned it all from the British. And I'm going to come to that as we move through the podcast, because the links are absolutely unmistakable, you know? And I think there's a very strong argument to be made that the British Empire, given the enormous skill of the damage it inflicted over generations and over, over almost half the world,

is a more malevolent influence on the world than even the Nazis.

No, that's, you know, I don't think you can say that. How can that not why? Why do you have the fact? Joe, why would you recoil from that? Because I think you can, you can lay out, you know, why you have to kind of actually try and make it kind of lead table out of it. I don't know. But I make the point that that, but I make the point that this is right. If you want to pick out a villain, we all do this. We all say at all, Fiddler, please, you're fuck.

You can't even use the name Adolf. I think it's actually banned on the statute books in Germany. I'm quite rightly, I'm quite rightly. But if we say Winston Churchill, we see all the propagandistic movies about what a wonderful chap he was. This guy who graciously killed half a million people in Dresden when the war was over into the days to go.

And he instructed bomber Harris to go in and raise it to the ground. And I've seen Dresden since and how they rebuilt that brick by brick. And nobody says, nobody says, fucking.

bloodthirsty, disgusting, inhuman, warmonger. Look at what he did in Ireland, in Africa. Look at what he did. How many people died during the war? How many people died during the Great Leap Forward in China over about four or five years? Like people still, people go around, like Chairman Mao, who's a restaurant named after, restaurant chain named after Chairman Mao, and about 65 million people died in China in about four years.

You know what I mean? Like, what do you tell me? You're the one who two minutes ago told me that it wasn't the league table. No, but I'm just saying. But no, you don't want to bring up, you don't want to talk about that one. We're talking about that. We're talking about the influence. We're just saying whether or not Ireland should be grateful for what the British have done for us. You know, I mean,

The point I want to make is this, when Elkin's book won the Pulitzer Prize for no infection, there was a ferocious backlash in Britain. But her research six years after her first book was published in her first book was...

Imperial reckoning. Yeah, six years later London barristers who represented the Kenya human rights commission on receiving damages for the elderly Kenyan survivors of British torture You know the ones who were lucky enough to survive Elkins was an expert witness and along with the British historian David Anderson and Hugh Bennett they presented compelling statistical evidence documentary evidence to the court you know and

The British government's position was that all of this was untrue, until it emerged, that they had hidden the files in a high security storage facility in Hanslope Park outside London. And once those documents came to earth, all of this was shown to be true. There were 5,200 Kenyans still alive who had been tortured and brutalised.

And each of them were awarded. It was a Paul chain of sum, but it was two thousand and eleven, thirty eight. Sorry. Yeah. Thirty eight thousand pounds. And the government publicly acknowledged using torture and controlling its empire. No. And yet. Here we are. We should be thankful to them. Palestine. I mean, what they did in Palestine.

is directly linked to what's happening there today. I mean, from Ireland, this is what they used here. From Ireland, they used the paramilitary techniques in their armored cars, expertise in aerial bombing from Mesopotamia, from South Africa, the use of dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects. From India, the interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement. My father, amongst others, found out all about that.

You know, the white noise, the fingertip torture, you know, the deprivation of food and sleep, white light, noise, all those things, you know. And from the rages northwest frontier in India, do you know what technique the British pioneered unveiled to the world for the first time ever in India? Go on, the use of human shields.

One British soldier in the documentation that was revealed recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners. If there were any landmail mines, it was the Arabs that hit them. We sent them out first. It was rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it. Lovely.

Suppose the Palestinians should be grateful to the British as well. Other practices which were native to the British and Palestine were stuffing sand stuck with oil down the throats of the Palestinian natives, mass demolition of houses, open air cages for holding villagers.

Whenever Israel was essentially handed over in 1948 by the British, by the mandate that came through the Rothschilds, they had learned precisely how to torture and subjugate and commit genocide in the local Palestinian population.

Yeah. You know, the first thing that they did, they adopted, they adopted a 1937 order that was made by, I think it was His Majesty the King at that stage.

Conferring on the ruler of Palestine, the right to make whatever regulations appear to you in your unfettered discretion to be necessary or expedient for securing the public safety, the maintenance of public order and the suppression of mutiny, rebellion and riot and from maintaining supplies and services essential to the empire, leaving really strips and police free to operate without restraint or fear of prosecution.

I did the legacy of Israel violence is still there. Okay, the British secured their hold in the territory the way they did. And the Israeli security forces in 1948 began emulating those messes from killing civilians, flattening whole villages, poisoning the water wells, you know, taking control of their vital natural resources.

You know, and in 1969, and we've heard this a million times over the last year, when Israel's Prime Minister, Gold America, asserted there is no such thing as Palestine. There has never been such a thing as Palestinians. She was, in my view, simply following an erasure of a people's rights and a recognition of those people, which the British Empire had set in motion.

And I ask the question, should we be thankful for the British Empire? Should we be thankful for their legacy?

Well, it's funny when you talk about, it came into my head and you probably think this shows my propaganda, but I thought also when you talk about people being used as human shields and I thought of Patsy Gillespie in Northern Ireland who was strapped to a bomb and sent out to kill five British soldiers, I think. But I interviewed... But can I ask you this question? Why was it that you thought of that?

Whenever we're talking about this, why was it that you thought specifically of that? Is it because your mind is conditioned to think like fit into it? Sorry, just bear with me, just bear with me, or the mainstream media. It goes without saying that what the IRA did to that man

was disgusting and outrageous and inhumane and under no circumstances can be excused. Nothing, nothing can excuse that. So it goes without saying, and you know that that's my view of these things. My point is that it shows that things are true to all of these, all of the terrible things, Kingsmore, Massacre, Le Mans, all of those things, I mean, disgusting atrocious acts that cannot

be justified, could never be justified. You know, the worst of humanity was revealed in those actions. Okay. But let me ask you an interesting question. Why, when we were talking about this, the jury is what the IRA did to Patsy Gillespie. Why did you do that? Why did that come into your mind? Because I'm aware of it, I suppose. And I can't. And when we talk about an answer, we need to be aware of the humanization. I'm answering you, Joe.

when we talk about the dehumanization and we talk about these things and we're talking about the consequences of empire. I think one of the things that is one of the things we keep talking about in this podcast is how people are dehumanizing these situations.

I don't think that's why I don't think that's why you had that example. I think the reason that you give that example is the reason that Finnegales sort of stock response of anybody makes a point is what about the IRA? What about the IRA? What about the IRA? So we're talking about the genocide of hundreds of millions of people around the world by the British Empire. And you say your answer to that is

What about Patsy Gillespie? I think the reason that you said that is because there is particularly in that sort of finnegeal establishment. I know you're a finnegeal guy. You're not a finnegeal guy. I thought you were a finnegeal guy.

But the point is, I don't criticize you for it. I see that it is an inbuilt trigger response. You think that anybody who has got an aversion to the IRA is somehow an establishment or finnege a lackey when there are lots and lots of people across the country who don't fall into either of those into categories. Yes, how did this discussion

How did this discussion about the legacy of Britain and Ireland and whether we should be thankful for it?

cause you to concentrate on that single incident. The answer to that must be, it has to be, that in your mind you're conditioned whenever there is criticism of the British Empire and what they did in Ireland to say, what about the IRA? And the interesting thing is this, your mind didn't reach for examples

From the good old area, the war of independence, any of the rebellions that happened down through the 800 years that the British were here, you didn't go into the war of independence, the atrocities that were committed, the disappearances of people in multiples of what happened in the North. Not that any of it can be accused, but what you thought of in your mind was this one incident that occurred.

Why did you ask me about it? Why did you use it? Because I think one of the things, there's lots of other things I have to say about what we're talking about.

And one of the things I think that are critical when you talk about history is to actually be to give your own history a reckoning to and whether you like it or not whether I like it or not those stories the story of Irish nationalism is much to do with our history my history are shared history.

as anything else. And the stories of what happened during the troubles is a central part of that. So I think when we're talking, and we, you know, when we talk about the British Empire, and there are times when I think it's not a question of point. It's a question of actually, we all need to get honest about our history. Because what I was also going to say was I interviewed Satlin Sangara a few years ago about his book, Empire Land. Yeah, yeah. And I was sort of referring to as it was, yeah.

And it's a brilliant book about stuff that he grew up, he was born, he grew up in Wolverhampton. But there were things about, you know, from Indian heritage. And there were things about Indian history and British empires history in India that he didn't learn until he went to India in his twenties and thirties.

and because they weren't taught in schools and I think everybody and there was a line there was a line in his book that always stuck with me and I think this applies you know it obviously applies to a country like Britain and to the legacy of the British Empire but it applies to every country too and everyone trying to make a reckoning with their own history and lots of people have histories that bring up unpleasant dark moments and we know that we know that but I'll tell you something

Well, no, let me finish the point. I want to just quote the line that stuck with me. He quoted Ernest Rayne and Andes, and it's the essence of a nation is that all its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.

Yeah, but you see, I mean, you're your trigger response to that. I think it is very, very instructive, you know, everybody likes saying, well, I know that the British sort of their presence resulted in the deaths of 100 million Indians, okay, Indian people.

But you have to say, on the other hand, that there were some terrorist attacks by Indians on British families who were stationed out there as part of the Raj. There were some slaughters of families. How can you justify that?

You understand the point of making to you that there's no equivalence between those things. There's no equivalence whatsoever between those things apart from the fact that they're deeply inhumane butchering of other human beings, which I fundamentally disagree with. I mean, the taking of life for me, life is sacrosanct.

You see the point of Meakin, if you said that, people would say, well, what are you talking about? But when you say, yeah, but the IRA did this, the modern IRA did this, that's perfectly acceptable in your mind because that is the way the propaganda in the South has conditioned people's minds there about the new bad IRA and about the Catholic savages in the North.

That's the point about it. It would be very discordant if you made that comparison and said, well, to be fair though, you know, the Indians did some terrible things with the British themselves. People say, like, what has he lost his mind? But when you say it about the IRA,

People say, well, fucking fair play to Dion Fanning. He's absolutely right. That Republican savage brawling. Cool. Cool. Cool. Good old about the British Empire. It's outrageous. Finally, you're seeing the light. You see the point I'm making. I understand the point. And when we see, and when we see the art workings of this, when we see King Charles, I'm sure he's a grand fella, if you like that sort of thing, you know, emerging from his three quarters of a million pounds Rolls Royce.

just last week to cut the ribbon on two foot banks. We really don't have to search too far into the legacy of empire to see this sort of inequality and damage that has caused throughout the planet and the damage

and death that it caused in Ireland, you know, where it just caused untold suffering over the gods of a thousand years, and was, as Carlin Elkins quite rightly describes it, their laboratory for genocide around the world.

We will be back on Saturday. We're going to be back on Saturday. We're going to be back on Saturday. For another election special, a lot to talk about this week. We've got the big debate to analyze. Yeah, you know, one of those debates. We've got Michael Healy-Riz promo video. A lot, yeah, yeah. I still got to figure out who everyone was on the stage at the debate. But anyway,

I thought it was really fascinating to be in the ravine. Let's talk about it. We will save all this, save this gold for Saturday and we'll talk to you then. Thanks for listening everyone.

Let go of it!