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Author Topic:   A measured look at a difficult situation
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 204 of 289 (748730)
01-28-2015 4:33 PM
Reply to: Message 202 by Tempe 12ft Chicken
01-27-2015 12:18 PM


Re: Crime and its punishment aren't the same thing
I am not sure how many times I have to explain this, but let's see if this one finally gets through.
The Irish Rebellion occurred in 1641, ending in 1642 with the Irish winning the war and setting up an Irish government to control Irish affairs. This was called Confederate Ireland. They won their rebellion. Cromwell, who arrived in Ireland in 1649, cannot be putting down a rebellion that ended 7 years before his arrival. He was making an attempt to reconquer Ireland after Great Britain had lost control of it to the Irish. How is trying to reconquer one place years after a rebellion ended different from trying to reconquer another place? Remember....Cromwell arrived 7 years after the rebellion ended.
This isn't right. The wars in Ireland continued long after 1642, and the Confederates never controlled the whole country. They weren't fighting with Great Britain at the time, either, since there was no such beast. James I did use the term informally to refer to the personal union of the kingdoms of Scotland and England under himself, but that union had been torn asunder by the civil wars.
The Confederates were fighting variously against English and Irish Royalists, Parliamentarians, Scottish covenanters who invaded Ulster in 1643, and Irish nobles who feared the loss of their power. They eventually tried to form an alliance with the Royalists, some of whom were Protestant, against the Parliamentary forces, leading to many of the Confederate leaders being excommunicated by the papal nuncio, who had brought money from abroad to try and establish a papal state. This was all before Cromwell's arrival.
To clearly see that Great Britain didn't exist at the time, we just have to look where Cromwell invaded after Ireland - Scotland, where the hardcore Protestant Covenanters had declared Charles II king in exchange for his agreement to impose their strict, anti-episcopalian brand of Protestantism on England and Ireland, as well as Scotland. This was somewhat ironic, as it was the Covenanters who had been the first to take up arms against the crown in 1638. Charles was almost certainly lying for political gain, as he had some sympathy for Catholicism, and supposedly promised to convert some years later to get military support from the King of France.
The main thing I'm getting at here is that anyone who tries to present the complex wars and revolutions of Britain and Ireland in the seventeenth century as some kind of simple 'Catholics vs. Protestants' struggle either doesn't know much about them, or is intentionally misrepresenting them for religious or nationalist motives.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 202 by Tempe 12ft Chicken, posted 01-27-2015 12:18 PM Tempe 12ft Chicken has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 210 by Tempe 12ft Chicken, posted 01-29-2015 11:30 AM caffeine has replied

  
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 213 of 289 (748788)
01-29-2015 12:31 PM
Reply to: Message 210 by Tempe 12ft Chicken
01-29-2015 11:30 AM


Re: Crime and its punishment aren't the same thing
Understood, if there was not an actual victory then I will definitely stop using the war of 1812 as any sort of comparison. As for the great Britain thing, this is a fault of my terminology. I've never been comfortable with which descriptor to use for certain time periods in that area, so i tend to choose Great Britain simply for consistency of location. I will try to fix that error in the future.
I don't think you're the only one who gets confused about what to call things during the 17th century. It was a very complicated time politically.
I will freely admit I do not know much about them and that is another reason I wanted to start this thread. The main reason was to show Faith that her simple Catholics versus Protestants did not properly encompass all that was really happening during the struggles in Ireland. Plus, that one cannot make a judgement or use as examples of Catholic evilness the Irish conflicts, which had multiple combined causes that led to the events that unfolded and were not simply a religious war. Also, I realized that while I knew some of the history of the region, in my education process the history of Ireland was glossed over very quickly and I knew there would be some incorrect information I would have received. Even right off the bat, those with knowledge were able to show me it was not as religiously based as what we are taught here.
I was mostly just using your post as a springboard to point out the complexities of the political situation at the time that, rather than criticising you, so sorry if it came off that way. I didn't mean to say that religion wasn't important either - religion was one of the big causes of the civil wars, but there was a lot more too it than Catholics vs. Protestants.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 210 by Tempe 12ft Chicken, posted 01-29-2015 11:30 AM Tempe 12ft Chicken has not replied

  
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 214 of 289 (748792)
01-29-2015 12:43 PM
Reply to: Message 212 by Tempe 12ft Chicken
01-29-2015 11:52 AM


So, how about herding them out to die....Did that ever happen (with the exception of the Famine, since you agree that forcing the Irish to starve was terrible treatment, I don't think we need to rehash that). Yes, you just don't see the forcing them out of their homes and confiscating their lands as driving them out into the cold and forcing the risk of death upon them. However, the English used laws to take away property and force them into poverty during a period of extreme cold within the continent. I'm pretty sure they were forced to deal with the cold as well and I doubt all the civilians that lost their homes were armed.
On the 'herding them out to die' front, I believe Faith is thinking of the Portadown massacre in 1641, when about 100 Protestant settlers in Ulster were forced at gunpoint to strip out of their clothes and march into the River Bann in freezing November weather. Such things happened more than once, though this is by far the most infamous from it's use in Protestant propaganda.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 212 by Tempe 12ft Chicken, posted 01-29-2015 11:52 AM Tempe 12ft Chicken has replied

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 Message 215 by Tempe 12ft Chicken, posted 01-29-2015 12:51 PM caffeine has not replied

  
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(4)
Message 216 of 289 (748799)
01-29-2015 1:22 PM
Reply to: Message 208 by Faith
01-29-2015 11:19 AM


Except the "Proddy" violence was all in the form of military retaliation, not wholesale murder of unarmed people by herding them out to die in the snow, or bombs blowing them up.
I haven't read through this whole thread, or the previous one, but I'm frankly speechless if you can be at more than 200 messages and believe that Protestant violence in Ireland didn't bombs blowing people up. The single largest loss of life in one day during the whole of the Troubles occured on 17th May, 1974, when four car bombs exploded in busy streets in Dublin and Monaghan, killing 34 people. The bombs were planted by the Ulster Volunteer Force, a Loyalist Protestant organisation who spent much of the 1970s setting off bombs in pubs. Over the course of 1973 they set off more than 200 bombs in total.
The UVF weren't the only Protestant bombers of the Troubles, but they were the most prolific.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 208 by Faith, posted 01-29-2015 11:19 AM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 219 by Faith, posted 01-29-2015 4:50 PM caffeine has not replied

  
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