This has been a most interesting discussion, on occasion heated.
Not being American I have not followed these matters as closely as many of you folk have. But I concur for the most with Todd and Terry’s remarks.
With regard to the War of Independence, it does bear recalling that fully a third of the colonists in the 13 colonies remained loyal for one reason or another, and that a great many of them (you could perhaps tell me what proportion) emigrated afterwards, to the Bahamas, Canada or back to Britain.
One of them was Flora Macdonald, of Bonnie Prince Charlie fame.
Following the ’45 she was obliged to take an oath of loyalty to King George, as was the man she married, also a Macdonald.
On the strength of this oath they were permitted to emigrate to one of the southern colonies (I cannot for the moment recall whether it was Georgia or South Carolina).
And it was because of this oath that they found themselves unable to support the King’s enemies. For this they were very badly treated by those who supported independence.
After the war they found their position so intolerable that they were forced to return to Scotland at their own expense. As a result of the debt so incurred they died in penury.
The references to “victimology” strike a chord in South Africa, too, since both Afrikaners and black South Africans are fond of playing this tune, too.
Afrikaners will remind you of their sufferings in the concentration camps (for wives and children) and prisoner of war camps (far away from Africa) during the Boer War, and the unlawful annexation of their republics as British colonies.
And black South Africans talk of “300 years of oppression” when it has not all been repression, and for black people it is considerably less than 300 years.
They also harp on the slave trade, ignoring the fact that African rulers readily sold their own people, or made war on their neighbours in order to sell them, and so were at least as culpable as those who carried the slaves away.
This despite the fact that no South African people are known to have been enslaved at any stage.
Ranting against Britain for the slave trade is also a stock attitude, when it was Britain that ended the slave trade first, emancipated all its slaves in the colonies and sent its navy to capture slave vessels of all nations.
And following the American Civil War, the US joined Britain in suppressing the last slaving route, from West Africa to Cuba.
And to bring this back to Celtic culture, two final points:
1. While I am not of Irish descent, my wife’s great-grandfather was from Antrim.
2. The oldest Anglican parish in Port Elizabeth was founded by a priest of the Church of Ireland.
The Irish who took part in the settlement scheme of 1820 were initially separated from the English, Welsh and Scots in the Eastern Cape because it was feared that they would stir trouble. Instead they went to Clanwilliam, far away in the Western Cape.
Only in 1825 were they permitted to join their fellow settlers in the Eastern Cape. A few remained in Clanwilliam, however.
Regards,
Mike