Back on The James Conway Experience

‘It worries me that we have a country where the only possibility of achievement — to be honoured, recognised, to be treated properly — you need to have a certain outlook on reality, and nothing else.'

The alleged leader of the ‘Irish’ ‘Government’, or at least the man currently bearing the title ‘Taoiseach’, as Minister for Foreign Affairs in 2009 attended the funeral in Havana of José Julián Martí Pérez, a Cuban nationalist acivist, poet, philosopher, essayist, journalist, translator, professor, and publisher. Today, virtually every sentence Michaél Martin utters on the subject of Irish nationhood is derogatory of the Irish nation and the claim to soverignty of those who cherish and promote their country wtih words, flags or songs. Self-hatred is a primary symptom of untreated post-colonial syndrome, Ireland’s most debilitating pathology.

A Nation Insane

‘By not acknowledging [our colonised past] we have blundered into a new trap, which is that in the time of mass immigration in the world, we are seen as white, even though we are, in the same way, the casualties of the period of colonisation as the African or the Middle Easterners, or anybody else. We have an intense experience of that — the same kind as they have — but we can’t discuss that with them, and we don’t. And they come in and they call us imperialists because they’re ignorant. They’ve never been told the histories of their own countries, never mind ours. And yet they’re here, living off the fat of the land, and abusing Irish people, and abusing Ireland, and telling lies to themselves and us about ourselves. And the problem is then that there’s almost nobody in Ireland to say, “You’re talking nonsense! You know nothing!”’

The great tragedy of contemporary Ireland is that is had failed to face up to the ultimate meaning of its past experience of subjugation, in particular to the psychological legacy of hundreds of years of colonial abuse by its nearest neighbour, formerly known as The British Empire. In many respects, this failure was itself a function of post-colonial pathologies, such as inferiority complex, bravado, denial, mimicry, Stockholm Syndrome and self-hatred. In this postmodern moment, there is an added impediment, in that the usurpation of the historical phenomenon of colonialism by leftists seeking to recruit human shields from the Third World to protect and enable its march through the institutions of Western civilisation, has trapped Ireland in a double-bind arising from a paradox of skin-colour, which appears to place the Irish in the Western post-imperial club, whereas in reality our historical experience is the same as many nations of Africa, South America and the Middle East — or even worse. Indeed, many of the influencers and adacemics of the so-depicted ‘conservative’ or ‘Right’ of contemporary politics discourage any discussion of colonialism on the grounds that such talk falls into the ideological barrow of Marxist and communistic academics intellectuals, and the ultimate outcome of this is a total denial of the truth of colonialism and its effects, which amounts to a distortion of history, and, in the case of a country like Ireland — a relative rarity among casualties of radical interference in its character and development — an obstruction in the path of its access to self-realisation. The result is a population utterly demoralised and broken, dispirited, infantilised and drug-addled — restless, rootless, horizonless and — very soon to be — homeless.

In our latest conversation (linked below), James Conway and I explore the effects, outcomes and future implications of this untreated condition, of which I have written a great deal over the past thirty-five years or so, including the article linked at the bottom, ‘Of Hares and Hounds of History’, originally published here on JW Unchained in July 2021.

‘How come we alone appear to have this “international obligation”? Because, if you look at the stats for the last 20, 30 years, in terms of absorption of outsiders, we are far ahead of everybody. In fact, we’re so far ahead that we’ve taken in twice as many as our nearest — as it were — “competitor”’, which is Spain. So if we have an “international obligation”, how is it framed?’

‘Ireland is being undone. Undone! And it’s a systematic programme. And you know the way that when you use words like “invasion” or “replacement” or “plantation”, they go crazy? That’s because those words are true.'

‘it is hard to like the Irish people now. I watch them now in different situations — maybe coming off a plane — and I feel pity for them, because they’re so confused looking, and so frightened looking. But I cannot feel a great love for them, because I know that they have capitulated to this. When they had opportunities to stand up against it, they didn’t. The have been cowardly, They have scapegoated other people rather than face the fact that the people they were listening to were criminals and scumbags. And still are. There’s still there, and still doing it.’

“What happens to culture in a period of colonisation is in effect that it goes underground, because people lose contact with their own culture. And thereafter they cannot recreate it, and it turns therefore into artifacts and customs, as opposed to culture. Culture is a living thing. It needs to be alive all the time. But the flame has gone out and they can’t find the source. They can’t find the wick to light it again, as it were. And this is the fundamental problem of Ireland: that it has never had a cadre of artists in any generation who were capable of undertaking that project: to find the wick and relight it, and recreate the culture, which would then be alive. Maybe that was what [James] Joyce was talking about: “the uncreated conscience of our race”’.

To buy John a beverage, click here

If you are not a full subscriber but would like to support my work on Unchained with a small donation, please click on the ‘Buy John a beverage’ link above.